====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
It's 8 pm and I'm just now home from work....where there was a rather impressive mass "town hall" meeting on SB5. There were about 25 speakers, including about 12-15 representatives of different unions. All of these were on the same page and talking "solidarity." Two teabaggers spoke. As near as I could tell one was a rather socially dysfunctional Edmund Burke freak of some sort who denounced democracy as "mob rule," and the other wanted to clarify that, while the rest of us were garbage, the police and firefighters should be allowed some rights. A representative of the latter replied by saying that they stood with the teachers and the other unions represented. More remarkably, the recent mobilizations of tens of thousands of us here were enough to get the Democrats talking like they remembered who FDR was. As far as that goes, an indeterminate number of the Republicans in the State House are backing away from the governor on this. The key thing, of course, are the numbers. As I told my union at the last meeting, politicians are all about getting reelected with minimal opposition. If they see big numbers out against them, a legislature full of Sarah Palins will at least go through the motions of playing the Internationale on a kazoo.. I can't actually recall being in another meeting quite like this...ever. Both its political nature and the breadth of the union participants raised the spectre of the sort of movement we've not seen in my lifetime.... Tomorrow, we're off to Columbus. Solidarity, Mark L. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
