The best way of explaining the priorities at this Take Back the American Dream conference may be to list all the events that happened on Monday. See if you notice a pattern.
Putting America Back to Work
Corporations Corrupting Democracy
More Justice, More Peace: Solutions to End Violence and Uplift Our Communities
“They Own the Place”: How Citizens Can Challenge the Bankers Hold on Washington
Starving the Dream: The Attack on Public Education
Social Security & Medicare and the Election
Stop Outsourcing the Dream: How American Can Revive Manufacturing in Green Industrial Revolution
Without Vision the People Will Perish (with Drew Westen, author of the much-discussed New York Times op-ed about Obama and storytelling
War at Home and Abroad
Voter Supression and the 2012 election
Challenging the Mainstream Media to Report Our Reality
From Video Expose to Flash Demonstrations
Days after the controversial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, weeks after a special election that largely turned on the issue of America’s relationship to Israel, there’s almost no foreign policy talk at this event. Yesterday, the foreign policy/justice blogger/reporter Marcy Wheeler reminisced about how previous conferences had featured a regular gripe session with Rep. Jerrold Nadler, all about civil liberties. Those issues have been subsumed by the economy. According to MoveOn.org’s Justin Ruben, the new focus on jobs had been explosive: “There’s more energy on this issue than any issue since the Iraq War.” The Iraq War isn’t even over; MoveOn has moved on. The agenda that’s come out of Rebuild the Dream is summarized this way: “Tax corporations and the wealthy, protect the social contract, and ‘create millions of jobs for people who are unemployed and want to work.’”
The culmination of this in 2011 will be a November 17 “day of action and indignation.”
