The recent U.S. election was discouraging in general for green transportation advocates, but one loss I felt particularly keenly was the unseating of Minnesota Democratic congressman James Oberstar by a slim margin. For as Carolyn Szczepanski writes on her blog People Powered Transportation at Mother Earth News:

If you don’t live in Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District or follow federal transportation policy, you probably don’t even know the name James Oberstar. He was elected to Congress in 1974, and, since his very first term, served on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

For bike-ped advocates, those committee members are critical and, for three decades, Oberstar pushed to get bicyclists and pedestrians recognized and treated as “intended users” of our public roads. In the last wave election in 2006, when Democrats took control of the House, Oberstar was elected chairman of the Transportation Committee. A few months after he claimed leadership, he told a crowd at the National Bike Summit: “We’re going to convert America from the hydrocarbon economy to the carbohydrate economy.”

Oberstar was vested in many transit issues, as Minnesota Public Radio reports, but it was clear that biking was close to his heart, and he was responsible for directing funding to many bike trails in the nation and the state. He was in some ways a classic pork-barrel politician, but he served up an awful lot of tasty pork to bicyclists. I’ve ridden many miles on Oberstar-funded trails, including the Lakewalk along Duluth’s Lake Superior waterfront—and so, I imagine, have many of the people who voted red over blue this time around.

Washington, D.C.’s Streetsblog reports that now that Oberstar is out of the picture, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, a “coal-n-highways Dem,” may be angling for the top Democratic seat on the Transportation Committee. (The silver lining: This would take Rahall and his pro-coal agenda off the Natural Resources Committee.)

Oberstar is a savvy guy. He probably knows that he didn’t get voted out because people suddenly hate bike trails, but because the soft, doughy, pliable middle of the electorate simply swung in the other direction this time. Maybe they need to get out and bike a bit more.

Sources: Mother Earth News, Minnesota Public Radio News, Streetsblog Capitol Hill  

Image of Rep. James Oberstar by John Schadl, courtesy of the photographer.  

This piece was originally published by TomDispatch . 

This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They’ve invaded; they’ve infiltrated; they’ve conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. They’re like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world.

We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you.

The results are near-invincible bodies, the most gigantic of which are oil companies, larger than blue whales, larger than dinosaurs, larger than Godzilla.  Last year, Shell, BP, and Exxon were three of the top four mega-corporations by sales on the Fortune Global 500 list (and Chevron came in eighth). Some of the oil companies are well over a century old, having morphed and split and merged while continuing to pump filth into the air, the water, and the bodies of the many -- and profits into the pockets of the few.

Thanks to a Supreme Court decision this January, they have the same rights as you when it comes to putting money into the political process, only they’re millions of times larger than you -- and they’re pumping millions of dollars into races nationwide. It’s like inviting a T. rex into your checkers championship -- and it doesn’t matter whether dinosaurs can play checkers, at least not once you’re being pulverized by their pointy teeth.

The amazing thing is that they don’t always win, that sometimes thousands of puny mammals -- that's us -- do overwhelm one of them.

Gigantic, powerful, undead beings, corporations have been given ever more human rights over the past 125 years; they act on their own behalf, not mine or yours or humanity’s or, really, carbon-based life on Earth’s. We’re made out of carbon, of course, but we depend on a planet where much of the carbon is locked up in the earth.  The profit margins of the oil corporations depend on putting as much as possible of that carbon into the atmosphere.

So in a lot of basic ways, we are at odds with these creations. The novelist John le Carré remarked earlier this month, “The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done -- dare I say it -- in the name of God." Corporations have their jihads and crusades too, since they subscribe to a religion of maximum profit for themselves, and they’ll kill to achieve it.  In an odd way, shareholders and god have merged in the weird new religion of unfettered capitalism, the one in which regulation is blasphemy and profit is sacred.  Thus, the economic jihads of our age.   

They Fund By Night! 

In the jihad that concerns me right now, most of the monsters come from Texas; the prey is in California; and it’s called our economy and our environment. Four years ago, with state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, we Californians decided we’d like to cultivate our environment for the benefit of all of us, human and biological, now and in the long future.

They’d like to pillage it to keep their profit margins in tip-top shape this year and next. The latest tool to do this is called Proposition 23, and it’s on our ballot on November 2nd. It is wholly destructive, cloaked in lies, and benefits no one -- no one human, that is, though it benefits the oil corporations a lot. (You could argue that it benefits their shareholders, but I’d suggest that their biological and moral nature matters more than their bank accounts do and that, as a consequence, they’re acting against their deepest interests and their humanity.)

When he signed AB 32 into law, Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, who’s totally weird, termed out, but really good on climate stuff, said: “Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals. Using market-based incentives, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That's a 25% reduction.  And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels. We simply must do everything in our power to slow down global warming before it's too late." 

With Proposition 23, two out-of-state oil corporations, Valero and Tesoro, and right-wing oil billionaires based in New York and Kansas are trying to use the California initiative process, originally intended to allow citizen intervention in the governance of this state, to countermand AB 32 and set policy for us. “According to data from the California Secretary of State's office,” Kate Sheppard recently reported in Mother Jones magazine, “more than 98% of contributions to the pro-Prop. 23 campaign are from oil companies. Eighty-nine percent of the contributions come from out of state… Valero contributed $4 million, Tesoro gave $1.5 million, and a refinery owned by the notorious Kansas-based billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, kicked in another $1 million. Just last week, Houston-based Marathon oil contributed $500,000.”

Actually, Tesoro and Valero are headquartered out of state, but their refineries in California gave us 2.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals in our air and water last year, and they’d like to continue offering the citizens of my state these gifts that keep giving illness, death, and long-term environmental devastation without interference. The coming vote is not about protecting fancy places for upscale hikers -- the stereotype used to portray environmentalism as a white-person’s luxury movement -- it’s about air quality for inner-city people, especially those who live near refineries and harbors. This is the kind of environmental degradation that’s about childhood asthma and increased deaths from respiratory illness. In other words, Prop. 23 is part of a corporate war on the poor. A vote for Prop. 23 is a vote to turn the lungs of poor children into a snack for dinosaurs, to put it in bluntly Hollywood-ish terms.

Lies of the Living Dead 

To sabotage AB 32, they’re spending lots and lots of money and telling lots and lots of lies. Start with the proposition’s name -- “The California Jobs Initiative” -- designed to make you think that this measure will create jobs. Actually, according to most reputable analyses, it will do the opposite. A green economy has made jobs, is making jobs, and will make more jobs. This stealth initiative would suspend AB 32 until unemployment in California drops below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters, which it won’t anytime soon, if ever.

The implication is that doing something about climate change is a luxury we cannot afford in this bleak economy. That’s a lie. Down the road, if we don’t retool to address a future in which there’s less petroleum (at far higher prices), we’ll truly crash and the suffering will be intense. AB 32 would prevent that crash; Prop. 23 steers us directly into it.

