Today's long thread is brought to you by Throw the Bums Out, the liberal theory of politics that looks good on paper but in reality hardly ever works.
#iowacity #iowacityprotest

So, I come at this from the perspective of labor organizing, where no one ever thinks or says... https://twitter.com/lbergus/status/1273789309125046273

"hey, if we got ourselves a new and better boss, all our problems will be solved." No, what you actually do to win--because the point is to replace management's wants and needs with your own--is create conditions within the workplace that are untenable for your employer.

You organize your fellow workers to engage in slow downs, strike actions, and so forth so that management have no choice but to negotiate with you. Their feelings on the matter are beside the point, and the whole point of agitation is, in fact, to render them irrelevant.

The New Deal is instructive here. Liberals have somehow come to believe the sainted Roosevelt came along and rallied his political allies to create the most enduring social institutions the US has. This is not what happened. Roosevelt was quite clear that what he and other...

...New Deal liberals were trying to do was "save capitalism." From what? you might ask. From the communists, anarchists, and trade unionists who were on the verge of pulling a 1917, if social conditions didn't drastically improve. Through mass movements, they created the...

...conditions on the ground (the threat of revolution), wherein those whose own interests were diametrically opposed to labor had no choice but to give. Not completely, mind you, but enough to move the needle, so that armed insurrection was less likely.

I use this example, because it occurs entirely within the context of a supposedly liberal democratic society, no communism needed. And there are plenty more contemporary examples of how simply recognizing class antagonism and acting on it gets the goods:

The Chicago Teachers Union vs. Lori Lightfoot, the Gilets Jaunes vs. Macron, our own IFR vs. City Council. Sure, councilors have now successfully gotten ahead of the protest and called it a parade, but none of these issues were even on their radar, until protesters made it...

...impossible for them not to consider them. It didn't matter what the individual councilors' politics were. Even Cruisin' Pims had to concede something, though I imagine she'll do everything in her power to sabotage things down the line, if she stays true to form.

And there are plenty of examples where people thought they were electing "better bosses," only to be immediately betrayed: Catherine Pugh in Baltimore, Muriel Bowser in DC, the aforementioned Lightfoot (all supposedly "progressive" candidates), and IC's own "Core Four."

For more on that, see this thread: https://twitter.com/city_of_iowa/status/1269316136782479364

Speaking solely for myself, I don't see my role as recruiting candidates, in the hopes they'll do a better job, because this does nothing about the intransigence of city staff, who are insulated from political consequences coming from council. It also assumes that politics...

...is something that only happens every two or four years with a scantron sheet and nearly dried out marker. Meanwhile, we're expected to sit idly by while bad actors continue to go on a rampage of decision making that only makes matters worse for the rest of us.