Archive for February, 2011

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February 28, 2011

Wisconsin – Next Stop, the General Strike!

Union members and supporters pack the halls of the Wisconsin State Legislature

“This has been a life experience we will never forget. I feel like all of these people are family.”

Union Supporter and protester, Neporsha Hamlin, of Madison, WI.

News this week of well over seventy thousand union members and their supporters occupying the Capital Rotunda of Madison, Wis., comes not a moment too soon, as workers around the country have faced vicious attacks on their basic freedom’s in the face of badly managed state budgets.

Events in the embattled state have unfolded quickly, starting with the public Teachers unions and quickly spreading to other sectors.

So far, over 40% of the city’s union teachers, acting on their own initiative, have led wildcat strikes in their schools, calling in “sick” to attend protests, closing entire school districts, with thousands of their students following in toe.

In response, city employers threatened to fire any teacher who skipped school to attend the protests. Thwarting their efforts, Doctors from hospitals across the city joined together and set up a station near the capital to provide the “sick” teachers with notes, covering their absences from work. Family physician Lou Sanner, 59, of Madison, told reporters that many of the teachers he was writing notes for appeared to be suffering from stress.

Fire-fighters in Madison joined protests last week as well, marching with other union members and supporters, with some even occupying the capital overnight.

Across the country, protest and rallies have been had in over 60 cities that we are aware of, and solidarity protests were held by the unions on Saturday at every state capital in the country.

Whats in the bill?

On February 11th, Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill  (which you can read here) that would essentially destroy collective bargaining rights – the rights which legally allow workers to band together to bargain over working conditions – for Wisconsin’s nearly 175,000 state and local government employees. That Bill has now passed a house vote, and is awaiting a vote in the State Senate.

Barring police and fire-fighters, most workers employed by the State of Wisconsin would lose their right to bargain over wages that exceeded inflation, and could be terminated for participating in legally protected acts of protest if the Governor ever declared a “State of Emergency.” Home health care workers, family child care workers, UW Hospitals and Clinics employees, and UW faculty and academic staff would lose their collective bargaining authority altogether.

State employees would be barred from negotiating a contract which lasted longer than a year, and employees who have voted to certify as a union would automatically lose their recognition at the end of one year, and have to run an entirely new certification campaign in order to remain union.

To justify his vicious attack on workers, Walker argues feebly that the state’s budget shortfall has tied his hands. In a letter to Wisconsin State Employees, he cites a strange statistic to back himself up – “In the current fiscal year which ends on June 30, 2011, we face a budget deficit of $136.7 million.”

He fails to mention that before his recent debt plan, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau reported that the state would actually end the year with a surplus. Walker and Republicans themselves sunk the State into debt by spending hundreds of millions on benefits for the wealthy.

Their new debt plan gave $48 million to private health savings accounts, which reports found regularly only benefited wealthy people – people with an average adjusted gross income of $139,000. The HSA accounts are, in fact, primarily serving simply as tax havens for the wealthy, nearly half of whom reported withdrawing nothing from their accounts.

The handouts to the wealthy – which happened to also bankrupt the state – have prompted SEIU president Mary Kay Henry to speculate that this year’s “budget crisis” may well have been engineered specifically to justify anti-union legislation.

Perhaps most revealing of all, however, is the recent discovery that Wisconsin tax payers are not in fact paying for the pensions and health insurance plans of state workers – one of the biggest rallying cries of conservatives.

In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, author Rick Ungar found that: “Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, creates the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not. Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.”

As it turns out, workers receive their pension and health insurance plans using ”deferred compensation” – money that employees otherwise would have been paid as cash, but instead have placed in the government operated pension fund where the money is then invested.

What next for us workers?

When asked why she was attending protests in Madison, 30 year old Virginia Welle, a teacher at Chippewa Falls High School, told reporters in no uncertain terms that she was “fighting for my home and my career.”

More than that, though, workers in Wisconsin are fighting on the frontline of what is quickly becoming a heated nationwide assault on workers’ rights. Already, similar bills have been proposed in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee, and Iowa.

But in Wisconsin, the next step for the Republican controlled government is to kick the protesters out of the capital.

They may try a number of things to do so. They have already, in fact, passed new rules barring protesters from sleeping overnight in the capital building – a move opposed so thoroughly by the public that even the head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association called on the governor to keep the Capitol open.

But that will not be enough to end the unrest. Even “If they kick us out,” says Dan Wise, a 19-year-old Technical College student who has been attending class by day and protests by night, “we will protest outside.”

