Party poopers

“Nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.” -- Alexander Hamilton, 1787

While at present political parties are practical mechanisms for the expression of political intentions, for average citizens allegiance to party -- partisanship -- is self-defeating.

It was the existence of independent concentrations of power and influence, especially labor unions, national associations (such as the NAACP) and, on the local level, social clubs, that gave ordinary people muscle in the long struggle for economic and social justice.

Restoring such organizations must be part of any long-term reform of our democracy.

“If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” -- Thomas Jefferson, 1789

Activism: Think globally. Organize locally.

In the 2008 electoral season, to an unusual degree ordinary people got involved -- contributed cash, manned phone banks, walked precincts and talked to many thousands of their friends and neighbors; they hoped that one candidate would bring positive change to a country that many felt had lost its way. Also in 2008, it was business as usual for others -- the banks, military and security companies, big pharma and big farmers, the corporate elite that had been fleecing the country for 40 odd years. On election day, both got what they wanted, the difference being that for the newly engaged voters election day was an end. For the corporate elite, it was only another season in an endless process of influence, manipulation and outright control of the political system with twin goals: transferring wealth from poor to rich and from public to private. If it wasn't obvious in November 2008 that the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress was a beginning not an end, it is clear now: to beat the corporate elite will require new organizations, untiring labor from thousands of citizens, and profound reform of the electoral mechanisms. Paul Loeb, author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, suggests one place to begin.

"Soul of a Citizen": Village Politics - Rebuilding Engaged Communities

by Paul Rogat Loeb (Truthout 2010-07-24)

How do we respond to a political landscape where Meg Whitman can spend $80 million on her primary candidacy alone? Or where, aided by the ghastly Citizen's United Supreme Court decision, right-wing groups are pledging over $200 million for the November elections. On-the-ground activism is key; ordinary citizens reaching out to knock on doors, make phone calls, talk to friends, neighbors and coworkers, spread the word through social media, and do everything possible to convince undecided voters and get reluctant supporters to the polls. That's what so many of us did during 2006 and 2008, helping tip the balance in race after race. If voters are dependent on campaign ads and sound bites to make their decisions, the most manipulative politics tends to prevail. If we can reach out broadly enough to talk about the real choices, and reach out beyond the core converted to those who may have vastly different perspectives and experience hand, we can overcome the electronic lies.

If we do this well enough, even with lowered expectations, we'll be in far better shape working to create a more just and sustainable world. If we do it badly, or fail to actually reach out, we'll go backwards. So the next hundred and something days matter immensely.

One way to do this outreach while simultaneously building a base for the future is to work toward engaging those face-to-face communities we're already part of in key issues like climate change or the challenges of creating a just and sustainable economy. This means churches and temples, PTA's, block associations and Rotary Clubs, soccer clubs and softball leagues, the places we work, and all the other ordinary institutions of daily life. Building on the community that they offer, and on our relationships with colleagues, co-workers, and neighbors who already know us, they can provide powerful venues to engage our fellow citizens in our country's most critical issues.

I first saw the power of this approach initiated by a Baptist preacher in Florence, South Carolina named Bill Cusak. Although Bill had never organized anything more controversial than a revival meeting, he became concerned that the Reagan-era nuclear arms race was risking his granddaughter's future. The issue challenged him "like a crowbar to my soul." Bill approached a community college biologist who'd written a letter to the local paper, and they began building an activist community from scratch. They spoke and showed a video on the arms race at every church, PTA, and garden club that would have them. They enlisted a key African American pastor and asked younger church members to enlist their friends.

One of the first groups Bill addressed was the local Rotary Club, where he was a longtime member. "They kind of treated me like I had the plague," he recalled later. But eventually some responded. "Basically," he said, "it takes like to reach like: youth to reach youth; blacks to reach blacks; Catholics to reach Catholics. I even think," he added with a sly smile, "it takes Baptists to reach Baptists." Moving from this issue to others like homelessness, Bill began to change his community.

Granted, some contexts are more intimate and approachable than others. And some have been supplanted by virtual communities, which I'll talk about in a separate essay. But even megacities such as Los Angeles, New York, or Denver are vast patchworks of smaller communities, or potential communities. Every neighborhood, business, fraternal organization, or church group represents a potentially fertile field for public discussion.

When we use these networks to promote humane social visions, we can build on existing bonds of human conviviality and connection, and have the advantage of acting where people know us. As Karl Hess, a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Vietnam War opponent, once wrote, "To carry the message of a cause in a community when you are a generally respected neighbor is far better than when you do it as virtually your sole activity in public."

