Here we go - using the populist-fueled defeat of the collective bargaining law in Ohio as a way to co-opt OWS

our establishment folks can only see things in terms of elections, voting and candidates... using yesterday's rejection of the effort to revoke basic worker rights by ohio voters, cfa's robert borosage calls for a ramped-up effort to get progressive candidates running for offices at all levels across the country in 2012...

Two years ago, the Tea Party turned protest into political power, fielding right-wing challengers to office holders of both parties. Public dismay with the failed economy enabled Republicans to capture the House of Representatives, and state houses and legislatures across the country. They captured 675 state legislative seats, the largest sweep since 1938. Shock-doctrine conservatives then used the crisis to cut taxes on corporations while savaging public services. They moved to roll back worker rights to weaken unions, their most organized opposition. Realizing they represented a minority position, they passed a range of laws seeking to constrict voting rights, requiring photo IDs, limiting early voting, etc. Then they went after women's rights, environmental protections and the poor while doing most of what the business lobby asked of them.

Now from Madison to Wall Street and across the country, the new populist uprising is challenging the failed conservative ideas and corporate interests that have dominated our politics to devastating effect. The question now is whether that uprising will generate progressive challengers to conservative office holders in both parties. That will take not just inspiration but organization as well.

To supply that, Progressive Majority has joined with Moveon.org, US Action, the Center for Community Change, Rebuild the Dream, the New Organizing Institute and other partners in the emerging American Dream Movement to set the goal of recruiting and supporting 2,012 candidates in 2012.

the old saw has it that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results... our electoral, two-party and campaign finance systems are so profoundly broken, i, for one, can no longer delude myself into thinking that "more and better progressives" (to paraphrase the daily kos mantra of "more and better democrats") will fix anything... it's the system that's broken, not individual office holders, and that's precisely what the occupy movement has forced us to look at...

i succumbed to my eternal and unrelenting desire to get my country back when i voted for obama, only to be rewarded with a president who has taken the national security state well beyond the excesses of george bush, who sanctions the remotely-controlled, targeted killing not only of foreign innocents but also of american civilians, who has populated the closest ranks of his advisers with wall street elites, and who is now taking a populist tack to try to win me back...

so, please don't try to crank up my enthusiasm and co-opt my energy and money for getting 2012 progressive candidates to run in 2012... ain't gonna happen...

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