[This was written for the Union of the Unemployed Thinkitank group on Facebook, a group originating among members of the Union of the Unemployed initiated by the Internation Association of Machinists.]

There’s been a lot of good input here and I thank you all.  Now I’d like to try to focus on what the Thinktank can do to represent ourselves, other unemployed, and working people in general who are a whisker away from being unemployed themselves. If offer no easy solutions.  I can’t get you a job.  I can’t even get myself a job.  But I can try to facilitate us coming up with a few ideas to pursue.  I have been getting to know some of you, I’d like to get to know you all better.  From looking at what people have been posting, it seems like there are roughly 3 levels of concern:

[first published on Docudharma 01/04/10]

I am very far from being okay.  The murder of handcuffed Afghan schoolchildren by American "civilians" (CIA?) who have access to helicopters has me in a surly mood.  I have to repeat to myself over and over, "small steps, small steps, stick to the plan."  So I stick to the plan.  The Full Court Press is a good plan, a very good plan.  But I'm feeling a little less tolerant of bullshit today, so let's have a fight.  Over strategy and method.  Let me pick on ActBlue, because variations of its strategy of funding liberal candidates to replace the worst of the Democrats has been holy writ among progressives for so many years.

We’ve hashed over the same old 3rd party arguments pro-and-con for years and years. But in promoting the Full Court Press ( http://www.docudharma.com/diary/17796/full-court-press-what-the-openleft-brouhaha-was-about ), I realized that some of the people I’ve been talking with are progressive Democrats and some are independents and some are both. Yet we are all saying remarkably similar things. I’m not regarded as a sellout for pushing Democratic primaries, and they are not wild-eyed radicals. There is a new realism among independents, including at least respect for the Full Court Press, and Democrats are no longer all saying my party right or wrong, remember how bad the Republicans are.

A New Look

I think the times they are a’changing, and 3rd party politics needs a new look. Three changes:

(1) having spent years in the wilderness, Democrats have elected a Democratic president and Congress, and it has turned to ashes in their mouths;

(2) self-declared independents, amorphous, once marginal and still largely unorganized, have become the largest single bloc among American voters;

(3) the teabagger movement has shaken us, both because they pose a real fascist threat, and because we sense that many of them are our sisters and brothers and would be with us now, if only we could have controlled our laughter at their silly signs and seen the valid fear and rage behind them at a government out of control.

The critical alliance is between independent progressives, and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

  A few words on how I got here, old, tired and sick, but truckin' on.  About my focus on tactics, not just tactics in-themselves, but how they are developed.