When the bankrupt state of California fires liberians and teachers, what do the PTAs on the west side do? They call everyone to get on board for selling more lemonade and cupcakes at the next meeting. Can this really be the lasting legacy of the Sixties, participatory democracy at the baked goods table?

Instead, how about organizing politically, say, with 200 buses with mothers and fathers, everyone, furioso, converging on Sacramento, on the lawns of the capital building, making a political presence and then some. Like the Black Panthers in 1967, but not like the Black Panthers, i.e, leave the guns and revolutionary rhetoric at home.

But liberals, with a liberal in office that works like a mickey finn to the body politic, are disarmed, too passive, bereft of ideas that may have a broader reach than the home front and the lemonade stand. In two words, liberals are confused and weightless, unable at the moment to punch above their class. And, in a phrase, they are afraid to upset the apple cart that is the return of the repressed, Jerry Brown, who seems to merely want something to do, but does not know what, exactly. But he, and the Party, will spend millions to try and do it. This is political vision in the days of our demise: see Great Britain, post-empire.

The fact that the argument is framed in terms of a never-to-be-contemplated federal jobs program (delivered like mana from Heaven) tells us a bit about the left’s political imagination and memory. Can we not recall that FDR and LBJ would have been a two-bit presidents without pressure from below, by the CIO and other broad-based popular movements? Do we not remember that FDR and Johnson were pushed to bring on the New Deal and the “Great” Society? I know, where are the movements from below?

History moves in mysterious ways. But we do know this, until forced, most politicians will trim, unless in a very “safe” district where lassitude is a winner. Witness the Republican party today. Do you really think they want to embrace Tea “Party” politics as a way to power in 2012? Not going to happen, unless they are profoundly foolish. Is the left going to take a lesson from the Tea Party’s inevitable failure: to wit, don’t get too excited about leading from the left of the present conventional wisdom?

Ok, Laborlou, what are the deep thoughts besides “union jobs in America and they’re not coming back.”

How might we organize to reverse prop 13, especially for corporate properties, how might we make it a point of Brown’s campaign to tax at higher rates the oil revenues derived from the state of California (good timing, right?), how might we begin to slough off the weight of the dead past that is Clintonism, the triangulation that is never too far from our now inbred instinctual political reactions, of how to be a “progressive”, with deadly memories of the good old days when the Democratic Party, in a mood for deregulation with a ideological frenzy inspired by R Reagan and Milton Friedman, let the good times role for finance Capital? Are we so ideologically impoverished, and doped, to be hoping (yes we can?) that a tax on hemp will save us?

200, 300, buses to Sacramento, anyone?

kerry candaele
venice, ca. Home of the Homeless, and a part of the failed state of California.

btw, does Rupert Murdoch own “The Enquirer?” (a joke, I think)