Coffee Party Design 2.0 Transition Team Bios

Diane Owens, Transition Team Chair, is a founding member of Coffee Party Austin (Texas) and the SW Regional Coordinator for Coffee Party USA. She retired after a 35 year career in management and public relations with the Social Security Administration and now works as a consultant and speaker on Social Security programs.

Eric Byler, Transition Team Vice-Chair, is a member of the Directors Guild of America. He was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for his debut feature Charlotte Sometimes (2002), hailed by Roger Ebert as a breakthrough for Asian American filmmakers. His five films, including 9500 Liberty co-directed with Annabel Park, have won 16 awards. Eric has directed over a hundred web videos, including dozens for the Coffee Party, reaching millions of Americans.

Barbara Bull has worked in Land Use Planning. She has volunteered in various traditional committees, commissions, and boards having to do with citizen involvement and engagement and has recently become interested in more active engagement herself through the Coffee Party.

Vince Lamb, Transition Team Secretary, is a community college science instructor in southeast Michigan and a journalist/blogger for the Detroit edition of Examiner.com. Vince and his wife Kimberly ran the first meeting of the Ann Arbor Chapter of Coffee Party USA in March 2010. He is currently one of the Social Media Outreach Coordinators for Coffee Party USA.

Gloria LeBlanc is local coordinator of the St. Augustine FL Coffee Party and a SE Regional Coordinator for Coffee Party USA. She is a retired teacher who taught middle school language arts classes, special programs for at-risk students, and GED instruction.

Lynda Park is an editor of the Coffee Party newsletter and a coordinator of Coffee Party Pittsburgh. She is involved in the Coffee Party because she is concerned about her children's future. She is executive director of a non-profit association and has many years of experience in administration and in small business.

Billy Sears is Lead Coordinator of the Coffee Party of Greater Champaign-Urbana, IL, and served as volunteer Regional Support Director for Coffee Party USA. As of April 9th, Billy will become Coffee Party USA’s first employee taking on the duties of Director of Membership Administration.

Leah Spitzer serves as a SE Regional Coordinator and New Media Coordinator for Coffee Party USA. She is a retired dog trainer/ behaviorist and was a volunteer advisor and foster home for dog rescue groups as well as a founding member and Board Member for the International Association of Canine Professionals. Leah also has 13 years of experience in a large brokerage firm in customer service and research.

Eric Whinery is involved in the Coffee Party because of the importance he places on equality in politics. He is employed a financial analyst with experience in IT budgeting, forecasting and procurement.

Become a Member

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Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition, oppose the spectacle.
Not just why, but how young people should become politically engaged.

I really don’t need to spell out the reasons why it is important for young people to get involved in the struggle for political change. We need to play a part in deciding our future. It is pretty simple.

One common fallacy surrounding youth political engagement is that young people are “too apathetic” to get involved. My generation is completely aware of the problems that we will face when we are handed the reigns of political and economic power.

But the corporate elite plays the middleman between awareness and action. We are either told it is more important to care about trivial cultural phenomena or we are pigeonholed into playing in the arena of lifestyle politics. Not that playing lifestyle politics is inherently bad, it’s just woefully misguided. Our message of change is continually co-opted by corporate interests who only want to keep us ignorant of the root causes of today’s problems.

When someone is considered politically knowledgeable for watching a comedy show controlled by Viacom, we have a problem. When one of the best known crowdsourcing initiatives to fund groups for social change is run by Pepsi, we have a problem. When people lull themselves into believing that they are contributing to social change by buying overpriced bottles of water from Starbucks, in the hopes of some small fraction of the profits going to a good cause, we have a problem. We, as a generation, need to wake up, stand up, and reject this corporate charade.

We don’t need a generation of people who can make a text message donation to the Red Cross; we need a generation of “Radical Solutionaries”. Bill Moyer of the Backbone Campaign was the first person I heard use this term. A Radical Solutionary is someone who focuses on finding solutions to the root causes instead of trying to put bandages on the symptoms. Let's not just make it a hobby to live a ‘green’ life, let's teach ourselves about the perilous situation we are in today and how we can fix it.

One place to go to learn about the root causes of the current problems is the Coffee Party. The Coffee Party realizes that a key part of the problem is corruption of our government by corporate interests. And that this corruption causes the increasing deficit, austerity measures that disproportionately effect the young, poor, and minorities, outrageous amounts of foreclosures, the ever-growing income gap, and many more issues. These aren’t issues that will be polished and prostituted to young people via MTV, but these are the ones that matter.

We, as young people, can’t be afraid to turn off Family Guy, stop listening to Wiz Khalifa, take off the Uggs and the cheap, mass produced, neon colored sunglasses, put down the Red Bull, put Twilight back on the shelf (and never pick it back up), unfollow Charlie Sheen on Twitter, and take a step back, maybe two or three steps. Let’s talk about Wisconsin; Egypt; GE’s taxes; the cost of higher education; Citizens United; and maybe if we are feeling adventurous we can talk about some Karl Marx or Adam Smith (neither bite, I assure you).

