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 Logo of the Pirate Party in Germany New Orleans My son subscribes to Wired magazine, the glossy, tech and computer boosting publication. I like it and read it regularly once he’s finished. Yesterday, it was in the pile of publications I toted to the basement of the Criminal Court jury rooms to pass the time in my required biannual service as a citizen of this fair city.
An article by Wired contributing editor, Joshua Davis, called “Fewer Voters, Better Elections,” was breathtaking in its elitism and implicit attack on democracy. Citing two current research studies, one disappointingly from Stanford, Davis argues for a random “statistically valid” sample of 100,000 of our 313 million citizens who would be polled on the questions and candidates of the day. Davis deftly avoids the gaping holes in his argument against mass citizen participation by citing the litany of problems with the current system (lack of participation, problems of campaign financing, TV ads) and arguing for a system of random participation in “small group deliberations” which would have more time and ability to make “informed” decisions, which he likens to jury pools, ignoring all evidence to the problems with juries as well.
Parts of the Wired argument are not only anti-democratic but almost calculatingly deceptive. First, Davis glances over the fact that he and the researchers want to pool their random people from a pool of “registered voters,” which blatantly reinforces a huge structural weakness in the current American system, which excludes, and increasingly suppresses, the citizen participation of minorities, elderly, and the poor among many others. Secondly, Davis tries to conflate the Stanford “small group deliberations,” which he touts as “part of legally binding decision processes in 18 countries” as being the same or an adequate substitute for the real engagement and participation that is voting. Small group, big group, mass meetings, whatever, let a thousand flowers bloom as pieces of a “decision” process, but that will never be the same as democracy, and no country has adopted that in this world.
Continue Reading Technology and Democracy: Wired Magazine Elitism versus Pirate Party Openness
 Helene O'Brien SEIU Local 21 LA New Orleans May Day may have begun as a celebration of the coming of spring many years ago, but since the Haymarket Riots in Chicago in 1888 around workers rights, fair wages, and the 8-hour day and the commemoration of May 1st adopted by many in 1890, unions and progressive movements have made the day an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity and keep hot the fires of struggle. In the United States and Canada the day is more confusing to some, because we won legislation making Labor Day the first Monday in September, more a celebration of the coming of fall than the beginning of spring, but I won’t linger on that irony.
In 80 countries around the world, including most of Europe, May Day is our labor day and time to shine. Working with ACORN International you could tell the difference when greetings ran out between our offices and organizers in solidarity and commemoration, first from Rome and then picked up by Mumbai, echoed in Buenos Aires and around our world. The notion of solidarity and support for workers is harder won here, which prompted the monthly Fair Grinds Dialogue and invitation to local labor leader, Helene O’Brien of SEIU 21LA to speak on the subject.
Though O’Brien’s local largely represents public employees in the City of New Orleans and East Baton Rouge Parish, she wisely focused on the plight of some of her lowest paid members, school cafeteria and janitorial workers that had been contracted out to huge multi-national companies and were being exploited viciously despite the efforts of the union. The workers were largely privatized after the storm and organized by a controversial multi-union program when Sodexho took over. Now the contract has flipped to Aramark, which though party to the original deal, has proven a rougher customer for the workers, firing 13 this week solely because they were at the end of their probation and the company could do so with no questions asked and no answers offered. Interestingly, Helene revealed Aramark was now owned by the giant squid, Goldman-Sachs, where they hardly make calculators that could figure the distance between a lunch lady’s paycheck and the CEO of Goldman! Helene also told a story of workers with Janicare in Baton Rouge that were being imported from Bolivia, housed 8 and 10 to a trailer, told to claim they were from Puerto Rico, and working as a subcontractor of another subcontractor to clean some schools in EBR.
Where solidarity became the theme is that O’Brien indicated that they were taking the initiative to organize a campaign in New Orleans called Justice for Support Workers and trying to enlist others to support them. She told of the difficulties in trying to create community-labor alliances in the past, which she attributed to “lack of capacity,” but obviously felt a more specific focus on workers in need and requests to support a specific campaign being undertaken by her union might be more successful.
Let’s hope so! The questions at Fair Grinds returned again and again to the fact that the public had no clue what was happening to workers. These were obviously folks inclined towards solidarity and listening for a way to help. On May Day anything seemed possible.
 Solidarity Dialogue on May Day
 Walmart Protest in New York City New Orleans Walmart annual board meetings are legendary dog-and-pony shows with literally thousands traipsing to Bentonville for a Roman circus of entertainment and company spectacle. This meeting next month may have a sharper edge that not even a packed room of handpicked “associates” can stifle. It will be impossible for the board to ignore shareholders questions about how they could have not known about the corporate corruption and bribery, involving $24 million in Mexico and known and covered up by all of the top executives.
