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| March 11, 2011, Vol. 1 No. 5 |
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From the Editors
We received a lot of feedback about our article, "The Tipping Point," from our last issue. Many were enthusiastic letters of support. Others provided different points of view. One reader wrote,
"Please don't forget: there are many progressives out here (like me) who are also fiscal conservatives. We must find a sustainable way to address the budget deficit and still maintain a solid commitment to social equity, environmental reform, and the elimination of corporate influence on a broken congress. Thank you, and keep up the great work." --Bob C.
We hear you. Continue to keep us informed of your thoughts.
--Lynda Park, Barb Bull, and Tim McDonough (Newsletter Co-editors)
newsletter@coffeepartyusa.com
You Can Still Become a Member
Our Founding Membership drive was a great success thanks to over 4,000 of you who contributed. You can still become a contributing member of Coffee Party USA and receive a membership card and a bumper sticker! Click here to become a member.
Coffee Party Regional Coordinators
Contact us. We will help you organize locally.
Northeast
States: CT, DC, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VA, VT, WV
northeast@coffeepartyusa.com
Southeast
States: AR, AL, GA, FL, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN
southeast@coffeepartyusa.com
Midwest
States: IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, NE, OH, WI
midwest@coffeepartyusa.com
Southwest
States: AZ, CO, NM, OK, TX
southwest@coffeepartyusa.com
West
States: AK, CA, HI, ID, MT, ND, NV, OR, SD, UT, WA, WY
west@coffeepartyusa.com
Wake Up to a Coffee Party Blend
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Coffee Break Campaign to Save America
From a Tipping Point to a Boiling Point. In a blog posted Feb. 25, we talked about the fact that we've reached a Tipping Point.
"Years from now, we will think of February 2011 as the tipping point in America’s great awakening. After all the warnings and wake-up calls, this will be remembered as the time when the American people decided to come together, confront the plutocracy that plagues our republic, and do something to change the economic inequality / instability that has grown from it."
In the last two weeks, that tipping has become a boiling point. Everywhere in America, there are organized and spontaneous acts of peaceful resistance. US Uncut is spreading like wildfire, 350.org is empowering small business owners to stand up to powerful corporate interests, and there will be nationwide rallies on March 15 to Defend the American Dream. Years of complacency and cynicism have transformed into indignation and determination.
This is not about winning an "issue." This is about challenging our current power structure. We can't keep fighting small battles, all in different cycles according to the issue or approach that most appeals to us. The fact is, our government has become corrupted by money, and We the People are marginalized and ignored in the process of making the policies that affect our lives. No one will swoop in and save us. We must save ourselves. We need to go from believing in politicians and TV hosts to believing in ourselves as indomitable agents of change.
On February 26th, Eric filmed as Annabel challenged students at Wesleyan University to do exactly that: to believe in themselves and exercise their power to effect change. They responded at first with sighs of hesitation. Then came an idea. Then came a roar. The beautiful sound of young people discovering their voice and power is now out of the gate. It's gone viral on Facebook and Youtube. And it's unstoppable.
CLICK HERE to see the amazing video these Wesleyan students created to stand up for their future and their freedom — it was viewed 52,000 times in its first 24 hours, and now students on other campuses are making their own versions.
You can CLICK HERE to watch the video of Annabel talking to the students.
Coffee and Taxes. That psychological shift occurring at the individual level will lead to a political shift. As movement builders - and all Coffee Party members are -- we can work to catalyze this shift.
Now, here is what we can do together in the coming weeks.
We also said in the "Tipping Point":
Imagine if the national narrative about Tax Day 2011 were based on accurate information, and a need for real change, instead of the misinformed and misdirected anger from a year ago? This is within our reach.
Below is a list of initiatives which Coffee Party volunteers are developing for tax week, April 9 - 18. These ideas were incubated and crowdsourced in Coffee Party's Tax Payer Action Facebook group with over 400 volunteers exchanging ideas for actions, slogans and resources.
