Revolution #59, September 3, 2006
On August 25, Revolution interviewed Debra Sweet, National Coordinator of World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime.
Revolution:
The WCW plan for the next six weeks, building up to October 5, has two
major focuses. One, a big ad campaign to connect with and mobilize
millions and millions of people who do not yet know about October 5.
And two, important planning meetings to be held across the country on
September 7. First of all, can you talk about the vision and importance
of this ad campaign?
Debra Sweet: We have a
simple plan in the sense of raising a lot of money and then buying ads
in as many places we can to reach a wide variety of people because we
do know one thing: in order for people to act on October 5 they have to
know that it’s possible to act on that day and they have to feel a
momentum in society towards acting. Most people who will act on Oct 5
don’t even know about it yet. And I’m talking about only six weeks from
the day. We know that. Even a lot of people who acted on Nov 2 last
year, which is over 20,000 people around the country, do not necessary
know that a day posed right in front of them as the most important day
to act, is happening on October 5th. So we have a tremendous
responsibility to number one, get the word out in society, and one big
way that you do that in this society is to buy ads. Yes, we’re going to
do all sorts of other ways to get the word out that includes handing
out fliers and putting the word out on the Internet, those are all very
important. But there are key ways that people hear about things, and
that is newspapers and radio. And in order to get many, many millions
knowing about this right away, we are raising, right now, hundreds of
thousands of dollars, and we should eventually raise millions in order
to buy air time and print to advertise: October 5-There is a way, There
is a day, Bring this to a halt.
The goal of this national
ad campaign is that people will start to see October 5 all over the
place. They will see ads, hear about this on the radio. Then people
will go to worldcantwait.org, and they will start sending out e-mails
about what’s going on, downloading and posting fliers on campuses, in
their neighborhood, at their workplaces. They’ll start to talk about
the actual plans for October 5th, people will hear about it on the
radio and on street corners and this is how we build word of mouth and
things start to snowball.
At the same time, those ads are
going to be announcing mass organizing meetings everywhere across the
country on the same night, Thursday, September 7. And it’s really
important to turn people out to those meetings. We have to follow up
and follow through with everyone who contacts World Can’t Wait. Listen to them, find out what they”re all about, and bring them out to these meetings.
The
ads are going to tell people to go to worldcantwait.org and find out
where the organizing meeting is in your area. If you don’t see one,
organize one. This is what our ads on radio and in print are going to
tell people to do. You want to know what’s going to happen on October
5, you want to contribute your ideas and creativity, then come to these
national organizing meetings with people at the same time all across
the country.
The first hour will be a message from WCW on
what October 5 is aiming to accomplish, reversing the whole political
direction of society. And the second hour of these meetings will be
very well organized, well prepared, breaking down into groups, where
people who want to organize their campuses or their schools, or people
who want to help on the program, or people who want to learn and help
on fund raising, or people who want to get out fliers and work on the
Internet, can all come and find out what to do and contribute their own
ideas in very well-organized sessions, and then leave that night
knowing what they are going to do for the next four weeks. You might
have people in the visual arts figuring out how to make a major impact
in that sphere; or teachers getting together to figure out ideas for
schools; or public relations or fund-raising professionals, or people
out of the religious communities”could be a lot of things. The point
is when you reach out very broadly, like we”re doing with these ads,
and when you systematically do the follow-up and follow-through with
people, and then you get people together with a basic understanding of
what we”re aiming to accomplish and a basic vision, a whole lot of
things that maybe didn’t seem possible that morning can all of a sudden
seem very possible.
This plan builds on the fact
that we can do national advertising and everyone who has access to
Internet or who can call an 800 number can find out where these
meetings are, where they need to be that night. They can find out
everything they need to do, and they can meet people who feel like they
do. We already have some of these meetings posted on worldcantwait,org,
including a brand new organizer from Portland, Maine who saw the ad in
the New York Times and has a message right on our website
right now that says, come to City Hall on September 7 and meet me
because I’m forming an organizing committee for October 5.
