The Coldest Hour

From Leo McGarry: "The session's two days old and we can't put a forkful of waffles in our mouth without coughing up the ball!"

That's how I feel about Harry Reid and the Burris fiasco. Progressive politics will die in the Senate unless we can get a better leader in the Senate.

There's something that's always bugged me about stories like this one, wherein religious right figures posit that Obama is the Anti-Christ:

The former Archbishop of Denver, J. Francis Stafford, told a university audience in Washington, D.C., last week that the election of Barack Obama has ushered in a time of trial for America.

Stafford described the president-elect as "aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic" in remarks quoted by the Catholic News Agency on Monday.

You saw a lot of this during the campaign on religious right sites. Sarah Posner has written about it at length for The American Prospect and others. The thing that always bugged me about these smears was that, theoretically, they should make Christians less likely to vote for Obama, right? Yet, if you stop and think about it, wouldn't a Christian who genuinely beleived in the Anti-Christ want to see him elected, to usher in the Rapture and Christ's thousand year reign? Wouldn't Obama being part of God's plan be an arguement for electing him, not against it?

Part of me hopes that Matthews is serious this time when he says he's running for Senate against Specter (via Atrios). That is, if Specter is planning on running again. Specter and Matthews draw from the same base - Philadelphia and it's collar counties. Democrats have been trying all kinds of tricks against Specter - they've run liberals (Hoeffel in '04), conservatives (Kline in '98), without luck. Now, the dynamics might have changed since the Bush presidency, but if Specter is able to run the kind of campaign that's kept him alive before, I'd rather see Matthews go down as a sacrificial lamb than have some of the other promising politicians taking a look at the race lose and cripple their careers.

I found this interview with Sol Sender, the guy who developed the "Hope Symbol" (via Yglesias) fascinating. There was a particular quote that jumped out at me from the Q&A: Sender notes that he and his design team were focused on corporate logos and branding, and had never done political branding before.

This, I think, more than anything else explains why the "Hope Symbol" was so effective. Obama's campaign took marketing ideas that corporations had been testing for fifty years and applied them correctly to his campaign. That's why his campaign looked nothing like John Kerry's, or Hillary Clinton's or John McCain's for that matter.

Bill Hillsman, who has worked as an adman for Sen. Paul Wellstone and others, has some interesting thoughts on this idea as it relates to political advertising in his book Run The Other Way.

Publication: WireTap Magazine
Date: April 28th, 2008

Late last year, progressive foreign policy lost one of its shining stars. Dr. Randall "Randy" Forsberg, leader of the nuclear freeze movement, passed away after a long battle with cancer. Forsberg was the founder of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign, a national effort to abolish nuclear weapons. She conceptualized the Freeze idea in 1979 while working as a researcher at MIT; the grassroots movement soon caught fire across the United States. The Freeze recruited hundreds of local leaders across the country, and its apex was a rally in Central Park in 1982 attended by an estimated 700,000 to one million protesters calling for a halt to the arms race. Forsberg, in the words of Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball, "demonstrated how the power of ideas and civil society can change long-held conceptions of weapons and war, and how to achieve peace."

Forsberg's passing presents an opportunity to asses the current nuclear abolition movement. Is the post-Cold War millennial generation meeting the anti-nuke challenge? Journalist and nuclear weapons expert Jonathan Schell has noted that the nuclear abolition movement has never been able to recapture the energy that brought close to a million people to Central Park in 1982, despite the fact that the danger of nuclear weapons remains ever-present. "It is no simple matter to take stock of the nuclear predicament," notes Schell says. "...Under the Bush Administration, the nuclear policies of the United States -- and of the world -- are in a state of greater confusion than at any time since the weapons were invented."

At the same time, it would seem that young people have other political interests -- the issue of nuclear weapons does not make it on to the public agenda of national student organizations such as Campus Progress and the United States Students Association, which focus on issues like global warming, the Iraq war, and college affordability. But this perceived silence from large, multi-issue student groups masks an increase in campaigns and activism (including the now-yearly Think Outside the Bomb conference) around nuclear weapons issues by students and young people. Youth awareness is largely driven by established policy organizations such as Peace Action and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and is having a serious impact on the debate about the current nuclear arsenal.

A Movement with Structure

Katherine Fuchs, organizing and policy associate for Peace Action (a Freeze Campaign descendant) doesn't buy the idea that young people aren't concerned with nuclear weapons. In an interview, Fuchs noted that a recent poll conducted by World Public Opinion found overwhelming opposition to nuclear weapons among all respondents, 29 percent of which were under age 30 (PDF). Students today may be the first post-Cold War generation, but that doesn't mean that nuclear weapons aren't on their minds. The Bush Administration's focus on North Korea and Iran has spurred interest in the issue after a near decade of dormancy.

