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August 13
AP is reporting that the federal Court of Appeals overturned a district court which had ruled unconstitutional Congress’ ban on future ACORN funding.
h/t: Dan Riehl
The lower court decision was preposterous and the reversal is both understandable and welcome.
Clarice Feldman
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/08/acorn_loses_its_funding_ban_ap.html
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As an aside:
An excerpt from an article titled : “Radicalizing Community”
Link
After asserting the importance of human agency in the struggle for social justice, it is essential to keep in mind how difficult the struggle has been and how quickly opportunities are closed by those in power. Cloward and Piven (1999) assert that throughout the twentieth century, for example, there were only two five-year periods, 1933–1938 and 1963–1968, when significant gains were won. The rest of the time, progressive forces were either back on their heels, treading water, or planting seeds. This analysis does not highlight gains made by other history makers, including movement activists, trade union members, and Left political formations, who struggled in all those other ninety years in the past century around so many other causes. But the gains during the ten years were definitely transformative ones, where the national political economy and especially the national state were forced to expand the social welfare system, engage in redistributionist politics, and support the broad struggles for human rights and inclusion. The authors were clearly drawing a historical lesson, more than detailing history making. The lesson remains worth repeating.
People make history when they challenge the existing power and when the times are right. But those right times are few and far between, and they do not last very long. Community organizing has a critical role to play in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, and this current economic crisis offers a window of opportunity that students and makers of history should recognize and make the most of. We see the current moment as filled with potential, but only if people act. On the other hand, whether major or minor gains are made in the present, the potential shift underway that began with the economic crisis and the presidential election in the United States should play itself out for the near future, either reversing neoliberal policies of the past thirty years or reforming its gross excesses.
Still, the future of democracy and the egalitarian project depends on Left opposition. Mary Ellen Lease, in a similar historical moment, working with American agrarian populists, challenged her fellow history makers to “raise less corn and more hell.” It was an idea and strategy in the finest traditions of democratic dissent. It would do us all well to heed the varied lessons of the past, understand history better, and seek to become the history makers feared by those who have controlled the forces of history for more than a generation.
“Radicalizing Community” is an excerpt from Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing, to be published in June 2010 by Rutgers University Press,
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
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America: ”Had Enough” of the Progressive agenda?
The ONLY thing the Progressives FEAR is the BALLOT BOX.
November 2010 is coming…….
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NOT RACIST.
NOT VIOLENT.
JUST SILENT NO MORE.
