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Different Views of the Significance of the Oct. 2 One Nation Demonstration (long)
* One Nation: Uniting for Jobs, Not War (Phyllis Bennis)
* Reflections On The October 2nd Rallies And Where We Go
From Here (Bill Fletcher)
* Sound and Fury Forever (James Cersonsky)
* `One Nation' March Shows the Tough Fight Ahead for the
Emerging Progressive Majority (Carl Davidson)
* One Nation Fails to Impress Corporate Media -- Progressive
D.C. rally doesn't get Tea Party treatment (Fair &
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR))
==========
One Nation: Uniting for Jobs, Not War
At the historic One Nation Working Together march,
activists made the connection between unemployment
and our outsize military budget
by Phyllis Bennis
Yes! Magazine
posted October 6, 2010
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/one-nation-uniting-for-jobs-not-war
His always-identifiable, once-in-a-generation voice booming
across the sun-drenched National Mall, the legendary actor-
activist Harry Belafonte evoked the words of his long-ago
friend and colleague, Martin Luther King, Jr. As he spoke, a
hundred thousand people rose to their feet in a roaring
ovation. Whatever had come before, this was the real
reclaiming of the legacy of another speech that had issued
decades earlier from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
King, Belafonte reminded the crowd, "said that America would
soon come to realize that the war that we were in at that
time that this nation waged in Vietnam, was not only
unconscionable, but unwinnable. Fifty-eight thousand
Americans died in that cruel adventure, and over two million
Vietnamese and Cambodians perished. Now today, almost a
half-a-century later, as we gather at this place where Dr.
King prayed for the soul of this great nation, tens of
thousands of citizens from all walks of life have come here
today to rekindle his dream and once again hope that all
America will soon come to the realization that the wars that
we wage today in far away lands are immoral, unconscionable,
and unwinnable."
It was an extraordinary moment. The first national
mobilization in Washington led by civil rights and labor
groups in more than a decade was motivated by the economic
crisis and energized by the demand for jobs - but reflected
the breadth of understanding of a wide range of communities
and constituencies who joined One Nation Working Together.
The leadership of the coalition began with the NAACP, whose
dynamic young president, Ben Jealous, stood as the first of
his generation to head one of the fabled early civil rights
organizations in the U.S. The SEIU, whose fast-growing
service worker sector faces some of the most oppressive
conditions, was there at the beginning, and the AFL-CIO as a
whole quickly followed suit. Other core sponsors included
the National Council of La Raza, Center for Community
Change, US Students Association and more. By the time of the
rally, hundreds of labor, civil rights, community, immigrant
rights, environmental, and peace organizations were on
board.
Part of the goal was easy - a massive get out the vote
effort ahead of the Nov. 2nd mid-term election. But part of
it was much more complicated - the organizations that
initiated ONWT included some that had been at the center of
the Obama campaign in 2008. So it was very unclear how they
would walk that fine line between cheerleading for the
president they had helped elect and criticizing the
president who continued to disappoint so much of those
organizations' political base.
While jobs were the uniting issue of the march, the ralliers
who carried "Jobs Not War" signs were a reminder of the
connection between our out of control military budget -
particularly the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -
and the jobs crisis in the U.S. But the presence of that
large, visible, vocal anti-war contingent was not
inevitable. The peace movement had not been approached
during the initial organizing process. Following very
friendly and supportive meetings soon after, national peace
and anti-war organizations, led by the United for Peace &
Justice network and Peace Action, created the ONWT Peace
Table, which was quickly welcomed as part of the steering
committee of the broader coalition.
...
The challenge reflected the current political moment. Of
course the wars themselves have not ended; Iraq's war
continues with 50,000 re-named U.S. combat troops and 75,000
military contractors still occupying the country, while the
U.S. war in Afghanistan has escalated and is causing
dramatically higher casualties among the civilian
population. But those wars are now being waged in a changed
political climate, in which they are no longer the symbolic
or strategic centerpiece of the U.S. political trajectory.
The economic catastrophe overall, and the urgency of the
jobs crisis in particular, have for the past two years
superseded the wars as the most urgent issue most Americans
face.
Inevitably, that means that the anti-war movement is no
longer the centerpiece of U.S. and global opposition to U.S.
policies of aggression that continue to assault and
undermine lives, health, and prosperity at home and around
the world. The anti-war movement itself is now only one
stream in a much wider river of protest.
But that anti-war stream was central on the National Mall
last Saturday... Informal counts indicated that all but two
of the speakers mentioned the military budget or the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan in some context while on stage.
...
Harry Belafonte reminded us that voting is hugely important.
