Yves Smith — Skunk Party and the Barriers to Entry to Effecting Social/Political Change

Organizational issues around The Skunk Party. Crossing the barriers to entry.

Readers have been kind enough to make occasional reference to the Skunk Party, an idea we discussed last November. Even though we used the label “party,” the intent was to define a political position that would operate outside the formal party structure. We thought it was important to create a label for a set of social/political views that was not nor would be likely to be embraced by the mainstream and watered down into near-meaninglessness, as “progressive,” “liberal,” and “left” have been. 

The focus of the Skunk Party is to find ways to address the fact that wide spread-corruption is producing governance failures, both in government and in commerce, and that traditional political parties are poor vehicles for addressing deep-seated social problems. We set forth some initial principles and reform ideas.

Readers responded enthusiastically and wanted to create a logo in order to make T-shirts and signs as a way to publicize the idea.
I have to confess I haven’t gone any further because I’ve come up against what one might call barriers to entry to political action. Silly me! Of course society makes it hard for newbies!

Let me identify several hurdles:

Naked Capitalism
Skunk Party and the Barriers to Entry to Effecting Social/Political Change
Yves Smith