Well, I’ve decided there must be a reason I can’t bring myself to blog. I figure I’m either one of those Obamazombies in that hilarious Onion video or it’s because I’m still trying to get through this fascinating and very long series in Newsweek that takes us behind-the-scenes of the Obama and McCain campaigns (though, I probably should just wait for the movie).

Regardless, I’m sure I’ll snap out of it soon. I’m feeling too good about where this country is headed. Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I read things like how Obama is going to move quickly to reverse the Bush administration’s policies on stem cell research and offshore drilling. Am I dreaming?

Anyways, as Will.i.am says, “It’s a new day.”

I decided that I wasn’t going to sit this election out. If Sen. Barack Obama loses this election, I wanted to be able to look myself in the eye the next day and say that I did everything I could. So, I hooked up with two other D.C.-area folks and drove down to Salem, Va. a few days ago to help get the vote out for Obama.

Salem and next-door Roanoke are red Virginia. These precincts won’t be blue on election night but if we can turn out some numbers here, it may help turn Virginia blue for the first time since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won the state.

One of the campaign’s rules is that you can’t blog about your experiences as a GOTV volunteer. So, I won’t. All I’ll say is that my feet are a little sore from all the walking I did today. I’ll be doing a lot more over the next four days.

If you’re planning to vote for Obama or already have, that’s great. But you should consider spending some time in the next few days volunteering for the campaign. There’s still time to get involved and we need all the help we can get.

You can find out how to volunteer at the Obama website or you can contact a group like MoveOn.org. You’ll meet great, passionate people, like my new friends above, and you’ll have done your part, win or lose, in the most important election of our lifetime.

Photo by Joe Newman.

Ed, who I’m guessing was in his 70s at the time, had a problem. The city was going to tear down his house. More of a shack, really. It was what they called a nuisance property. No electricity. Garbage strewn about the yard; broken windows, busted boards, peeling paint. It didn’t smell too good, either.

But it kept the rain off his head and it kept him off the street. It was home, and Ed wasn’t sure what he was going to do if the city tore it down. Ed was alone. No family. No friends. No place to go after his house was gone.

Could I help him?

A photographer and I hung out with Ed, talked to him about his predicament and took pictures. I remember the pictures very well: Powerful black and white images of Ed sitting in a chair on his porch surrounded by junk. The story that I wrote, not so much.

Back then, I thought journalism could save the world. Write stories, print them in the newspaper and the power of the words and images could move mountains or, at least, call some attention to someone like Ed’s plight. I don’t remember what happened to Ed. My guess is the city tore his shack down and Ed ended up on the street. Maybe a social worker gave him directions to a shelter and the soup kitchen.

I was young and self-absorbed and didn’t really think of the other things I could have done to help Ed. I couldn’t see beyond the front page. I won’t say I’ve lived with regret because I haven’t thought of Ed too much over the years. But thinking back today, I wish I had done more.

That’s the difference between my life now and the one I led as a journalist. As a reporter, you use your mantle of “objectivity” and role of “impartial” observer as an excuse not to get personally involved; not to pick a side.

I still believe in the power of words and images but when it comes down to it, the question is always, what are we going to do about it? Will writing a check to a nonprofit help? Yes. Will donating old clothes or canned goods to charity help? Yes. Will buying a homeless person a sandwich help? Yes.

You don’t have to make a grand gesture or give more than you can afford. Some simple actions can make a difference, if not in the long run, at least for the moment.

I’m willing to bet that anything you do to move the conversation in your country, in your city, in your neighborhood, on your block toward addressing poverty will help. Today, thousands of bloggers around the world are writing about poverty.

Liberals, conservatives, moderates, parents, college students, retirees — the whole melting pot of the blogosphere is coming together for Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty.

It’s only words and pictures but the conversation has to begin somewhere. Spend some time reading what people have to say about poverty today and then ask yourself, “What am I going to do about it?”

This was no Battle in Seattle. No Combat in the Capitol. Not even a dust up in D.C. Despite a lot of Internet chatter, the planned late night march aimed at waking up the delegates to the International Monetary Fund looked like a bust by the time I left about 2 a.m. Of course, all hell might have broken loose afterwards but with the district po-po out in force, the small band of protesters would have been badly outnumbered.

The few dozen activists who gathered at DuPont Circle at 1 a.m. were outnumbered by the police a good three to one. The traffic circle around the park was lined with police cars and the area around the fountain was ringed with police motorcycles. There were also at least 20 bike cops at the ready.

The D.C. cops were clearly hoping that their show of force would serve as a deterrent to any anarchists looking to incite some civil disorder. And if the sight of all those cops didn’t do it, there was the cop-in-charge, pictured above, who made a point to tell the college-aged crowd that they could (would?) be arrested if they stepped off the sidewalk during the protest.

Organizers had urged people to get rowdy and loud with the plan to march to the hotels where the IMF delegates were supposedly sleeping.

Bring noisemakers to wake up the caretakers of global capitalism and tell them they’re not welcome in DC!

NO PEACE FOR THE BANK!
NO SLEEP FOR THE ELITE!

The IMF and World Bank delegates gathered in Washington where they warned of a global economic meltdown:

“Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest U.S.-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown,” IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

To learn more about the IMF and why their policies benefit the powerful at the expense of the third world, visit the U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice.

[Update: Linda at FanaticAttack and Will at Vox Populi both blog about the protest.]