The more we heat up the planet, the more it costs all of us, not just in money, but in colossal famines, displacements, deaths, and species extinctions, as well as in the loss of some of the things that make this planet a blue-green jewel, including its specialized habitats from the melting Arctic tobleaching coral reefs.

Doing something about climate change makes economic sense right now. It’s good business.

It’s hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.  After all, oil corporations funded a lot of the disinformation campaigns which, for years, promoted the idea that human-caused climate change was a figment of the overheated imaginations of mad environmentalists, and later that there was controversy (as well as corruption) among scientists when it came to global warming.  The only honest information would have been that about 97% of the world’s relevant scientists overwhelming agree that climate change couldn’t be more real and is a genuine danger to humanity and the planet -- and that the evidence is all around us in freakish weather, rising oceans, melting arctic ice and glaciers, shifting habitats, and more.

The Phantom of Democracy 

The oil dinosaurs want to win so badly in my home state because what happens here matters everywhere. The nation often follows where California goes. In the 1970s, we started setting energy efficiency standards that mean we Californians now use about half the energy of the average American (with no diminishment of quality of life or pocketbook pain). In the last decade, we created cutting edge measures to curb carbon emissions.

In 2002, Los Angeles state assemblywoman Fran Pavley (now a state senator) put out AB 1493, which was to -- and will -- reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.  It was, unfortunately, held up for six years by the Bush administration and then transformed into a national standard by Barack Obama as one of his first acts in office. Pavley also authored the now embattled “Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” AB 32.

If you think oil corporations and life share an interest, you should’ve been in the Gulf of Mexico a few months ago. I was. I saw their oiled pelicans, their unemployed fishermen, and their oil-smeared marshes.  I tasted and smelled the poisons I could not see, and I read their lies.

The people of the Gulf will struggle to survive the recklessness of BP for decades to come, but the petrobeasts aren’t just destructive when things go wrong; they’re that way when things go according to plan as well. If the 5.5 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf, thanks to BP, had instead made it to our gas tanks, the consequences would still have been dire. They are dire.  The companies funding Prop. 23 are themselves a major source of climate change and, of course, a major obstacle to coming up with solutions to it.

Like the people of the Gulf during the spill, the people of Richmond, California, in the San Francisco Bay area, live with those tastes, smells, and consequences all the time, because they’re in the shadow of Chevron’s biggest west coast refinery. (Corporate headquarters are only 25 miles away.) Sirens go off during excessive leaks of toxins like ammonia, and as if out of a horror movie, an explosion at the plant in 1999 that sent an 18,000-pound plume of sulfur dioxide fumes into the air was said to be so nasty it took the fur off squirrels.

Chevron is one of the biggest corporations on the planet.  While the average income for a human being in Richmond is a little over $19,000, Chevron’s profits last year were $24 billion, meaning the corporation is more than one million times as rich as the average citizen there. Nonetheless, the humans there won a huge victory recently, preventing the corporation from expanding and retooling its refinery so that it could process even dirtier crude oil (with dirtier local emissions, in a place that already suffers huge health consequences from the monster in its backyard). It may be the world’s first victory against refinery expansion.

Chevron is both the state’s biggest single greenhouse-gas emitter and a huge financial force in Richmond elections, invariably funding campaigns against green candidates. The mostly poor, mostly nonwhite citizens of Richmond are, however, organized and motivated, so if you want to watch a monster movie in which the little guys have been winning lately, follow city politics there.

One of the cool things about the West County Toxics Coalition, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Green Party mayor, and the activists working with them is that they know better than anyone how to act locally and think globally, and even sometimes how to act globally and think locally. Maybe collectively they’re not so little. They’re allied with antiwar groups, with Burmese human rights groups, with the people of Ecuador and Nigeria who have suffered petro-contamination at least as bad, if not worse than BP’s Gulf spill this spring, with groups around the world fighting the petrobeast. There’s a movement out there, and sometimes it even wins amazing victories.

Around the world this month, 350.org coordinated more than 7,000 demonstrations in favor of lowering atmospheric carbon to a sane 350 parts per million, while the climate justice movement had a global day of action on Columbus Day.  Among the month's heroic efforts were direct action against mountaintop-removal coal mining in West Virginia, blockades of refineries in France and Britain and of a coal-fired power plant in Germany, protests and gas-station blockades in Canada, and a rally in the Philippines, a demonstration in Finland, a march in Ecuador, a protest in South Africa, among others.  In California, activists worked steadily against Prop. 23.

Think for a minute about horror movies: in some of them, the little people rally and do heroic things and the monsters or aliens are vanquished. The forces that have come together against Prop. 23 are impressive, ranging from inner-city job coalitions and traditional environmental groups to university think tanks and business interests.  Winning or losing, however, depends on what happens when California voters look at that deceptive label “California Jobs Initiative” on their ballots on November 2nd.

If your heart isn’t pounding, and you aren’t biting your fingernails and teetering at the edge of your seat, then you haven’t noticed the monsters yet. Look carefully. They’re all around us -- and they’re coming for you.

Rebecca Solnit’s brother David does organizing work against Chevron, and she often shows up for the marches. She is the author of 13 books, including the forthcoming Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (which maps toxins and right-wing corporations in the Bay Area, among other things) and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.  She writes for Tomdispatch.com as often as she can.  It’s her personal version of being David in the face of all those Goliaths.To catch Solnit discussing “mixed-up California” in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod,here. 

Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit

Two Tea Party leaders, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, have been jet-setting all over the country ginning up support for conservative politicians. Literally.

They’ve been flying around in a private jet like Wall Street CEOs, except they’re heading to “grassroots” rallies instead of merger talks. Meckler and Martin don’t say how outraged, ordinary citizens can find the money to support such extravagance, and they don’t have to. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in this year's Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, they can now accept unlimited funding without disclosing the identities of their donors.

No one would even know about the jets themselves, but Meckler and Martin never counted on Mother Jones, or a reporter named Stephanie Mencimer. Using public flight-tracking information, the Tea Party Patriots’ flight schedule, and some serious attention to details in the group’s own videos, Mencimer was able to figure out which jet the not-so-populist duo were using. She then traced the plane to Raymond F. Thomson, founder and CEO of a semiconductor company called Semitool, which he sold last year for a cool $364 million.

It’s both sad and hilarious to see the secret financial arrangements of the super-rich masquerading as grassroots activism. But it also shows the lengths to which reporters must go to actually report on political spending in the wake of Citizens United. There is no documentation to follow, just the contrails of private jets.

Social groups target state races  

And while secret political spending has been dominated by big corporations this cycle, the legal maneuvering that liberated corporate coffers was actually performed by fringe right-wing groups targeting social issues. As Jesse Zwick emphasizes for The Washington Independent:

Groups advocating against abortion and gay marriage have waged a low-grade war on laws restricting their ability to spend money freely in elections since the early 1980s, and their victory in the recent Citizens United ruling has hardly caused them to rest on their laurels.