I saw another example of this in a University of Michigan student group called Greeks for Peace, founded after scattered fraternity and sorority members got involved in peace and justice issues and realized that they weren't the only ones. They organized events that brought critical social issues into the traditionally disengaged domain of Michigan's Greek system. People who otherwise would never have taken an interest began to respond. While these students wouldn't have walked across the quad to hear the exact same speakers discussing these issues, they responded when peers invited them to events held in safe and familiar environments, like the lounge of a major sorority. "So much politics," said one of the founders "is geared for those already involved. We wanted a vehicle for people to be with their friends and learn to take a stand together."

Mobilizing these kinds of villages can give us both the confidence and means to address often overwhelming political and economic problems. The community they provide can also ease the inevitable frustrations of working for social change, helping us endure the endless phone calls, meetings, and other repetitive tasks needed to galvanize people to act.

Most of all, engaging these communities can broaden the stream of those who participate in social change, drawing on common bonds that already exist, and drawing in those previously disengaged. In the wake of the Louisiana oil spill, I think of how surfer (and computer scientist) named Glenn Hening began worrying about the pollution and deterioration of the California beaches near his home. He'd just become a father and wondered whether his daughter would be able to enjoy the beaches when she was older. Glenn was also increasingly angry at the stereotype of surfers as dumb blond party animals "whose total vocabulary consists of 'hang ten,' 'cowabunga,' and 'far out.' He decided to counteract that image by persuading his fellow surfers to "use their skills to protect the marine environment for all of us."

Glenn first talked to surfer friends who were similarly concerned. Their inaugural effort addressed a Malibu lagoon where spillage of polluted water was damaging the shape of the waves on an adjacent beach. The group, now called the Surfrider Foundation, next challenged the dumping of contaminated waste into that same lagoon. Fellow surfers enlisted in droves.

Surfrider went on to win the second-largest Clean Water Act suit in American history, stopping pulp mills from polluting northern California's Humboldt Bay. Members testified at hearings, filed lawsuits, educated schoolchildren about marine ecology, challenged destructive developments, and monitored coastal water pollution levels nationwide. They enlisted swimmers, divers, beachcombers, windsurfers, and sympathetic environmental scientists. The organization now has 50,000 members in chapters throughout the United States, plus affiliates in eighteen other countries on five continents.

Glenn has helped change the culture of his community, in a way that offers lessons for other communities as well. The challenges we face to create a more just and sustainable world remain immense, but because of his efforts and those of his compatriots there's one more group of people ready to try and take them on. "Before we started," said Glenn, "a beach full of surfers would end up being a beach full of trash. We let developers wreck some of the finest surfing areas on the planet. That doesn't happen anymore. By now, the issues we've raised have gained the attention of surfers everywhere. They think about water quality, the impact of development, the need for government agencies to protect the environment. We created a new thread in the weave of what it means to be a surfer."

So what does this mean for November and beyond? We need the kinds of immediate practical outreach that tip elections, but we also need to keep building engaged community, as a base that makes everything else far more possible. If we do enough of both, we have a chance to prevail.

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of an updated new edition of "Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times;" of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear" (named the No. 3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association); and of "Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus." See http://www.soulofacitizen.org. To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.

Economic Justice: The Corporation

Corporations have no soul to be saved, no body to be incarcerated, thus they are difficult to motivate toward good. When they were delivered to life by the Supreme Court, they became "people," but what kind of people are they? If the financial meltdown -- or Michael Moore -- has piqued your interest in the workings of capitalism, this three-hour documentary will blow your stocks off.

"You'd think that things like disasters, or the purity of childhood, or even milk, let alone water or air, would be sacred. But no. Corporations have no built-in limits on what, who, or how much they can exploit for profit. In the fifteenth century, the enclosure movement began to put fences around public grazing lands so that they might be privately owned and exploited. Today, every molecule on the planet is up for grabs. In a bid to own it all, corporations are patenting animals, plants, even your DNA. Around things too precious, vulnerable, sacred or important to the public interest, governments have, in the past, drawn protective boundaries against corporate exploitation. Today, governments are inviting corporations into domains from which they were previously barred." -- from the website.

Resource: New Organizing Institute

"The NOI runs the only progressive advocacy and campaign training program focused on cutting-edge online organizing techniques (e.g. writing effective emails, engaging bloggers, leveraging social networks, utilizing video), political technology (e.g. using data effectively, progressive technology infrastructure), and the intersection with field and management of these areas of new organizing." -- from the New Organizing Institute website.

