Obama, Tea Party Populists, and the Progressive Response:

[mahina]

Tonight at the American Friends Service Committee meeting house, writer and organizer Chip Berlet spoke to a group of like minded individuals, and he was AWESOME. Here's the blurb. He's traveling around the country and can give this extremely insightful and inspiring talk to your group too. K here's the flier data:


How is the Right organizing to build power in the U.S.?
What are the ramifications for the peace and social justice
movements? How do these trends affect us in Hawai‘i?
Speaker: Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates
Friday, February 5th, 2010 6:30 – 8:00 pm
Honolulu Friends Meeting House, 2426 O‘ahu Avenue
Free admission
The Right-Wing Populists who spawned the Tea Bag and Town Hall protests against
Obama are a growing force and working to take over the Republican Party. Meanwhile,
centrist Democrats are dominating the Obama Administration and dismissing populist
anger at government bailouts that feed the wealthy and starve the poor.
Now, Ultra-Right activists are recruiting from among the angry Tea Bag Populists and
targeting immigrants, people of color, Muslims, Arabs, reproductive rights activists, and
lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered persons. And they are spreading
antisemitic conspiracy theories about economic woes & foreign policy.
Chip Berlet spent over fifteen years as a radical journalist and organizer
with student, community, and labor groups before joining Political Research
Associates as Senior Analyst in the 1980s. He is co-author of Right-Wing
Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford, 2000), and penned
the cover story on this topic in the current issue of The Progressive
magazine.