Our democracy is now more beholden to corporate greed than ever, but at least gays won’t be allowed to visit each other in the hospital.

This is just the beginning of corporate rights  

But the implications of Citizens United extend far beyond the (critically important) realm of campaign finance itself, as Jeff Clements and John Bonifaz of the organization Free Speech for People emphasize in an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now! As Bonifaz notes:

Citizens United was not just a campaign finance case, it was a corporate rights case. In fact, it was an extreme extension of a corporate rights doctrine that has eroded the First Amendment for thirty years.

At its core, Citizens United grants First Amendment rights to corporations on the grounds that corporations are people, just like ordinary citizens. Sound crazy? It is.

The bill of rights for corporations? 

As AlterNet’s Joshua Holland emphasizes in an interview with historian Thom Hartmann, the implications of the view that corporations are people are simply absurd. Now corporations have been granted First Amendment rights, but what happens when they start arguing for Second Amendment rights? And what would it even mean for a corporation to have Second Amendment rights?

A visual map of Campaign Cash 

What are the most common themes and issues surrounding the untold amounts of cash flowing into this election cycle? To create that visual, the Media Consortium piped 10 articles by our members through Wordle. While all the articles were generally focused on this topic, they were picked at random and published between October 25-29.

For clarity's sake, we made "Tea Party" "TeaParty," "Supreme Court" became "SupremeCourt," and we also merged the first and last names of key players such as Karl Rove and Jim DeMint. Finally, we removed any extraneous words such as "the," "and," and "even." We did not combine the words corporate/corporation/corporations or Republican/Republicans (but examine the frequency as much as the size). To get the latest reporting on the funds feeding into the mid-term elections, go to www.themediaconsortium.org or follow the search term #campaigncash on Twitter. Wordle research by Amanda Anderson.

But wait, there's more! 

• Sarah van Gelder argues in Yes! Magazine why families can't afford to stay home on Election Day.
• And no matter who wins on Tuesday, it seems one thing is clear: Democracy will pay the price, says Henry A. Giroux at Truthout.
• Lobbyists are already buttering up the incoming committee chairs, reports Siddhartha Mahanta in Mother Jones. Time to get to know Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), who could be the incoming chair of the House Ways & Means Committee.

Everett Dirksen is one of my heroes. The Senate Republican leader from 1959 to 1969, he pushed strongly for Vietnam escalation and took conservative stands that I’d have strongly disagreed with on economic issues. But he joined Lyndon Johnson in going to the mat to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills, and for that I admire him immensely.

Today’s Republicans are far from Everett Dirksen, and that’s a shame. Beyond political differences with Obama and the Democrats, they’ve been making war on reality itself, which should be a major issue of the campaign’s final days.  Consider these examples:

The myth of Obama as a secret foreign-born Muslim: If 45 percent of Republicans think Obama wasn’t born in this country and 57 percent think he’s a secret Muslim, there’s a reason. It’s not just that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have been spouting crazy lies, but that the overwhelming majority of Republican leaders have been silent, so as not to damp the fervor those outraged at Obama’s mere presence in the White House. Yes, a few have bluntly said it’s nonsense, like Hawaii’s Republican governor Linda Lingle, South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, and Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck. But most have responded with a wink and nod, saying Obama’s the legitimate president or that he’s a Christian "as far as I know," or in Senator James Imhof’s words that the birthers “have a point.” They’ve refused to publically challenge a belief that fuels so much grassroots Republican energy.

Denial of global climate change: Dino Rossi, Washington State Senator Patty Murray’s Republican challenger, recently told the Seattle Times that he couldn’t take a stand on climate change because it’s still being debated between “scientists and pseudo scientists.” Agreed. On the one side you have the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the British, German, and Norwegian academies of science, the Japanese, French, Indian, Brazilian, Australian equivalents, and the major scientific organizations of every nation in the world, not to mention such dangerously radical groups as the American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Society, and the American Statistical Association, all of whom say that human-caused climate change is a real and unprecedented danger  that’s rapidly getting worse. On the side of the skeptics you have a handful of scientists funded by Exxon, the coal companies, the Koch Brothers and other corporate sponsors who want to maintain business as usual. They claim the jury’s still out, and do this in a year when a fifth of Pakistan was flooded, when Russians fled Moscow because runaway forest fires made the air impossible to breathe, and when much of the US suffered both record temperature levels and extreme weather events like massive floods, tornadoes and ice storms. But Rossi sided with the pseudo-scientists, as has practically every other Republican Senate candidate on an issue that should cross political lines. Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Roy Blunt, Marco Rubio, Linda McMahon, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Carly Fiorina, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller and Rossi—every one of them has questioned the reality of the crisis and therefore the need to act. Even some who once took strong stands, like John McCain, have muted their voices to appease their hard right base.  While European conservative parties lambast their more left opponents for not doing enough, the Republicans remain in denial on the ultimate issue of our lifetime.

Denial of our economic crisis and of its roots: The Republicans are certainly talking about the crisis. It benefits them politically. But they’re also denying the urgency of doing anything to assist those who cannot find jobs no matter how hard they try, or to acknowledge the roots of the crash in policies spearheaded by Bush and the Republicans. They focus particularly on the bank bailouts while refusing to acknowledge that they were voted in on Bush’s watch with major Republican support. They also near universally parroted the talking points of the banks in trying their best to stop or gut the Financial Reform Bill that makes such bailouts less likely in the future I’d call a refusal to rein in tax breaks for corporations shipping jobs overseas a similar fundamental denial of the relationship between actions and consequences. Granted, Clinton era deregulation and treaties like NAFTA have helped erode America’s industrial base. But it’s still a major denial of reality to pretend to support Main Street while doing the direct bidding of those whose sole interest is protecting their right to make as much as they can off predatory speculation.

Denial of the threats to our democracy by the power of unlimited wealth: You could say Republican stands on this are just a question of opposing government regulation. But it takes some massive level of denial to claim that it does no harm to the public good to allow corporations to buy and sell politicians of either party like baseball trading cards. In an even greater affront to reality, Republicans who’ve long claimed that transparency solves the problems of  opening up the floodgates to unlimited cash have fought unanimously against the barest attempts to impose this accountability through the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would have at least required ads to list the names of their prime corporate backers. As a result, groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and new front groups that spring up daily have been flooding the airwaves with commercials paid for by corporate donors whose identity is masked. These ads will elect Republican candidates, or so their backers hope.  They will also provide a subtle or not so subtle incentive for Democrats to avoid challenging corporate interests. Yet not a single Republican was willing to vote for the DISCLOSE Act, which remains one vote short of passage.

If there’s an antidote to this denial and to the paid lies that fuel it, it’s citizen participation. If enough of us knock on doors, make phone calls, talk to coworkers and neighbors, and otherwise reach out beyond the core converted (or at least get sympathetic voters to the polls), there’s a chance that this denial of reality will backfire, and that the Everett Dirksens of the Republican Party will regain the upper hand. If we’re silent, we allow reality itself to become hostage to delusion, and our country and planet to pay the price.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010), and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear , which the History Channel and the American Book Association named the #3 political book of 2004. See www.paulloeb.org .  

