Politics and Social Movements

Will the US withdrawal from Iraq include contractors? Obama's commitment to withdrawal is already sketchy. He might leave 30,000 troops in Iraq, possibly in a permanent US base, and call it withdrawal, move many of the troops to Afghanistan - or he might just completely change his mind and not withdraw at all.

One of the main problems of activists advocating for the Democrats in the 2008 US election is that it contradicts our values and will cause the public to stop trusting us.

It's morally fine for activists to advocate for a Democrat vote if you call it a "lesser evil", but when we say that the Democrats are actually "good" then we are being dishonest.

There is no such thing as a "fair" election, there are only elections that are more fair than others.

If you look right now at the Yahoo News page there are two conflicting stories:
1 "Obama lead on McCain grows to 12 points"
2 "AP presidential poll: Race tightens in final weeks"

Either Obama has a 12 point lead (Reuteurs) or 1 point lead (AP).

I think putting a ban on foreclosing mortgages and printing money (increasing liquidity) would "solve" the crisis. Let the banks fail (currently the largest bank that was failing was bought up by another corporation (JP Morgan I think) which seemed happy to get it!). Let the stock market fall 20%.

Also, I think there are more important economic problems in the US including unemployment, poverty, and non-existent or overly costly healthcare.

Obama is calling for hope, but failing to talk about power and is failing to be an organizer. The goal of community organizing is for the organizer to help people realize that they have power, to help them organize around their grievances, and for the people to lead.

Here are a couple possible causes for how a major progresive political party could develop in the US.

It will probably take several of them.

1. The death of the Democrats.

Interesting looking activist journal. Hard to read though. Because of the layout and disorganization of the contents I didn't read any of the articles. Whereas if they'd just done regular black text on white background, and used regular fonts, I'd probably have read at least 3 articles.

http://www.joaap.org/

In 2007, Clinton raised $97 million for the primaries and Obama raised $95.6 million (http://www.capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=332). Obama did get more small donations (as did Ron Paul), but he is NOT doing well in this race because of his message. In fact Clinton is getting more votes per dollar spent than Obama (probably because she has a major name recognition advantage).

Obama is doing well because he has an ok message and a hundred million dollars of money that comes from the rich (and the guillible non-rich).

The goal of this website (CampusActivism.org) and ActivismNetwork.org is to serve both students and non-students.

However, if you look at our list of upcoming events you will see that around 80% of them are student related. Here are several reasons for this:

1. This site is better plugged into student networks. You might think this is the major reason, but I hypothesize that a key reason is that there are a lot more student grassroots activisty conferences than non-student ones.