The smarter, and more likely move that the Walker administration will take is to try to “compromise” on the bill, offering to the Democrats and Union Leaders a more watered down version of the same crap.

If the workers stay out in the streets, and continue to occupy the capital, Walker will eventually come to terms with the fact that he has to compromise in order to quiet the crowds. The problem is that Walker, in an effort to keep as much of his bill as possible, will look to compromise with Democrats, and not with the workers themselves (who undoubtedly have much more at stake than the politicians).

The Democrats, in turn, will lean on their lackeys in the union leadership to begin helping to reign the crowds in.

The rank and file of Wisconsin, if it is interested in stopping this bill, has to ignore the calls that may soon come from their union leaders should the Democrats reach a “compromise” with Walker. The union bureaucracies of every country have always, when push came to shove, been fundamentally on the side of the employers – on the side of the state.  Although they may support the basic rights of their members, and may even at times support their militancy, the union leadership has an interest fundamentally at odds with the rank and file.

The union leadership, in the end, is interested in dues collection. The union leadership is interested in “seats at the table” with the Democratic Party, and the union leadership is interested in maintaining its position as “union leaders.” They will, at all costs, defend this holy trinity of modern business unionism, if necessary against their own members.

The creative and brave initiative of the Wisconsin rank and file, in fact, have put some of these interests at risk. Union leaders are at this moment scrambling to regain control over their workers, who without being instructed, led one of the most brash wildcat strikes in recent memory. They are concerned the workers may realize that not only are they capable of acting independently of their union presidents, but that their independent action is twice as effective!

The single most important thing to do now is to keep that independent spirit alive amongst the workers of Madison.

To do this, and to bring more workers on board with the Teachers, workers must devote all of their energy to building for the general strike in Wisconsin, which the South Central Federation of Labor (representing 45,000 workers from 97 different unions) has recently announced it endorses. The prospects are superb, with an outpouring of solidarity the likes of which this country has not seen for years.

In using this spirit of mutual support and understanding to build a general strike, workers in Wisconsin can definitively show that our greatest power, and our greatest virtue, is our ability to withdraw our labor power from society, and in so doing, pound the forces of reaction into submission.

Perhaps Joe Hill, the famed “troubadour of the IWW,” said it best, when he observed that:

“If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.”-Joe Hill

Posted in Economy, Government, Resistance | Leave a Comment »

February 25, 2011

Our Economic Pain Is Coming from Big Industry CEOs, Not Public Employees’ Unions

Reposted from Alternet – an article by John Schmitt:

Pay in the private sector has been stagnant or falling for decades, health insurance coverage has been dropping, and traditional pensions have all but disappeared.

Conservative think-tanks and politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have been leading an attack on public-sector workers. The crux of their argument is that the economy is a mess and a large part of the reason is that public employees are overpaid.

On closer inspection, the evidence suggests a different culprit: private-sector employers. The problem is not that public-sector pay and benefits are out of control. The problem is that pay in the private sector has been stagnant or falling, health insurance coverage has been dropping, and traditional pensions have all but disappeared.

Back in the late 1970s, public- and private-sector jobs were not that different. About 70 percent of private-sector workers had health insurance through their jobs. Public-sector workers were a bit more likely to have coverage than private-sector workers –about 75 percent at the local level, 80 percent at the state level, and 85 percent at the federal level. Then, as now, this largely reflected that, on average, public employees were older and more likely to be college-educated than private-sector workers.

Health-coverage rates today are little changed in the public sector. But, coverage is down almost 15 percentage points for private-sector workers.

Over the last three decades, in our role as “employers” of public-sector workers, we taxpayers did the right thing. We generally kept our commitment to public-sector workers and their families. Coverage hasn’t slipped, even if most public workers now pay a larger share of premiums, and have seen increases in deductibles and co-pays. In our other role, however, as employees in the private sector, we didn’t get the same treatment from our own employers.

Public-sector workers were more successful in holding onto their health care and other benefits for two reasons. First, taxpayers generally value the work performed by public school teachers, police, food inspectors, medical researchers, air-traffic controllers, and other public workers. We also know what it takes to maintain a middle-class standard of living and want to ensure that our neighbors meet that standard.

Second, public-sector workers are better organized than their private-sector counterparts. As private-sector unionization rates fell from about 20 percent at the end of the 1970s to just 7 percent in 2010, the share of public-sector workers in a union held steady at over 35 percent. Public-sector unions played an important role in protecting their members against declines in health and pension benefits seen in the private sector.

