----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Nathan Newman wrote:
>A lot of people rightly condemned the Dems in the Senate who rolled over on
>the Bankruptcy Bill, but where was the discussion on designing the best
>counter-propaganda against the credit card industry? Where were
discussions
>of sample op-eds that could be developed and fact sheets that could be
>distributed?
-That fight was all about money. There was no money on the side of the
-angels, and oodles on the side of the devil. How can you match that
-with op-eds and fact sheets?
Come on, Doug, that's really simplistic bull. With that analysis,
conservative forces would enact fascism tomorrow. The point is not to match
opeds in the vaccuum with corporate money, but to support mass organizing
that can defeat money with bodies. Not forever and not on every issue, but
in particular fights when the right combination of political threat and
intellectual justification is backed by that mass organizing.
The argument for the inevitability of defeat is the most comforting position
for the left intellectual. It absolves them of responsibility to do
anything, since they have no ability to effect the outcome.
There were arguments made that this bill would benefit the working poor,
namely those not filing for bankruptcy, by lowering interest rates and
increasingly the availability of credit. It also appealed to the moral
sense that people should pay their obligations if they could afford them,
with some real reforms that ended abuses of the system by rich folks who
were squirrelling away assets in big houses in Florida and Texas.
This basic argument could have been refuted overall with a range of economic
and political analysis, but except on the Consumers Union site, I saw very
little of it. By itself of course, such arguments don't defeat money, but
if combined with helping unions and other groups mobilize grassroots public
opinion, they would help. But that organizing didn't happen.
-- Nathan Newman
