Don't Try. Do.

My most extraordinary twenty minutes of the year so far were spent on Wednesday morning at the Sound Alliance leadership retreat. It was the beginning of the second day, and as we prepared for the session, I noticed this little Jewish old man in a cardigan waiting expectantly off to the side. This, it turned out, was Dick Harmon, the lead regional staff for the IAF Northwest, and one of the two main organizers who built the Industrial Areas Foundation along with Saul Alinsky.

From the moment he opened his mouth, he no longer seemed little at all. He had gravitas. He had duende. He spoke as if the words welled up from the ground beneath his feet, slowly, directly, forcefully. His vision was huge, and seemed to come from the sort of spiritual center and political grounding that one very rarely encounters. I felt, funny as it sounds, as though I were in the presence of greatness.

Together, we will create a new spirit, not grounded in optimism, but in hope. A full employment economy. We need to redo every building and car to be energy efficient. We need to build levies to hold back the waters. All of our infrastructure needs to be redone. We are embarking on a task that is more radical than any New Dealer ever dared to dream of. Not because we want it, but because it is being forced upon us.

We need to reground our imaginations. What is being given to us is a new world view, in an early state of articulation: low carbon economy, full employment, power among. When people get together, their imaginations change, as well as their hearts. And so it comes to discipline.

This is a great enterprise that respects the great mix of our people. Wall Street has committed to $6 billion for clean energy. These guys are out in front of us. The churches and institutions are lagging behind. We are present at the founding of the birth.

After Harmon spoke, he asked each of us to think of all of the social pressures that motivate us to work for change, and to assign our commitment a value between 1 and 10. After a moment he asked for someone to share. Someone who hadn't talked much. Since I'd uncharacteristically kept my mouth shut for most of the retreat, I raised my hand.

"I gave it a nine," I said, "because I don't even know what a ten is. If I were at a ten, it would be dangerous." The room laughed. "Our group is cross-class in its work, but my work for twenty years has been with homeless people. I see a system that is massively broken, and these are the people who fall out on the bottom. And the bottom seems bottomless. And I see people seeking advantage at the expense of the most vulnerable people around. So, yeah. A nine."

Harmon stood up front, searching my eyes. "Do you feel grief?"

The question took me by surprise. "Um, yeah. I feel grief."

"What do you do with that?"

"I channel it. I'm not big on despair."

I'd stopped taking notes by then. But Harmon took this as his opening to talk about the need to embrace our grief. To not succumb to the easy denial of optimism. To walk toward what makes us uncomfortable, own it, and make this the source of our passion.

"When we talk together, when we plan and understand," he said, "our hearts are strangely warmed. We need to live in this warmth, and discover new life."

Beneath the Mountain

I'm at a Sound Alliance key leaders retreat today. While there isn't anything especially retreat-like about it, and as a member of an unaffiliated organization I'm hardly one of their key leaders, still, here I am. The only way homeless people will ultimately win more than a shit sandwich with extra mayo is in the context of a mass movement. We need economic justice for the bottom 85%.

So here I am, looking for allies.

Ever since I read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals in college, and then, as a young organizer, his biography, I've been an admirer of the mass-based model he inspired. The Industrial Areas Foundation that he helped build, with 57 affiliates across the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK, is bringing membership organizations together to reclaim democracy.

Sound Alliance is the IAF organizing effort in this area. While they've mostly focused on Thurston, Pierce, and South King County, over the past year they've been building for another run at Seattle. Two previous attempts have failed, leaving a certain amount of cynicism in their wake. Seattle is a turfy sort of town, and there's a half-assed coalition pretty much everywhere you look.

This time, they're taking it slow, building on their successes to the south. If it works, there will be a founding conference in June attended by around 4,000 people, all of whom are organizing for power.

And that's the sort of thing that makes my tired hopeful heart go pitter-fucking-patter. Seriously.

So we began today with an extended exercise in metaphor. A photo of Mount Rainier was projected on the wall. I happen to like the one above, which is the view from South Seattle.

"What do we notice about the mountain," asked organizer Joe Chrastil? He went on, but I'll summarize.

First of all, it's massive. Mountains are awe-inspiring. The base is unbelievably broad. Mountains create their own eco-systems. They are defining. People see them from everywhere. But here's the cool part. All of the energy in Rainier is below the surface. There are all these pools of hot magma that come together, and under the right circumstances, are forced up through fissures for some truly spectacular results.

