by Jose Gutierrez, Coffee Party Board of Directors
When I signed up to become an official member of Coffee Party USA a year ago, I couldn't have imagined I'd soon have the the incredible honor of being elected to our Board of Directors. How I got here is a whole story in itself. Why I am here is what I want to talk to you about.
Growing up as the son of an undocumented immigrant to this country, I recognized injustices amongst all walks of life. While I am continually struck at how many people aren't able to voice their concerns, I am surprised that others who can, don't. One current concern is the purchase of our government by large corporations. Our politicians continue to squander money on costly legislation that benefits those corporations — leaving millions of Americans to fend for themselves. I've seen veteran employees of 20 years laid off from what they thought was a secure job and hopeful university students graduate only to struggle to find a job.
I was a senior in college when I heard about the Coffee Party. I signed up for their email alerts to learn more. For the first time, I found an organization that really thinks about all sides of the story, and promotes logical answers to the tough questions and issues we face today. Finally, I'd found a community of people who think outside of partisan or ideological lines. The truth is, both within our membership and within our Board of Directors, we don't agree on everything. But there are a few fundamental things on which we can agree. One of them is money. More particularly, the corrupting influence of money in politics — we don't like it. [READ MORE]
Leland R. Beaumont strives to strengthen our democracy by promoting thoughtful dialogue, critical thinking, in-depth understanding of issues, and wise decision making He is a charter member of the Coffee Party and lives with his wife in Middletown, NJ.
Our beloved smartphones and iPads hide a dirty little secret. Low labor costs combined with an efficient supplier infrastructure make particular Asian factories the economic choice for electronics manufacturers. Many smartphones, most Apple products, and many other technology products are manufactured at Foxconn, headquartered in Taiwan. Unfortunately labor conditions at Foxconn are oppressive, almost barbaric by Western standards. Pitiful wages, long hours, tedious work, bans on organized labor, abusive management, and even suicides are prevalent at the massive plant. While American-designed iPhones are manufactured in oppressive Asian factories, Americans face high unemployment and a troubling decline in manufacturing jobs at home. What can be done?
Perhaps working conditions will improve if we begin to tax oppression. It might work like this. A panel including human rights experts, labor representatives, manufacturing executives, economists, and government trade analysts would begin by creating a reference standard and index for quantifying oppressive working conditions. Let’s call it the sweatshop index. The most worker-friendly factories would score zero; the worst factories would have high scores. Next a team of independent auditors and examiners would visit factories around the world and score individual factories on this index. If examiners were barred from visiting the factory or hindered in their examination, they would assume the worst and assign a high score. No doubt the Foxconn factory would receive a high sweatshop index score, unless of course it was reformed. Finally, the United States would impose an import tariff on products based on the weighted sweatshop index of the factories used in their manufacture, regardless of the host country. Smartphones and other products manufactured at worker-friendly plants are subject to little or no tariff. Products manufactured in sweatshops pay a high tariff. This would provide a direct financial incentive for factories around the world to improve working conditions. Work would begin to flow out of sweatshops into the worker-friendly factories, including American factories, because they now have an economic advantage. Workers around the world would all benefit. [READ MORE]
Eric Whinery is a financial analyst from Chicago, IL and has been involved in finance, tax, operations and management for over 12 years. He joined the Coffee Party as a fan on Facebook in April 2010 and is the current Treasurer on the Coffee Party Board of Directors.
What is a CEO worth in relation to the employees who make up a company? In many large companies, a CEO is a more political position with some decision making authority over the direction a company takes. A CEO may have connections with congressional staff, an above average understanding of the industry space the company inhabits, and in some cases, he or she is the highest level sales person and public face of a company. A CEO certainly requires a strong skill set, and there is definitely some risk for the individual. As the public face of a company, a CEO caught up in scandal can have a very negative impact on the bottom line.
When the highest corporate vision is set, the CEO relies on a few direct subordinates to plan strategy and then act on it. Those subordinates have, in some cases, thousands of operations managers and staff to carry out those plans. These men and women on the staff are responsible for innovating, producing, selling, shipping and ensuring quality control for processes, among other important duties. They interface directly at the customer level, and thus can have a direct impact on the product or service a company delivers.
