An Unruly Book: "Uprising!"

Pitchfork? Check.

Torch? Check.

Unruly attitude? Check.

OK let's go:

In all the noise and fury of the last primary run, and Scott McClellan's book last week, there's a unruly gem in them thar hills:

"David Sirota is a clear-headed and principled hell-raiser for economic justice. More like him and we'll have a real uprising on our hands. "
—Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine"

Do I have your attention, Mob? Good, I thought so.

I saw this on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" show last night. I am a latecomer to David Sirota. He has been blogging on Squarestate.net which is a major Colorado progressive blog, (credentialed to the DNC by the way) and I always thought he was interesting, but I had never dug fiercely into him before. Last night's show had me absolutely riveted.

You can watch the whole show here, but I have excerpted a couple of points:

His observations about Obama, the political process this cycle being the "starting point, not the end point" and further observations about "direct action" making Wall Street and K Street "scared" are just music to my ears. Literally.

Just listen to what he says about the Iraq War. We've been saying it for the longest time!

AMY GOODMAN: David Sirota, you talk about conflicts of interest within the antiwar movement: the antiwar movement, which enjoys widespread support, and the politicians who ally themselves with pro-war consultants.

DAVID SIROTA: Right. What happened, in the chapter that I reported on the antiwar movement, is back in 2007, what we found is that you just had an election where the Democrats were elected promising to end the war, and what ended up happening was that the same Democratic Congress refused to really do what it takes to actually end the war. And part of that was, I think, a strategic decision on behalf of the antiwar organizations in Washington about how they said we could end the war. You had consultants who were simultaneously being paid by the Democratic Party and Democratic Party politicians.

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

DAVID SIROTA: You had Hildebrand Tewes. You had consulting firms. They were the lead consulting firm. And I don’t mean to pick on them. It’s just that they were the consulting firm that was heading up the major coalition in Washington of antiwar groups. And so, the strategy that came out of those antiwar groups was we have to simply bash the Republicans to end the war, when in fact, of course, Congress was controlled entirely by Democrats. Last I checked, Democrats have forty-one senators in the US Senate, if they wanted to filibuster a bill to continue funding the war [sic-they could]. They haven’t done that. Yet the strategy kept saying, well, we have to only focus the ads, the media buys and the pressure on Republicans. It was sort of a dishonest strategy, and I think it had something to do with the fact that you have organizations in Washington that put partisan affinity over movement goals. [emphasis mine]

He is totally speaking our Unruly Language, I do believe. The part about sneaking into the Exxon Shareholder meeting is GREAT!

Watch the whole show, (Sirota's interview starts at 30 minutes into the stream) and buy the book. I have never EVER said buy something before on this blog, but I'm telling you I am buying it, and from what I saw of the interview, Sirota's insights into the whole political process and "direct action" really speak to what we as the Unruly Mob hold dear.

Pitchfork? Check.
Torch? Check.
Unruly attitude? Check.

OK let's go!

TAGS: Democracy Now!, David Sirota, "Uprising", Let's Do Something Besides Blog