Coffee Break Campaign to Save America
 Wouldn't our coffee breaks be so much more fun if hundreds or thousands of people took them together? Help us plan and execute a series of direct actions that just might save America. The idea is simple: everyone in a 2-mile radius takes their coffee break at the same time on a set date, creating a 30-minute, face-based and peaceful gathering that transforms the visual facade of (for example) the local branch of a tax-dodging ubiquitous corporation. We partner with other organizations, and call for Coffee Breaks around the nation to impact or even transform the national dialogue on deficits and budget shortfalls, focusing on the irresponsible tax policies, bailouts, and deregulation that led to them. Coffeebreak@CoffeePartyUSA.com
Weekend Coffee Breaks
Coffee Breaks can be on weekends too. In addition to the work-day Coffee Breaks mentioned above, we'll partner with other organizations using our brand-neutral "Movement For the People" website to facilitate self-organized actions and events around the U.S. Isn't it fun to see a digital map fill up with events around the country? Prolonged advertising on corporately-owned "news" channels isn't the only way to fuel a populist movement. We the people can choose our own issues and take our own stands. Meetups@CoffeePartyUSA.com
 Yard Signs to Make us Laugh and Save America Slogan contest and design contest for yard signs expressing the spirit of Tax Fairness week, with a sense of humor. Distribution via the e-commerce site. To be eligible for the top prize, you have to top these yard sign ideas: "This sign cost more than Bank of America paid in taxes last year," or our Wisconsin special, "Keep your corporate hands off my governor!" CLICK HERE for more info. Designs are also being made into T-shirts.
There are other ideas in development. We will keep you posted. Please join us to collaborate 24 hours a day at this Facebook group. For more information: taxpayer@CoffeePartyUSA.com
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US Supreme Court to Hear Arizona Clean Elections “Matching Funds” Case
 For the first time since affirming the constitutionality of public campaign finance programs in Buckley v Valeo 35 years ago, the US Supreme Court will consider another public campaign funding case – McComish v Bennett. The Petitioners (several political candidates and one independent expenditure committee) are appealing a unanimous ruling by a three judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court in favor of the Respondents (the State of Arizona and the Clean Elections Institute).
In 1991, Arizona voters witnessed one of the worst public corruption scandals in the state's history. The scandal, eventually known as AzScam, resulted in nearly ten percent of the state Legislature being implicated in the alleged reception of bribes totaling more than $370,000.
Tired of political scandals, Arizona voters declared their intent to improve the integrity of state government elections by passing the Citizens Clean Elections Act (the “Act”) on November 3, 1998. This act provides candidates the option of receiving public funds for their campaigns; and it appears that candidates welcomed this opportunity as participation in the Clean Elections system increased steadily from the first year of its implementation through 2008, when two-thirds of the candidates in the primary and general elections accepted public funding.
Candidates wishing to participate in Arizona’s Clean Elections program must collect a specific number of $5 donations from prospective constituents, and are allowed a small number of “seed money” contributions limited to $100 per individual, but must agree not to accept any other donations to their campaign, among other restrictions. In return, the candidate receives an initial grant amount to fund their campaign. At question is the way the AZ law helps candidates participating in the program keep up with their privately funded opponents as the contest evolves. If a traditionally financed candidate begins to spend funds in excess of a participating candidate’s initial grant, additional incremental matching funds are awarded to the participating candidate. Matching funds are also awarded if an independent expenditure committee expends funds against a participating candidate or in support of his or her opponent. The amount of these matching funds is limited to two times the participating candidate’s initial grant. Traditional candidate and/or independent committee expenditures beyond that point are not matched. There is no statutory limit on how much a traditional candidate or independent expenditure committee may spend.
The Question:
Does the First Amendment allow Arizona to condition the release of a portion of government subsidies to publicly funded candidates on the campaign activity of privately funded candidates and independent expenditure groups?
The Petitioners assert:
Awarding public monies as matching funds to a participating candidate when “triggered” by a traditional candidate’s (or their supporters') expenditures has an impermissible “chilling” effect on the traditional candidate’s fundraising and campaign spending.