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader. 

Image courtesy of Paul Loeb.

Poll-based predictions are flying as Election Day approaches, Mark Trahant writes at the rural-news blog the Daily Yonder:

But here is one prediction you won’t read in the press: Not a single poll will capture what’s going on with Indian Country voters during this election cycle. The science of polling doesn’t work very well with small population groups living in rural or isolated locations.

That’s too bad because it would be interesting and useful to know what’s in the mind of American Indian and Alaska Native voters this cycle. 

Trahant zeroes in on two places where the Indian and Native vote is newsworthy.

In Alaska’s Senate race, he writes, “The only way that Lisa Murkowski returns to that office is if Alaska Native voters turn out in large numbers and write her name on the ballot.”

And in South Dakota, Democratic-sponsored reservation voter rallies that feature food have attracted suggestions from some Republicans that they are a food-for-votes scheme. Write Trahant:

I can’t tell you how much food I’ve eaten at voter events over the years—sponsored by both parties. This is a silly issue. 

But I know the real fear: It’s fry bread power. A piece of bread in the hands of a voter could make a real difference.

Native blogger Ajijaakwe goes into much greater detail about the South Dakota food-and-voting controversy at Daily Kos.

Source: Daily Yonder, Daily Kos  

Image by James Durkee, licensed under Creative Commons. 

"I’m not a witch."  

Kings and sons of God
Travel on their way from here
Calming restless mobs
Easing all of their, all of their fear

Strange times are here
Strange times are here

-The Black Keys

Strange times are indeed here, especially when we step back and take a look at the midterm election cycle of 2010. Here are a few stories that make us a little queasy about the state of the political process.

If the following are any indication, then apparently there is no room for peaceful assembly or freedom of the press this go-around: MoveOn.org volunteer Lauren Valle had her head stomped on by Rand Paul supporter Tim Profitt at a Paul rally. And Alaska Dispatch editor Tony Hopfinger was detained by “security agents” working for U.S. Senate Republican nominee Joe Miller for doing that thing those pesky journalists always want to do: ask questions.

Then there’s the Iowa Republican Platform, which pretty much wants to abolish all parts of government except, presumably, themselves. Who knows, maybe they do want to get rid of themselves. In which case there may be more common ground out there than we think.

Speaking of crazy, The New Republic has an article called “Year of the Nutjob” that highlights the candidates vying for the Maddest Hatter at our current national Tea Party.

Hey, did you ever think you’d live to see the day when you’d hear about a candidate for Congress dressing up like a Nazi or a campaign ad that begins “I’m not a witch”? Well, that day’s here and so are you! Thank your lucky stars.

The nice folks over at The Christian Science Monitor have come up with a way for you to waste at least ten minutes of your work day: It’s “The 10 weirdest political ads of 2010”! These range from frightening to just plain old entertaining. And you got sheep, Chuck Norris, and Auto-Tune. Looking at that line-up, maybe this election season wasn’t all bad.

Ok, that’s enough. You can get sucked down a wormhole looking into this tomfoolery. Let us know some of the weirder stories from Election 2010 that we didn’t include here.

Source: New York, Alaska Dispatch, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor  

“About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel.”

So begins Steven Thrasher’s riotous take on the white brain, which, the New York-based freelance writer observes on the cover of the September 29 Village Voice, has finally gone “haywire in spectacular fashion.”

And why? Well, for one thing, the President of the United States is black, which isn’t sitting particularly well with prejudiced citizens who, Thrasher argues, are seeking cover in the Tea Party movement. What’s more, “for the first time in their lives, baby boomers are hard up against it economically, and white boy is becoming outnumbered and it’s got his bowels chilled with fear.”

Thrasher’s aggressive, albeit satiric tone will turn off most moderate readers and has enraged a legion of conservative and libertarian commentators. And, the Voice being the Voice, not one column inch is reserved for nuance. As a piece of political essay writing, however, “White America has Lost Its Mind” is as refreshing as it is well-argued. In large part because Thrasher has the audacity—and the forum—to take off the gloves and fight foment with foment. 

Can you help a brother on health care? No.

The economy? No.

Financial regulatory reform? No.

Now, some folks can be forgiven for thinking, as they watched the political drama in Washington unfold over the past two years, that this was just another form of the same old thing they’d put up with in one way or another in this conflicted multiracial country.

But there is another explanation.

White people have simply gone sheer fucking insane.

To bolster his thesis, the author points to recent polls conducted by Newsweek and CNN, which show that nearly a quarter of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim and that he was “probably or definitely” born in another country. And Harris found in an online poll that 14 percent of Americans believe the President is the antichrist, with nearly a quarter of Republicans saying so. Thrashers then goes on to give examples of how these statistics, which he believes are racially charged, manifest themselves in mainstream media and politics—from the sham attacks on ACORN to the demonization of Muslims and immigrants.

The funniest and most insightful stuff—especially considering that the midterm elections take place in just a few days—comes near the end of Thrasher’s tirade, where he wonders aloud who, except for the craziest of Caucasians, could excuse the ignorant rantings of New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino or Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell.

 As for the Tea Party, which is threatening to have a big night Tuesday?

Suddenly, other angry (and obviously confused) white people began organizing their own “tea parties” and, from the start, had to defend themselves from charges that there was more than a little racial component to their movement.

Few were really surprised, for example, when Tea Party Express President Mark Williams turned out to have penned a letter that could have been written in the worst decades of Jim Crow: “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just too much to ask of us Colored People and demand that it stop!”

Source: The Village Voice  

Imagine if your actions made the difference in electing a senator, governor, or congressional representative. Suppose the phone calls you made, money you donated, doors you knocked on, and conversations you initiated helped swing a critically close race, or two or three. Suppose the friends you dragged to the polls helped America reject the anonymous corporate dollars that threaten to drown our democracy.

You’d feel pretty good, I believe, at least about your own efforts. So why aren’t more of us doing everything we can from now through the election to ensure the best possible outcome? In 2008, millions of people reached deep and then deeper to stake our time, money, and hearts on the possibility of change. We knew it was a critical election, and helped carry Obama and the Democrats to victory. Now, too many of us feel burned and disillusioned, with dashed hopes. We’ve lost the habit of being engaged. The election seems someone else’s problem. We doubt what we do will matter—for this round or in general.

Think about what you and your friends did during the election of two years ago compared with what you’re doing now. Then think of some ways to make an impact in the remaining days. November’s results will hinge on which side turns out its peripheral voters, those most overloaded, distracted, torn in their sentiments, and distrustful of politics. They’re at risk of succumbing to the deluge of paid lies, voting for candidates who don’t represent their values or staying home in cynical resignation. But with enough person-to-person conversations we can reach them.

