[lbo-talk] progress!

[Doug Henwood]

A very pleasant surprise to report: At the Brecht Forum event in NYC 
the other night on civil liberties after 9/11, Ira Glasser, former 
director of the ACLU (and a very fine speaker) and current NYCLU 
director Donna Lieberman both agreed that liberals had too long 
relied on courts to protect freedom of speech and assembly, and not 
enough on popular action. Glasser pointed out that historically the 
courts have rarely been friends of free expression; there was that 
great exception during the era of the Warren court, but that time is 
long gone. And Lieberman pointed out that the reason that New York 
City relented and gave a permit for the 3/22 peace march was that a 
couple of hundred thousand people ignored the city's refusal to issue 
a permit for the 2/15 demo and marched anyway. So it sounds like 
they'll be relying more on popular agitation and less on litigation 
than they used to (which is how the ACLU, founded in the wake of the 
Palmer raids, got going 80 years ago).

Doug