Travis Sharp, communications director for the abolitionist Council for a Livable World and affiliated Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation also doesn't believe that students and young people are unconcerned about nuclear weapons. He notes that the Council's outreach to young people in the last year has been a tremendous success.

The Council's programs bring military professionals to towns with large populations of students and military veterans; these experts speak on a variety of topics, but always address the issue of nuclear weapons. Outreach efforts have been so successful that in 2007 the Center hired a coordinator solely to organize the trips and conduct follow-up. Students working on these issues have called the trips "refreshing," especially when they hear military generals confirm their own nuclear abolition analysis.

The Center for Arms Control also runs three blogs on nuclear weapons; according to Sharp, a "significant number" of the readers are students. He also says that his experience working directly with college students tells him that the student movement against nukes isn't dead. His comments are confirmed directly by students themselves.

"Students and faculty at the University of California have a unique role to play in actively questioning this misguided U.S. nuclear weapons policy and UC's involvement in its implementation," wrote UC San Diego student Achraf Farraj for the Daily Californian in 2007. Farraj became engaged in the issue thanks to an outreach trip conducted by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.

Nuclear-Free Campus

What are students doing on the ground after outreach by organizations like the Center and Peace Action? Much of their work involves challenging the existing nuclear-weapons paradigm. Perhaps the most interesting student activism is taking place on the campuses of the University California system, which has a unique role to play in America's nuclear weapons complex.

"Every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was designed by a UC employee," notes the website of UC Nuclear Free, a regional coalition dedicated to ending the UC system's relationship with the Department of Energy. The University of California network houses a multibillion dollar system of three research labs, two of which conduct weapons research. These labs have been part of the UC system for decades, going back to the development of the atomic bomb -- and since the beginning, students and professors have been resisting the weaponization of higher education.

Students see plenty of problems with the idea that higher education should be dependent on, and supporting, weapons research. Activists such as Jonathan Williams of Peace Action and Will Parrish of the Think Outside the Bomb see obvious connections between the ballooning nuclear-weapons industry and deflating student aid available for those who want to attend public colleges in California.

UC Nuclear Free has conducted actions in a campaign calling on California's Board of Regents (the governing body of the UC system) to divest from the bomb labs. Since 2001, they've written letters, held hunger strikes, and organized aggressive campaigns to pressure the board. Parrish, formerly an organizer and coordinator for UC Nuclear Free (which itself exists as part of a larger Coalition to Demilitarize the UC), sees their work as important in a broader context. "We look a lot at the UC's history as an imperialist university -- this is no ivory tower that we're talking about here," he noted via email.

Parrish's comment underscores how and why the anti-nuclear work in the UC system is becoming national. Activists contend that the research itself and associated direct costs represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the militarization of schools. In 2005, UC Nuclear Free's sponsoring organization, the Santa Barbara-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, took the campaign national by helping to form the Think Outside the Bomb Network in 2005.

From Complex to Classroom

Students around the nation note that militarization is something that happens not just in the research labs, but in the classroom as well. Jonathan Williams, the student coordinator for Peace Action (another cofounding organization of Think Outside the Bomb) understands that all too well. As a physics student at University of Baltimore, he saw how weapons research drove much of the academic environment. "There were no ethics discussions in the classroom," Williams said in an interview. He also found that almost everything in his physics major -- the classes, the research, the career track -- were all closely tied to the weapons complex.

Students nationwide have reacted in several ways to the militarization of higher education in the post-Cold War world.

First, according to activists like Parrish and other leaders of the California coalition, students are using the university itself as a means to challenge the establishment. Students in the UC system have run school-accredited classes on the University of California's relationship with nuclear weapons, bringing hundreds of students to courses such as "The University of California and the Military-Industrial-Nuclear Weapons Complex: Past, Present and Future," and "Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction" every year.

Students have recently set up an independent oversight committee to keep tabs on the nuclear research conducted on campus. Chartered in 2007 at UC Santa Barbara, the UC Student DOE Lab Oversight Committee represents a beacon for students who want to challenge corporate weapons investment on their campuses -- producing investigations, policy briefs, and generally uniting students, faculty, and advocacy organizations for change.

Since 2005, students from across the country have been gathering at Think Outside the Bomb conferences to learn from the California model and build on their own organizing. Parrish notes that activists who look closely at the entire process of nuclear weapons find that the negative effects of weapons production (higher cancer rates, environmental destruction, etc.) tend to burden communities of color the most. Nowhere is this more true than in Native American communities of the Southwest. Tribal activists joined with peace groups and environmentalists in 1994 to form the Shundahai Network, which advocates for an end to nuclear testing.