Meanwhile, the four-fifths of the U.S. workforce in the private sector got hammered. As the Economic Policy Institute has documented so well in its report, the State of Working America, private employers did not do the right thing on health, pensions or pay. Private-sector workers — and unions — were too weak to resist the employer assault.

If the country were getting poorer, then it would be understandable that workers would have to share the sacrifice. But, in fact, we are on average much better off now than three decades ago. The hitch is “on average.” The last 30 years have seen an unprecedented upward redistribution of national income. The richest 1 percent have seen their share of national income rise from 8.6 percent in 1979 to 15.9 percent in 2008.

Virtually no public employee falls in this privileged top 1 percent. In 2008, it took a family income of $368,000 to make the top 1 percent. The president crosses this threshold, with a salary of $400,000, but even the vice president, at $221,000, falls short.

The real problem facing America is not that we don’t have enough to go around. The problem is that we have redistributed from the middle-class to the wealthy. Public-sector workers played no role whatsoever in that process.

Given recent economic history, the actions of conservatives look like a classic case of misdirection. Conservative think-tanks, Governors Christie and Walker, and their corporate backers want us to focus on public employees because they don’t want us to focus on the people who are really making out in the current economy.

Posted in Economy, Government | Leave a Comment »

February 14, 2011

The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters

Reposted from Salon.com – written by Glenn Greenwald

There’s a very strange episode being widely discussed the past couple of days involving numerous parties, including me, that I now want to comment on.  The story, first reported by The Tech Herald, has been written about in numerous places (see Marcy Wheeler, Forbes, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, Matt Yglesias, Reason, Tech Dirt, and others), so I’ll provide just the summary.

Last week, Aaron Barr, a top executive at computer security firm HB Gary Federal, boasted to the Financial Times that his firm had infiltrated and begun to expose Anonymous, the group of pro-WikiLeaks hackers that had launched cyber attacks on companies terminating services to the whistleblowing site (such as Paypal, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon and others).  In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the email accounts of HB Gary, published 50,000 of their emails online, and also hacked Barr’s Twitter and other online accounts.

Among the emails that were published was a report prepared by HB Gary — in conjunction with several other top online security firms, including Palantir Technologies — on how to destroy WikiLeaks.  The emails indicated the report was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank of America through its outside law firm, Hunton & Williams.  News reports have indicated that WikiLeaks is planning to publish highly incriminating documents showing possible corruption and fraud at that bank, and The New York Times detailed last month how seriously top bank officials are taking that threat.  The NYT article described that the bank’s ”counterespionage work” against WikiLeaks entailed constant briefings for top executives on the whistleblowing site, along with the hiring of “several top law firms” and Booz Allen (the long-time firm of former Bush DNI Adm. Michael McConnell and numerous other top intelligence and defense officials).  The report prepared by these firms was designed to be part of the Bank of America’s highly funded anti-WikiLeaks campaign.

The leaked report suggested numerous ways to destroy WikiLeaks, some of them likely illegal — including planting fake documents with the group and then attacking them when published; “creat[ing] concern over the security” of the site; “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters”; and a “media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities.”  Many of those proposals were also featured prongs of a secret 2008 Pentagon plan to destroy WikiLeaks.

One section of the leaked report focused on attacking WikiLeaks’ supporters and it featured a discussion of me.  A graph purporting to be an “organizational chart” identified several other targets, including former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee, Guardian reporter James Ball, and Manning supporter David House.  The report claimed I was ”critical” to WikiLeaks’ public support after its website was removed by Amazon and that “it is this level of support that needs to be disrupted”; absurdly speculated that “without the support of people like Glenn, WikiLeaks would fold”; and darkly suggested that “these are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause.”  As The Tech Herald noted, “earlier drafts of the proposal and an email from Aaron Barr used the word ‘attacked’ over ‘disrupted’ when discussing the level of support.”

In the wake of the ensuing controversy caused by publication of these documents, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Tech, Alex Karp, has now issued a statement stating that he ”directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary.”  The full statement — which can be read here — also includes this sentence:  ”personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.”  Palantir has also contacted me by email to arrange for Dr. Karp to call me to personally convey the apology.  My primary interest is in knowing whether Bank of America retained these firms to execute this proposal and if any steps were taken to do so; if Karp’s apology is genuine, that information ought to be forthcoming (as I was finishing writing this, Karp called me, seemed sincere enough in his apology, vowed that any Palantir employees involved in this would be dealt with the way they dealt with HB Gary, and commendably committed to telling me by the end of the week whether Bank of America or Hunton & Williams actually retained these firms to carry out this proposal).

