> And amen to this, from AC's column:
>
> "But as it organizes its upcoming September 24-26 rallies in
> Washington DC UFPJ seems to be turning its back on the rich
> opportunities for mainstream organizing offered by Sheehan and the
> nerveless platform of Win Without War, preferring to dilute the Out
> of Iraq message with cumbersome left agendas written by ultras from
> the casting couch of the Life of Brian."
I haven't been doing anything for UFPJ for some time (too busy to do much of anything in fact), but I did take a look at its website (at <http://unitedforpeace.org/>) recently, and the top feature on it is a call to organize vigils, rallies, and protests for Cindy Sheehan, as a prelude to mobilizing for September 24th. UFPJ may not have been as successful as MoveOn in organizing such vigils, though, in terms of getting its member orgs to do them and getting the media to cover them. That may be in part because MoveOn vigils came sooner, August 17th (cf. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/moveon/sets/774501/ show/>) as opposed to UFPJ's August 20th. Also, MoveOn, an adjunct to a political party, is a multi-issue mobilization machine (see the range of its campaigns at <http://www.moveon.org/campaigns.html>), not a single-issue coalition like UFPJ. One of the virtues of multi- issue organiizing is you can capture larger volumes of contact info -- through its diverse campaigns (some of which are popular, like the one on Social Security, and others, like "Fire Tom DeLay," go nowhere) -- than single-issue organizing can, which the org then can exploit to seize the moment when the corporate media (for once doing us a favor) help create something like the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>