The future of U.S. abolition efforts lies in the work of students, and the willingness of established activist and policy groups like Peace Action, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and the Council for a Livable World to make serious investments in inspiring the next generation. Randy Forsberg spent much of her life developing the organizations that will nurture the next generation. It is this first post-Cold War generation that has a serious chance to reverse the growth of nuclear weapons, and to potentially lead the way to abolition.

Labels: nuclear weapons, Students

I'm famous!

(Well, not really, but this definitely counts as the biggest publication I've even been published in).

Published: 10/15/2007

Publication: WireTap Magazine

Environmental activists at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC, had a lot to celebrate this last Earth Day. On April 25, about a dozen active students, faculty and staff gathered in the spring sunshine to commemorate Guilford's first solar-heated building. Campus activists had convinced the administration to spend tens of thousands of dollars refitting Shore Hall with solar panels rather than engage in costly repairs of the all-woman residence hall's broken hot-water heater. For activists, this represents an important first step in achieving real investments in ecological sustainability. Malcolm Kenton, a student leader of Guilford's ForeverGreen club, noted, "The smaller the group or institution, the easier it is for it to make major changes."

Angie Moore, coordinator of the environmental studies program at Guilford and another leader of the green movement on campus, notes that things have really "taken flight" around these issues in the last two years, with the college's president committing $50,000 to a newly formed "sustainability council" of students, faculty and staff tasked with developing green initiatives on campus.

The march toward fair trade

All over the country, students are working hard to convince administrators on their campuses to make similar investments in things like green architecture, fair trade goods, and sweatshop-free apparel. Their tactics are at times aggressive -- the famous sit-ins across the country organized by sweatshop opponents come to mind -- but all of these activists have a similar goal. Students around the country are asserting their right to have a say in how universities spend their tuition money -- and that universities use their power as spenders to promote justice.

In the last 10 years, student organizations around the nation have ballooned in size, strength and scope. As discussed below, two significant movements worth exploring are labor-based and environmental-based student organizations. It's important to note that the current successes of the student movement didn't happen by accident -- the current growth of student activism developed from strategic investment in college activists by advocacy organizations looking to the future.

A national movement focusing on college budgets makes sense. Consider that, according to a recent report (pdf) by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, the 100 best-endowed colleges and universities in the nation control a total of $258 billion in assets. To put that in perspective, the Defense Department's budget in 2007 was about $400 billion. Working together, U.S. students could outspend the Pentagon. Where did this movement come from? Where can it go in the future?

Today, two fair trade movements are prominent on college campuses. First, students around the country are involved in efforts to green their campuses -- investing practices that support environmental justice. Secondly, students are working with the labor movement to develop anti-sweatshop policies and pressure their college administrations into pursuing pro-worker policies on campus. This isn't to say that other movements aren't afoot harnessing the power of the college's purse -- the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition's campaign around Sudan comes to mind -- but Big Green and Big Labor have each been present on campuses across America for the last 10 years, and the history of their growth can be instructive.

Dirty laundry

In the early 1990s, the word sweatshop came back into the American lexicon with a vengeance. The combined work of labor unions, international human rights advocates, and investigative journalists exposed the low pay, inhumane working conditions and often-blatant disregard for the law facing many garment workers in the United States and abroad. Sweatshop Watch, a West Coast-based organization formed in the 1990s, notes that two major exposes of sweatshop conditions propelled the movement into prominence -- one involving a Southern California factory where immigrant workers were paid as little as $2 an hour, and the other exposing the fact that the Central American factories fabricating TV personality Kathy Lee Gifford's personal clothing line employed girls as young as 12 years old.

The garment workers' union UNITE! (now UNITE/HERE) worked with human rights activists to raise consciousness among the general populace. Students, understandably, reacted negatively to the idea of wearing a shirt made by someone younger than they were. After a string of lawsuits and mounting pressure against multinational corporations, labor activists turned their attention to college campuses. The organic activism of students across America combined with strategic commitment by organized labor produced one of the strongest national student organizations in the United States, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).

According to its official history, United Students Against Sweatshops germinated in the halls of the garment workers union UNITE!, where three summer interns responded in 1997 to anti-sweatshop campaigns at several major universities by producing the nation's first sweat-free campus guide. The alliance between students and unions made perfect sense.

"Today many young people focus on creating measurable success in their communities and on their campuses -- places where their voices carry the most weight," noted Elana Berkowitz, manager of strategic initiatives for the national student organization Campus Progress, in the Washington Post. Labor had invested in campus activism before the anti-sweatshop boom -- showing students that they could have a local impact over things they directly controlled.