So why aren’t most of us doing more? We may be disappointed at the past two years, but as I’ve written, we need to act, broken hearts and all, because to hand power over to those who represent America’s most predatory corporate interests will make change harder on every conceivable front. For instance, if the Republicans gain a congressional majority and John Boehner becomes Speaker of the House, he’ll be able to do more than just hand out tobacco lobbyist checks on the House floor, as he gleefully did in the 1990s. Because he’ll control legislation, next to nothing will pass without his consent, leaving an incredibly difficult road to addressing any of our most critical problems. When those who’d normally vote Democrat stay home in anger or spite, it’s time and again moved this country to the political right, as Robert Parry, who broke the original Iran-Contra stories, has brilliantly explored. Getting past our disappointment gives us a chance to remember that change is a long-haul process, with inevitable frustrations and setbacks.

But broken hearts aren’t the only reason for our inaction. There’s also inertia, distraction, and overload—the weight of our day to day routine. Following the 2008 election, too many of us stepped back from actively working to change our society and switched instead to morosely watching our hopes get frustrated, doing little beyond signing the occasional online petition or letter. Like most other activities, political volunteering is a habit, and we’ve let that habit atrophy. We need to once again start doing whatever we can, even if that requires shaking off some rust.

We also need to remember the power of our actions. In 2008, we took it on faith that the election could hinge on what we did, and then saw that faith confirmed. We need to regain at least some part of that sense, even with more chastened hopes. If we talk with a dozen people door to door or make 20 phone calls, we will yield one or two more votes, as studies have repeatedly shown. A hundred people each spending a day of volunteering can bring in a couple hundred votes. A thousand can produce a couple thousand. If just a tenth of us who were on Obama’s 13 million name email list spent two days on the phones, we’d be talking over a million votes, or enough to swing state after state.

Right now, much of the volunteer energy has been with the Tea Party members, who seek a return to the Bush policies or worse. But what about the rest of us? We need to do more than just vote, but get others to vote as well. TheNew York Times currently lists eight Senate races as toss-ups, with three or four others still in play. Key congressional races are equally tight, which means our willingness to get on the phones or drive an hour to a swing district could easily shift the results. With upcoming congressional redistricting dependent on who controls the state legislatures, even our local races could determine 15-30 congressional seats for the next ten years. So our individual volunteering is critical.

I’ve experienced the power of this volunteering directly. On Election Day of 2004, I was knocking on doors in Washington state and turned out three additional voters. One had forgotten about the election. Another needed a ride. A third didn’t know how to submit his absentee ballot. My candidate won the governor’s race by 133 votes, over a right-wing Republican who’s now running neck and neck with the once seemingly unbeatable Senator Patty Murray. I didn’t get those votes by any particular eloquence or skill, just by showing up. Any other volunteer would have had the same results. But had I and 50 other volunteers stayed home that day, we’d have lost.

Volunteer outreach made a similarly critical difference when Al Franken won his Minnesota Senate seat by 225 votes. Or in 2006, when Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney won by 83 votes before being reelected overwhelmingly two years later. In 2008, four House races were decided by less than one percent. I once interviewed a young woman who registered 300 voters on her campus, helping her strongly progressive congressman win by 27 votes. Given the volatility of the current electorate, our efforts could easily make the difference in race after neck-and-neck race.

You don’t even have to be bound by geography when you act. Groups like MoveOn have been steadily perfecting their remote voter calling efforts, which studies have found can matter immensely. You log in, get a series of numbers and a sample script that you use or not as you choose. You call and tally the responses. You convince people to vote and sometimes change their minds. MoveOn is doing this again, as are other progressive groups like Democracy in America. So are individual campaigns and Obama’s Organizing For America network. If you want to focus on local races, progressive groups are developing powerful tailored ballot guides that we can draw from and hand out. Whether or not there’s a critical race nearby, you can still do your part.

Think again about the stakes. Do we care about climate change, an equitable tax system, access to education, decent health care, and judges who aren’t the paid creatures of Exxon and the Koch brothers? Do we care about the poor and unemployed, or rebuilding America’s economic base instead of strip-mining the future for greed? Do we care about reclaiming our democracy from those who believe that their wealth entitles them to buy and sell the rest of us for their narrow self-interest?

We can never predict the impact of our actions. But suppose you did all you could from now through the election, while assuming that others would do the same. Suppose you once again vested your time, money, and yes, your battered hopes, and then helped elect some good people and stop some blindly destructive ones. If you did, and enough others did as well, we’d have an infinitely more hospitable political landscape going forward while we continue to work for the changes our country needs. That would indeed be something to be proud of.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010), now with 120,000 copies in print, and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear , which the History Channel and the American Book Association named the #3 political book of 2004. See www.paulloeb.org . 

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.   

Image courtesy of Paul Loeb. 

As campaigns and volunteers hone their final electoral messages, the best flier I’ve seen asks a simple question—“Will They Get What They’re Paying For?” Created by the Washington State Labor Council, and proudly bearing their name, not that of some shadowy front group, it portrays a check from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to Republican Washington State Senate candidate Dino Rossi. Notes in the memo field remind us of Rossi’s positions: Lower minimum wage, repeal Wall Street reform, offshore U.S. jobs. Below the check is a field of corporate logos: BP, Fox, JPMorganChase, Walmart, AIG, Philip Morris, Citigroup, Pfizer, McDonalds, Comcast, AT&T and more. The relatively conventional back contrasts Rossi and Senator Patty Murray on key economic issues, stating “Dino Rossi works for them. Senator Patty Murray works for us.”

Those angry at endless compromises may dispute whether Democrats have gone to the mat enough for ordinary citizens. But they must be measured against candidates who will delightedly play the role of wholly owned subsidiaries of the most rapacious corporations in America, and groups like the Chamber that give them political cover. There’s no comparison between most on the Democratic ticket (excepting a handful of corporate-backed obstructionists, such as Blanche Lincoln) and their hard-right Republican opponents. So the flier’s question is key: Who’s paying the campaign bills? What will they expect in return? Whose interest will the candidates serve once elected?

I’ve seen no other piece that sums up the election issues as powerfully, and would love to see organizations and candidates adapt its template for their own outreach. The creator, WSLC staffer David Groves, is delighted for people or organizations to do this—no permission needed. In the wake of Citizens United, with corporations pumping in unprecedented levels of dollars through shadowy front groups—like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (a completely separate organization from your local Main Street Chambers, despite trading on their credibility), Karl Rove’s Americans for Prosperity, and the Koch Brothers’ American Crossroads—we need to make their spending the salient issue in every message we put forth. This issue encompasses all others. As I’ve written earlier, nothing gets as strong a response when I’ve canvassed as directly challenging this hostile takeover of our democracy. And no other approach creates as great a chance that all the anonymous attack ads will backfire. Adapting the message of this flier would be a powerful start.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010), and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, which the History Channel and the American Book Association named the #3 political book of 2004. See www.paulloeb.org. 

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader. 

