I would like to suggest shifting the assumed initiative for the rightward drift from the right-wing political activists or the oligarchy to a response to the particular forms of gains made by workers during the New Deal and the post-WWII boom period. This would be in accord with (although not necessarily identical to nor derived from) an Italian 'autonomist' perspective. There are two advantages to such an approach: 1. it puts the political retrogression in a longer-term context and 2. it reveals much greater fluidity in the current 'conjuncture' than would be the case if we're assuming a course of development manipulated entirely by the oligarchy and its political flunkies.
If we view the rightward drift as a response to _particular forms_ of gains, then it may be possible to develop strategies that are more dynamic than "defending the past." Take Davis-Bacon as a case in point. It's a nasty piece of reactionary business for Bush to suspend it but what are the chances of defending it, given current union densities in general and particularly in the right-to-work South? What if there is even a grain of truth (& I suspect it's more than a grain) in the right-wing critique that Davis Bacon is, in practice if not in intent, more about protecting the privileges of those with good jobs than opening up opportunities to those without? Wouldn't it make more sense to 'move forward' rather than to defend something that is indefensible in more ways than one?
It seems to me that "disasters preparedness" is a fertile ground for popular mobilization in that emphasis needs to be on community resources and mobilization rather than on individuals and the state. Poverty is, in most cases, a result of unprotected emergencies -- people get sick, they get injured, their families break down, they lose their job and there's inadequate social support infrastructure to help them through those disasters. That's why we have the blame-the-victim industry -- to remind us that individuals are responsible for the consequences of the overwhelming social forces than affect them. What happened in New Orleans happens TO individuals and small groups of people thousands of times every day. Only the fact that it happened to the entire population of a city all at once made it newsworthy.
I would suspect that every disaster response plan in every city and town in the USA is a disaster waiting to happen to the people with, as the social work jargon calls it, 'multiple barriers'. Fixing that response plan means fixing the infrastructure. That infrastructure includes non-market housing, transportation, public health, nutrition and community association (not paper "associations" but functioning networks of mutual aid).
The Sandwichman