At a Personal Democracy Media event held last night, panelists deeply involved in the labor movement repeatedly touched on what they called the failures of traditional institutions to adapt to the 21st century. The wide-ranging, two-and-a-half-hour-long event covered territory ranging from the emergence of "open-source brands" — the way "Occupy" became a prefix for dozens of related, uncoordinated, complementary efforts, spontaneously becoming unauthorized sub-brands of the wider movement because nobody's there to withhold permission — to the increasing power of personal connections and personal narrative. But for several minutes, speakers with experience in the labor movement focused on the organizational arthritis that appears to now harry big unions like SEIU. Read More

“Young people like me have felt politically powerless for most of their lives. We came of age during the Obama campaign and we were fed the idea that the campaign represented the peak of progressive organizing. Now, my ... Read More

Wow, with our days to go, the gloves are officially off. An email comes in from the Tea Party Patriots. (Which one are they, again?) The subject line: "Total Annihilation." And the time for mincing words has ... Read More

I'm glad to see my friends Mindy Finn and Patrick Ruffini responding to my post yesterday "Tea Party vs Netroots; Rs vs Ds: Whose Online Base is Bigger?" And I don't mind at all that they're disagreeing with my questions ... Read More

Two stories published in the last few days make the claim that in this cycle, the online Right is whomping the online Left. First, in Investor's Business Daily, reporter Brian Deagon's story is headlined: "Tea Party ... Read More