The October issue of Harper’s contained a provocative sampler from the Iowa Republican Party’s platform, and there was enough eyebrow-raising bait there to warrant a more thorough investigation of the entire 387-plank document.  

Whether you find the thing harrowing, inspiring, or just plain mystifying is purely a matter of personal politics, but whatever prevailing vision or version of America you might believe in there’s no denying that the Republicans in the Hawkeye State have coughed up a fair bit of zeitgeist bile in their rabblerousing blueprint for a government ruled by black-and-white (or black-and-blue) political and moral values.  

Consider that the RPI platform requires that “each duly nominated candidate” and primary winner “sign the State platform once passed, and agree with 80% of the planks in order to receive funding.” Also keep in mind that “candidates running as Republicans for any local or state office should be required to complete and return to the Republican party of Iowa a signed questionnaire indicating whether the candidate agrees, disagrees or is undecided about each plank on the party platform.”   

Now imagine that you’re a Republican candidate in Iowa and ask yourself whether you can swallow some of these horse pills:  

The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not to ensure equality. 

We believe animal husbandry decisions and production practices should be decided by individual farmers, not the state or federal government. 

We call for fewer EPA controls on agriculture. 

We believe all individuals and business owners have the freedom to choose the quality of air in their homes and establishments. 

We call for the repeal of all mandatory minimum wage laws. 

We call for the elimination of the Federal agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). 

We support the elimination of the Iowa Department of Education and of the U.S. Department of Education. 

We oppose duplication of educational programs for bilingual consideration. Every child should become proficient in English by being immersed in English. 

We oppose teaching multicultural based curriculum.

We oppose the “Bullying Law.” 

We believe that claims of human caused global warming are based on fraudulent, inaccurate information and that legislation and policy based on this information is detrimental to the well being of the United States. 

We call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Energy. 

We support the abolition of the IRS. 

We call for the repeal of sexual orientation in the Iowa Civil Rights Code and we oppose any other legislation or executive order granting rights, privileges, or status for persons based on sexual orientation. 

We oppose unconstitutional “hate crime” laws. 

We support the continued use of Guantanamo Prison as long as needed.  

We believe that the term “assault weapon” should not be used as a term applicable to a semiautomatic weapon. 

The whole thing is pretty amazing, and it sort of makes you wonder what happened to the old kneejerk Patriot’s fallback line, “America, Love It or Leave It.”  

Make of it what you will, but whether you consider yourself a Republican or a Democrat, you really owe it to yourself to check out your state’s party platforms to see exactly what sorts of things you’re signing off on when you step in the ballot booth in November.  

Source: Iowa Republican Party, Harper’s  

I’ve been going door-to-door canvassing, and it’s not that bad—really. It’s actually kind of fun. But only because I’ve found a way to break through people’s cynicism.

No wonder people are cynical. Crashing from the sky-high hopes of two years ago, people are worried about jobs, the economy and their own uncertain futures, about the wars we’re bogged down in and the threats to our planet. They don’t like where America is headed, don’t like most politicians or candidates, and are often uncertain whether their vote even matters. But when I talked about the takeover of our politics by destructive corporate interests, culminating in the barrage of anonymous attack ads unleashed by the Supreme Court’s ghastly Citizens United decision, they quickly became willing to listen.

So I’m delighted the Democrats are finally hitting back at the US Chamber of Commerce and other Republican front groups for dumping millions of dollars of untraceable corporate contributions into the election, with the total likely to exceed $300 million. But the Democrats need to do more, and we do as well, as ordinary citizens. We need to make the buying of our democracy the salient issue of the coming election and beyond, because it affects everything else that we need to change.

So how do we do this in the few remaining weeks before the elections? We need to talk about the ads of all the front groups from the Chamber of Commerce to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity. But we also need to highlight the Republican justices who overruled a century of precedent to enact Citizens United. And talk about how Republican Senators have stood in unison to prevent requiring corporate interests to at least put their names on their ads.

From what I can tell, most Americans are most vaguely aware of the DISCLOSE Act, the transparency legislation that a Republican filibuster blocked by a single vote. When they do find out, they’re outraged, because anonymous attack ads are an affront to even the barest standards of fairness, whatever one’s political beliefs. In fact, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have long argued that so long as people knew who was paying for campaign ads, there was no need to regulate them through campaign finance reform or counterbalance them with public financing. “We ought to have full disclosure,” said Boehner in 2007, “full disclosure of all of the money that we raise and how it is spent. And I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Yet since Citizens United opened the floodgates for monied interests to drown out the rest of our voices, Republican leaders and their key allies have done everything they can to foster anonymous and untraceable attacks from the shadows.

Frustrated as voters are with the state of America, including with the Democrats’ own frequent capitulation to corporate interests, most still don’t want our government to become the wholly owned property of BP, Exxon, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, and all the other corporations (including foreign ones) who can now buy our elections without people even knowing they’re involved. Obama, the Democrats, and progressive organizations therefore need to keep talking about the issue repeatedly and forcefully, through their speeches, debate points, and ads, and through the talking points they circulate for campaign volunteers. As ordinary citizens we have to do our part as well— knocking on doors, making phone calls and talking to friends, neighbors and coworkers who may be discontented with the Democrats, but would draw the line at furthering the total capture of our democracy by the most powerful economic interests on the planet. Or at least they would if we gave them the chance to have a conversation. But we can’t just leave the issue up to the candidates.

Of course we also need to tackle the issue beyond November. Public financing of campaigns would help immensely, using the model of $5 contributions and public matching funds that’s worked wonderfully in Maine, Vermont, and even Arizona. This model remains legal even under the new Supreme Court rules, would reduce the corporate influence on both parties, and can complement a push to reverse Citizens United through Congressional legislation, grassroots organizing, and perhaps a constitutional amendment. But for now, we need to focus on whether or not those running to represent us at least recognize our right to know who is trying to buy our votes. The political allegiances are clear from the DISCLOSE Act. If we work well enough at explaining why the money matters, it could tip race after close race, and help us begin to rein in the power of unaccountable greed.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010), and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear , which the History Channel and the American Book Association named the #3 political book of 2004. See www.paulloeb.org.  

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.   

Image courtesy of Paul Loeb . 

In trying to get one-time Obama supporters to volunteer for the November election, I often hear this refrain: “The Democrats have sold us out. I’m tired of their spinelessness, their subservience to corporate interests. I’m staying home to teach them a lesson.” Not everyone responds this way, but enough do to make me worry, because if these people don’t show up and work to get others to vote, it could make the difference in race after neck-and-neck race, as a similar withdrawal of Democratic volunteers and voters did in 1994. As I’ve written, we either get past our broken hearts to help elect the best possible candidates between now and November, or cede even more power to the most destructive interests in America.