Revolution:
Could you share with our readers some of the experience that you have
had in going out to people, taking out the message of World Can’t Wait?
What has been the response to the New York Times ad, or what
kind of experience have you had in working the WCW phone bank-in other
words calling people who have left their names to be contacted?
Debra Sweet: Very concretely, we published an ad three weeks ago in the New York Times.
Thousands of people responded to it, one-third of those people sent
their phone numbers and even more than that sent money in order to pay
for the ad and to pay for more ads. What this tells us is that we have
a base right now of thousands of people that we know are waiting to
hear more about October 5. So we’ve set out to get back to every one of
those people and have conversations with them. And the results have
been extremely encouraging.
What we found in the people
that we’ve called and talked to is a great eagerness and a happiness
that we called them and that they’re hearing from a live human being,
who wants to hear what they think and listen to and give substance and
affirmation to their feeling that this regime has to go and actually
has a plan to do something about it. We’ve found people who are very
well informed, very opinionated. We have tapped into a wellspring of
revulsion for Bush. People really are very, very angry at what the
Bush Regime has done. They know all about it, they have been looking
for a way to act.
So we are calling back every one of the
people that has come to us, and if we don’t have a phone number, we’re
e-mailing them and if we don’t have an e-mail address , we’re sending
them snail mail. A lot of retired people have responded by mail to us,
sending money to us, including money out of their Social Security
checks to WCW. This is another thing I tell wealthy people who want to
give us $150, I will say, look, people on Social Security have sent us
that much money who are just living on pensions. A survivor of Katrina
sent us $100 out of their FEMA check. Prisoners have sent us $30 out of
the prison commissary. So people who are wealthy have to dig a whole
lot deeper than that.
We’re still learning about all the people who sent money off the NY Times
ad. But we have presidents of large corporations, a retired brigadier
general, editors and writers of major publications, political science
professors and all sorts of academics, a lot of ministers. We have just
all kinds of people from every single state, and many are saying the
same thing: this country is going fascist and I want to stop it. This
is a good sign, the recognition of what’s really going on. But again,
we need to multiply this 10 times right now. This is why we’re doing
this advertising and reaching out to people.
We called a
retired writer who had already given money. He said I already sent off
my check and I think this is a good plan, but I don’t really know what
I can do to help. So the WCW person initially said, well OK, thank you
for donating money. But then they thought about it and called the
person back and said, look, you’re retired, you know a lot of people,
what about all your friends. And it ended up that the person sent a
letter to 75 of his friends saying, I just donated $50 to WCW and I
want you to do the same. This is an example I want to send out to
everybody. Literally everybody can multiply this effort very quickly.
You need to be asking your friends and the people you work with, and
the people you went to college with, your colleagues and your
neighbors, people you go to school with and all of your co-professors,
to be doing the same thing. Sign this call, send money and raise money
for World Can’t Wait. There needs to be an epidemic of fund raising and
getting involved and jumping on the band wagon, and we are completely
unabashed about this. There is nothing more important that people can
be doing right now as we’re going into this Labor Day weekend. You’ve
out socializing, talk to everyone-did you hear about this movement to
drive out the Bush Regime and you have to be out there with me on
October 5 and organize for it. People should go on worldcantwait.org
and print out right now the flier and the call for October 5 and get it
all over the place. Get the word out, contribute money so the word can
get out to many more people.
Revolution:
Can you talk more about the actual vision for Oct. 5? Sometimes people
say, well how is this going to be different than protest as usual? Or
you were saying earlier that some people say, how can this one day
actually make a difference, isn’t it more of a long-term struggle, that
we have to educate people, this kind of thing. Why is WCW saying this
day is so crucial in terms of actually building a movement that can
drive out the Bush Regime? And what actually is the vision of what
would happen on that day? What needs to happen on that day, and on what
scale?
Debra Sweet: Well, I want to
approach it from a couple of things. What makes it different than any
other protest demonstration is the demand: Bring This to a Halt. This
is not approaching this one abuse and outrage at a time. This is
bringing on to the fore a movement saying: This all has to stop. Bring
it to a halt. We must drive out this hated regime because the world
can’t wait. This in itself is completely a different approach than
anything that’s before people right now. It is very audacious and bold
and it’s saying, look, we’ve got to get something going in this society
that challenges the conventional wisdom that things can’t change
quickly and that the people really have no role here. We’re bringing
something new to the fore.