Photo by Joe Newman

Change.org launched its redesigned Web site this week. I never spent too much time on their old site, so I can’t really compare the before and after. However, what I’ve seen of the after is pretty encouraging.

I’m not quite sure how many more social networks I can maintain without suffering serious overload but I’m going to give this one a tryout period.

Again, I can’t really remember what the old site was like because I had only logged onto it a couple times but I don’t recall it being content driven. That has changed with the redesign, which revolves around several staff blogs, each focused on a pressing social (progressive) issue, such as human rights, fair trade and stopping global warming, among others.

Will becoming a content provider, while providing a social network for progressive activists and a fundraising tool for nonprofits be a successful mix? It’s not a new concept but I think the difference here may be in the execution.

Compare the new Change.org format to Care2 or Idealist. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison but I think in this case, the folks at Change were quicker to realize the power in more tightly integrating all three concepts of content, social network and nonprofit tool.

Is there room for all three of these sites to prosper, since they are competing for basically the same audience? And while we’re at it, we should throw Facebook’s Causes application in the mix.

Of the four, Change and Care2 seem to be in more direct competition. Both now provide content, though in different manners. Change produces more original content, while Care2 is an aggregator, like Digg.

And while Care2 has an active social network and drives a lot of visitors looking for content, they’re also apparently making some changes in response, perhaps, to Change and Facebook’s Causes. If you visit Care2, you’ll notice that they are preparing to launch a “causes we care about” feature.

The measures of success for sites like Change and Care2 will be how much traffic they can generate, how successful they are as fundraising and call-to-action tools for nonprofits and their ability to build a membership base that is willing to maintain their social profiles at least once a week.

From my perspective as Joe citizen, I will probably not maintain an active profile on more than one of these sites, since my time is already spread pretty thin. From my perspective as a non-profit media strategist, my organization probably needs to be involved with all the sites until we can determine which one(s) gives us the most bang for our buck.

It’s one thing for someone to “join” a cause or nonprofit through one of these social networks and it’s an entirely different thing to cultivate an active and engaged member.

Venture Beat posts about the change at Change.org

[Update: Literally seconds afer I made this post, I saw Max Gladwell's tweet about the same subject. Check out his excellent post on the subject.]

So I considered suspending my blog and offering my services to Congressional leaders to help them hammer out a sensible solution to our looming economic disaster.

But they didn’t really seem interested in what I had to say. So screw ‘em. I decided to march to the White House to protest the $700 billion bailout, instead.

I blogged about Thursday’s bailout protest over at Citizen Vox, where I write as part of my day gig. The turnout for the protest was light — the rain probably kept a lot of folks away — but don’t misread that as a lack of anger about this unbelievable bailout plan.

People are plenty angry.

There were protests across the country Thursday. CNN’s John King writes about the bailout revolt on AC360 from Montana. A rancher tells King:

“We’re responsible for our debts out here. We pay our debts,” Rieder says. “I think George Bush himself said they got drunk on Wall Street. Well, they ought to suffer the hangover like we have to every day out here.”

In NYC, the Campaign Silo blogs about the march on Wall Street where the protest motto was “Buy my shitpile”:

Protesters said they wanted a chance to sell their bad investments back to the government for millions of dollars, just like the Wall Street bankers.

This bit of street theater was intended to underscore the message that ordinary people need a bailout and not just corporations, Asked what message he hoped to send, activist Andrew Boyd said, “We hope to show that Americans all across the country beginning to realize what this means, that we’re basically foreclosing on our future. We want people to take a long breath and make sure that Main Street is prioritized in this crisis.”

I’m not an economist. I’m not smarter than Ben Bernanke or Henry Paulson. I know that something needs to be done to keep our economy from going into the tank, or deeper into the tank, as the case may be. But why do I feel like I’m sitting in that little room in the car dealership where the manager is trying to give me a “deal” but only if I sign that day? Or maybe it’s deja vu. Isn’t this how President Bush tried to sell us his war in Iraq?

The difference is that this time around, Congress is on its own. Main Street’s not buying the dog and pony show a second time. Wasn’t it President Bush who famously said “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

We’re about to spend $700 billion on a plan that was exactly 3-pages long when it was given to Congress this week? I’ve bullshitted my way through college essay tests with more thought and detail than that. Isn’t anyone a little concerned about how quickly this deal is being rammed down our throats?

Isn’t anyone concerned that Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted to make himself King? Should we trust Paulson — a former CEO of Goldman Sachs whose net worth was estimated by Forbes in 2006 at $700 million — to do what’s best for Main Street, or do what’s best for his buddies on Wall Street? But I’m just another liberal. What do I know? How about someone like conservative pundit Michelle Malkin:

Both parties in Washington are about to screw us over on an unprecedented scale. They are threatening us with fiscal apocalypse if we don’t fork over $700 billion to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and allow him to dole it out to whomever he chooses in whatever amount he chooses — without public input or recourse. They are rushing like mad to cram this Mother of All Bailouts down our throats in the next 72-96 hours. And right there in the text of the proposal is this naked power grab: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Is it just a coincidence that all 435 members of the U.S. House and a third of the Senate are up for re-election and all of them were eager to adjourn and get out of D.C. this week to hit the campaign trail?

Slow down people. Let’s think this one through before we hand Wall Street a blank check.

Photos by Joe Newman

]]> http://www.anotherdeadcanary.com/2008/09/whats-a-few-billion-dollars-between-friends/feed/ 4