But suppose you simply can’t stomach your local Democratic candidates? Suppose you’re simply too furious at their compromises and retreats? Then make phone calls or donate to those you do respect, but don’t abdicate entirely. Maybe it’s Russ Feingold, narrowly trailing in the latest Wisconsin polls. Or Jack Conway, challenging Rand Paul in Kentucky. Or Barbara Boxer, with the slimmest of leads in California. Or Congressman Alan Grayson, a powerful progressive voice being hammered by outside money in a swing district of Florida. Or anyone else you might choose. But unless you’re as purist as the Republican fundamentalists, I can’t imagine you want to see candidates who’ve stood for strong humane values be defeated by opponents who have nothing but contempt for democracy, justice, and even the barest stewardship of the planet. To shift our country’s direction, we’re going to have to elect and reelect some less than stellar candidates as well, but making sure the best of them win is a critical task.

So why wouldn’t we make calls for or donate to candidates who have shown genuine courage, yet are equally in jeopardy along with the most compromised? Maybe we’re stuck in our inertia—watching the bad news instead of trying to change it. Maybe we can’t get past our anger at the gap between what needs to be done and what the Obama administration and its congressional allies have accomplished. Maybe we feel our efforts won’t matter. But we might remember that 312 votes elected Al Franken to the Senate just two years ago, that 133 votes defeated a hard-right candidate in the 2004 Washington State governor’s race, and that the official Florida margin that gave George Bush the presidency was 537 votes, leaving aside all the other manipulations and abuses. Given the volatility of the current electorate, we might well end up with margins equally close, where our volunteer efforts would make the critical difference.

Obviously it’s easier if you live close enough to be able to knock door to door for candidates you admire, but it isn’t essential. I spent much of the weeks before the 2006 and 2008 elections calling swing voters in race after close race, volunteering with MoveOn’s remote calling effort. Follow up studies found that these efforts played a key role in electing people like Franken, Jeff Merkley, Jon Tester, Jim Webb, Mark Begich, and Claire McCaskill, all of whom won by three percent or less, and all of whom have voted pretty decently, while progress has been blocked by people like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman, and Evan Bayh. You log in, get a series of numbers and a sample script that you can use or not as you choose, then call and log the responses. You convince people to vote and sometimes change their vote. MoveOn is doing this again, as are other progressive groups like Democracy in America. So are individual campaigns. Based on past history, for roughly every dozen doors you knock on or every twenty phone calls you make, you get out an additional vote for your candidate. That may not seem like much, but if a hundred thousand more people spend just a couple days on the phones, they could bring in close to a million additional votes, which would make even more of a difference in an off-year election where everything depends on whose supporters show up at the polls. Wherever you live, you can still make an impact.

For the long-term, we need to build strong citizen movements that can push American politics beyond its current definitions of the possible, and challenge our elected leaders whoever they are. We didn’t do this enough in the past two years, instead waiting for Obama and the Senate and Congress to lead. But the coming month will determine the landscape we work in not just between now and 2012, but (in the case of Congressional redistricting) for as long as the coming decade. Whether you agree or not with every Democratic position or vote is not the question. If certain candidates seem too noxious, volunteer for better ones. If you want to work primarily outside the electoral arena, that’s fine. But to stand back in the next critical weeks and had victory to the most greed-driven interests in America seems an unconscionable moral lapse. Far better to help make what difference you can in electing the electoral allies you most respect, and then keep on with all the other organizing that needs to be done.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, April 2010), and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. See www.paulloeb.org. 

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.   

Image courtesy of Paul Loeb . 

“OK, so your heart’s broken,” as the old song goes. So’s mine. But we have to get over it—now—and start taking action for the November election.

Granted, we’re far from where we thought we’d be when Barack Obama was elected and people danced in the streets. Change was on its way, spearheaded by Obama’s soaring words and by the millions of ordinary Americans who got involved as never before to help carry him to victory. We thought we’d finally created the opening for a historic transformation.

Now, too many of us watch morosely from the sidelines, feeling disappointed, spurned, and betrayed, wondering if anything we can do will matter. We’re angered by the gap between Obama’s lofty campaign rhetoric and his reality of half-steps and compromises, and by his failure to fight passionately for his policies. We’re angered that we dared to hope for more. We’re angered at scorched-earth Republican obstructionism, a Supreme Court inviting corporations to buy our democracy at will, and a public all too receptive to blatant lies. In response, we decide not to let our hearts get broken again by taking the risk of working for change, at least not in the electoral arena. We feel this way even though most of us have done little since Obama took office to create the kind of sustained grassroots movements that could have actually pressed him and a resistant Senate to take stronger stands.

So how do we act in the upcoming election despite dashed hopes? How do we do this in a way that builds for the future?

Granted, it’s far easier to take a stand in those moments when, in the words of poet Seamus Haney, “the longed-for tidal wave of justice” seems to rise up, and “hope and history rhyme.” Yet unless we decide that our democracy and the planet are all simply doomed, we can’t afford to succumb to cynical retreat.

We might start by acknowledging our disappointments. We don’t have to be delighted about Obama’s Presidency to get involved in the fall elections. We can talk honestly about areas where he and the Democrats have fallen short, while still making clear the major differences between their positions and those of the Republicans. In fact, people may respond even more positively if we admit our mixed feelings, some of which will reflect their own. This approach may not be quite as time-efficient as simply repeating whatever standard talking points we’re given, but it lets our conversations do justice to reality.

When I’ve tried this approach with disenchanted friends, they’ve confirmed that they’d be much more likely to volunteer in the election if they could voice the full complexity of their feelings. They don’t want to be spectators. But they want to acknowledge critical areas where they’re angered and frustrated. They don’t want to surrender their voice. We’d do well to be honest both with those who we need to recruit as fellow volunteers, and with the ordinary citizens who we need to convince to show up at the polls.

If we’re going to be honest about our disappointments, we should be equally clear that opting out of this election portends disaster. For all our frustrations with the Democrats, at least we’ve been fighting about how to move the country forward, out of the hole of the disastrous Bush years. Productive change will be far more difficult if our inaction helps hand the Senate over to those who deny climate change, scapegoat immigrants, blame the unemployed for their fate, and strive to privatize Social Security, make permanent Bush’s regressive tax cuts, and block every conceivable environmental and consumer protection regulation. Equally troubling, they seem to have no shame in campaigning on gross distortions and lies, from talk of health care “death panels” to claiming to stand up against Wall Street while blocking everything they could in the financial reform bill to doing nothing to challenge the belief in Obama as Kenyan-born closeted Muslim. Though we may want to deny the possibility, the polls threaten major Republican gains, the right-wing base smells blood, and even once-safe states like Illinois, Washington, and maybe even California are in play. The important legislation from green energy funding to the valuable parts of the health care Democrats are equally at risk in the House, where Nancy Pelosi has led in passing and financial regulation bills to the strongest student financial aid program since the Pell Grants got started. Were it not for Senate intransigence, Pelosi would also have passed a climate change bill, a far larger stimulus package, and a health care public option. But if we don’t get engaged in the next couple months, we risk electing enough Republicans to replace her with hard-right Republican John Boehner, who’s already talked of reviving Gingrich-style investigative crusades against every conceivable Obama agency and program. Despite the frustration that many of us have with Obama, we might also remember some of his under-appreciated actions, like appointing a labor secretary and National Labor Relations Board strongly supportive of workers’ rights, an EPA head who’s begun to regulate greenhouse gasses and pretty much ended destructive mountain-top removal, and an attorney general who by accepting state medical marijuana laws, has opened space to question our costly and futile prohibition policies. It matters that Obama has saved America’s auto industry, appointed two decent Supreme Court justices, and begun to reshape our international image from one of reckless belligerence. For all the Democrats’ failure to adequately reverse their inherited crises, their flaws don’t compare to those of a party determined to turn everything over to the most predatory forces in America.

