Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the online community made themselves heard.

But those of us charting the protest yesterday were struck by how most of the lawmakers turning against the bill were Republicans. If you look at the latest whip count on PIPA, for example, you see that more Republicans oppose it at this point than Democrats.

As I wrote earlier, the public option fight changed the progressive movement. You had a popular, compromise measure that the public supported, where advocates did everything right, and none of it mattered. Now, the head of HCAN, the labor-backed coalition trying to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010, confirms the public option was traded away in the midst of the fight.

The progressive movement is undergoing a transformation where they no longer see engagement with candidates as the best or only strategy to advance goals. Those not hopelessly alienated by the entire political process prefer outsider strategies that force political pressure from the bottom up, rather than relying on the promises of those politicians to carry the day. That’s the new reality, and the public option fight was such a catalyzing event, that I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus met with occupy representatives about legislation and also released today a new bill called the Restore the American Dream for the 99% Act, a combination of stimulative job creation measures, progressive taxation, a funding cut to draw down current wars and other measures popular with the mainstream of the country.

Yesterday, Gov. Jerry Brown penned an “Open Letter to the People of California,” announcing his intention to go to the ballot in November 2012 with an initiative that would raise revenues by roughly $7 billion annually. But there are two other progressive tax initiatives and another for tax cuts sponsored by a billionaire. It could be a very confusing ballot next year

activism, Occupy Wall Street, political ideology, progressive movement, protests, unions

The Campaign for America’s Future expected their conference to be a launching pad for an American Dream Movement that would be a counterpart to the Tea Party, a left populist movement that would branch out across the country. But it found itself overtaken by the #OccupyWallStreet movement.

I think we’ve all become inured to an era of “looking forward, not backward” and retroactive immunity for both official and corporate crimes, that it’s hard to even process what happened here. The Bush Administration and their private military and intelligence contractors committed acts of torture and murder, and nobody but low-level officials gets prosecuted. Indefinite detention is found to violate the Constitution, and Congress passes a law immunizing the government for that crime and effectively suspending habeas corpus for non-citizens. The government partners with the telecom industry to capture a massive web of the private communications of US citizens without a warrant, and Congress passes a law letting the industry off the hook for the crimes. Financial misdeeds lead to a near-collapse of the US economy, and Congress rewards the firms responsible with a bailout. The culture of no accountability has been the signifying feature of the last decade.

And it looked as if this movie would play once again with respect to foreclosure fraud.

Here you see the dog that didn’t bark on cable news. It’s a compilation of some of the 400 jobs protests from around the country in August. Thousands of people participated in the actions. If 2009 was any indication, it should have been an enormous story. As it is, you had to search for any traditional media coverage of the story.

CREDO has become the first national progressive group, to my knowledge, to back New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman as he attempts to hold a full investigation into fraud in the securitization processes by the mortgage industry.