Community: Future of News and Civic Media

The “Future of News and Civic Media” conference in mid-June, sponsored by Center for Future Civic Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, showcased some of the work being done as a part of the Knight News Challenge (slogan: "You invent it. We fund it.") on creative ways to provide people with the news and information needed to manage their communities effectively.

Planning: The McMansion - Threat or Menace

Planners Move to Close Window on US 'McMansions' in the Guardian is about city and county governments finally getting wise, a decade or so late, to the possibility that building houses of 10,000 square feet for two people might not be such a wise thing for maintaining scale, husbanding resources, and keeping communities connected other than by three-hour freeway commutes (although, when you think about it, the same logic applies to single-family homes of any size). The development may mean more trouble for those invested in the struggling housing market, but for the rest of us it's welcome news.

In Boulder County, Colorado, which has recently adopted measures to cap the size of new homes, houses have grown from an average of 3,900 square feet in 1990 to 6,300 square feet last year.

Last month in Los Angeles, the city's planning commission passed a motion to restrict the size of new homes. If the city council adopts the measure it could affect 300,000 properties in the city. Similar measures have been adopted in Minneapolis and in Florida.

"I think people are suspicious of development in the US right now," says John Chase, architecture critic and urban designer for the city of West Hollywood. "People have an unconscious cultural association with a place. Mansion-building takes away from a person's sense of the identity of a place."

Now if we can just pass the Stop Building Cheap, Crappy Condos Act, we'll really be getting somewhere.

The rest of the story: The Guardian.

Second thoughts: Municipal Wi-Fi Easier Said Than Done

As you know if you've tried to use it, wi-fi access in Santa Monica is hit or miss. Instead of organizing wi-fi around the excess bandwidth of major users -- businesses such as Yahoo, Google, Sony; educational institutions such as SMCC; government entities such as the city itself -- Santa Monica is planning to hire a private service provider to build a system over the next few years (why it should take "years" to provide service to 8.3 square miles of flat terrain is a topic for another time).

According to reports, instead of contracting with a big player like Earthlink or a civic-minded company like Google, the city plans to hire AzulStar, a little Michigan-based company specializing in municipal access, to create a seamless city-wide network of hotspots.

According to AzulStar’s website, the company has built four city-wide systems to date, in such major metropolitan areas as Grand Haven, Michigan and Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Although touted as a free service, in reality, relatively slow, advertising-supported public access will be available to residents and tourists for free, but they will be asked to pay for faster ad-free service. Businesses will required to pay for access separately, which will require the creation of some sort of enforcement mechanism to keep companies from logging on to the slower but costless version.

Any city-wide plan will be a big advance over the patchwork of public hotspots, now numbering 11 and growing, including City Hall, the Third Street Promenade, the Pier and Virginia Avenue Park, that make current access so spotty (at the end of May, three more parks -- Reed, Cloverfield, and the new park at the airport -- were scheduled to be on line).

A city-wide system will also enable the City of Santa Monica to tie all municipal services together on one wireless network.

Some of the problems with using a private company to provide a public service (instead of relying on a municipally owned system or a city-wide cooperative, two methods widely used in other parts of the world), as well as some of the technical difficulties particularly irksome to commercial providers, are outlined in an article published this week by The Economist (2007-05-25).

Long before Walt Disney built his theme park in Anaheim, this savvy little city 30 miles south of Los Angeles was deploying cutting-edge technology to improve its citizens’ lot and upstage neighbouring communities. It was one of the first cities in America to build its own electricity grid -- to illuminate its streets and lure late-night shoppers from nearby towns.

The innovation continued. Before most had even heard of the internet, Anaheim had networked the city with fat communications piping, so residents could have a variety of cable TV providers and telephone companies to choose from, while local utilities could automate their meter reading and businesses could provide all manner of online services. Now the city is in the process of blanketing itself with a wireless broadband network.

Anaheim is not the only city turning itself into a giant Wi-Fi hotspot. No fewer than 175 municipalities and metropolitan regions in America are building community-wide networks. A similar number are in the planning stage. But having blazed the trail in network services, Anaheim is the municipality that other cities are watching the closest -- all the more so because the company rolling out its wireless network is Earthlink.

Once the loudest booster of municipal Wi-Fi and still the biggest in the business, Earthlink is having second thoughts. Having turned in a $30m loss for its most recent quarter, Earthlink now says it is “re-evaluating its position in the muni-Wi-Fi market." The announcement has sent shivers through city halls across America.