Involvement, action, and personal awareness can take many different forms and levels of commitment. But the most important thing is to do something substantive to ensure not just your future, but our future. Take it easy, but take it.

--Paul Weiskel, Coffee Party activist and college student in Massachusetts

What IS the Coffee Party? Let's hear your Elevator Pitch!

The Coffee Party Looks Like America. Tell us how it looks to YOU!

America is a big place. It takes a big tent to include everybody. And for many of us – according to our recent “Elevator Pitch” survey – this breadth of inclusion is a big part of why we joined the Coffee Party and what we feel is great about what we are doing.

Listening - Civility - Working Together

The way I see it – and a perspective I like to encourage on SharedPurpose.Net – is that a diversity of perspectives on issues that affect people is often a potent and vitalizing influence on how to develop the best solutions. Look at an issue from many angles – and you are likely to see the issue more accurately. What one person doesn’t see, another person does. What is needed – and what the Coffee Party has been suggesting since the beginning – is that we work together to solve our common problem in a civil and respectful way -- listening to all sides, carefully weighing the facts, considering the situation carefully – and then forming a policy position based on those facts we can then advocate in a strong and persuasive way.

Yes, this friendly and inclusive approach can seem a little confusing, because the traditional way of organizing politics is to pick a few issues where people agree on positions, and then try to cobble together a winning movement by adjusting the party position on the issues until there seems to be enough votes to win over the opposing party. This approach to politics is inherently divisive – it is about “my team can beat your team” – a fundamental weakness in traditional politics that our founder Annabel Park has strongly criticized in no uncertain terms. For thousands of Coffee Party people, we have to do better than this. And thousands of us believe we can.

In our Elevator Pitch Survey – a brief statement intended to persuasively introduce the Coffee Party in one minute or less -- the response receiving the highest rating by participants simply states a basic message that seems to resonate for many of us:

The Coffee Party is a grassroots transpartisan movement to bring civility and fairness back into the political process.

Diversity Creates Power

For me, the diversity in the US is not a surprise. We have been a nation of immigrants since our beginning. And for me, the diversity of perspectives within the Coffee Party is a sign of our strength. We are a big container. We are big enough for America. We are big enough for All the People. E Pluribus Unum. We the People. All the People. This is what makes America great. This is what makes the Coffee Party great.

If you have not yet completed the Elevator Pitch survey, now is your chance. Let us know how it looks to you.

Click here to participate.

Add your voice to the SharedPurpose melting pot. Let us know how you see it.

-- Bruce Schuman
Founder, SharedPurpose.Net

Coffee Party Cincinnati and friends held their first annual “Patriotic American Peace Rally” on Fountain Square, Saturday March 19. This rally was held to mark the 8th anniversary of the Iraq War, and to promote peace and civility. Coffee Party Cincinnati hopes that this rally will encourage people to take a stand against war, violence, and hate. Approximately 150-200 people attended the rally.

The national Coffee Party Movement established itself in January 2010 as a non-partisan grassroots political organization, and Coffee Party Cincinnati is one of its many local chapters that have sprung up across the state of Ohio and the US since its inception. The Coffee Party was created to be a venue for people who are disenchanted with two-party politics and want to work toward positive solutions, government accountability, removing corporate influence from politics, and making government a true expression of our collective will. When it comes to political discourse, Coffee Party wants candidates and elected officials who will stand against party politics, side with the people, and never use rhetoric that deliberately incites hatred and violence toward other groups. The Coffee Party formed last year in response to the hateful and misleading rhetoric surrounding the healthcare reform bill and to the non-stop media coverage of the Tea Party. Over the last year, local chapters have organized in nearly every major city across the US, and have taken on a wide range of political causes.

At our rally we presented speakers from different organizations around Cincinnati that are in support of ending the wars. The speakers we featured included: Don Rucknagel, Green Party; Josh Spring, Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless; Professor Mark Lause, University of Cincinnati Department of History; John Waltz, Veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Robert “Buck” Clay, Veteran of the Iraq War; Donna Park, Citizens for Global Solutions; Elizabeth Ampthor, International Socialists Organization; and Fariba Nourian, Coffee Party Cincinnati.

Throughout the rally, we circulated a letter to our US Representatives from Ohio that requested they stop funding the wars and invest taxpayer money in job creation and public services like education, healthcare, libraries, public radio, infrastructure; all that we believe the government should be providing for us in order to improve the lives of the American people.

We organized this rally because we know that it is wrong for the US to wage wars and occupy foreign countries. We know that it costs enormous amounts of taxpayer money and creates enormous amounts of national debt to sustain such efforts, while other much-needed programs go unfunded or underfunded. We know that contractors and corporations are making huge amounts of money in profits from the wars, while we who pay for the war are left with a slumping economy and deteriorating services. And more than the monetary cost of the war is the loss of life that results from it; thousands of soldiers, and over a million more civilians, that could otherwise have lived out their lives and continued to make positive contributions to society, are lost to us forever. Many of us have lived through several periods of war, violence, and political unrest, and we believe enough is enough.

