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July 19, 2008
How to keep the conversation on race alive post-Obama
Members of a panel titled “Black Blogging Beyond Obama” called on black bloggers and activists to get into the political trenches — spreading the word about issues relevant to their communities — and avoid relying solely on high-profile African-American politicians and leaders.
“What has happened in the past decades is that we’ve fallen into the complacency of enjoying black faces in high places,” blogger Leutisha Stills said. “We’ve got people who want the title but don’t want to do the job.”
Stills — also the chief researcher for CBC Monitor Report Card, which publishes reports on the legislative performance of members of the Congressional Black Caucus — said that black politicians need to be held accountable for their decisions, and that a void in leadership in the black community needs to be compensated for by grassroots activism.
The same goes for Barack Obama. Though the rest of the nation may look to Obama as a magical cure for America’s racial problems, Stills said, the black community needs to keep pressure on leaders if it wants to see change.
“For the majority of us, we wake up after January 20, 2009 after the party is over and we’re still going to be African American,” Stills said. “We’re still going to have all the problems we have now … they’re not going to go away because Barack Obama becomes the president.”
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Wait, bloggers read printed text too?
Bloggers may have spent hours at Netroots Nation railing against the inadequacies of the MSM (mainstream media for those of you who don’t understand blogger-speak), but they’re still wholeheartedly embracing the bound word.
The Progressive Book Club has set up camp in the middle of Netroots’ exhibit hall, hawking their wares to convention-goers, who at this point late in a jam-packed day (a 8:30 a.m. start time followed by Nancy Pelosi followed by Al Gore followed by a full slate of panels and workshops) seem a little fatigued and in need of some recuperation time with a thick tome.
Which books have been raking in the cash? John Dean’s Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Richard Clarke’s Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters, Progressive Book Club Marketing Manager Dina Owobu said.
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Copy this DVD
It’s not everyday that filmmakers encourage people to make pirated copies of their documentaries, but here at Netroots Nation, DVDs with instructions to “Please Copy & Distribute” have been strategically placed on tabletops in the exhibit hall, nestled next to free highlighters, coffee mugs and pamphlets.
Currently on tables: one DVD titled “The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw” and another featuring not one, not two, not three, but FOUR videos on the same disc: “911 Mysteries,” “TerrorStorm,” “Loose Change” and “David Ray Griffin Presentation.”
This reporter’s question: how are you supposed to copy this thing? Do bloggers just carry around blank DVD’s or movie-ripping software in their messenger bags (the luggage of choice around these parts)? Anyone who has technical expertise — or who wants a free movie rental for the night — is advised to run over to the Austin Convention Center ASAP to help this reporter before this confab shuts down for the night around 6:00 p.m.
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Confidence in Congress? Nine percent, prof says
Nine percent.
That’s what Stanford professor and Change Congress founder Lawrence Lessig wants you to remember. That’s the level of confidence Americans have in Congress, he said.
Lessig gave a passionate keynote Saturday to liberal bloggers at the Netroots Nation conference at the Austin Convention Center, asking them to help push politicians into only accepting public financing for their campaigns.
Lessig focused a good bit of his Power Point-heavy presentation on how Congress is influenced by money. He cited an example of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., campaigning against a bill that could increase credit card debt while she was first lady and then changing her mind once she was in the Senate, voting twice for the measure.
Change Congress will help push elected officials by encouranging several things: take money only from individuals, banning earmarks, increased transparency, and public financing of campaigns.
Bloggers have enormous power and influence, Lessig said, and they should use this to pester politicians into supporting public financing and fixing what he referred to as a system that produced laws that are immoral or wrong.
“I need you to take the peddle,” Lessig said. “I need you to follow us. We can fix the flaw.”
“We have to solve the democracy crisis,” Lessig chanted, encouraging audience participation in chanting this mantra, which he pulled from an speech former Vice President Al Gore gave. “This is what we have to do to make this government work.”
Part 2: Q&A
I read an article about you in The Nation that talks at the top about how popular you are in the liberal blogosphere. Why do you think your writing and message has achieved such resonance?
