[corp-focus] Activism Inc.

[robert weissman]

Activism Inc.
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Young people, listen up.

For those of you seeking to curb corporate crime and violence --

For those of you seeking to counter the right-wing, corporate drift of 
the country --

For those of you seeking to push back against the Chamber of Commerce, 
the Fortune 500, and the corporate control over the two major political 
parties --

Three words of advice:

Read this book.

Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling 
Progressive Politics in America, by Dana Fisher. (Stanford University 
Press, August 2006).

Fisher is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University in 
New York.

Some people are going to be very angry with this book.

These people would be the institutionalized, bureaucratic, 
inside-the-beltway "liberals."

But for the rest of us, this book is a joy.

It's due out in a couple of weeks.

Fisher's study finds that most of the national environmental, student 
and progressive groups have shut down their internal grassroots 
operations and outsourced door-to-door fundraising to a handful of large 
national canvass operations.

Fisher says these national canvassing operations are the point of entry 
for hundreds of young, idealistic and politically aware people.

But instead of funneling these people into a lifetime of progressive 
politics, more often than not the national canvass operations, run as 
secretive corporate top-down bureaucracies, burn their idealism and spit 
them out onto the trash heap of politics.

Fisher was given access to one of the major groups -- she calls it the 
People's Project.

She explains in a footnote that "due to my data gathering agreement with 
this organization, its identity will remain anonymous. Throughout the 
book, it will be referred to as 'the People's Project' or 'the Project.'"

The People's Project clients include major environmental, public 
interest and human rights groups.

The Project runs between 55 and 75 campaign offices around the country 
and hires more than 275 primarily young canvassers a year -- mostly in 
the summer months.

And Fisher is not happy with its organizing model.

"How can the People's Project run effective grassroots campaigns that 
are coordinated by rootless workaholics?" she asks. "Instead of 
connecting canvass offices to pre-existing local progressive 
institutions through its canvass directors, the People's Project chooses 
to move them around regularly."

"When I asked the canvass directors if they participated in any local 
political or civic work outside of their jobs, most laughed at me, 
pointing out that they rarely had time to sleep or do their laundry, let 
alone volunteer or attend community meetings," she writes.

Fisher concedes that these large national canvassing operations didn't 
create the problem.

The problem was with their clients -- the large public interest 
organizations that have little real contact with their membership base 
to begin with.

Or as one former adviser to the John Kerry for President campaign told 
Fisher: "None of these organizations can actually produce two bodies 
usually when they need to."

"Given their failure to elicit action from their members, it is unclear 
how much actual political clout should be assigned to these national 
groups based on their members numbers," Fisher writes. "Threats by these 
national groups' lobbyists that their members will strike, protest or 
even vote according to their position on an issue could be called into 
question. … By outsourcing these outreach tactics, the distance between 
progressive Americans and politics today has grown significantly. In 
other words, most members recruited through canvassing do not develop 
personal ties to the organizations they join. True membership, in 
contrast, involves participation that extends beyond making a monetary 
contribution, including meaningful engagement at the local, regional 
and/or national level."

And by outsourcing the canvass operations, the public interest groups 
also undermined their own recruiting efforts.

Case in point: Greenpeace USA.

At one point, Greenpeace ran its own canvass.

But then it outsourced it to a national canvass operation.

Mistake.

Greenpeace USA's executive director, John Passacantando, has 
subsequently brought the canvass back inside Greenpeace.

"The Greenpeace canvass served as a feeder track for hungry, smart 
people who would one day run Greenpeace campaigns and even run 
Greenpeace. We lost something huge when we shut down our canvass," 
Passacantando told Fisher a couple of years ago. "It is not a secret. So 
many of the heavyweights throughout the Greenpeace world have started in 
our canvass. It served an amazing purpose. And we are now tasked with 
finding other ways to bring people in."

Fisher has some unkind words for Democratic operatives who outsourced 
the 2004 grassroots presidential campaign that parachuted hundreds of 
out-of-state canvassers into Midwestern states -- and alienated local 
residents.

She compares that failed strategy with the winning Republican Party 
72-hour plan that tapped into already existing local civic and political 
infrastructures.

Fisher also discounts the "man" and "messages" explanations for why 
progressives have been routinely routed by right-wing Republicans in 
recent years.

Waiting for the charismatic candidate to come around means waiting a 
long time.

And even if the leader arrives, "rebuilding civil society requires 
people talking and listening to each other, not blindly following a 
hero" -- as former Senator Bill Bradley put it.

Then there is the weak message theory -- this is the George Lakoff, 
Geoffrey Nunberg school.

Or as Nunberg puts it in the title of his new book: Talking Right: How 
Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, 
Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times Reading, Body-Piercing, 
Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

But Fisher says its not as much the man, or the message, as it is the 
members -- the grassroots.

And we've corporatized them.

And processed them.

And disdained them.

Now, she wants to reclaim them.

"As civic and political organizations have become increasingly 
professionalized, the ways that they engage their members have become 
less personal," Fisher writes. "Most national progressive groups do not 
require any actual participation from their members beyond writing checks."

She quotes citizen activist Harry Boyte: "politics has largely become a 
spectator sport run by professionals with disdain for ordinary people."

Time to bypass the beltway.

Go straight to the grassroots.

Read this book.

And then let's start anew.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime 
Reporter, <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>. Robert Weissman is 
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, 
<http://www.multinationalmonitor.org> and director of Essential Action 
<http://www.essentialaction.org>, which helped organize the tobacco 
awards ceremony. Mokhiber and Weissman are co-authors of On the Rampage: 
Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy (Monroe, Maine: 
Common Courage Press).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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