What can happen Oct. 5-if we
get the critical mass, the momentum in society, the snowballing going
into it, and the critical mass on that day-is that a new political
force will be in existence that says because of our firm stand-“Drive
Out This Regime”-and our large numbers, we can not be ignored. We’re
making a powerful political statement, refusing that day to work, or
leaving work, refusing to go to school or walking out of school,
rejecting business as usual, making it to the town center or the
federal building, demanding together: Bring This to a Halt. This is
what makes this different from any other day. And the dynamic it can
get going in society is that people who feel there’s nothing that can
be done and feeling that there’s not a way to act, will see us act in
sufficient numbers to wake them up and give them a sense that there is
a way to act.
The success of Oct. 5-and I believe there is
a huge basis for this, given this huge reservoir of people who really
detest the Bush regime and the whole direction it’s taking things-is
that it will be tens of thousands of people in even just the major
cities acting in a visible way on our felt sentiments that no other
voice in society is speaking to. No one else is going to represent this
other than ourselves taking it into the streets in intense, serious,
joyful, imaginative ways-but in massive numbers. The key to this is
massive numbers in a very determined way being out in the streets. We
want to take the same spirit that people remember from the
demonstrations we called on November 2 last year, we want to take that
spirit but we want to multiply the numbers by a factor of ten-and then
we want to build from there. And that, combined with this message, can
be extremely powerful.
There are people who say, look,
nothing can change in one day. This has been building up for years, and
it’s going to take years and years to right the situation. I completely
disagree-that this is going to happen in some linear, incremental way
with quiet, patient organizing, one here, one there and building it up
from where we are now. In just the most basic sense, there’s not time
for that-the Bush regime is very quickly, to take one very important
example, making preparations to attack Iran, and you”ve got all the
main Democrats going along with that-and think what that kind of attack
would mean to the world, how disastrous that would be in so many ways.
Again,
this is why we’re trying to immediately, very quickly reach millions of
people with a message that there is a way to act on the sentiments that
they already deeply feel. Because a critical mass taking the streets
right now at this urgent moment, a mass of people that takes
responsibility for looking at the stakes and saying, no, we won’t let
society go in that direction, we’re going to stop it, we’re going to
drive out this regime, creates a new dynamic in society where more and
more people will have the question posed to them: maybe you could drive
out this regime.
We don’t have to accept that there’s
nothing that can be done but tying our hopes to the Democratic Party
that is providing no effective opposition and in fact agrees with the
basic direction that this is going in. We’re not just building a
movement here over some period of time that is trying to do some good
in society and trying to protest some policies we feel are very bad.
We’re doing something different. What’s on our minds, or what’s in our
thinking and what’s in our hearts is, this regime is illegitimate,
unjust, and immoral, and they have to go, they have to be driven out.
This is “drive out the Bush Regime” thinking, versus we’re only out
here to protest some of the bad things they’ve done and after all, we
could never really stop them anyway. This is about understanding and
seeing that there’s a huge reservoir out there we can connect with if
we act quickly and with enough resolution and substance.
And
we’re really not afraid to go out and argue with people that, look,
what you’re doing is going to lead to a bad place, if you’re relying on
and only supporting the Democrats, and if that’s where your money and
energy is going. No. Your money, your energy, your heart, all of your
thinking needs to be going into, how we can create the one thing
lacking-the expression of people’s real sentiments out on the streets
in a public way, that will mushroom and lead to this question being
debated on editorial pages all across the country, and in lunchrooms
and break rooms, and in church basements, and even in the pulpit, over:
Is it right that we should support the direction this Bush regime is
going? Or must George Bush himself be driven from office? And must we
STOP what this government is doing in our name? And don’t we have the
moral duty to act on that? This is what Oct. 5 has the very real
potential of breaking open. Look, if company presidents and retired
brigadier generals are sending substantial amounts of money to fund
this, and if on the other hand, high school students are getting ready
for walkouts, and prisoners are sending us $30-and we”re really only
beginning to get our message out-then there is a very broad basis for
this movement in this society. Many many people feel this must be
stopped. They’re waiting for a way to do it. We have a way, and we have
a day. And we have a responsibility to pull as many people out on that
day as possible.
