----- Original Message -----
From: UFPJ Action Alerts
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 3:09 AM
Subject: Citizen, Call Your Senators TODAY!
Please forward widely!
CALL YOUR SENATORS TODAY!
Tell them:
* Bring the troops home from Iraq now!
* Support Sen. Webb's amendment to prevent funds being used to
attack Iran!
Call the Congressional Switchboard TOLL-FREE: 888-851-1879
Dear Citizen,
On Monday, the U.S. Senate began to debate its version of Bush's
supplemental war funding request. It appears that, like the House of
Representatives, the Senate will give Bush $100 billion more to continue the
occupation in Iraq, while calling for troops to be brought home next spring,
a year from now. It is important that the Senate hear from the antiwar
movement: We want this war to end now!
It is likely that the bill will be voted on TODAY, so we urge you to
make your calls right now. It is critically important that your Senators
know we want them to support an amendment from Senator Webb that would
prohibit the use of military funds for operations against Iran. Given the
ongoing tensions and the recent decision by the UN Security Council to
impose sanctions against Iran, this amendment is very timely and must be
supported.
Some have argued that a bill with any kind of withdrawal date is the
best we can hope for, and that we must accept "reality." Within the special
kind of "reality" that exists in the halls of Congress, that might seem
true. But what about the other reality? The reality where dozens are being
killed and hundreds wounded nearly every day that this war continues, and
where our critical infrastructure at home is decaying from neglect? It is
our job to remind -- and keep reminding -- those who represent us in
Congress of that reality.
Whatever the outcome of the debate and vote in the Senate is, the
Congressional process around the supplemental funds is far from over. The
House and Senate versions of the bill will be different and so this all will
move into a Conference Committee, out of which will come one new version of
the bill. That new bill will then go back to both houses of Congress for a
final vote before going to the President. In other words, in the coming
weeks we will have more opportunities to remind Congress of the clear
mandate that came out of the November elections: It is time for Congress to
take action to end the war, not to prolong it!
Next week Congress will be in recess, which means that members will be
in their home districts. The Senate is scheduled to be out for one week and
the House of Representatives for two weeks. We hope you will take advantage
of this opportunity to bring your concerns directly to your elected
representatives.
UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org | 212-868-5545
To subscribe, visit www.unitedforpeace.org/email
***
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/23/48/
Salon Media Group: March 23, 2008
MoveOn Moves In with Pelosi
The netroots group's support proved crucial to passage of the Democrats'
Iraq spending plan. But antiwar activists say MoveOn has been co-opted by
its access to power.
by Farhad Manjoo
When Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, looks at the Iraq
spending bill that Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders managed to pass
in the House today, what he sees is a way to end the war. The bill, which
won passage on a nearly strict party-line vote, commits $124 billion to fund
operations in Iraq, but it calls for removal of American combat troops by
the summer of 2008. The plan is not perfect, Pariser concedes. It does not
require complete withdrawal. Still, this week, MoveOn signed on to Pelosi's
supplemental funding bill, citing a poll of its members showing overwhelming
support of the idea.
MoveOn's longtime allies in the antiwar movement, however, look at the
bill - and MoveOn's support for it - and see something very different.
Groups who call for immediate withdrawal argue that MoveOn's position is a
betrayal of their cause, and that Pelosi's bill merely continues the war
while allowing Democrats to say they've done something to oppose it. Cindy
Sheehan, the "peace mom" who favors immediate withdrawal, describes MoveOn
as supporting "the slow-bleed strategy of the Democratic leadership." Gail
Murphy, of the group CodePink, says, "MoveOn has taken a compromised
position - in fact I think they were involved behind the scenes in creating
a compromised position." Other peace activists call MoveOn's e-mail poll of
its membership a sham. If MoveOn's millions of members knew the full details
of the bill, they would surely oppose it.