The Respondents assert:
- Public campaign finance programs serve the public interest in constitutionally permissible ways by diminishing both actual and perceived levels of public corruption tied to campaign donations and subsequent political favoritism, as well as enhancing public discussion and participation in elections.
- Matching funds programs conserve public dollars by providing a base level of funding adequate for most campaigns, yet still assuring participating candidates they will have the funds necessary to respond to issues and allegations that may develop in a high intensity campaign. This assurance is necessary to safeguard candidate participation in the public program.
- Triggered matching funds allow public dollars to be focused on the campaigns in which voters will most benefit from a vigorous back-and-forth between candidates.
- If, in fact, triggered matching funds chilled the speech (spending) of traditionally financed candidates one would expect to find candidate spending clustered just below, or just over the trigger level. An exhaustive analysis of campaign spending in Arizona disproves this assumption. Plaintiff testimony also contradicts this assumption.
- Matching funds result in more speech, not less speech. To restrict their use would be antithetical to the First Amendment.
- The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, not freedom from rebuttal. Nothing in the Arizona law limits the nature, or amount, of speech a traditionally funded candidate is allowed -- traditionally funded candidates are free to spend every dollar legally raised, with no upper limit on their expenditures, as opposed to publicly funded candidates who voluntarily agree to a maximum spending limit when they opt in to the Clean Elections program.
Oral arguments in McComish v Bennett are scheduled to be heard by the US Supreme Court on March 28th.
Petitioner and Respondent briefs as well as Amicus briefs can be found at: http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/mccomish_v._bennett/
--Barb Bull, Coffee Party USA West Regional Coordinator
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Coffee Party Collaborates with
Other Organizations
350.org: U.S. Chamber of Commerce Doesn't Speak for Me
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is controlled by Big Polluters, poisons politics with its dirty money, and opposes every single effort to curb climate pollution.
We must expose the Chamber’s dirty business in Washington, DC and discredit their efforts to delay the kind of bold action we need to create a clean energy economy and a safe climate future.
If we can get thousands of small businesses across the country to declare that “The U.S. Chamber Doesn’t Speak for me,” we can get local and state chambers of commerce to do the same. By compiling thousands of declarations, we’ll build a critical mass representing the true voice of business, and fight back against the millions of dollars of money pollution that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pumping into Washington, DC.
Join us at  http://chamber.350.org
On Facebook. http://on.fb.me/hVpodF
Coffee Blog Radio interview with Phil Aroneanu, co-founder of 350.org on Friday, March 11th at 5pm ET.
Public Citizen and Story of Stuff: Story of Citizens United vs. FEC
We love Story of Stuff "Story of Citizens United v. FEC," produced in collaboration with Public Citizen and others. Watch the video (click on the image below), share with 10 friends, and ask them to share with 10 friends, and so on and so on.
Watch for various announcement next week about Public Citizen, including some Coffee Blog Radio interviews.
We also hope to interview Annie Leonard from the Story of Stuff Project soon. Stay tuned!
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Dude, Where's My Card (and bumper sticker)?
I want to thank each and every one of you who participated in Coffee Party USA’s Founding Membership Drive. To say that our goals for this drive were exceeded would be a gross understatement because we did not envision the incredible response that enabled us to raise over $125,000 in just under five weeks!! Again, thank you for your overwhelming support.
I would like to personally thank Tom Dufour from our Pittsburgh, PA chapter for donating his time and creative energy in designing a card and bumper sticker that capture the spirit of Coffee Party USA.
Now you’re probably wondering when you can expect to see your card and bumper sticker show up in the mail. Due to the Founding Member card being a limited one-time run, we had to wait until the drive was completed before we could print all of them in one run. The online portion of the drive ended on Thursday, March 3, and we’re just waiting a couple more days for the last few mail-in memberships to arrive. Giving the printers about a ten-day lead time for the job, I expect that we’ll have the cards and bumper-stickers in the mail around March 23, 2011. I want to thank all of you for your patience in waiting for your card, but I am sure that you will agree that the wait was worth it when you have the finished product in hand.