Revolution: I”d like to
follow up on that point on the Democrats. It sounds like you”re saying
that you”ve got to argue with a lot of people about this.
Debra Sweet: I
think people have to come to grips with what these Democrats have done
and what they”re about, and why it’s such a harmful dead-end to be
throwing in with them. For instance, the Patriot Act, which was hastily
passed after 2001-and we know some of the Congress never even read the
act, and we were all supposed to be mollified because they said well,
after five years we’ll get a chance to look at this again and some of
the most egregious parts will never get ratified. Well, guess what, 96
members of the U.S. Senate ratified the Patriot Act earlier this year.
That should say to everyone that something has happened-when five years
ago this Patriot Act was so over the edge that very few people wanted
it to hold up, certainly there was a real determination on the part of
the Bush Regime and others that it be enacted very forcefully into law,
but many people, especially many people very alarmed at the trampling
of civil liberties, thought it would not hold up. Well, there was a
climate created, largely through the accommodation and cooperation of
the leadership of the Democratic Party who came out and argued for
these restrictions, and now this is locked down and in place and this
is just so typical. What happened with the Supreme Court? There have
been two Supreme Court appointment of people whose views are clearly
way over to the right, including right in there with Clarence Thomas
and Antonin Scalia, the most right-wing members of the court, on all
sorts of questions, even whether people have the right to habeus
corpus, whether people have the right to a speedy trial, whether women
have any self determination over their bodies at all-this has been
locked into place, largely through the accommodation, again of the
leadership of the Democratic Party.
You have a situation
where both of these parties are saying we’re going to have to attack
Iran. And they are not shy about it, the nuclear option has not
officially been taken off the table. They’re not giving a timetable,
but this could happen very quickly. At the same time, George W. Bush
says, look I am not withdrawing any troops, this is up to the next
president. And you have John McCain in there arguing that whatever the
bad options about attacking Iran, it would be much worse if we don’t
attack Iran. They’re telling us and they’re not saying off in the far
distant future. Lebanon was a practice for Iran. Seymour Hersh said in
his New Yorker article, people in this administration and
the Department of Defense were saying this was practice for attacking
Iran. Not idle practice: 1400 civilians killed, the use of
anti-personnel weapons, scattering cluster bombs that are still alive,
the destruction of airports and bridges and highway systems that kept
people from being able to evacuate, the destruction of the electrical
system. All of this done very consciously, according to plan and to
practice for attacking the bigger nation of Iran. This absolutely
cannot be allowed by any person who cares about the future of humanity.
And it is very urgent. Anyone who thinks that they are not out there
building a constituency every day, including by increasing people’s
fear of terrorism, needs to wake up.
So we have to struggle
with people who still want to go down that well-trodden path of relying
on people who have accommodated to this whole road that the Bush
Regime has taken society, and that this is somehow OK, because these
are not Republicans, these are the Democrats. But people have to face
up to what is the actual political program of the Democratic Party as I
touched on earlier.
Doing fund raising for WCW, I have
found that there are people who very much like what we’re doing and are
very attracted to the idea of getting people out on the street on
October 5 to bring the Bush Regime to a halt and the idea of
impeachment. At the same time they are very much involved right now in
working for one or another Democrat to get elected his fall and even
looking forward to the 2008 presidential elections as something they
need to be working on. I think we have to tell people honestly, look at
what they’re actually saying. They’re telling you right now, they’re
not really for any of those things that you care about. They pay lip
service to choice, but they are running anti-abortion candidates up
against the most horrible reactionary, cretinous, anti-abortion
politicians, anti-gay marriage politicians, including Rick Santorum of
Pennsylvania-the Democrats are running Casey, an anti-abortion
Democrat. And people are being told to swallow that on the basis of,
it’s better to have an anti-abortion Democrat than an anti-abortion
Republican. This is just ludicrous. What are you going to have when you
have an anti-abortion Democrat win? Surprise, you’re going to have an
anti-abortion situation.