MoveOn, which began with an e-mail petition opposing President Clinton's
impeachment in 1998, has grown into one of the biggest and best-known
netroots groups on the left. When Republicans controlled the White House and
the Congress, it raised millions of dollars in soft money for insurgent
liberal candidates and produced memorable commercials blasting President
Bush. Now, however, with the Democrats running the House and Senate,
MoveOn's
stance on the Pelosi bill has led critics to suggest complicity with the new
congressional power structure. MoveOn has settled for something less than
ideal. It's the classic problem the outsider faces after getting inside: Now
that it's got an in with the speaker of the House, has MoveOn lost its soul?
It's true that Pariser, a 26-year-old who has worked for MoveOn since 2001,
looks at the Iraq supplemental bill with a shrewdly pragmatic eye. Of all
the Iraq plans discussed in Congress this week - including one by liberal
members calling for a quicker, complete withdrawal - Pariser saw Pelosi's
bill as the left's best chance. He saw it as the only one that could
plausibly pass. And Pariser argues that its passage will help end the war.
"Let's play this out," he says. "Congress passes a supplemental with a
timeline attached and Bush is forced to veto it. That forces the Republicans
to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the
Congress and the majority of the American people." The bill is thus a
starting point for future efforts. It builds legislative support, Pariser
says, for an eventual congressional mandate to withdraw.
MoveOn has long been part of Win Without War, a large collection of
progressive antiwar groups; now it is virtually alone among the coalition's
membership in its support for the Pelosi plan. Sheehan says that some in the
antiwar movement were so upset at MoveOn's position this week that they
spent a couple of days drawing up full-page newspaper ads accusing the group
of betraying its members. (In the end they decided to hold their fire, at
least for now.)
But whatever the mainstream impression of MoveOn may be, it has never been a
lockstep member of the idealistic, activist left. It may have seemed that
way during the years of one-party GOP rule, when MoveOn and other
progressive groups fought a common enemy. But the real story here goes back
to an earlier age; MoveOn has always had a more pragmatic agenda than its
lefty brothers. The group was founded to solve a political impasse in a
practical way: When Berkeley software developers Joan Blades and Wes Boyd
drafted their online petition calling for Congress not to impeach Bill
Clinton, they were suggesting that it censure him instead, so that the
nation could "move on" to other business. Not exactly a very lefty position.
MoveOn is now one of the largest activist groups in the country, but its
popularity is more a consequence of its organizational savvy than any
pie-in-the-sky plans. Peace groups believe in the grand possibilities of the
firm, principled stand. But MoveOn has never had much truck with idealists.
For Pariser, the bottom line on Iraq is the vote count. "If we could tell
all of the Democrats plus the number of Republicans we'd need to survive a
veto to end the war, we would," he says. "But getting that level of support
for ending the war - it sucks, it's terrible that so many politicians in
Washington are out of step with where people are, but it's the case. And so
we've got to make it hurt for them to support a continued war."
What precipitated the recent scuffle between MoveOn and its former allies
was an e-mail that Pariser sent to MoveOn's members on Sunday, March 18,
asking them to help guide the group's position on the war debate in
Congress. As Salon's Michael Scherer has noted, the e-mail read like a push
poll; Pariser described Pelosi's plan and Bush's opposition to it, and made
only cursory mention of progressives' concerns. He did not describe plans
floated by members of the House's Out of Iraq Caucus that would have funded
a quick withdrawal from Iraq. "Should we support or oppose the Democrats'
plan?" Pariser asked in the e-mail. Slightly more than a hundred thousand
MoveOn members voted in the poll. The vast majority - 84.6 percent - sided
with "the Democrats."
"It reads like a Soviet ballot," says John Stauber, the founder of the
Center for Media & Democracy, whose harsh indictment of MoveOn's survey has
been a hot item on lefty blogs this week. If Pariser had more thoroughly
educated members about all of the positions in the debate, many would have
voted against the Pelosi plan, Stauber says. More important, MoveOn could
have helped the chances of an amendment by Reps. Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters
and Lynn Woolsey, leaders of the Out of Iraq Caucus, that called for
withdrawal of all troops by the end of 2007. "They could have put out an
alert to 3.2 million people across the country and said, 'If you do anything
tomorrow, get up and call your representatives and tell them to support the
Lee Amendment,'" insists CodePink's Gail Murphy. "They've got millions of
dollars. If they put their money toward stopping this war, we'd have a lot
more leadership in the Democratic Congress toward stopping this war." But
MoveOn didn't stump for the Lee plan, and it died in committee.
