>Lisa Fithian
FTA: Call it pinko talent development, but we can still learn from it
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Born in 1961, Fithian got her start in serious activism in 1982 when Abbie Hoffman of Yippie fame spoke at her college. She went to work at his environmental organization upon graduation, which led to her radicalization on foreign policy: Hoffman and his partner Johanna Lawrenson were avid supporters of the leftist Sandinista government and travelled to Nicaragua regularly. By 1984, Fithian was organizing Nicaragua show tours; when she took a job with an electoral pressure group in Boston in 1986, she hooked up with the Pledge of Resistance campaign, which was a leftist Christian campaign against U.S. support for the Contras and anti-communism in Latin America.
After some organizing adventures that included a blockade of CIA headquarters, Fithian went over to the Washington Peace Center, where she was involved with blockading the Supreme Court, the White House, and the Pentagon before moving over to union organizing in 1993. After nearly bankrupting a local hotel with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, she moved to SEIU, where she cut her teeth on the hugely important and influential Justice for Janitors campaign, about which I’ll write in a future column; it’s a seminal campaign that present-day radical organizers talk about in the kind of rosy tones reserved for foundational myths. From there, she went on to a host of causes: the Battle in Seattle, World Bank and WTO protests, Hurricane Katrina relief, the International Solidarity Movement, war protesting, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson, Standing Rock, abortion rights in Texas, and protests against Justice Kavanaugh.
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https://archive.ph/IL80f