Making all this clear is essential when we’re trying to bring people out of demoralized retreat. Obama had 13 million people on his email list. If we can reengage enough of them, including those who’ve pulled back from active political involvement, we can help our fellow citizens reject the corporate-funded lies. In the wake of the ghastly Supreme Court decision gutting campaign finance laws, groups like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce are spending four hundred million dollars to try to buy the election, and the impact of their spending will be everywhere. For the moment, we can’t stop it, although it would take only one honorable Republican to require financial transparency by helping pass the Disclose Act. But even without this, if people knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, talk to enough neighbors and coworkers, donate enough money and engage in enough real dialogue, we have a chance to make the lies backfire. Massive citizen-to-citizen outreach will be critical for engaging the young and minority voters who carried the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008, but largely stayed home during subsequent Democratic defeats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts and threaten to do so once again. Americans do mistrust the powerful economic interests that have strip-mined our country. But they’re also scared, overloaded, distracted, cynical about government, and insulated from perspectives that could help them separate truth from lie, or give them reasons to vote. So we need to get as many volunteers as possible to help them sort through the political arguments and to convince them to go to the polls. We do that best by reaching out as directly as possible and honoring whatever mixed feelings people have.

We might remind those we approach to volunteer or to vote that they’ll never know when their participation will make a crucial difference. On Election Day in 2004, I was knocking on doors in Washington State and turned out three additional voters. One had forgotten about the election. Another needed a ride. A third didn’t know how to submit his absentee ballot. My candidate won the governor’s race by 133 votes, over a right-wing Republican who’s now running neck and neck with the once seemingly unbeatable Senator Patty Murray. Had just 50 of us stayed home that day, we’d have lost. Our outreach made a similarly critical difference two years ago in Minnesota when Al Franken won his Senate seat by 225 votes. In an example of why involvement can’t wait until the election, I once interviewed a young woman who registered 300 voters on her Connecticut campus, helping her strongly progressive Congressman win by 27 votes.

In 1994 we paid the price for not having these volunteers. Infuriated by Bill Clinton’s support for the NAFTA trade agreement, core Democratic activists stopped knocking on doors and making phone calls. Because there was no one to get out the vote, the Democrats lost race after critical race, often by the narrowest of margins. According to CNN and Gallup surveys, the forty-two percent of America’s registered voters who stayed home leaned Democratic widely enough that they would have reversed the electoral outcome, had they only showed up at the polls. NAFTA helped destroy America’s industrial base, and I shared the anger of those who opposed it. But even a modest effort could have prevented the Republican sweep.

We now risk heading down a similar path, one we might have avoided entirely had we built stronger grassroots movements to pressure Obama from the start. Two years into Roosevelt’s first term, with one in six Americans still out of work, the Democrats swept the 1934 elections, winning nine more seats in both the Senate and House. But they had a president who overtly challenged the “money changers” of Wall Street, and a Senate and House that did far more to address the economic crisis. Most important, they had organized citizen movements that actively pressed Roosevelt from day one. We haven’t created these movements, or engaged enough people to give them clout. Instead, most of us have spent far more time griping about the real shortcomings of the Democrats than we have engaging our neighbors, rallying in the streets, showing up at Town Halls and community meetings, or doing anything else that could have actually changed America’s politics in the directions we wanted. This trend started early, during the summer of the “death panel” rallies (much as those who’d supported Clinton failed to adequately organize to pressure him once he took office), and it’s continued ever since. Other than the useful but limited activities of signing petitions and automated letters, we’ve mostly ceded the field to Exxon, Goldman Sachs, United Health, and the tea partiers.

We can still push Obama to deal with the massive crisis of the unemployed, (for instance by joining the October 2nd national rally for jobs and justice). If he challenged the Republicans strongly enough on this it would help, whether or not he can pass the necessary bills before November. But whatever Obama does between now and then, and he needs to do far more, much of what happens is still in our hands. If we don’t want corporations, billionaires, and the religious right running our country even more than they do already, we owe it to ourselves to do all we can to prevent their power from increasing further through this election. We’re going to lose some battles. That’s inevitable. But the path of purist retreat prevents even the chance of our efforts succeeding, whether for now or down the line.

Imagine if each of us did as much between now and November 2nd as we did in the election of two years ago. If enough of those who’ve pulled back from political involvement can become reengaged, and if we can find ways to keep them involved, we can begin rebuilding the grassroots momentum that we should have been creating from day one of Obama’s term. So we have to act and keep on acting. Think of the civil rights movement and its relationship to Kennedy and Johnson. Both were personally sympathetic but initially held the movement at arm’s length for fear of driving southern segregationist whites from the Democratic Party. Civil rights activists then created a political and moral force so strong that it expanded the horizon of the possible. In the wake of the March on Washington, and marches like those at Selma, Johnson put all his political skill and capital on the line to pass the civil rights and voting rights bills. He did this while accurately predicting that the Democrats would, as a result, lose the South for a generation or more. But he did the right thing because ordinary people took a leap of faith, convinced that their actions could make a difference.

There’s no guarantee that our efforts will work, whether in November or long term. But the stakes—whether regarding climate change, the economy, or every other major issue we face—remain as high as they’ve ever been. Most of us have mixed feelings, but rather than waiting forever for the perfect candidates or ideal political context, or riding an endless emotional roller coaster between elation and despair, we can instead do our best to plunge into the messy and contradictory now. If we can do that well enough, we can once again begin to recreate the base for the kind of change we hoped for just two years ago.

Paul Loeb is the author of the wholly updated new edition of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (St Martin’s Press, $16.99 paperback, April 2010). Howard Zinn calls it "wonderful...rich with specific experience.” Alice Walker says, "The voices Loeb finds demonstrate that courage can be another name for love.” Bill McKibben calls it "a powerful inspiration to citizens acting for environmental sanity.” Loeb also wrote The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear , the History Channel and American Book Association’s #3 political book of 2004. For more information or to receive Loeb’s articles directly, see www.paulloeb.org.  

Paul Loeb is a guest blogger at utne.com. The views expressed by this guest blogger belong to him and do not necessarily reflect the mission or editorial voice of utne.com or the Utne Reader.