* * * * *

My initial reaction to all of this was to scoff at its absurdity.  Not being familiar with the private-sector world of internet security, I hadn’t heard of these firms before and, based on the quality of the proposal, assumed they were just some self-promoting, fly-by-night entities of little significance.  Moreover, for the reasons I detailed in my interview with The Tech Herald — and for reasons Digby elaborated on here — the very notion that I could be forced to choose “professional preservation over cause” is ludicrous on multiple levels.  Obviously, I wouldn’t have spent the last year vehemently supporting WikiLeaks — to say nothing of aggressively criticizing virtually every large media outlet and many of their leading stars, as well as the most beloved political leaders of both parties — if I were willing to choose ”career preservation over cause.”

But after learning a lot more over the last couple of days, I now take this more seriously — not in terms of my involvement but the broader implications this story highlights.  For one thing, it turns out that the firms involved here are large, legitimate and serious, and do substantial amounts of work for both the U.S. Government and the nation’s largest private corporations (as but one example, see this email from a Stanford computer science student about Palantir).  Moreover, these kinds of smear campaigns are far from unusual; in other leaked HB Gary emails, ThinkProgress discovered that similar proposals were prepared for the Chamber of Commerce to attack progressive groups and other activists (including ThinkProgress).  And perhaps most disturbing of all, Hunton & Williams was recommended to Bank of America’s General Counsel by the Justice Department — meaning the U.S. Government is aiding Bank of America in its defense against/attacks on WikiLeaks.

That’s why this should be taken seriously, despite how ignorant, trite and laughably shallow is the specific leaked anti-WikiLeaks proposal.  As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns.   The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking.  That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is.  The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is.  These highly experienced firms included such proposals because they assumed those deep-pocket organizations would approve and it would make their hiring more likely.

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power.  I’ve written many times about this issue — the full-scale merger between public and private spheres –  because it’s easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics.  Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized.  There is very little separation between government power and corporate power.   Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former.  The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did.  It’s not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it’s worse than that:  corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

That’s what this anti-WikiLeaks campaign is generally:  it’s a concerted, unified effort between government and the most powerful entities in the private sector (Bank of America is the largest bank in the nation).  The firms the Bank has hired (such as Booz Allen) are suffused with the highest level former defense and intelligence officials, while these other outside firms (including Hunton & Williams and Palantir) are extremely well-connected to the U.S. Government.  The U.S. Government’s obsession with destroying WikiLeaks has been well-documented.  And because the U.S. Government is free to break the law without any constraints, oversight or accountability, so, too, are its “private partners” able to act lawlessly.  That was the lesson of the Congressional vesting of full retroactive immunity in lawbreaking telecoms, of the refusal to prosecute any of the important Wall Street criminals who caused the 2008 financial crisis, and of the instinctive efforts of the political class to protect defrauding mortgage banks.

The exemption from the rule of law has been fully transferred from the highest level political elites to their counterparts in the private sector.  “Law” is something used to restrain ordinary Americans and especially those who oppose this consortium of government and corporate power, but it manifestly does not apply to restrain these elites.  Just consider one amazing example illustrating how this works.

After Anonymous imposed some very minimal cyber disruptions on Paypal, Master Card and Amazon, the DOJ flamboyantly vowed to arrest the culprits, and several individuals were just arrested as part of those attacks.  But weeks earlier, a far more damaging and serious cyber-attack was launched at WikiLeaks, knocking them offline.  Those attacks were sophisticated and dangerous.  Whoever did that was quite likely part of either a government agency or a large private entity acting at its behest.  Yet the DOJ has never announced any investigation into those attacks or vowed to apprehend the culprits, and it’s impossible to imagine that ever happening.

Why?  Because crimes carried out that serve the Government’s agenda and target its opponents are permitted and even encouraged; cyber-attacks are “crimes” only when undertaken by those whom the Government dislikes, but are perfectly permissible when the Government itself or those with a sympathetic agenda unleash them.  Whoever launched those cyber attacks at WikiLeaks (whether government or private actors) had no more legal right to do so than Anonymous, but only the latter will be prosecuted.

That’s the same dynamic that causes the Obama administration to be obsessed with prosecuting WikiLeaks but not The New York Times or Bob Woodward, even though the latter have published far more sensitive government secrets; WikiLeaks is adverse to the government while the NYT and Woodward aren’t, and thus “law” applies to punish only the former.  The same mindset drives the Government to shield high-level political officials who commit the most serious crimes, while relentlessly pursuing whistle-blowers who expose their wrongdoing.  Those with proximity to government power and who serve and/or control it are free from the constraints of law; those who threaten or subvert it have the full weight of law come crashing down upon them.

