Earlier: Get Angry and Vote Green

You have to be five kinds of nerd to get this one. But some ideas just won’t leave you alone…

In the above Democracy Now! segment that attempts to provide some context for the Occupy Wall Street movement, Professor Dorian Warren extols the brilliance of Left Populism during the Great Depression and New Deal years, but coolly omits the role of socialist parties, communist parties, and anarchist organisations who –in conjunction with radical trade-unions (between which there was significant membership overlap)– provided the infrastructure, popular education, and grassroots media that provided a backbone for the “uprisings” Warren celebrates.

The way he tells it, farmers and factory workers plucked the idea of mass mobilisation from the air and went on to pressure for New Deal reforms. Wow…if only!

Warren also gives a pass to contemporary union leaders who have “been making some of the same critiques (as the Wall Street occupiers) for a long time but have not gotten the leverage politically or economically as the protesters have, in terms of capturing our imagination.”

First, despite the impressive grassroots fundraising efforts of the Occupation movement, the money at the disposal of unions has dwarfed anything else in what we call “the Left” for a very long time. So it’s unhelpful to talk about a relative lack of economic traction.

As for political traction, that comes down to union leaders choosing to squander their significant resources on backing corporate-friendly Democrat candidates who just were not that into workers.

Union leaders were willing to back Democrats just to keep “a seat at the table”, even if that table had nothing for them. The DNC has always known this and, since American unions have been largely phobic toward building real 3rd party alternatives, the Democrats continue to take workers for granted and cater to finance.

And let’s take a moment to point out that, during the boom years, many unions opposed initiatives popular among the #OWS movement, such as single payer health care/Medicare For All.

Why would a union leader oppose such a patently humane and effective program for working people? Because then the *union* would have one less benefit to offer members and, perhaps most importantly, the unions’ own health insurance companies were cash cows for cronies and retired leaders salivating for sinecures.

It comes down to this: radical, competitive parties of the Left are necessary to keep both Democrats *and* the leaders of labor institutions from giving the game away. As long as elected Democrats fear no challenge from the Left, they will continue to take the ecological and economic crises for granted.

When FDR said the country needed to “make him” pass reforms, he wasn’t talking about the power of a PAC with an email list. The New Deal passed because Washington DC faced real pressure from the Left in the streets, on the shop floor, *and at the ballot box* — from local elections on up.

And as long as unions have no parties to the Left of Democrats to back, the urge to stay in that abusive relationship will continue, and the DNC will use its influence to ensure the most corporate-friendly factions stay in leadership positions within labor.

A party that is unashamedly of the Left is only one piece of the puzzle, but it is a critical piece, and we have too long been in denial about its necessity.

via ACES

It is clear from all the studies and possibilities – as well as nearly two decades of delays and sabotage of international treaties to address climate change – that the central problem is the political priorities of the social and economic regime of Capital. This point was made forthrightly by the United Nations in its 2011 report, Towards a Green Economy:

“Although the causes of these crises vary, at a fundamental level they all share a common feature: the gross misallocation of capital. During the last two decades, much capital was poured into property, fossil fuels and structured financial assets with embedded derivatives, but relatively little in comparison was invested in renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, sustainable agriculture, ecosystem and biodiversity protection, and land and water conservation.”

Hardly a hotbed of radical thought, the United Nations says the system is to blame.

The real answer to whether or not we can power the planet on clean energy isn’t so much a technical question as a social and political problem. Either we change the social power relations or we will continue to obtain our electrical power from fossil and nuclear sources.

Here’s the banner I designed for the march. As you can see we had a nice array of Green banners, Greens turned out from New Jersey and around the Tri-State Area.

Checklists can have a big impact on your ability to get large numbers of people to do things more precisely and effectively. I wanted to make some printable checklists for Green Party tabling, event production, you name it.

I tried creating a bulleted list in LibreOffice but found that, absurdly, it was missing a “hollow square” bullet graphic. They have solid squares:

…which are not helpful. They even have “checkmarks”

which create, of course, the opposite of the psychological effect I want to achieve with this list. What about the provided “graphical bullets?”

Absolute garbage. So what do we do? I hunted around, and if you click on that “Options” tab you find a screen that allows the selection of a character as a bullet:

Click on that strange, sad little ellipsis box next to “Character” and a pop-box appears:

Select Webdings as your font, and scroll down until you find that lovely Hollow Square. Select it, then select “Ok”, and start making a template using a bulleted list:

Make note that I’ve adjusted the indent of the list. Your team will thank you. Ok, maybe they won’t, but take some pride in your work, dammit! Are you worried you’ll have to go through this song and dance every time you want to make a checklist? Put your fear in my mind-vise so that I may crush it, as we save your work as a template!

Ahh, but templates can be such a pain to find amid your myriad drafts of WALLANDER fan-fic, right? Then we’re going to Import your template file into LibreOffice’s gallery. First go to File -> New ->Templates and Documents. Now you have a new window:

In the pop-up shown above, click “Templates” and then “Organize.” That gives you another pop-window. Click the “My Templates” folder, then “Commands”, and select “Import Template.”

To access this template in the future, select File -> New ->Templates and Documents, then click the Templates icon…and there it is:

Happy checklist-making.