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new/issues :: League of Pissed Off Voters by Yasmin Tabi and Adrienne Brown |
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Every four years we're faced with the same kinds of decisions when it comes to voting. Do we like the representatives? Do we know who they are? Do they represent our goals and ideals? What party do they belong to? Will they make a difference? 1-42 sat down with Adrienne Brown, activist and educator, to discuss the League of Pissed Off Voters; an effort currently being realized by author, artist and activist William Upski Wimsatt, and many other dedicated, aware men and women, young and old. The point? To show the younger cultures how they, too, can learn about political efforts and how they fit in, because, quite simply, they ARE the next generation and they WILL BE the ones who call the shots...READ ON... 1-42 :: What
is the League
of Pissed Off Voters? AB :: Well, basically after the last election and then all the crap that’s
happened since then – the black hole of our economy and the international
relations failures including a preemptive war – I was one of many
folks feeling pissed with no way to channel that energy. The League basically
started this summer. It’s a new organization – actually three
new organizations – currently being started by William Upski Wimsatt
and I and a bunch of other folks. The people involved are some of the
most genius political minds in the world, and I’m really honored
to be working with them. 1-42 :: How did
Wimsatt come up with the idea? Can you provide some background on him?
AB :: He went to vote for the first time and it was confusing and frustrating
– and you know Billy has written two books, Bomb the Suburbs
and No More Prisons. His idea was that if someone as aware of current
events as himself was having a hard time negotiating voting then how would
the masses of young folks who are not as politically schooled to be expected
to vote and feel powerful? He figured he wanted an organization that provides
voter guides for people, helps people vote together, normalizes voting
and voter information and makes it a part of daily life. He’s like
a visionary for ordinary people. 1-42 :: Why are you
involved and what do you hope to accomplish? AB :: During the war I was writing to a list of about 700 people daily
on how frustrated I was about the state of politics and the world. I’ve
been doing activist work in the health field – HIV/AIDS and drug
user rights, specifically – for a long time now. But the budget cuts
have hit my world hard, and the last little stint of world events has
really gotten under my skin – all the offenses are so large and irreversible,
it strikes me as being so obviously amiss. I was getting personally frustrated
because people were so checked out; no one felt like they could do anything
about it, including me. When Billy first approached me with his little
surveys I was way too busy to do anything but fill out a survey, and then,
bit by bit, he hooked me in, because the idea is really brilliant, and
it’s something we could actually do. None of the ideas require a
political genius mind or a life dedication; it’s the small things
that people can actually do that make a difference. And what we hope to
accomplish is to get these small things going in a big way so that we
snowball a youth movement that understands how the system works, and understands
how to use it to improve their own quality of life, and that of their
children. 1-42 :: How is
the League different from other Voting Awareness groups out there, if
there are any? Students in N.Carolina (http://www.theeastcarolinian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/07/09/3f0c7aaeaccf3),
the Federal Voting Assistant Program (http://www.fvap.gov/),
Project Vote Smart (http://www.vote-smart.org/)
and Kids Voting USA (http://www.kidsvotingusa.org/)
all seem to have similar goals, and their efforts are both widely recognized
or quite localized… AB :: Good question. We’re sort of like the next step to a lot of voter registration spots. First you register but then you need to know who and what you’re going in to vote for! We are distinctly non-partisan, distinctly progressive in the old school since of the word: Progress! There are a lot of programs trying to register people to vote without giving them a framework from which to vote – people don’t know what to vote for or who to vote for or how to find out which candidate will represent them or how to make their vote matter. The idea of democracy was originally based on the premise that the candidate is representing the will of the people and not vice versa – where the candidate is just cavorting wildly in his fantasy world with millions of dollars dripping out of both hands with horrific repercussions on the waking masses. So far there isn’t really a space out there for long term strategic planning for young progressives – I mean we are up against such a powerful and entrenched force. Everyone I talk to is either like “who cares” or “let’s stage a coup”. But the ‘who cares’ method is bad karma, it’s no way to be a human and I don’t think it’s a sustainable space, personally or for the country/world. And the coup isn’t happening anytime soon either as far as I can tell, so what are normal progressive folk gonna do? We’re gonna break out of the party system and form an improved method of thinking. And once we identify that crucial point of entry, the spot where young people’s voices will resound furthest, then we’ll blow up the spot a bit, make the spot bright and clear and easy to see so that everyone can go there and be powerful. 1-42 :: Is there