Ironically, at the same time we were holding our rally Saturday, a coalition of armed forces from Britain, France and the US began attacking the Libyan military in order to stop them from killing their dissenting citizens. While we agree that the people of Libya must be protected, we hope in the future that regimes like Gadhafi’s are never put in power in the first place. We also wish that coalition forces would not pick and choose which people they are going to protect, because while they may be stopping the attacks on the people of Libya, the people of Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen are still being killed by their governments.

Finally, several of our supporters have spoken out against the name Patriotic American Peace Rally, saying that it is misleading, delusional, and even offensive, since nationalism and patriotism in the US is associated with a long history of imperialism and national superiority. While those are fair and well-intentioned critiques, we believe that as Frederick Douglas once said “a patriot is a lover of one's country that rebukes it and does not excuse its sins.” We at Coffee Party Cincinnati reject the framing of what some call patriotism, and we want to challenge these definitions. Being against the wars and the military machine is patriotic. Of course, we know our title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but we sincerely hoped that the rally attracted some from the right who oppose the wars. They exist, and we should reach out to them. With them we are a majority. And we feel that we can love our country and the world at the same time. Making change starts at home at the local level.

Sheli DeLaney and Fariba Nourian, Coordinators of Coffee Party Cincinnati
coffeepartycincinnati@gmail.com

Accountants, plumbers, teachers, lawyers, barbers, technicians — people and societies have many needs and many professions to fill them. If your car’s broken, you take it to a mechanic. If it’s your body that’s ailing, you call a doctor. But what do you do when it’s the society itself that’s in need of emergency care?

America is hurting, and even those who love to wave the flag and speak of our greatness are hard pressed to argue otherwise. We have 15 million people out of work and long-term unemployment at a record high; 44 million Americans now live below the poverty line; real median household income has been in decline since the turn of the century, and those people lucky enough to find a job often do so at a significant reduction in pay.

From coast to coast, American infrastructure is in decay, needing more than $3 trillion in repairs. Our healthcare costs continue to spiral out of control. The federal debt is presently over $14 trillion; the budgets of 46 states are in crisis; our education system is in disarray; the foreclosure crisis is still wreaking havoc; our manufacturing base has been decimated; our trade balance is upside down — and worst of all — the American people seem more divided than at any time in modern history.

So, where do we turn for answers? Who do we call?

It’s government’s responsibility to “ensure domestic Tranquility” and “promote the general Welfare.” So, with the domestic climate being anything but tranquil, and the welfare in recent years far from general, it would seem sensible to look to government for leadership — after all, this is the reason for its existence. Our elected representatives are then the people we should call . . . but alas, that really hasn’t been working so well.

The problem is that far too many of our representatives have, in practice, changed employers. They no longer work for the American people. They’re now employed by our nation’s largest corporations. You see, elections are expensive: the 2010 edition ran up a tab exceeding $4 billion. And the sad truth is that the candidate who doesn’t have a sufficient war chest doesn’t get elected. So, candidates are forced to seek donations from those most willing and able to give, and all too often, that means taking money from those who the government is established to oversee.

Tragically, our Congress has been purchased by wealthy corporations, and many of those in control actually have no national loyalties whatsoever. In fact, 83 of the 100 largest American corporations maintain foreign bank accounts and shelter their income in tax havens — many paying nothing in U.S. income tax. It’s actually so bad that General Electric, our largest corporation, made profits of $10.3 billion in 2009, and Uncle Sam wound up owing them $1.1 billion. Repeating for 2010, G.E. had profits of $14.2 billion and an even bigger tax benefit of $5.1 billion. In total, it’s estimated that companies using tax havens manage to evade more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes every year.

The American public needs to realize that we now live in a globalized economy, and the paradigm that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America” is a relic of times gone by. In all too many cases, what’s good for “American” corporations is actually a poison pill for the average American. Not only do many of these corporations harm our environment and deplete out natural resources, but they also use taxpayer funded infrastructure and services, from roads and utilities to police and fire protection, all without paying their fair share. They’ve actually managed to carve out so many deals in Washington that the overall corporate share of federal revenue has fallen from 30% in the 1950s to only 6.6% today.

Of course, Republicans say that lower corporate taxes help create jobs, but what are those “American” corporations doing? Well, they are creating lots of jobs; it’s just that the majority of them are not in the U.S.. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “American” corporations created 2.4 million jobs in 2010, but nearly 60% of them — 1.4 million went to foreign nations.

Fueled by cheap foreign labor, free trade and government subsidies, the profits of American businesses are soaring. Posting their highest profits ever, $1.659 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, things are good for corporate America. Meanwhile, American workers are in a race to the bottom. Their compensation is dropping while commodity prices are climbing. They struggle to provide the basic essentials for their families, while politicians and pundits are increasingly selling the tale of an unavoidable economic shift.

But all that’s unavoidable is the truth that American democracy has let down the American people —there is nobody to call when those charged with service have been corrupted and no longer seek the greater good. We the People must now exert our will, and that process starts with asking a new question: what’s good for America?

--Dave Paulson, Coffee Party member in San Francisco and blogger
A longer version of this blog can be found here.