But voting alone is never enough. "Let us vote on November
2nd," Belafonte called out to 100,000 people, "for jobs, for
jobs, for jobs, for peace, for justice, for human rights,
for our children and the future of America. And let us put
an end to war. Peace is necessary. For justice, it is
necessary. For hope, it is necessary. For our future."
[Phyllis Bennis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a
national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful
ideas with practical actions. Phyllis is a Fellow of the
Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute
in Amsterdam. She is co-author of Ending the U.S. War in
Afghanistan: A Primer.]
read full story here:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/one-nation-uniting-for-jobs-not-war
==========
Reflections On The October 2nd Rallies And Where We Go
From Here
By Bill Fletcher - Black Commentator Editorial Board
Black Commentator
October 7, 2010
http://www.blackcommentator.com/396/396_aw_oct_2_rallies.php
The October 2nd rallies, sponsored by the
OneNationStandingTogether Coalition, have received a curious
response in both the mainstream and progressive media.
Needless to say, one can assume a cynical approach by Fox
News, but in the more mainstream media there were a range of
views from tepid to curious to ignoring altogether. In some
sections of the progressive and Left media there was a
tendency to discount the rally as simply a pro-Democratic
Party love fest.
The actual numbers of people at the DC rally were probably
in the range of 200,000. It was massive. Whether it was the
same size as Glen Beck's seems to be a point of contention,
but there is no question but that people turned out. It was
also one of the most diverse rallies I have attended in
years. It was diverse racially, ethnically, gender, age,
politically, as well as type of organization. It was also a
very optimistic gathering, a point that is well worth making
since there had been a high degree of skepticism as to
whether this rally could be pulled off at all and whether
the turnout would be pathetic.
Yet the optimism seemed to arise, not only based on the
numbers, but in a certain level of audacity. Specifically,
there was a sense in the crowd that we -- whoever "we"
happened to be -- were fighting back and were not falling
prey to despair. The speeches echoed this sentiment, to a
great extent. They were also noteworthy for being relatively
brief, and in some cases, quite impassioned.
OneNationStandingTogether is a somewhat curious coalition
that may or may not last. Despite the rhetoric, it is not
clear that the Coalition's leaders are thinking of this as a
strategic alliance. Clearly this alliance is necessary as
part of the Get Out The Vote effort as we face the mid-term
elections in November. The Coalition sought to energize the
base, and so it seems to have. But it also, implicitly, was
saying to the Obama administration and to the Democratic
Congressional representatives that the "change" for which
people voted in 2008 has not appeared on the scale that is
necessary.
This last point regarding the scale of change is of
particular importance in light of several comments offered
recently by the Obama administration, including by President
Obama himself. There should be no question but that there
have been significant reforms introduced during the first
two years of this administration. These have been statutory,
such as healthcare reform, as well as administrative. Yet
what the President and many others seem to miss is the
matter of scale. The Obama administration, through its
initial efforts at so-called bi-partisanship and by various
premature compromises (such as eliminating single
payer/Medicare for all from the debate over healthcare
reform), weakened the base. Additionally, Obama demobilized
the base, quite literally, with the transformation of his
campaign into Organizing for America, which basically became
a one-way electronic communications mechanism. It was not
just reforms that people were voting for, but a different
means of governing, particularly in a time of crisis.
...
It, then, becomes the job of forces on the Left to push the
envelope. The unions, community-based organizations, student
groups, etc., that were in attendance in the various rallies
across the country have a base in 21st century USA. This
stands in utter contrast to the Glen Beck white bread rally
we saw in late August. We saw in the rallies a sparkle that
needs to be enhanced, but it can only be enhanced if it is
tied to a longer-term strategy that moves from the rhetoric
of change to the practice of social transformation. In that
sense, some of the commentaries that have written off the
rally are not only premature but actually myopic in not
seeing the possibilities. Of course, it is certainly easier
to mourn the lack of rain than it is to develop an
irrigation system.
[BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher,
Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy
Studies, the immediate past president ofTransAfrica Forum
and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in
Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice
(University of California Press), which examines the crisis
of organized labor in the USA]
Read full story here:
http://www.blackcommentator.com/396/396_aw_oct_2_rallies.php
==========
Sound and Fury Forever
By James Cersonsky
The Nation - blog post
October 5, 2010
http://www.thenation.com/blog/155195/sound-and-fury-forever
On Friday at midnight, I joined students from nearby
universities and high schools to gather with members of
local unions and community organizations at a parking
lot on the New Haven shoreline. Soon we would set off
to Washington for One Nation Working Together, a
nationwide march for jobs, education and economic
justice...