any sense of voter influence within the project? What I mean by that is:
do educators from LOYV use their position as supporters of a particular
candidate, if any, and infuse that support within their work to educate
others? Wimsatt, for instance, is known for his sentiments on the prison
industry; do those feelings and other personal political issues come into
play? AB :: Actually the point is that there are a lot of issues that have a general progressive framework in place already, but because this administration is the peak of a long-term shift of what was once the center over to the right, a lot of that framework is now not considered progressive, but radically left. We’re non-partisan, but in this next election we need a solid Democratic candidate behind whom all different progressives can throw their support. So with the national election, and with encouraging folks to get involved in the local level as well, we’re talking about rebalancing the push and pull. The country shouldn’t be right or left, you know? Clinton did a lot of things I didn’t agree with, but with Clinton
it felt like someone attempting and sometimes managing to balance a push
and pull. The economy was in the positive zone and international relations
were in a much better place with a few trouble spots. Now the U.S. is
just sloppy everywhere and there are only a few peaceful spots that we
treat with disdain or eyeball for future conquest. I will criticize any
politician - it’s up to them to be as honest as possible. They work
for us. Bush should be doing my bidding, not using my hard earned cash
to do his. Personally, right now I like Kucinich the best and I think
Clark has the best chance of winning. But it’s most important to
me that we, as a community, determine our primary goal, whether it be
getting Bush out of office or formulating a peaceful administration or
merely non-isolationist, non-imperialists. Whatever it is, we should then
act collectively to achieve that goal. 1-42 :: Can the
ultimate goal be achieved, do you think? I guess that would mean the demise
of the League? AB :: Um – yes? (Laughter) I mean, shit, I hope we can realize the
ultimate goal, which is just to get people voting smarter and automatically
– and make voting easier – and be able to have a major impact
on elections. I mean if we just scare the shit out of people so they listen
to us and recognize the power of the numbers who stand with us and are
not going to march and go home anymore, but are going to march from the
picket line to the voting booth and start pulling politicians strings
again, then that is a major accomplishment. I don’t think the organization leads itself to demise. I mean in
the book, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of
Office (Wimsatt, Brown 2004), we will be talking about presenting
a sustainable 30 to 50 year plan for how to meet people and engage them
in the voting process. That should be an automatic part of the educational
system, an automatic part of all the work people do. The idea of progress
and change and evolving as people and as a nation should come naturally
to us, and until it does, or until the situation spins out of control
so that no one working on or around the system can effect anything, an
org like LOYV will always be needed. 1-42 :: Can you
tell me about the people behind the League and its efforts? What are their
backgrounds? How do you all fit together to make a team? AB :: Billy is kind of the anchor holding the ship in place while everyone hops on. The folks involved, a lot of them come from electoral political backgrounds – have run successful campaigns and voter drives, have been successful candidates, or run political media outlets, or are brilliant organizers of youth and campuses – everyone is covering a different aspect. These are some mind-blowing individuals. And we’re not stepping on toes, if someone is doing a good job and we can build together, we’re doing it. Folks like MoveOn (http://www.moveon.org/)
are doing a marvelous job at reaching people and getting quick informed
actions accomplished, boom. Folks like Third Wave (http://
www.thirdwavefoundation.org/) and Next Wave are organizing and funding
women and young progressive folks, boom. So the team is really organic,
we work in a transparent way, but we are hella focused, none of us have
time to waste. 1-42 :: Tell