Well, first of all I wouldn’t credit the praise as directly. I don’t feel that I’ve actually achieved any resonance yet. What works in the blogopshere is actually what works in the academic world as well which is people who speak with a certain kind of independence. So, it’s not that people necessarily agree with me. But the key is to make sure they continue to believe that I’m doing what I’m doing because I believe in it as opposed to it happens to fund me or it happens to support my salary or something like that. And that’s the best of the blogosphere as well, there is a very strong sense of integrity here that people believe is the difference between in the success in the blogopshere or not. If you hide facts about your financial connection and you are not transparent about exactly what is driving you, you lose respect very quickly and so I think that is the family resemblance between the three of us.
You have a very distinct speaking style. I was curious how you hit upon that way of speaking?
It was really a response to ADD. Especially when you come to conferences, blogger-like conferences where everybody has a laptop and there is wireless connectivity, so you are fighting with the Internet. What do you got to do? You’ve got to speak in a way that constantly forces them to think and to focus and that is 95 percent of why I do what I do. I think the real objective is to figure out how to make ideas understandable. There are some people out there who think of amazing new ideas and the rest of us who try to make it understandable and the discipline of creating a presentation like the one that I create.
How long does it take you to develop a Power Point?
This particular version which re-uses parts of the old, but I’ve also added a bit of the new stuff, it probably took 40 hours.
You’ve decided to devote a considerable amount of your time and energy to this issue of public financing and reforming Congress. Given your background, why you decided to focus on this particular issue?
The issue I want to focus on is how to reform Congress in a fundamental way. I think public finance would be one important component to that because I think there is so little trust in the way Congress functions is that people think the only reason Congress does what it does is because of the money, whether that is true or not. So for example you had a judge who decided a case and then it turns out his wife owned stock in the company. What the system doesn’t do is give the judge a chance to explain why his decision wasn’t effected by the money. They just say, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have decided that case. We’re going to recuse you from the case. This relfects a pretyt mature understanding about how people can be distraced from their understanding of the issue. this is one very efficient first step twoard getting to the right answer of a Congress people can respect and trust.
As you said, this isn’t a new issue, it’s something that has been discussed for decades. What is it about your solution that may get us to where we need to be?
I think the public funding issue has not been sufficiently framed for the right. So it’s an issue that the left loves and the right hates. The right has got ot begin to recognize why they should be in favor of public funding as well. When you begin to think about maybe Congress is regulating as broadly as it is regulating just so it has more opportunity to raise money for its own elections. I was on a television show where a guy asked, I think you are totally wrong, the thing we need to do is get a flat tax. We will never get a flat tax until we solve the public funding issue. Because the reason the tax code is so complicated the way it is right now is it gives members more levers they can pull and say oh your special break that covers your particular industry, we’re re-considering that this year so you better get in and give us your views and of course that always means you better be supporting us financially. So the right, so I think one thing is we’ve got to be able to make sure the Right understands that public funding is a small payment that we can make in exchange for the opportunity to consider how big government should be. If you want the chance to make sure you can argue in favor of smaller government you at least should make sure members of Congress don’t depend on there being a bigger government.
And number two, the issue has been around forever, but we’re just at the beginning to use network technologies to connect a bunch of people. So the model of its issue in the past 50 years has been the broadcast model. My group tries to broadcast our message and your group tries to broadcast your message. And the fact is our groups have never had the funding to compare with big organizations like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. So our message never quite gets out. By the infrastructure of the Net gives us a way to leverage that in surprising ways. So you take this issue and make it work in the Net. That’s basically what is new here.
I understand Change Congress is a non-profit but in some ways it’s like a start-up business. How did you get it off the ground?
Private contributors, a range of mainly Silicon Valley people who are really frustrated with the existing system and want to see it change.
And you have two employees at this point?
Two full-time employees but we have a bunch of volunteers too.
I understand in February you briefly considered running for Congress and then decided against it. Was your decision more just that situation and who you might be up against or was it fundamentally you don’t think that is the right way to achieve your goals?
It was more the former. It was really an attractive idea to have a short campaign where you can focus people on this issue. It would have been helpful for me to consider how to frame it in an effective way. And just a lot of fun. But recognizing that a significant defeat would translate into people thinking the issue had no legs meant that for the sake of the issue it just didn’t make sense to campaign.
Tell me a little bit more about the blogger council and what it is.
So the blogger council will be a handful of bloggers who agree to give us a monthly teleconference time ad ongoing feedback about what we’re doing and how we should be doing it differently. I’m just beginning the process of recruiting these people so I’m not ready to announce who they are.
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