* * * * *

What is set forth in these proposals for Bank of America quite possibly constitutes serious crimes.  Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud.  Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well.  Attacking WikiLeaks’ computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws.

Yet these firms had no compunction about proposing such measures to Bank of America and Hunton & Williams, and even writing them down.   What accounts for that brazen disregard of risk?  In this world, law does not exist as a constraint.  It’s impossible to imagine the DOJ ever, ever prosecuting a huge entity like Bank of America for doing something like waging war against WikiLeaks and its supporters.  These massive corporations and the firms that serve them have no fear of law or government because they control each.  That’s why they so freely plot to target those who oppose them in any way.  They not only have massive resources to devote to such attacks, but the ability to act without limits.  John Cole put it this way:

One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. There is a reason for these clowns going after Think Progress and unions, just like there is a reason they are targeting Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald, Planned Parenthood, and Acorn. . . .

You have to understand the mindset- they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn’t enough. They want it all.  Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. . . . And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them . . . .

I don’t even know why we bother to hold elections any more, to be honest, the game is so rigged. We’re a banana republic, and it is just a matter of time before we descend into necklacing and other tribal bullshit.

There are supposed to be institutions which limit what can be done in pursuit of those private-sector goals.  They’re called ”government” and “law.”  But those institutions are so annexed by the most powerful private-sector elites, and so corrupted by the public officials who run them, that nobody — least of all those elites — has any expectation that they will limit anything.  To the contrary, the full force of government and law will be unleashed against anyone who undermines Bank of America and Wall Street executives and telecoms and government and the like (such as WikiLeaks and supporters), and will be further exploited to advance the interests of those entities, but will never be used to constrain what they do.  These firms vying for Bank of America’s anti-WikiLeaks business know all of this full well, which is why they concluded that proposing such pernicious and possibly illegal attacks would be deemed not just acceptable but commendable.

UPDATE:  Several new items to note:  (1) Salon‘s Editor-in-Chief, Kerry Lauerman, has an excellent response to all of this on behalf of Salon; (2) The CEO and COO of Berico — the third company whose name appears on the report (along with Palantir and HB Gary) — has now issued a statement [link fixed] condemning the proposal as “reprehensible” and also severed all ties with HB Gary; and (3) Bank of America has issued a carefully worded statement to USA Today, denying that they ever saw or have any interest in the proposal and claiming they never hired HB Gary to do this work (though they don’t say whether they hired Berico or Palantir, the firms that were coordinating the proposal, to do similar work, nor whether Hunton & Williams did); I’ll look forward to hearing from Palantir’s CEO, as promised, on those questions.

UPDATE II:  The New York Times this morning has a fairly thorough account of this matter that is worth reading.  While Bank of America continues to deny involvement in these proposals, its law firm, Hunton & Williams — one of the most well-connected law firms in Washington — refuses to comment, and that firm appears to be a key link in all of these efforts.

Posted in Government, Resistance, U.S. Media | Leave a Comment »

February 2, 2011

Why You Should Start a Solidarity Network

People often accuse anarchists of being opposed to all forms of organization. Some of us are quick to point out, however, that it’s not all organization we are opposed to – just apparently the effective ones.

When I first became interested in Anarchist politics, there weren’t many groups for me to get involved with. All of the collectives I joined seemed to form, fall apart, and reform – always the same people reshuffling into new groups, disbanding, and starting over again. If they took part in any discernible action at all, it was normally because some other group had organized it.

All over the U.S., in fact, the Anarchist organizations I had worked with could be summed up in one word – they were aimless.

They had vague objectives. They had no discernible, immediate goals. Actually, if you asked most of them what they were doing, I’m not sure you could get a straight answer.

Sound familiar?

These are chronic issues in much of the Anarchist movement today, and if my experience is any indicator, you’ve probably run into similar problems.

There is, however, a way to get around these issues: with perseverance and a little bit of elbow grease, you can start your own solidarity network.

Although by no means does this model offer the only solutions to these common problems, the solidarity network model, nonetheless, does offer some practical insights and examples of how we can:

1. Win fights against our bosses and landlords, 2. Attract new workers to our organizations, many of whom will have never even heard of Anarchism before, 3. Empower ourselves and our fellow workers, and 4. Establish a stable and positive presence in our community, off of which we may continue to grow in new directions.

