Raising money doesn't quite cover what Jane does. With her it's not some passive, mindless activity.
She mobilizes people, including their dollars, to pressure Members of Congress to vote for progressive positions. She actually gets involved at the specific vote level, fulfilling a function akin to the floor whips. The whips herd the cats to vote when they are supposed to. Or try to. Jane does that from outside using the Internet. She also organizes demos and was heavily involved in the effort to dump Lieberman.
At the moment she is mobilizing people to vote against health care reform unless it includes a public option -- a position I happen to disagree with, but pretty edgy as conventional politics goes.
Along with MoveOn, which has come out against the Afghanistan venture, it's the only game in town right now. Diddling on listservs really doesn't compare.
As to other games, I'm curious as to what's happening on campuses these days. It used to be sweatshops and living wage. Now that the bloom is coming off the Obama rose. Obama says we can't spend our way out of the recession, Bernanke is against more stimulus and wants to cut SocSec, Obama might as well. Scott McLemmee, lately dissed by Louis the P for armchair left cleverness, reports on an poorly-attended anti-Afghan-war demo he attended.
What could be next?
On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:44 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> At 07:29 PM 12/2/2009, SA wrote:
>>
>> So in the spirit of that thread: Are these people radicals could
>> profitably ally with? (Insert your own definition of radical).
>
> I guess the question, for me, is what do you mean by "ally with"? I don't
> think Hamsher will ever move outside of conventional politics or anything.
> She's akin to the religious right: it's an independent fundraising and
> branding machine. She's always been about that. She wants to create a force
> to threaten dems into voting the way they want. But there's no raison d'etre
> for their existence otherwise - is there? - which makes Hamsher unlike the
> religious right. The religious right has, uh, projects regardless as to who
> is in office and, some aspects of the religious right have been deeply
> apolitical -- because they invest their energies in these other, uh,
> projects. Hamsher's org has no reason for being other than to act as the
> loyal opposition to the democrats. But it seems to remain completely at the
> level of fund-raising -- raising funds for the organization which will
> ultimately need Democratic bad actors in order to survive.
>
> I don't think orgs like Hamsher's create people who are actors or doers.
> They just stuff cash into piggy banks branded by the firedoglake logo.
>
> shag
>
>
> --
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>
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