Student Action With Farmworkers represents one of the most famous student-union alliances in the country. SAF, a national nonprofit based in North Carolina, brings students and professors to the Carolinas to experience the perspective of the people who pick the food that goes on their plates around the country. SAF, founded in 1992, has had an immeasurable impact on how students view the food in their cafeterias. Other student leadership initiatives such as Union Summer, sponsored by the AFL-CIO, further develop student leadership and show them the link between their lives on campus and the lives of workers. Victoria Dulce Cepeida-Mojarro, one of three staffers in USAS' Washington office, notes that while these programs are important, USAS "has always been independent" of unions while working with them.

Campus clothing choices

Students are intensely interested in working on issues that affect them locally. It wasn't a big leap to look at the sweatshops on TV and realize that the clothing made for universities around the country might bear the mark of oppression. Students began forming anti-sweatshop organizations all over the country -- and in July 1998, 30 student organizations from across the nation came together in New York City to form United Students Against Sweatshops. What began as a relatively scattered movement across a handful of campuses has really blossomed over the last ten years. USAS boasts over 200 affiliated chapters nationwide, including a sizable contingent of high-school affiliates. USAS has also worked to build an effective infrastructure capable of achieving its goals.

USAS' primary campaign revolves around students convincing their campus to join an independent organization called the Workers' Rights Consortium. The WRC, founded in 2000, brings together students, labor representatives, and university administrators in an effort to provide independent sweat-free certification for member schools' clothing suppliers. The WRC investigates factories from Southern California to central Indonesia to ferret out abuse and lawbreaking by suppliers, allowing schools to make a conscious decision to buy sweat-free. There are roughly 175 schools affiliated with the WRC, with more joining all the time.

USAS's growth and development of affiliate organizations like the Workers Rights Consortium has allowed it to branch out into other areas beyond garments. Over the last decade, the student-labor movement has begun converging with the student-environmental movement on the issue of fair trade.

Going green

Like the story of USAS, student environmental activism exists as a combination of local student initiative and institutional support from environmental organizations working with activists. As noted in the introduction, many local activists are dedicated to improving environmental standards on campus -- with organizations like the Sustainable Endowment Institute and Energy Action Coalition, students are working to decrease their campus footprint and raise awareness about how decisions made on campus can impact the wider environmental world.

Like labor-oriented work, environmental work on campus has seen a boom in the last few years. As an example, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a national network designed to serve as a resource for green activists nationwide, formed in 2005 as a merger between several regional environmental groups. AASHE boasts over 200 affiliate members. Its programs, which commit colleges to actions like a zero-carbon footprint to combat global warming, boast even more signatories. Again, like the student-based labor movement, concern for the environment on campus didn't grow wholly formed from the earth -- it was nurtured by leadership development programs like the National Wildlife Federation's Ecology Fellows program, which provides grants to students working on sustainability issues on their campuses.

Along with fellow activists in the anti-sweatshop movement, environmental activists are branching out. Greens on campus are moving from things like solar panel installation and working on issues closer to USAS' mold -- questioning campus investments in companies that damage the environment. Guilford's Kenton perhaps sums it up best: "If Guilford were the greenest school in the country in terms of [the environment], we still wouldn't be fully sustainable if ... people weren't paid enough or still had issues of racial ... intolerance." It seems that, during this decade, green activists and labor activists at America's colleges have come together around an opponent they are intent on driving off campus: the Coca-Cola Co.

Aggressive students, fed up with its human rights and environmental records, have hit Coca-Cola, that titan of American capitalism, smack in the face. According to Cepeida-Mojarro, USAS' involvement in anti-Coke campaigns was driven by members' concerns about human rights in Coke's bottling plants in Colombia; USAS began a formal campaign against Coke in 2001. Meanwhile, environmentally conscious students around the country were concerned about Coca-Cola's record in India. Together, students have banned Coke from such venerable institutions as Rutgers Law School in New Jersey and Smith College in New Hampshire, along with smaller schools like Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, citing a host of environmental and labor concerns. Coca-Cola feels the heat -- according to Swarthmore College officials, last year the company asked the International Labor Organization to conduct a review of its labor practices in response to all the criticisms.

There's no telling where the pressure that sparked this investigation will lead. However, it does show that it pays for students not to be silent. The reality remains that colleges do control a lot of money -- and students can redirect that money for justice by working together with support from their elders in allied movements. Other social movements would do well to emulate the investments made by labor and sustainability activists in student leadership and training -- those investments are starting to mature, and the sky's the limit.

Get involved! Contact the United Students Against Sweatshops and Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education to see how you can make a difference!