At 8 am we arrived in DC. The wide morning sky and
movie-set city blocks gave no hints of the crisis in
Washington or the impending activist struggle which
intended to combat it...
Even more extraordinary was the motley crew of ralliers
on hand. Known and unknown labor unions and socialist
parties were joined by smatterings of civil rights
activists, college students, public education
advocates, environmentalists, Catholic progressives,
Israeli settlement objectors and African aiders. At
least at first, this one rally to fit all felt more
like a thousand species at a common food source than a
movement.
... Solidarity is spectacle. Modern contexts shape
modern social movements.
That was the beauty of October 2 in DC, a day away from
the mainstream liberal consensus on campus. One Nation
felt more symbolic than real, more like theater than
grassroots action. And yet AFL-CIO President Richard
Trumka was wrong when he told us that "We signify our
one nation." We are our one nation, as real an America
as any.
Though we are not inevitable. Without reimagining the
present so as to channel anger and disillusionment
leftward, our nation cannot, as NAACP President
Benjamin Jealous put it, "get votes off the sideline
and onto the battlefield."
...
What we need is a united left organized around new
cultural patterns and new teachings. This demands that
we look beyond our own "race problem" and connect with
others. For me, Saturday's frenzied, incomprehensible,
half-mile-long pool party with colorful signs and big
screens was a kaleidoscope of Warsaw ghettos. My
contingent of New Haven students and laborites had
gathered in solidarity before, but never as notes in a
melodiously cacophonous national medley.
I stood up, walked around a bit, saw more kitschy
signs, grabbed some to put up in my room, and got
closer to the stage. Jesse Jackson thundered forth. The
loudspeakers echoed. Workers from SEIU 1199 in
Tennessee cheered. Socialists screamed. Journalists
scribbled something about Glenn Beck. Lincoln looked
down knowingly. Marian Wright Edelman, president of the
Children's Defense Fund, said, "Feel your own power!" A
sign said, "Hell yes, we can."
[James Cersonsky, an avid reader of The Nation, is a
senior at Yale, where he writes a column for the Yale
Daily News.]
Read full story here:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/155195/sound-and-fury-forever
==========
`One Nation' March Shows the Tough Fight
Ahead for the Emerging Progressive Majority
by Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
October 7, 2010
http://beavercountyblue.org/
If you wanted to know what a dynamic and emerging
progressive majority of Americans looked like, the place to
be was the National Mall at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington, DC on the beautiful and sunny Saturday
afternoon of Oct. 2, 2010.
It was a sight to behold. Pulled together by the `One Nation
Working Together' coalition of some 400 groups, an estimated
175,000 people filled the area. They were the country's
trade unions, civil rights, women's rights, and community
organizations, peace and justice groups, and many more. The
focus was jobs, justice and education, with sizable
contingents against the wars as well.
"I hope they look at the mall today," stated the Rev. Al
Sharpton from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, referring
to the GOP and the Tea Party right, "because this is what
America looks like, not just one color or one gender."
A rainbow of nationalities, men and women, young and old,
and with a solid core from all sectors of the working class
filled the area. The crowd's mood was upbeat and militant,
and they let it be known with a range of voices, from old-
fashioned liberals to the socialist left, that they were fed
up with the right wing assaults from Tea Party, the GOP
neoliberals and the Blue Dog Democrats going along with
them.
"This gathering is a wakeup call for the American people,"
declared Harry Belafonte, in one of the strongest and most
critical speeches of the day. ""Do we really believe that
sending 100,000 troops to kill innocent men and women in
Afghanistan and Pakistan makes any sense?" he continued,
clearly and sharply criticizing Obama's concession to the
war machine. The actor-singer went on to attack the
"crippling poison of racism" and "the undermining of the
Constitution and the systematic attack on our most
inalienable rights..At the heart of this danger is the Tea
Party which is coming close to achieving its villainous
ends. On November 2, in the millions, we must overburden our
voting booths, and vote against those who would have us
become a totalitarian state."
...
Among the thousands arriving from the East Coast, South and
Midwest, there were four from Beaver County-organized by a
coalition of the United Steel Workers, the Beaver-Lawrence
County Labor Council, the Beaver County NAACP, the Minority
Coalition, SEIU, and our 4th CD Progressive Democrats of
America. The USW had other buses and vans from other
counties near us, and they, together with local civil rights
groups, were fully engaged in building this event. Most
important, they were also working to build new jobs
coalitions to fight at the county level for new
manufacturing startups. The Oct 2 rally was only one part of
a wider and ongoing effort.
...
