An Activist’s Life, by Thomas Leavitt

Just as small businesses (not large ones), are the primary creators of jobs, it’s individuals and small groups, such as partners and families, and who create the majority of affordable housing. Over 50% of affordable housing is “informal;” i.e.; it doesn’t show up on any rosters of apartment buildings or anywhere else. It’s created room by room and conversion by conversion. That’s where most housing comes from, and has for centuries. So many of us are in a position to create affordable housing.

A Christmas carol for our times.

Though its tactics might be insurgent, MoveOn’s political orientation isn’t far from the center of the Democratic Party. The group sees itself as representative of the new silent majority, average Americans abused by right-wing ideologues who claim a monopoly on national definition. Its support suggests just how many people in America have felt voiceless and yearned for some way to make themselves heard.

“MoveOn has been tagged in mainstream media as a liberal activist group, when in fact the positions they’ve articulated have tended to fall more in the center,” says Jonah Seiger, a visiting fellow with the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “Their birth was a moderate position on the Clinton impeachment — censure the president and move on. It wasn’t ‘This is all bullshit and we shouldn’t do anything,’ and it wasn’t ‘Let’s tar and feather him.’ Their position on the war was also a middle-of-the-road position — give inspectors time. It wasn’t ‘Let’s not be there,’ and it wasn’t ‘Let’s go right to war.’”

The American antiwar movement is decked out with all the elements of the counterculture, but it is getting some very establishment funding.