Someone else besides me is upset that Walmart was hiding its hands behind rock in 2005 when many of us were organizing aggressively in an attempt to win real corporate accountability from the company on community and labor standards. John Liu, New York City controller and sometime candidate for mayor, was involved in pushing for an outside investigation of Walmart’s labor standards in China and other source countries through a shareholder resolution then, which was pushed aside despite a direct meeting with the board. Now, the New York City pension funds have pledged 4.7 million votes according to a story by Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times to unseat the Walmart directors facing re-election.
Too bad for Walmart that too many of us that were straight armed with constant denials and obfuscation then are still around and asking the same questions and now knowing that the answers are different than the board and top executives claimed at the time. New York City funds may be out in front but from Morgenson’s reporting it seems clear that Illinois Retirement funds and F&C Management, which she describes as a $150 billion asset manager, are also on the record still smarting from the slap down in 2005 and laying in the gap in 2012 still looking for satisfaction.
Shareholder “democracy” is largely a joke, but my bet is that win, lose, or draw, opposition to the board will be broad and significant and this time, if these folks survive the test, they will only do so by finally giving the right answers, which will mean giving in and establishing real and objective external accountability measures for a corporate culture now proven corrupt to the core.
Side bet: when are we going to start looking at how they greased palms in India? How about now!
 New Orleans In organizing, even in the smallest space of a neighborhood, we have always argued that you have to “create a happening” where the coming new organization seems to be everywhere on the tip of tongues, laundromat posters, telephone poles, mailings, and whatever tools could be assembled. The same is true of a political campaign where immersion and momentum are essential in creating a sense of urgency, momentum, and even inevitability.
In the new world of modern communications and emerging campaign tools, I’ve kept an eye on the Kony Campaign being mounted by the young, upstart Invisible Children organization with an open mind to learning whatever is possible. I knew it was something serious not when it got millions of hits on YouTube because with all respect so do some cat pictures, but when established international NGOs started criticizing them. Then I saw a Kony 2012 campaign packet on the dining room table of some friends in Madison. I started noticing that there were different posters and exhortations on all of the community bulletin boards at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse. Something was happening here. This guy, Joseph Kony and his ragtag 300 person Lord’s Resistance Army, had to be “dead man walking!”
Now with a hundred American military advisors on the ground helping, the effectiveness of the campaign seems verifiable. And, truth to tell, this could not have been about the video piece. That’s sizzle. This group had to have had steak to leverage a bill through Congress – how many groups can make that happen these days – and trigger the authority of military involvement, which is almost impossible to achieve. The video was from 2012. But, Invisible Children managed to pass the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Action in 2010. The US has spent almost a half-billion in this area of Uganda now! They may be one-hit wonders, but they are teaching here, and I’m ready to be a student.
Here’s a quote from a story in the Times:
Yet no other American military project in sub-Saharan Africa has generated the attention — and the high expectations — as the pursuit of Mr. Kony, partly thanks to a wildly popular video on Mr. Kony’s notorious elusiveness and brutality, “Kony 2012,” that set YouTube records with tens of millions of hits in a matter of days. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the overall commander of American forces in Africa, has a “Kony 2012” poster tacked to his office door. As one American official put it: “Let’s be honest, there was some constituent pressure here. Did ‘Kony 2012’ have something to do with this? Absolutely.”
To me that sounds like an endorsement of campaigning strategy AND tactics.
 New Orleans HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced that about 132 Head Start agencies charged with providing pre-school education for the poor will go through “redesignation.” Redesignation really means that they will lose their contracts and go through a rebidding process because they have been found deficient in some respect. Many of the deficiencies seem trivial, but the impacts are large since agencies in parts of Los Angeles, New York City, St. Louis, and Houston are among the large districts impacted in this rebidding “auction.”
The Administration is spinning this as a push to make sure the poor are getting the best in Head Start services and support, and I hope so. Unfortunately, the federal free-for-all on $7 billion in funding also seems somewhat political because Head Start though largely protected by funding cuts under Obama is under fire from different directions on how much impact the preparation for poor children in preschool has on long term performance. I worry that Obama’s Head Start initiative here could become to Obama what Bush’s No Child Left Behind has been: a critique without a program or solution!
Local 100 represents Head Start teachers and staff in Houston, Little Rock, and Shreveport, so we see the daily sweat, blood, and tears in good times and bad that dedicated workers give to educating these very young children to prepare them for the future. When studies question whether or not the advantages of Head Start last past the 1st grade, we wonder whether Head Start is the problem or what happens in the increasingly beleaguered public school systems, where we also represent workers in Texas. There are more and more expectations with less support and resources.
I wouldn’t say that Head Start should be a sacred cow, but attacking the programs after years of defunding and funding freezes under Bush and as one of the few remaining programs that seeks to give the poor a break early in their lives, seems risky politics and bad policy in these polarized times where the right is looking for more scapegoats.
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