The problem with our initiative system isn’t “unfunded mandates”–that’s a symptom.  The problem is that it’s too easy for organized money to put absolutely terrible policies on the ballot.  Banning paid signature gatherers would ensure that only measures with real grassroots support could get on the ballot, and once again make the initiative the people’s check-and-balance it was intended to be.

If you’re interested in more, David Broder, no raging leftist, writes about this at length in Democracy Derailed.

I do this to attempt to genuinely educate the public about the true cost of asking for disproportionately higher public spending in education, health care, transportation, capital budgets and so much more all the while sending legislators to Olympia who prioritize anti-tax pledges to Washington, D.C.-based anti-government organizations. If, as some argue, we have a massive state budget deficit because spending from Olympia is out of control, we have that deficit in large because we can no longer sustain an unbalanced status quo by which only 6 primarily urban counties are ‘net contributor’ of taxes while 33 primarily rural are ‘net recipient’ counties. Our rural communities are part of the soul of our state’s glorious history and residents deserve the same quality education and health care that urban communities receive. I am not troubled by the massively unbalanced subsidy of tax dollars from state government to rural areas, I am troubled by the disingenuous political arguments of those who pretend those subsidies don’t exist and prioritize anti-tax pledges above all else.

We’ve been reading Garry Wills’ masterful book “Lincoln at Gettysburg” which had just been published when I last took an American history class in 1992.  It’s a masterful analysis and contextualization of the speech, worth reading for so many reasons, but the insight I like the best is Wills’ analysis of how Lincoln uses the Gettysburg Address to literally redefine the fundamental notion of what America is and where it grounds its political and moral legitimacy.

What Lincoln did in the Gettysburg Address was to ground the idea of America not in the Constitution, a necessarily flawed and incomplete set of rules, but in the Declaration of Independence, a document that lays out a forward-looking vision of human rights grounded in the inherent dignity of each individual.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” This is a transcending and universal statement of ideals, and the task of succeeding generations (Lincoln’s and ours) is to ever more closely align reality with that bold ambition.

Social media does a fantastic job of creating noise and through noise you get attention. But noise has no narrative. The decentralized approach has served us brilliantly. Again, I am grateful and in awe of those in the OWS movement who have done what I do not have the courage to do myself.I believe we are rapidly approaching the time when old school Port Huron style organizing is necessary. Reading up on the early days of the last civil rights movement, it took them about 10 years to get to the catalytic moment of 1968. I think we are at our 1968 moment today but don’t have the structure underneath us.

1. from liberty plaza, Adrienne Maree Brown
2. Turning Occupation into Lasting Change, Tom Linzey and Jeff Reifman
3. Occupy Wall Street is Not a Brand, Marty Kearns

Very different perspectives, but some amazing thematic resonance: opportunity, radically democratic process, networks instead of organizations, diversity (of people and ideas).  Will these seeds blossom or wither and wait for the next season of discontent?

In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become “entitlements,” a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.   Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately.

What is left unsaid is the fact that this is yet another example of deliberate right-wing framing that has insidiously crept across the partisan divide.  She who names the problem gets to prescribe the solution.

Apparently, in our present political climate, this makes me some sort of leftist weirdo. Well, that says more about the parlous state of our political discourse than it does about my politics. At the end of the day, though, I want people in government who actually think that government is a good idea, because the alternative a self-baking recipe for incompetence and tyranny.

Effective social change organizing creates relationships in order to build measurable power and wields that power to achieve specific, significant behavioral, policy or political outcomes.

How does that work for you?

We like that it is succinct and clearly connects relationships, power and tangible outcomes.  But it also raises questions of what we might mean by “measurable power” and “specific, significant outcomes.”

Any organizing campaign or organizer will need to figure out what measures of power are most meaningful for their context, but in general, we think that power is most often measurable in terms of “I can motivate X people to take action Y, which results in Z.”

“Specific and significant” outcomes will also vary greatly across campaigns, but again, we want to emphasize how important it is to be able to articulate these outcomes in specific and measurable terms.  Some examples could include:

• Winning an election
• Passing legislation or administrative policies
• Measure shifts in public opinion or behavior

If your “big hairy audacious” goal will take years to achieve, that’s OK, but you need to be able to define some specific shorter-term outcomes to let you know whether you’re on track.