Volcanic mountains, someone objected, are destructive. We are instead constructive and focused. This is where the metaphor breaks down. Or not. "Some things need to be destroyed," murmured someone nearby.

My own imagery of volcanoes and magma comes from watching Tarzan on TV when I was around seven. He's inside a volcano, crossing an orange lake of lava by stepping carefully from rock to rock, barefoot. Even at seven this struck me as ludicrous. But that's us, I think. Inside the mountain, coming together, building for power, playing with fire, trying to not get burned.

The Squandering of America

Last Sunday, I had the privilege of interviewing Robert Kuttner, whose new book, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity is the perfect companion piece to Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. While these two American Prospect superstars have some minor chicken and egg differences over what’s behind our current period of growing inequality and declining democracy, their perspectives have far more in common than not. Both agree that the window of opportunity after which things become infinitely harder to change is closing fast.

Kuttner was in town for his Sunday Town Hall reading, and we talked for about half an hour in the swank lobby of the Alexis Hotel as curious people came by to take free Sunday papers from our coffee table. It was an exciting interview. I hope to see the thing in print over the next few weeks. I know that Angela Davis is in line ahead of me.

His analysis is basically that opportunity and a certain amount of equality are foundational American values that would be much better served by some moderate form of a managed economy than by the current environment of radical free market ideology. Like Reich, he identifies a period — for him it's 1948 to 1973 — during which a balance of power between business, government, and mass-based organizations led by labor gave us 3.8% average annual growth and steadily declining levels of inequality. The common good was well served by this system.

Recession and the OPEC oil shocks of the 70s offered a leg up to business and financial interests that were chafing at regulatory restriction and looking to reduce the power of organized labor. Things began to shift significantly under Carter, and with Reagan, the new rules became our explicit national policy. Taxes and regulatory controls were out. Homelessness and cuts in social spending were in. Inequality has steadily increased since 1973, and we now have the widest income disparity this country has seen since the twenties.

Due to the enormous influence of wealth in politics (Kuttner describes how democratic participation is very much alive and well among the elites) both political parties have largely turned their back on the concerns of ordinary Americans. The days when the Democratic Party had the back of the middle class are long gone. It gets in the way of fundraising. Ordinary Americans, therefore, have also turned their backs on politics. Expectations that government might actually improve our lives are so low that most people hardly bother. This, he says, is a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

One ray of hope is that the six Democratic candidates that defeated Republican incumbents in 2006 all ran as economic populists. Kuttner describes how he’s advised John Edwards that his use of poverty as a campaign issue should be broadened to include the concerns of the increasingly economically vulnerable bottom 75-80% of the population. Edwards has ignored this advice to his peril. Obama, on the other hand, seems to get it. Bill Clinton’s economic populism seemed to evaporate right around the time Maya Angelou finished reading her inaugural poem. Hopefully, things will be different this time.

Kuttner describes our current situation as a bit of a race. Conditions in the financial sector are very reminiscent of the twenties, when there was little accountability, transparency, or regulation, and the current subprime mortgage crisis has the potential to escalate into broader financial collapse. Kuttner’s analysis of the financial sector is what makes this book “a slog,” as one reviewer put it, but the writing is as lucid as it is detailed, and he succeeds brilliantly in conveying just how dangerously out of hand things have become

The difference between now and the 1929 crash is that the Federal Reserve now plays a bailout role that mitigates the potential damage. Kuttner and Reich both argue that this creates a situation of “moral hazard.” Financial speculators — driven to take big risks by an environment that demands unrealistic rates of appreciation as a matter of course — know that the Fed will keep the whole floating crap game going. Kuttner argues that this creates a downward spiral of greater risk, and that government must come to understand its obligation to regulate the financial sector, as opposed to just bailing it out when the whole economy threatens to tank.

His solution? Mass-based organizing, typified by the sort of work ACORN and the IAF have led in many regions of the country. Only a reinvigorated grass-roots politics that reclaims democracy and addresses the economic interests of the squeezed middle class, the working poor, and those left out of the economy altogether, is capable of holding government accountable to the people and overcoming the raw power of money. In his view, campaign finance reform is where we end up, not where we begin, because under the current conditions, getting big money out of politics just isn’t possible.

The bad news is that time is running out. The severe economic shock of a real economic crash could clear the way for the sort of demagoguery that might lead to harsh political repression of pro-democracy organizing. And there are multiple scenarios under which this sort of financial collapse might occur. This next election, it seems, is for most, if not all, of the marbles.