SEIU1199 was one of the initiators of today's events,
together with the NAACP and La Raza. It has largely through
their prodding, along with the USW, that the national AFL-
CIO came on board. But you could clearly see the clusters of
SEIU locals everywhere in the crowd, with their distinctive
purple T-shirts. Everyone was color-coded-red for the
communications workers, sky blue for the NEA teachers, navy
blue for the steelworkers, yellow for the NAACP, and so on.
The next surge was hundreds of African American youth from
community colleges in the DC area, full of excitement,
carrying banners demanding jobs and funding for schools...
[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board
member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver
County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. If you like
this article, make use of the PayPal button on Keep On
Keepin' On.]
Read full story here:
http://beavercountyblue.org/
==========
One Nation Fails to Impress Corporate Media
Progressive D.C. rally doesn't get Tea Party treatment
Fair & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
October 6, 2010
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4162
Thanks to the efforts of independent media outlets like
Free Speech TV (10/2/10), GritTV (10/4/10) and
Democracy Now! (10/4/10), you may have been able to
follow the happenings at last weekend's One Nation
Working Together rally. Organized and endorsed by
hundreds of progressive citizens' groups, labor unions
and grassroots activists, the gathering drew tens of
thousands to Washington, D.C., to make the case for
jobs, peace and social justice. But the corporate media
seemed mostly less than impressed, either ignoring the
rally completely or framing it in the shadow of the Tea
Party.
The network evening newscasts were mostly uninterested,
with NBC Nightly News the only one of the big three to
file a report, according to a search of the Nexis news
database. The PBS NewsHour did not cover One Nation,
though a few weeks prior Tea Party organizer Dick Armey
was featured in a long one-on-one interview (FAIR Blog,
9/10/10). And far-right Fox News personality Glenn
Beck's August rally in Washington was covered on the
NewsHour before it happened (8/27/10) and afterwards as
well (8/30/10).
The rise of the conservative Tea Party movement has
been the subject of intense, often uncritical media
coverage (Extra!, 5/10), so comparisons of One Nation
to Tea Party rallies were inevitable. "Liberals Take
Their Turn at Rallying," said the Washington Post
(10/3/10), describing the event as "the left wing's
first large gathering designed to counter the
conservative Tea Party phenomenon."
That might comes as a surprise to the organizers of the
U.S. Social Forum in June, where thousands of
progressive activists rallied and strategized in
Detroit (Extra!, 9/10). And it ignores the National
Equality March for gay and lesbian rights in
Washington, D.C.--which, by some counts, drew more to
Washington than a Tea Party rally in September, though
it attracted a fraction of the corporate media coverage
(Extra!, 12/09).
The Post continued its comparison: "The rally lacked
central charismatic speakers like Beck and former
Alaska governor Sarah Palin." This conclusion is
typical for a corporate media that treats every
Facebook post or public appearance by Palin as if it
were inherently newsworthy.
Not all of the corporate media's coverage was
dismissive; CNN featured regular reports on October 2,
many from correspondent Kate Bolduan--though the
network also made sure to give the Tea Party a platform
on the subject of One Nation, interviewing National Tea
Party Federation spokesman David Webb (10/3/10).
Some of the references to Beck and the Tea Party were
bizarre--like when an NBC Nightly News report (10/2/10)
noted that "thousands of party liberals today borrowed
a page from the Tea Party movement, gathering on the
National Mall in Washington to try and stir up both
passion and Democratic voters." Of course, rallying
progressives around the theme of jobs and justice does
not exactly require "borrowing" an idea from Glenn
Beck; Martin Luther King delivered a rather well-known
address on those themes some 40 years ago.
Beck's red-baiting of the rally was woven into some of
the coverage. On ABC's Good Morning America (10/2/10),
Deborah Roberts asked NAACP president Ben Jealous:
"Now, Glenn Beck has said to some of his viewers and
listeners on the radio, that among your organizers are
Communist Party members and a New York City Democratic
Socialist of America. What do you say to that?"
Many news accounts (e.g., New York Times, 10/3/10)
concluded that the rally attracted fewer supporters
than Beck's most recent Washington rally. That may very
well be true, but numbers have never determined how
much coverage corporate media devote to a given event.
Anti-war protests before the invasion of Iraq, for
instance, were massive gatherings that generated little
media interest (FAIR Action Alert, 9/30/02, 10/28/02),
while somewhat small Tea Party protests or anti-
healthcare bill protests have been given abundant
coverage. Such coverage helps foster a sense of a
protest movement's strength, which has been the media's
gift to the Tea Party movement over the past year. It
is no surprise that progressive activists were not
awarded a similar corporate media platform.
==========
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