So that’s actually where that
road is gong to lead. And as I’ve said to many, many people in building
this movement, it’s not so much a question of voting or not voting.
It’s a question of where you put your time and resources and energy. So
come out with us, put your whole heart in building for October 5. Your
$10,000 towards one more Democratic candidate being elected will only
serve to foster the illusion that that’s going to do some good. I don’t
think that will do any good at all. What’s going to do some good is
spending that $10,000 on and getting contributions from your friends
and arguing with them right now over what difference it will make to
bring into society something new on the scene, a movement that rejects
the official politics being forced down our throats, and says very
clearly we’re going to be out visible for our actual sentiments: an end
to the war, an end to this whole direction, bringing this to a halt.
And following that road out, on the basis of looking again at this
statement that is out on our website about October 5 – There is a Way,
There is a Day: If this is done, imagine if this huge reservoir of
people is pulled out…, this great wave is unleashed. If this is done,
then the possibility of turning things around and on to a much more
favorable direction, will take on a whole new dimension of reality.
People need to see this manifested out on the street for real. They
need to see people voicing and with substance making real these
sentiments and not just going along with the projected conventional
wisdom that the Democrats must be on our side here.
Putting
your money, your efforts, and your heart behind the leadership of the
Democratic Party right now that is telling you what they’re going to do
around Iran is wrong. It’s telling you that they are not going to
oppose the fundamental direction of the Bush Regime and they’re not
even willing to bring this guy on trial, in an impeachment trial in
Congress, and put up all these crimes against humanity for people to
look at. They’re telling you, they’re not going to go there. When you
have a chance to really change the whole direction and take
responsibility for changing history, it’s just wrong to keep pouring
money down the rathole of these Democratic candidates. It’s a wrong
place to go. We can do some real good in building a movement from below
right now and really challenging this. And the $10,000 that people are
considering giving to the Democrats, they should be giving to World
Can’t Wait – and to not do that, to give to the Democrats instead, to
maybe give a token amount to World Can’t Wait “cause you”d sort of like
to see it out there but you”re not gonna give it what it takes to
really become a force when, let’s face it, it’s the only thing taking
on the whole fascist direction of this Regime – well, that’s not
neutral. That’s doing harm, and it’s unconscionable.
On the
other hand, a movement from below of driving the regime out, based on a
real repudiation of everywhere they are going, has every possibility of
getting a different dynamic going in society, where the whole question
gets changed. I was talking to Father Luis Barrios, who is of Puerto
Rican nationality, a very active campaigner for WCW and for justice
everywhere in the world. He’s somebody who helped lead getting the U.S.
army kicked out of Vieques some years ago. He was telling us the story,
he remembers Nixon, he said, we all have to remember that the day
before Nixon left office in August of 1974, he said look, I am not
going to resign. It was a testament to the fact that he was so opposed
all over the world and that his whole program was hated that he ended
up having to do just that and resign. And Father Barrios said, I think
we have to keep that in mind, that things can turn quickly, and a
question that everyone says is impossible, you could never think that,
you can’t even think that way, could become reality on the basis of the
conscious political mobilization, the conscious political activism of
even a small minority, reaching a bigger minority in society and doing
something very momentous that starts on one day. That’s what we’re
trying to do with October 5. We are trying to actually help people see,
on one day, how you would start to create a political situation where
you can drive out a regime and create a political situation where Bush
himself has to leave office.
And that’s what everybody needs
to be doing. We”ve got a really good plan to get the word out to
millions through these ads, and to turn hundreds of people out to these
meetings on the 7th. Then there’s a whole lot of thinking we have
about how to leapfrog from there in the four weeks we have after that.
So I’m hoping that a lot of your readers will be plugging in and
throwing in and really make this happen.