[lbo-talk] Barter Town Will Rebuild, was Rove

(Chuck Grimes) cgrimes at rawbw.COM
Fri Feb 22 16:58:58 PST 2008


``Nobody doesn't like community organizing. The question is where does it lead. Assume you are able to put together a bunch of folks who will come to meetings, make phone calls, write letters, go to demos, pass out leaflets. What do they do then? ....

It seems to me you have to at least make a start at imagining how serious change could take place...

For we the perplexed, please describe some alternative path or scenario from our present wretched state to better times...''

Max Sawicky

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Okay I'll bite. But you gotta promise to read my last post under the subject, ``Narrative and the model, was Obama & white guys''

The reason is it contains an interview with a city planner who worked inside the late War on Poverty apparatus with community groups in the inner city. He started off as an economist, so this should sound familiar. He got a job with a consulting firm that got a government contract to evaluate some of the inner city federal programs. In the process of these extended evaluation projects, he got to know his program officer who then worked in OMB and of course got to know his way around government agencies. His boss at OMB then later got the appointment to be commissioner of RSA (Rehabilitation Services Administration). The first thing the new commissioner did was re-organize the agency and brought in consultants to his personal staff who had been at ground level in the inner cities working with, guess what?... community organizations....

See here is the plan. You need both community organizations, some federal projects and contacts inside the oversight apparatus and you begin to figure out how government works or can work to make positive changes in ordinary people's lives.

Whether Obama or Clinton gets into office, their first order of business will be to set up their own apparatchik, and guys like you Max, wanna be on their list. From your photo, you look a little too, let's say established to be doing community organizing these days:-). I kinda of suspect you already are or wanna be on those lists. From your bio blurp at TomPaine.common sense:

``Max B. Sawicky is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. He has worked in the Office of State and Local Finance of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. He also serves on the at-large national board of the Americans for Democratic Action.''

Wow. So, you know all about this government shit. Why so modest? You already know the political function of community organizing and community groups is the role they can play outside government, echoing demands for `change' while meeting in undisclosed locations with the very aparatachik they might denounce on camera... Geese.

For others, who are interested read Collignon's interview and see how it was played back in the day... pretty much the same way.

This is how the rightwing under Reagan, Bush 1, with some interim slightly less egregious neoliberal replacements during Clinton 1 and then finally the vicious return of the right under Bush 2, managed to ruined government.

As Tina Turner said in Beyond Thunderdome, ``Barter Town Will Rebuild!''

CG



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