In closing thank you again for becoming a Founding Member of Coffee Party USA.
David Overcash
Managing Director, Coffee Party USA
national@coffeepartyusa.com
2010 Treasurer's Report
On behalf of Coffee Party USA board and national team, I submit the 2010 financial report with a deep sense of gratitude to all of you who supported the Coffee Party in our very first year of existence. Please take a moment and read our financial statement.
Chris Rigopulos
Director & Treasurer, Coffee Party USA
board@coffeepartyusa.com
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New User's Guide to Twitter:
Part III More on Retweets
 In my last installment, I mentioned manual retweets(RT) as a way to add tags that the original tweeter forgot. Steven Dorst (@sjdorst) replied to me that there was another reason to use manual retweeting. He writes: "There is a much more important reason to retweet manually: To create a conversation with context included. The official 'Retweet' doesn't allow you to add your own thoughts, an RT does - although your addition usually must be VERY short. A reply that you have to edit to fit 140 characters should have 'MT' (modified tweet) instead of 'RT'. Twitter's official Retweet, IMHO, turned Twitter towards being an echo chamber, rather than what, in some cases, is a fascinating conversation. Personally, I use RT (or its cousin MT) when I want to add my own reaction, or when I want my followers to know it came from me. You see, that's the 2nd problem with the 'official' retweet - my followers don't know (without looking at the very fine print) that I am the person calling it to their attention! The Avatar they see is the original tweeter's, not mine." Thank you, Steven, for that valuable advice.
Speaking of the "fine print" that Steven mentioned, Twitter allows multiple ways to find out who has been retweeting and what they are retweeting. First, when a retweet appears in your timeline (the list of most recent posts on your home page from the accounts you are following), the name of the retweeter that brought that post to your attention appears to the right of the name of the original tweeter, just after the retweet symbol.
Second, you can use the Retweets menu at the top of the home page. There you can review which tweets you have retweeted, what posts the people you are following have retweeted, and, most importantly, which of your tweets others have seen fit to propagate.
Finally, you can simply mouse over an individual tweet on your timeline. Click on the small arrow icon in the upper right-hand corner of the tweet, and you will be able to find out all kinds of information about that tweet. First, you'll see who has been retweeting it. Second, you'll see the responses to it. If it's part of a conversation, you'll be able to read the conversation. Finally, Twitter will provide you with the most recent tweets from any accounts being mentioned, along with tweets with any hashtags being used and tweets that contain distinctive phrases used in the tweet. It's amazing the vast amount of information attached to 140 or fewer characters!
If you want to learn more, Mashable has an online guidebook to Twitter. Follow us at @coffeepartyusa!
--Vince Lamb
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Meet the Principles & Purpose Working Group
 Recently, the Principles and Purpose Working Group of the Coffee Party launched its third and last online survey on a set of draft "guiding statements" of the Coffee Party. The Group conducted two earlier "focus group" surveys between November 2010 and January 2011.
The Working Group is a self-organized volunteer advisory committee whose participants have included members of the Coffee Party's National Team; leaders of state and local Coffee Party organizations; and other grassroots Coffee Party thinkers, writers, and activists. The Group came together in August 2010 to engage members of the Coffee Party in a conversation about their hopes and visions for the Coffee Party Movement. Based on member suggestions, comments, and feedback, the Group has been developing draft statements of the Coffee Party's Core Values, Purpose, and high-level strategic Goals. In early April, the Group plans to present final drafts of these statements to the Board of the Coffee Party for its consideration.
Perhaps the best way to think of the Working Group is that it has functioned as a kind of virtual "chapter." Indeed, the three online surveys and the draft statements themselves are but the public face of a project that has been grounded in a rigorous collaborative process for soliciting member input --- in local chapters; on Shared Purpose forums; in breakout sessions at the Louisville convention; and through the surveys --- and then synthesizing those hundreds of member contributions over the course of more than 50 conference calls, usually using facilitated dialogue and deliberation with the Maestro service.