us about these monthly brunches….what’s the point? AB :: The point is that people do this already; get together with friends and kick it over food and talk about the state of things. So why not occasionally do that while learning and talking about some element of the political system that directly effects you? Take that negative frustrated energy and turn it into some shit you have on lockdown. Like, do you know anything about the electoral college and where they come from and how their vote can trump yours? Do you know how you could get a voting station in your area? This is an alternative media source right, do your readers know how this administration has been facilitating a historical media conglomeration to such a degree that now a handful of bigwigs determine what people will see, hear and read and that they could do something about it, a variety of easy things? I mean there are ‘patriotic’ limitations on what is a headline and thus what the majority of folk in this country will think is happening. That doesn’t benefit anyone in the long-term. It sounds so 1984 but it’s really happening 20 years later. But there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful; the last election was lost
by just over 500 votes in one state. I had more than 500 people at my
birthday party – any one of them could have gone to Florida and done
it, we just had no network in place so progressives in Florida could say
help us! And we just didn’t KNOW we could do it, we didn’t KNOW
it was that possible. So we’re saying, before the next election –
our lives depend on it – you better KNOW what’s up, let’s
be strategic for once – the left is always so multi-issue and multi-focused
that we never really pull together and really move as a movement. We can’t
afford that right now. We need to bling the vote for once and act collectively
for power. And we’re doing the hard work! All folks have to do is
get together and get involved. 1-42 :: How can
people get involved? AB :: Well the website is going to be up soon, and people will be able to register there to become members and it will tell them where their local brunches are jumping off, will talk about the book, and give all the resources we are creating like when progressive voter guides will be available, how to become voter experts really quickly and talking points. This is something people can very easily take and make their own but have support in place. But let’s do this y’all, its crucial. We HAVE to win this next election, and we have to think of it as US winning, not Kerry or Kucinich or Dean or Clark, but you, me, our kids, friends and families. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CHECK OUT WWW.INDYVOTER.ORG READ BELOW FOR ONE SECTION FROM THE LEAGUE OF PISSED OFF VOTERS :: The League of Pissed Off Voters You did WHAT? This is Eli Lee. He used to be Director of an organization called Youth Action. He realized that youth organizing is great. It's essential. But you have to build electoral power too. His company Soltari.com runs some of the nation's most sophisticated grassroots political campaigns. I met Eli a couple years ago.
I had never been into electoral politics before. I think I only voted
once in my adult life from 18-28. Even when I was a youth activism consultant
for Rock the Vote in the 1990s, I didn’t bother to vote. In my eyes
my job was connecting Rock the Vote with "real" political activism
–the grassroots kind. It’s not that I was ever
totally against voting (although I do remember thinking it was funny when
some anarchist friends protested outside the 1996 Democratic convention
with a "Fuck the Vote" sign). It’s just that I moved around
so much I didn’t know who the local candidates were and I had no
reason to believe my one measly vote mattered. To this day, no one in
my adult life has ever asked me whether I voted or not. Not once. Not
my parents. Not my "political" friends. And I never asked anyone
either until last year. Our view: voting was the lowest form of political
activity. I’ve spent most of the
past two years as part of a team that created The Future 500 Future500.com)
–the first serious attempt at a directory of Youth Organizing and
Activism in the US. Twelve of us talent-scouted 500 of the most kick-ass
youth groups in 50 states. When people would ask me what the groups achieved,
I found I usually got the biggest reaction when I told people stories
of electoral victories –like the above from Eli Lee. The problem
was, there weren’t many such stories. The vast majority of Future
500 groups –among the most vital youth organizations in the US- were
not doing much with electoral politics. Ditto for large-scale legislative
and corporate campaigns. Most of the hottest youth groups are focused
on social and community issues –without connecting them to a legislative
and electoral agenda. There are reasons for this. One, non-profits are
forbidden to do anything resembling partisan politics (most are even scared
to use their legal 20% lobbying allowance). Two, no one ever taught us
it’s possible to play politics on OUR terms. Three, we think politics
stinks (it does), and we’re too good to get our clean little paws
in it. Last November I had a small
revelation. I say "revelation" because what happened next was
definitely outside my control. I was working in San Francisco and I was
upset about Prop N, a cynical ballot measure targeting homeless people
-pushed by opportunistic silver spoon Supervisor Gavin Newsome. I was
rooming with an artist who found a discarded couch, wrote "Gavin
Newsome’s idea of a homeless shelter" on it, and convinced me
to help him drop it off at Newsome’s house in the plush Marina district.