Like Anaheim, most municipalities installing wireless networks are not paying for the privilege, but relying on providers like Earthlink to foot the bill. Having won the right to supply Wi-Fi services to a municipality, most companies expected to recoup the investment though subscriptions and advertising.

Neither revenue stream has lived up to expectation. Originally, Earthlink thought it would be in clover if 20-25% of households signed up for its wireless internet service. It now realises it will be lucky to get 15%. And without the eyeballs, advertisers have been slow to come aboard.

The trouble is that too many cities' schemes were half-baked to start with. In some cities, such as Philadelphia, the mission was to offer cheap (or even free) internet connections to the poor. In others, such as Anaheim, a more pragmatic, market-driven approach was adopted. Elsewhere, populist mayors and city councils pandered to voters with promises of universal internet access. In almost all cases, however, the reigning philosophy was “build it and they will come."

What no one seems to have bargained for was that, while Wi-Fi technology works perfectly well over short distances within a home, coffee shop or airport, it doesn’t work all that well outside. Wi-Fi’s popularity stems from its use of the unlicensed, 2.4 gigahertz part of the radio spectrum. But being unfettered by licences and regulations means that there are many PCs jostling for access. Adding to the mayhem are the domestic appliances, like cordless phones and microwave ovens, that radiate in the same frequency band.

This creates enough trouble inside a building. Outside, there are the added problems of foliage, tall buildings and hills. These can reflect, absorb or otherwise interfere with a municipal Wi-Fi’s signal, beamed from aerials on lamp-posts and traffic lights.

Because of these glitches, network operators have found that the old rule of 15-20 Wi-Fi aerial nodes per square mile is nowhere near good enough. Nowadays people expect to connect to the internet using low-powered devices such as laptops and Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones. To meet this demand, operators must install twice as many nodes per square mile.

The cost escalation does not stop there. In opting for external Wi-Fi, municipal operators seem to have forgotten that the vast majority of dwellings in America use chicken wire in their walls. As every high-school physics student learns, a mesh of chicken wire can screen out electromagnetic fields, especially those caused by radio waves. For an external Wi-Fi beam to be detected indoors, homes have had to be kitted out with signal-boosting wireless modems.

These complications have made a mockery of service suppliers’ business plans. When Earthlink says it is re-evaluating its position in the municipal Wi-Fi market, what it really means is that it can’t make money out of communities with fewer than 2,500 households per square mile. Even then, it needs assurances that the city will commit to buying a big chunk of the network’s capacity for such “anchor tenancies” as emergency services, traffic and parking control, video surveillance and internet telephony, as well as automated meter reading and other utility services.

This is precisely how it should be. Internet access for residential users was never going to be the mainstay for municipal Wi-Fi. Most communities are pretty well served these days by cable, DSL and satellite internet services. As a result, competition has beaten broadband-access charges down to around $15 a month. And where such services are not competitive, they quickly become so the moment municipal Wi-Fi presses its nose to the window.

No, the future of municipal wireless broadband rests on making cities safer, saner and simpler to manage. Trivial pursuits like downloading songs or posting video clips can be safely left to phone and cable companies."

Azulstar is using in Santa Monica the same business model, attempting to recoup its investment in infrastructure and to turn a profit through subscriptions and advertising, that the Economist reports is a failure elsewhere. At least Earthlink and its ilk have the deep pockets that would enable them to live up to their commitments even while losing money for a while. How long will a little outfit like AzulStar be able to hang in without making a profit? I guess we're going to find out.

The Economist

Access: Villaraigosa announces plan for citywide Wi-Fi by 2009

"Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa outlined plans Tuesday to blanket Los Angeles with wireless Internet access in 2009, in what would be one of the nation's largest urban Wi-Fi networks.

"The L.A. Wi-Fi initiative would give Los Angeles residents, schools, businesses and visitors uninterrupted high-speed Internet connections — for work, research, Web browsing or even phone calls.

"More than 300 municipalities nationwide already have launched plans for similar networks based on the Wi-Fi technology that has become popular at coffee shops, bookstores, public parks and countless other so-called hot spots...

"The city's existing commercial broadband providers — AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable and Verizon Communications Inc. — aren't planning to oppose the city's efforts. Verizon, which once joined cable giant Comcast Corp. to try to curtail Philadelphia's wireless project, no longer stands in the way of municipalities."

The rest of the story: L.A.Times

Connectivity headed for the nation's 4th largest town, too:
City Wi-Fi coming, but will it be worth what you'll pay? (Houston Chronicle)