What the Working Group has heard from members -- and what the Group hopes the draft statements reflect -- is twofold: First, a deep awareness that American citizens have been losing power and that American democracy has been getting weaker as a result. Second, a clear recognition that what is required is for citizens to join together in a broad-based movement that both (1) addresses institutional weaknesses -- from Big Money in to politics, to election laws that stack the deck against independent and third-party candidates, to ideologically biased news media -- and that (2) models an approach to political discourse and action that produces wiser, more effective solutions because it engages citizens from the broadest range of perspectives.
The Working Group sees this hunger of Coffee Party members as an affirmation of how strongly Annabel Park's early and continuing description of the Coffee Party as a "democracy movement" resonates with them.
Ultimately, the Group hopes that Coffee Party members at every level -- local, state, and national -- will take up the conversation that it started in August, by thinking about how to flesh out the general Core Values and Goals outlined in the draft statements with concrete and specific plans and actions.
Events from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, to Wisconsin challenge us to do no less.
Download a PDF of the draft guiding statements by clicking here.
Take the survey -- which ends on March 18 -- by clicking here.
To support this project and to contribute to the final draft guiding statements, join the Working Group's forum on Shared Purpose by clicking here.
--John Lumea, SF Bay Area Coffee Party
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Coffee Party LA: How to Maximize Your Resources
In the last issue of the newsletter, we gave an overview of Coffee Party Los Angeles. In this issue we highlight LA's use of committees to maximize the work of our active members. In order to develop an effective campaign on the problem of foreclosures, we formed a Foreclosure Committee with a few volunteers. The committee does its work independently and then reports back to our chapter. This committee system has been important to us because it both conserves and maximizes our precious people resources and makes our meeting as productive as possible.
There are three key tasks for our Foreclosure Committee: 1) research and education; 2) reaching out to community; 3) connecting with officials and various organizations for resource gathering. Research and education include keeping up with current events and legislation and informing our members and the community about the causes of foreclosure and potential solutions. This is done via literature creation and presentations.
The Foreclosure Committee reaches out to our community through our door-knocking campaign. Taking into consideration the personal nature of this issue and the willingness of homeowners to talk to strangers about it, the committee came up with the following strategy: Members first post flyers in a neighborhood that is heavily impacted by foreclosures. The flyers provide some info and a note that states that we will return the following week to listen to homeowners’ stories and offer some resources. The committee did the first few rounds of door-knocking on their own, as a "pilot program," and then they refined the process based on their experiences.
The Foreclosure Committee also attends neighborhood and city council meetings, events by our partners, and housing events hosted by refinancing servicers (nonprofit and HUD approved only). Many of these entities have added to our effort -- by printing our literature or providing us with their literature to add to our resource packets we offer to homeowners, and translating our literature into Spanish or by providing translators for door-knocking.
We also maximize our limited human resources is by sending “representatives” to events where we feel it’s important to have our presence or voice, either to support the effort and do some network building, or to ensure our perspective is represented/heard in places like public hearings or agency board meetings. Our representatives arrive prepared to speak and often submit a written statement for the record. If we are unable to send a representative to an event, we send a statement or letter for the record.
We also form temporary committees to plan events. Temporary committees are tasked with things like making arrangements for event space, promotional materials and outreach, refreshments, program content, and coordinating guest speakers. At our meetings a committee might ask for members to take on specific tasks as we move closer to the event and then volunteers are assigned. Forming committees to handle planning prevents our meetings from being bogged down in these details and better enables us all to address new developments or issues as they arise.
 Ths committee system has literally cut our meeting time in half. Our chapter meetings consist of taking votes on what issues will take precedence and assigning tasks or event attendance to specific members. Aside from intros and other formalities, our basic meeting formula is: 1) reports from events and committees; 2) review of needs for upcoming events; 3) volunteers to form committees or to take assignments; 4) member announcements of upcoming events and potential new agenda items, which are then voted on, and if agreed, are either assigned immediately, if needed, or scheduled to be addressed at the next meeting.
I hope that you found this information useful for your chapter. Now, let's get organized!
--Heather Meyer, LA Coffee Party Coordinator
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