aavans on "What if Obama can't do it all?"

aavans — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:35:28 +0000

This morning we were asked "What if Obama can't do it all?"

Well, obviously he can't "do it all" alone.

On Sept 8th Obama spoke at the Austin Polytechnical School in Chicago and said he wanted to fund 1,000 such schools. It remains to be seen how he delivers on this promise, but what is important is the economic model he was silently endorsing as he voiced his support for this new school. What is so outstanding about this school that President Obama would single it out for such praise?

Austin Polytech is a pre-engineering school operating in the deindustrialized Chicago neighborhood of Austin, a neighborhood I spent a lot of time in the mid-80s. Its African American and Hispanic high school students are being taught not only how to use general and special purpose machine tools, they are being groomed to become business people of the most collaborative and civic-minded kind, based on a model pioneered in the marketplace by the Communist-led government of Emilia-Romagna, Italy.

Morale among these youth is high and they've already been interacting personally with the leadership of business concerns in Emilia-Romagna. Emilia's fruits are sweet...in a region roughly the same population as eastern Ohio or Western Pennsylvannia, Emilia-Romagna has over 100,000 highly networked and collaborative MANUFACTURING firms, and tens of thousands of these companies are worker-owned.

Emilia-Romagna's collaborative economy is and has always been a regional initiative. This initiative was largely the fruit of disciplined urban activism that has been well-executed.

The greatest thing Obama has going for him as the American President is his community organizing background. That background and the campaign he built with it should sustain his leadership....but has limited application to the practical matter of serving as the chief executive of our Federal government. Any US president, whether of the right or the left is constrained by various constitutional checks and balances to govern from a "mushy" center.

Meanwhile, on Main Street, or in my case, Santa Fe Drive in Overland Park Kansas, his campaign runs the chance, a respectable chance, of living beyond Nov 4th and beyond Inauguration Day, and if enough goes well, beyond Obama's presidency. His campaign could result in the most profound grassroots social movement for economic change since the days of the NPL in the upper Midwest. It is my hope that Organizing for America might sustain the process of transforming his campaign into such a social movement.

Though he will be constrained as President of the United States he can continue to transition and lead his transformed campaign in a much less constrained manner than his presidential duties will require. He can do so with the power of organizing members of his transformed campaign to communicate powerful ideas that Americans can implement in their states, counties and cities regardless of what gridlock that may or may not develop in Washington D.C. and quite possibly despite what is going on at the Fed, on Wall Street and in the global financial casino in general.

He can do so because in the real world, the one I happen to pay the most attention to, social movements have already shown how to build both economic and political power concurrently and against such obstacles as adversarial national governments. They have staying power because while they cannot always choose the leadership at the commanding heights of their national political pecking order, they can consciously choose to work on their economic, social and political agendas 24-7-365 in their cities and their regions, much as the Communist Party and Christian Democrats (now under a new roof together, the Democratic Party) have done in Emilia-Romagna over the last several decades. The Communist Party may not have been in power in Rome, but nevertheless the regional party in Emilia-Romagna has successfully built a formidable "high road" counter-hegemonic economy by working out its agenda in the marketplace as well as in the civic social space.

And we can do this in every state and city-region and county in the United States to one extent or another. Once he is President, he can still provide significant leadership for our regional, state and local efforts. But we must understand, we must do the heavy lifting on Main Street, much as Dan Swinney, Carl Davidson and their cohorts are doing in Chicago and much as Gamaliel Foundation has been doing as well. There is only so much Washington D.C. can do, especially since our federal government has bled itself bone dry trying to prop up the banking system.

So states and cities, the next victims of the tsunami of tightening business credit lines and the resulting shrinking taxbase that will be left in its wake have both a crisis and a grand creative opportunity at hand.

And that opportunity belongs to progressives of the right and of the left willing to work every street, including Main Street, and willing to build coalitions with the business communities in their states and cities. The experience of Emilia-Romagna can inform our efforts here in Kansas City.

The Creative Process Forum Topic: What if Obama can't do it all?

aavans on "What if Obama can't do it all?"