Taling to Steve was like taking a quick course in grassroots revolution. The process of challenging greedy banks and landlords is so well thought out, so well tested and evaluated that it makes me wonder what local progressive groups in the Hudson Valley have been doing all this time.
Steve could have been a CEO of any major bank or real estate development firm. But he took a course in community organizing at MIT in the early 1970s and soon dropped out to test the ideas he had learned.
What is so interesting, I think, is that Steve's brand of community organizing gets right down to the basic questions we need ask of our society. Is everything measured by its dollar value? Do people have any basic rights apart from how much money they have?
These aren't questions a capitalistic society wants to bring up, especially the elites who demand that every human right be subjugated to their rule of law. By buying up all our elected representatives, the elites have written the laws just the way they want them. The rich are given unlimited rights to plunder the poor and the working class.
There is another way, and City Life shows us how to work for democracy in the streets.