Pariser defends his e-mail. He says that the group already knew that its
members would have supported Barbara Lee's plan, but whatever MoveOn did, it
would never have passed. What MoveOn didn't know was what its members
thought about the Pelosi plan. "The choice that we needed to make as an
organization was, Do we support this thing or not?" Pariser says. "And so I
think the e-mail was a very fair presentation of the choice that was
actually in front of the organization."
Pariser also says that his critics have confused MoveOn's policies with its
political strategy - they've confused what MoveOn wants with MoveOn's
efforts to get there. What the group wants, he says, is what everyone in the
peace camp wants: withdrawal as fast as possible. But there is no clear
political path to immediate withdrawal. "Unfortunately we're living in a
world where in order for anything to happen on Iraq that forces the
president's hand, were going to need two thirds of Congress." MoveOn's
strategy arises out of this parliamentary consideration; its goal is now
legislative, to build toward two-thirds support in Congress.
Pariser has previously drawn a sharp distinction between MoveOn and the
Democratic Party. In 2005, he told Salon's Tim Grieve that "the job of a
party is to get elected and the job of a movement is to promote ideas and an
ideology," and that "we're definitely on the movement side of the equation.
We don't want to be the party." People in the peace camp, though, say that
MoveOn has lately found a special place in the Democratic leadership
structure. It's the safe antiwar group. Members of Congress can meet with
MoveOn because they're sure it won't call for something too far out. Other
organizations have been shut out. Gail Murphy, of CodePink, is on the
steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, which represents 1,400
peace groups. "We've asked for meetings with Pelosi," she says. "We were
never approached to sit down and have a conversation."
Pariser is skeptical of the idea that MoveOn has much power with Democratic
leaders. "I wouldn't be over-grandiose about our influence with Nancy
Pelosi," he says. "We're still a group of outsiders trying to create change
in Washington, D.C." He concedes that some members of Congress considered
MoveOn's support important, and as a result, he says, the group held out to
provide it in order to get a better bill. And they saw results. "This wasn't
due only to us," he says, "but in those two weeks the timetable was added to
the bill."
MoveOn's imprimatur has certainly given many Democrats cover to vote for the
Pelosi bill. And this is really the main criticism people in the peace camp
level at MoveOn. "The leadership wants to say, 'Hey look, everyone voted for
an antiwar bill," Stauber says. "So I think the peace movement is being
hijacked and rerouted to serve a Democratic leadership and the 2008
political agenda." But Stauber believes the effort won't work; most of
MoveOn's members, he notes, didn't even vote in Pariser's poll. "They've
grown so blase about MoveOn's appeals that they don't even bother to
open their e-mail," he says. And when MoveOn can't reach people by e-mail,
what can it do?
Pariser disagrees; he thinks MoveOn members really got the substance of the
debate at hand, and that they do agree with the group's stance. "Our members
aren't stupid," he says, "and they responded in a serious and thoughtful way
to the political question of whether this incremental step to isolate the
president and the people who oppose a timeline is worth supporting."
Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group
***
I would go further in critiquing MoveOn. I think it's a
tool of the Clintons, based on its origin and later
actions. Another example: During the NY Democratic
primary last summer, MoveOn consistently refused to
question its "members" about the Jonathan Tasini
campaign a principled, anti-war, out-now campaign that
tried to smoke out Hillary Clinton's position on the
war and her vote against banning cluster bombs. Finally
the pressure became too great and MoveOn did a very
slanted pro-Clinton poll that lasted under 24 hours and
imposed an impossibly high requirement for endorsement.
It was so biased that the results were predictable. And
it's become more predictable in the Pelosi-Clinton
position this week. Time to move on to another
organization that represents our antiwar position. No
more money for MoveOn.
Jane VanDeBogart
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