Creating a movement’s not like it used to be.

It’s very hard in this modern day of ours to build mass movements. Look how hard it is just to get people to turn out for rallies and marches. We did better dozens and dozens of years ago on this score as a nation. But we’re calling our campaign an ’08/’09 campaign and by that we mean that we’d like to bring together in each Congressional district about 1,000 publicly conscious citizens who will form a watchdog lobby on Congress and put before Congress about ten major redirections of the country, like single-payer health insurance etc. … Every Congressional district has about 600,000 people in it. Just about every Congressional district has community colleges, colleges and other institutions that can be tapped into for these 1,000 people. I can’t overemphasize, as a person who’s worked on the Congress for over forty years and testified and exposed it, I can’t overemphasize the enormous turnaround value of a thousand people connected to one another holding accountability sessions, challenging the members of Congress putting pressure — you know, the good old-fashioned American way of lobbying, how it can change the Congress. And the Congress can pivot the entire federal government. It’s the most powerful branch of government if it chooses to use its constitutional powers, and that’s what we’re aiming for. The more people we get in this campaign the more we’ll say to them, Well, after November there’s going to be a real focused movement in each Congressional district. So we’re going to have the table out there for people to put their cards on in terms of mobilizing. Without that it’s not going to happen.