In 2011, we chose to spend more time doing stuff, and less time
tooting our own horn (the latter is actually more expensive). So, as we welcome our newly elected Board of Directors and begin 2012, let’s take a look back at ten important ways that Coffee Party volunteers helped to bring about the cultural and narrative shifts that made 2011 a year of progress despite many obstacles. Please join us as part of our "Class of 2012" Membership Drive so we can build on the following accomplishments.
10.417,572,792 Post Views on Facebook
If have any doubt that everyday Americans can have an impact on political discourse, consider the fact that a small team of volunteers shared the Coffee Party's civil, fact-based, and solutions-oriented approach to information gathering and civic engagement more than 417 million times in 2011. [Click here to see our Facebook statistics for 2011, and read more about how we did it.] 417 Million post views from a single Facebook fan page is pretty impressive considering that it cost us zero dollars and zero cents to operate it. If a handful of volunteers can do so much with so little, maybe We the People have a fighting chance in 2012 — Super PAC's or no.
Facebook page is not our only communication network — we have a YouTube channel that's reached 892,000 viewers, an email network of 85,000, and a Twitter network of 14,000, not to mention 175 other Facebook pages.
But “Join the Coffee Party Movement” is the virtual town hall that started it all. Total post views for the year (actually, through Dec. 28) include views resulting directly from Facebook.com/CoffeeParty, and views resulting from our users sharing posts to their own walls (and those posts being shared by their friends, and so on).
9.For the People Summit | Jan. 21, 2011
America's more informed citizens and our most responsible good-government organizations were in a state of despair after the "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision allowed unprecedented, unlimited, anonymous corporate spending to decide dozens of Congressional races in the 2010 midterm elections. As the first anniversary of the 5-4 ruling drew near, Coffee Party USA partnered with the relentless artists and activists at the Backbone Campaign to organize a Lobby Day, a satirical protest, and a very serious summit on money in politics at the Washington Plaza Hotel, which was carried live on C-SPAN. [MORE]
8."Are you suggesting that we start a revolution?" | Feb, 26, 2011
As the people of Tunisia, Egypt, London, and Madison, Wisconsin sowed the seeds of what would become a Global Democracy Movement, college students in America were also showing signs that they were prepared to rise up and respond effectively to anti-democratic abuses of power. What started out as a Coffee Party campus visit in late February, led to an international youth uprising in response to a baseless, ideological attack against Planned Parenthood. Students at Wesleyan University, prompted by Coffee Party’s Annabel Park and Eric Byler, brainstormed to produce an inventive web video called “I Have Sex: I Support Planned Parenthood.” 366,000 views later, the video had sparked a series of equally creative responses from students on campuses across the nation (and even overseas), thwarting a radical, fact-free agenda to undermine health care access for the young and the working class, and showing hundreds of thousands of America’s newest voters that positive impact on our deliberative process can be fun. [READ MORE]
Looking back at how history would unfold in 2011, it's interesting to note that Annabel Park's response to a Wesleyan student's question in the video below foreshadows a "tipping point" in America by examining similar movements in other countries.
It's time for a new voice in the Republican Debates and its NOT the voice of Donald Trump. Buddy Roemer is the only major presidential candidate who's talking about corruption in Washington.
SIGN THE PETITION asking ABC News to include Buddy Roemer in the Jan. 7 New Hampshire Debate.
Buddy Roemer is the only major presidential candidate who's talking about corruption in Washington—but he's being excluded from every presidential debate.
He's campaigning on one critical issue: the undue influence of special interests in Washington. He's pledged to run his campaign on donations of $100 or less, and he's not taking any money from PACs.
We desperately need to address the corruption caused by so much money in politics. This isn't a partisan issue. We won't see meaningful change in any other area until we fix this fundamental problem.
On January 7, ABC News will host a debate in Manchester, NH between Republican presidential candidates. We think the candidates should talk about corruption—but even though he meets the requirements, Buddy Roemer is being left out. Will you sign this letter to help us get the vital voice of Buddy Roemer into the national conversation that will shape America's future?