That was fun. I got inspired to vote. A few days after the election,
I sent out this memo to 120 hip-hop activists, organizers, and political
folks: I’m all for registering
and turning out young voters. But unless we give kids voter guides, we’re
setting them up to feel stupid! Ballot initiatives are worded confusing
as hell. You can’t tell the good initiatives from the bad ones. No
one knows who most local candidates are." I suggested on a whim that
we start a League of Hip-hop Voters, modeled on the League of Conservation
Voters (which I actually knew nothing about, except that it was highly
effective). Within hours, my inbox was overflowing -61 people from 13
states and DC wrote back to say they wanted to get involved in this new
effort which did not exist yet –some offered to start a local version,
and before I knew it, more than 80 people had volunteered in writing for
specific tasks and hours commitments. A young entertainment attorney from
LA named Kyle Stewart even left her job. Kyle did a landscape analysis
of dozens of major voting groups. Everyone told us: No one is really doing
this and someone needs to do it. The more we looked, we realized that the void we stumbled
onto was bigger than we’d realized. There was no national organization
teaching progressive young people how to win elections. (New organizations
like Wellstone.org and ProgressiveMajorty.org are planning to address
this). A few dozen of us are now devoting
ourselves to building the League. Some of us are working on a non-profit
organization, the League of Young Voters (youngvoter.net), which is going
to collaborate with dozens of national organizations, and hundreds of
local ones to train progressive 18-30 years olds to get smart about politics.
Some of us are working on a 501c4/PAC entity called League of Independent
Voters/League of Pissed Off Voters, which will use the Internet (Moveon.org-style
with geographically segmented email lists) to facilitate the creation
of local progressive voting guides. People in each community -Cincinnati
for example- will score their local, state and national candidates. They’ll
create scorecards (posted on Indyvoter.org) and endorsement slates (Pissedvoter.org).
These will be printed out then used to walk precincts, and canvass high
schools, colleges, cafes, bus stops, liquor stores… the beach. People
will pledge to vote the slate for their local area. Once these votes are
verified by an independent pollster -Voila!- we’ve got an instant
network of local progressive voting blocs which can hold politicians accountable.
We believe this voting bloc strategy
can capture the imagination of young non-voters –and cut the political
teeth of a new generation of organizers who didn’t know they were
organizers before. Initially, we will target 3-5 million cynical young
progressives aiming to inspire more than a million of them to take the
pledge and vote the slate in 2004. In a tight race, we believe the ‘voter
bloc effect’ could swing a presidential election (In 2000, Oregon
was decided by 6765 votes, Wisconsin by 5708, Iowa by 4144, and New Mexico
by 366 votes, not to mention Florida) -as well as congressional, state
and local races. (Even as unpopular as the Green Party is right now, they
still hold 174 local offices in 24 states.) We’re starting small. With
word-of-mouth and no budget, we already have more than 25 functioning
Politics ‘N' Pancakes brunch discussion groups across the country
(8 in swing states) –a precursor to the voting blocs. We’re
putting out a book in January with Softskull Press called: How to Get
Stupid White Men Out Of Office (and by the way some people of color are
just as stupid and need to go too) –which tells 15 local stories
of young people actually swinging I have never felt so invigorated
in my life –and I’m sure the same is true for most of the other
people involved. Since we previously knew nothing about electoral politics,
we’re inhaling it (but not inhaling). Dozens of us are recruiting
local political mentors and passing around books like: Blinded by the Right by David Brock;
Mobilizing Resentment by Jean Hardisty; Bush’s Brain by Moore and
Slater; The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira; and Making
Policy Making Change by Makani Themba. The League is only one exciting
new initiative inspired by the current political climate. Literally dozens
of groundbreaking new strategies for 2004 are being hatched as you read
this. The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (the campus network
which organized the March 5 student strike on 450 campuses) is developing
its strategy. A group of hip-hop generation organizers are launching a
National Hip-hop Political Convention May 19-22nd in Newark. Established
groups, way too many to name, mostly members of the Youth Vote Coalition
(youthvote.org) are launching major new initiatives. Even Rock the Vote
is getting remarkably more strategic with an online advocacy arm addressing
issues young people care about and a 40 city Community Street Team program. But you know
what? Haven’t you been holding it in long enough? 1. George W. Bush
Resume, by Kelly Kramer As governor of Texas: Accomplishments
as president: Records and References: Editor's comment after reading: Thank you Kelly
Kramer for this well researched expose. The arrogance, hypocrisy, and
criminality of the administration is enough to leave you breathless, and
outrageous enough to make one fear they will get away unscathed. Reports
like these, and the power of the Internet, might just be able to prevent
this. This document analysis was complied and published by Kelly Kramer and is presented here under the Fair Use Act for educational purposes. Kelly Kramer will receive your email at: kelley_kramer@yahoo.com
2003 1-42 Online |