Reddit reviews Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Oh and one more that approaches it from the opposite direction (why aren't the poor more mobilized): Poor People's Movements

yeah, but even metrics like that can be shifted for numerological purposes

you could measure the monetary wealth of, say, the world's 95 richest people, to covertly reference martin luther's 95 theses, and still achieve the same analogical purpose generally while making a more subtle reference to specific power dynamics of theologically oriented material privileges and broader coalescing of ontic trends interpolating intermittently between essential materiality and immateriality, a self-fulfillment of natural law intracohesion perhaps, reawakening ad infinitum to unending recognition cycles of the self and the other

power measures should not necessarily be seen as statically correlative with material, symbolic material, or even capital, of course +

I think you should read a book called Poor People's movements. It looks at historically successful campaigns for reform. Labor, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam. There are common threads in all of the ones that are successful, and this applies to Ghandi's work for independence and reduction in classism, and Mandela's work against apartheid.

Successful campaigns have clear figureheads, and clear demands. Rosa Parks is a great example of this. She was a manufactured figurehead. She wasn't the first person to personally boycott the back of the bus, but she was the first one to boycott it and create a cultural movement where other people wanted to join her. The demand was also very clear, blacks get to sit on the bus as equals.

They could have asked for more, but they wanted to win, not feel good about themselves, so they picked a winnable battle, and without having done that, and won in '56, the civil rights movement would not have been possible, because a bunch of naysayers would have said "Do you really think the crackers are gonna give up the rights to put us in separate bathrooms, schools, facilities, stores and give up the right to enact vigilante justice whenever they want?" But King and others already had an answer "We won in Montgomery, and that affected all of Alabama."

Personally, I think the salmon are much more important than anything else, and the risk of extinction for salmon is a potentially millenia long threat. Salmon provide immense ecological and nutritional services, and losing them would be catastrophic.

One oil spill is not going to make them go extinct though, and what I think matters more is setting a precedent where the protestors stop saying "no pipeline," which is an absurd request, and start saying "we'll let you build the pipeline when we see laws coming from congress that will ensure better oversight on safety than we've seen before and serious monetary penalties that make a perfect operation record the only clear way to have a profitable business model."

That is a power we actually have. Congress wants that pipeline, Kinder Morgan wants the pipeline. Lots of folks are invested in KM, so lots of people will want what they want. If we leverage that to say "hey we are willing to negotiate, but we're playing fucking hardball here and you gotta throw us a bone, and if you fuck up, we're taking you to the cleaners, as is only fair," that's a message that is actually sympathetic to the vast majority of the US public.

Link for the book I recommended.