To Begin:

The Seattle Solidarity Network, or SeaSol for short, started in 2008 with only a handful of activists, from a variety of backgrounds. Some had experience in labor organizing, others in anti-summit work against the G8, and others still in various anti-war campaigns.

In part, the intention of the first organizers was to build on the great work of people who had come before them. The vision for SeaSol, in fact, might best be described as a blending of the “direct action case work” of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the “solidarity unionism” of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Since its founding, SeaSol has grown to encompass a membership of over 100 people, and an organizing committee of 15. These fifteen organizers, moreover, can rely on a mobilizing list of 400 supporters to call out to actions when needed, of whom we can reliably count on perhaps 20 – 30 people to turn out.

Largely, SeaSol’s growth can be attributed to its success rate. Out of 25 fights SeaSol has taken on, we have won 22.

Further still, SeaSol’s success rate can be attributed to its organizing model – which brings us to the first reason to start a solidarity network in your home town:

1. Winning Fights Against Bosses and Landlords:

“Winning,” a SeaSol organizer once said, “is like a drug.” A very intoxicating and empowering drug.

For those of us who have poured our hearts into a lot of “symbolic” anarchist projects – a lot of anti-police brutality work, anti-war organizing, anti-G8 campaigns, and so on – for those of us who have spent time around these campaigns, we have often felt extremely demoralized.

We have felt this way because despite all the sacrifice, we never won anything. The campaigns never seemed to end after the enemy had conceded something; instead they always seemed to stop when people just became exhausted.

Because of this, the SeaSol model stresses that organizers should have both a good understanding of how to take on bosses and landlords (what tactics work, what don’t), and also on how realistic winning a potential new campaign could be.

We like to show this relationship – between our strength and our demands – in our “Winability” graph.

In the graph, we can see that as our demands on a boss become greater, it becomes necessary for us to find more leverage to hurt them. So, the smaller the demand, the less leverage we need. The bigger the demand… you get the idea.

 

The Seattle Solidarity Network's "Winnability" Graph

You might think this sounds obvious, and to Anarchists it probably is. This graph is just a nerdy way of teaching people a concept Anarchists have always deeply appreciated – Direct Action.

Even so, Anarchists could still learn a thing or two from SeaSol’s take on that old idea.

Part of what makes SeaSol so effective is that we base our actions on our actual strength. If, for example, it was going to take us “5 units” of pressure to win a demand from a boss, but we could only reliably keep up “3 units,” we would decline to take on that fight.

Of course, there is no way to quantify any of this, but you understand the concept.

The idea, in a nutshell, is to make sure that we aren’t ever spending time on fights we are not yet strong enough to win. By choosing fights carefully, we can focus our energy somewhere we can have a bigger impact. It is, after all, results that people most want to see.

Once the fight is underway, SeaSol uses two basic principles to plan the campaign: escalation and sustainability.

First, we brainstorm what tactics might be effective in the campaign, and we rate them from least to most powerful. We do this because we want to escalate as the fight goes on. “Its not the memory of what we did to them yesterday that will make the bosses give in,” explains a SeaSol organizer, “but the fear of what we will do to them tomorrow.”

The process of mapping out a fight in this way is helpful not only because it allows us see just how much support we will have to mobilize – its helpful also because it allows us to see if our initial plans are sustainable.

2. Attract new workers:

There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons people may choose to join an organization. How friendly people are, how inclusive the group is, whether or not they agree with the principles of the group – all of these are important considerations for people.

Unfortunately, they are often the only considerations many anarchist organizers have when starting new groups. But there’s another consideration we should take into account – people may also want to know what your organization is doing.

The fact of the matter is that its hard to attract most people to your organization with great ideas and inclusiveness alone. People really want to see things get done.

It’s also hard to retain people if there isn’t a sense that progress is being made – if there isn’t some sort of momentum. People tend to burn out pretty quickly in groups where there is not a lot getting done. And who can blame them?

One of the reasons SeaSol has had more sustained growth than any other Anarchist organization in the Northwest over the last two years is that it offers something practical and concrete to people: mutual support, community, and a real, practical defense against your boss and landlord.

What’s more, the retention of new members has also been helped along by our momentum: there is always enough work to go around.

No matter how involved someone wants to get initially, we can always find space for them to come lend a hand. When we attract new people through our ongoing fights and new campaigns, we are increasing our capacity, which means we can take on more fights, thus attracting yet more people.

Posted in Economy, Resistance | 5 Comments »

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