Check out Buddy's interview on The Colbert Report:
CLICK HERE to sign a petition asking ABC News to include Buddy Roemer in the Jan. 7 New Hampshire Debate.
A recent essay by renowned economist and former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich provides us with the good news and the bad news about the historic turning point facing America today. The bad news is that our economic struggles, and the social unrest that comes with them, are not ending any time soon. But the good news is that the extreme level of partisanship, corruption, and obstructionism we are seeing in Congress today very well could be. He writes: "Rather than ushering in an era of political paralysis, the Great Depression of the 1930s changed American politics altogether — realigning the major parties, creating new coalitions, and yielding new solutions. Prolonged economic distress of a decade or more could have the same effect this time around."
Before reading the essay, here are two short videos (each just over 2 minutes) in which Reich explains the economic, political, and social context for the incredible changes America is going through. The first was shot before the Occupy Wall Street movement transformed our national conversation and created a name for America's role in this global democracy movement. The second video was recorded a few days ago.
Most political analysis of America’s awful economy focuses on whether it will doom President Obama’s reelection or cause Congress to turn toward one party or the other. These are important questions, but we should really be looking at the deeper problems with which whoever wins in 2012 will have to deal.
Not to depress you, but our economic troubles are likely to continue for many years — a decade or more. At the current rate of job growth (averaging 90,000 new jobs per month over the last six months), 14 million Americans will remain permanently unemployed. The consensus estimate is that at least 90,000 new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the labor force. Even if we get back to a normal rate of 200,000 new jobs per month, unemployment will stay high for at least ten years. Years of high unemployment will likely result in a vicious cycle, as relatively lower spending by the middle-class further slows job growth.
This, in turn, could make political compromise even more elusive than it is now, as remarkable as that may seem. In past years, politics has been greased by the expectation of better times to come – not only more personal consumption but also upward mobility through good schools, access to college, better jobs, improved infrastructure. It’s been a virtuous cycle: When the economy grows, the wealthy more easily accept a smaller share of the gains because they still came out ahead of where they were before. And everyone more willingly pays taxes to finance public provision because they share in the overall economic gains.
Now the grease is gone. Fully two-thirds of Americans recently polled by the Wall Street Journal say they aren’t confident life for their children’s generation will be better than it’s been for them. The last time our hopes for a better life were dashed so profoundly was during the Great Depression.
But here’s what might be considered the good news. Rather than ushering in an era of political paralysis, the Great Depression of the 1930s changed American politics altogether — realigning the major parties, creating new coalitions, and yielding new solutions. Prolonged economic distress of a decade or more could have the same effect this time around.
What might the new politics look like? The nation is polarizing in three distinct ways, and any or all of could generate new political alignments.
Anti-establishment
A vast gulf separates Tea Party Republicans from the inchoate Wall Street Occupiers. The former disdain government; the latter hate Wall Street and big corporations. The Tea Party is well organized and generously financed; Occupiers are relentlessly disorganized and underfunded. And if the events of the last two weeks are any guide, Occupiers probably won’t be able to literally occupy public areas indefinitely; they’ll have to move from occupying locations to organizing around issues.
But the two overlap in an important way that provides a clue to the first characteristic of the new politics. Both movements are doggedly anti-establishment — distrusting politically powerful and privileged elites and the institutions those elites inhabit.
Lisa Gilbert is the Deputy Director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division.
Today the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is being called in to a hearing in the Elections subcommittee of the House Administration committee.
Anyone attending will hear the commissioners speak to their performance. However, it is hard to imagine how their statements can be anything but a whitewash. The agency is currently falling desperately short in its mission (PDF) to enforce the campaign finance laws on the books, and has been unable to promulgate new rules to react to the landmark case Citizens United vs. FEC. For years, a sharply partisan split between the commissioners has largely prevented the agency from fulfilling its directive.
With a gaping hole left by a deadlocked FEC, advocates are now looking to other remedies for dealing with the pervasive problem of secretive outside and corporate spending, highlighted in the 2010 cycle (which is sure to continue in 2012).
One avenue that the courts left open following the Citizens United ruling is increased disclosure and corporate accountability.
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In 2011, we chose to spend more time doing stuff, and less time
