Sure they are-- but are they necessary at a national level, where travel costs time and money?
Local massing of numbers are often far more effective in scaring the political class. When numbers mass in DC, politicians can assume they're from someone else's district. But even a smaller crowd locally can be quite effective, since a local politician knows what that means for them talking to fellow members of that political district.
But lots of simultaneous small one-hour rallies across the country would be far more cost-effective in time and money. And probably generate better stories for local newspapers around the country.
-Day to day, local coordination efforts and door to door outreach are -also essential. Both these levels are essential and must function in -some sort of harmony.
Which they aren't. Most of the antiwar focus of the big national groups has been largely on these kinds of big marches. ANSWER can't do anything other than these kinds of actions. That's all they're good at.
-- Nathan
Nathan Newman wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
>
> Jordan Hayes wrote:
>>> Train (when it's running): $80
>>> Plane: $120.
>> A 50% premium, but still pretty decent. Note that Acela is $126.
>
> Which also highlights how costly these marches are in both money and time.
> Assuming Yoshie's bus estimate of $60 roundtrip is more the average, a
> 200,000 DC person march cost $60 per person and probably 10 hours of time
> per person, or at least $12 million and two million hours of volunteer
> time.
>
> Imagine if that money and time had instead been devoted to staffing a
> national antiwar organization to coordinate all that volunteer time in
> communities across the country, organizing church and community meetings
> to
> discuss why the war needed to end, doing door-to-door outreach or
> whatever.
>
> No question in my mind that such use of funds and volunteer time would be
> infinitely more effective in both reaching the uncommited and pressuring
> the
> political class than a one-day story in the newspaper.
>
> --- Nathan
>
-- Bryan Atinsky Editor, News from Within e-mail: bryan at alt-info.org Tel: (972)2-624-1159 P.O. Box 31417, Jerusalem 91313 http://www.newsfromwithin.org http://www.alternativenews.org ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk