--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote:
> You know, Nathan, I and a bunch of comrades and
> coworkers (movement
> activists) in Ann Arbor attempted this through the
> 1980s. The party was
> happy to have our labor, but totally iced us out of
> any policy input. Thjese
> were super-liberal Democrats, not DLC types. We
> would go to party meetings,
> and after a bit, when we started to insist on our
> views, we were (a)
> attacked by the regulars in the press for "packing"
> meetings with
> "activists" who were not "real Democrats" (there
> were no official membership
> requirements), and (b) iced out of the closed door
> meetings with the hacks
> and bosses and big donors where the real policy was
> made, and (c) had the
> resolutions we got passeda t the open meetings
> unhdemocratically ignored,
> and (d) faced with real meeting packing when the
> bosses brought in boatloads
> of union bureaucrats from Ypislanti and other places
> who didn't even live in
> AA to defeat our resolutions, and (e) outmanuevered
> by parliamentary
> bullshit such as declaring meetings adjourned when
> we arrived, and so forth.
> Moreover, when we got a genuinely multiracial and
> radical Rainbow Coalition
> going in 1984, the black millionionare who funded
> the Michigan RC pulled the
> plug on it, setting up a rival RC, and both of them
> went down. Most of the
> people I worked with in this endeavour were so
> totally disgusted that they
> gave up on politics altogether. The lesson I drew
> was that the Dems were not
> reformable. I joined Solidarity. You think I should
> have kept plugging away?
> After seven years of trying--isn't that a
> respectable run?--with nothing tos
> how for it, I figured it was time to fish or cut
> bait. jks
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