Fairness Action Network 12 April 2014 at 19:45 PREFACE “A well informed educated citizenry that participates in its own solutions and governance is the foundation of a free and fair democracy. Towards this end we intend to create the framework for community level, education based civic empowerment. This framework or organization will help people learn how to access and share information and turn local community based groups into citizen lobbyists and a citizen press core.” While this document covers a wide array of ideas for building local civic organizations that empower people to participate in building a more loving society, it is meant as a suggestion not a roadmap. The main idea is to get people meeting face to face and sharing strength, courage and information especially about how our systems of government work. People fear what they do not understand so we should work to create more understanding. Using local meetings, Open Mic Nights and other community activities we can bring people together to create a culture of empowerment and participation. If we find candidates among us as the result of these activities we will have an organic year round support mechanism to help them get elected based on mutually understood priorities. Imagine This: Your neighbor who you like and talk to frequently about the bad jobs market, high price of education these days or maybe the rising costs of everything hands you a colorful flyer with a catchy title like “Love is our bottom line!” and he says “this sounds like it could be fun, let’s go to it this weekend!” You look at the flyer and reading further it says “Join our neighborhood Fairness Action Network meetup and meet a positive group of friends and neighbors working to make our community and Country more civil and fair and healthy for everyone! Activities will include a movie followed by a lively discussion. It’s our community, our Schools and Parks and Shops! We will talk about how to help create more good jobs, help our Students and Schools and make our elected representatives hear our voices! Refreshments will be served!” So you show up and you are greeted with a smile by a friendly face and handed a name tag to fill out and noticing other friends and neighbors sporting their name tags you slap yours on. There’s a big paper banner on the wall that says “We Care About Making Things Fair!” another says “Love is our bottom line!” and you sit down as the meeting starts. The moderator welcomes everyone saying something about how We Are All In This Together and how we can stand together as friends, neighbors and citizens to make a difference and make things better! The moderator talks about how we are going to work together to create good paying local jobs, work for fair labor standards and protect womens rights to equal pay and fair treatment in the workplace and work on other issues including protecting the environment and working towards a tax system that is fair, ending the war in Afghanistan and stopping predatory banking and foreclosures in our town. The group shows a movie about an important topic like getting Big Money Out of our Politics or Howard Zinns You Can’t Be In Neutral On A Moving Train about citizen activism in America or a speaker does a reading from a book. Next, an Open Mic session where a free exchange of ideas and opinions follows where you stand up and speak your mind and people hear you and acknowledge your ideas. The group leader reminds everyone that if they want their ideas and priorities to be heard in government then we must get the influence of big money out of it together! Then people break up into small work groups and are given handbooks with helpful resources like a checklist to fill out to list who all your local, state and federal elected officials are and where they have open meetings. It’s like a Citizen’s Handbook! You’re asked to google the information before the next meeting and bring your Fairness Action Network handbook back with you next week. You mingle with and meet new friends and drink some punch and share some cookies. You walk out of the meeting into the sunshine and know you are part of making things better! WHY WE NEED TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY The Status Quo is IMMORAL. It just barely maintaining the ability of the poor, old, students and working people to sustain ourselves in an increasingly unhealthy unrewarding standard of living. Everyone knows this and wants things to change. So while we are fighting to stop the slide downward into more poverty and poor health and we are watching the rungs of the latter to economic opportunity being sawed off, we are are responding by mounting a piecemeal defense. When Women are attacked women respond with protests, when public civil servants are attacked and Unions busted then their friends and families respond with protests and recalls. When Social Security and Medicare is attacked with the Ryan Budget and Republicans voting to end them and ship their money to Wall Street seniors and progressives respond with Petitions. When people are illegally foreclosed on and people are fired in the millions while health insurance becomes more expensive than rent, Occupy takes to the streets! It is time my friend that we all realize we are one. We are in this together. We are strong when we are united beyond Women or Students or anyone besieged group. We must come together as a united awakened community that realizes not only has our society been Rigged against us but our prospects of a dignified healthy life have been extracted from us by force by a well organized massively wealthy corporate right wing coalition. Our greatest strength is a united well informed community. We need to All come together and now. If only the rich can go to school and only the lucky can get and keep good jobs, if health insurance and college tuition have gone up over 600% since 1980 while our real term earnings have gone up 200% in the same time, if 97% of the gains in the economic recovery have gone to just 1% of our populous it is because of the corruption of our government by these monopolies and so they must be broken up using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act now! Too Big To Fail is too big to exist. WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO Coming Together And Participating Participating in supporting politicians or holding them accountable must not be relegated to a massively expensive brief period of activity preceding elections. Instead, we need to create a habit and culture of citizen action. We need an easy and easily accessible way for people to meet in every town and city to work on educating our neighbors, and empowering each other to claim our birthright as Americans to a free and fair society that works for the many instead only the few. We can do this together by strengthening our communities by educating ourselves, doing massively coordinated effective media outreach, group communicating with elected officials and helping people who are current system has failed. We can win by being United, in solidarity with the ideal of Fairness for all! The goal of this effort as I see it is creating a culture of participation, and service to others that respects differences and embraces diversity through education and creative good works. To Have The System Work For You, You have To Understand How The System Works We can we help people work together cooperatively and collaboratively to make our governments work for all of us but first all of us need to understand how our Government works. We need to educate ourselves and our neighbors about who our elected officials are from School Boards to City Council to the United States Congress. We can start by learning who our representatives are and when and where they meet publicly so we can show up and speak up as informed active members of our communities. So the first step is coming together locally and helping each other learn the basics ie being a citizen. Everyone attending local meetings receives a handbook where they can record this information. A Well Informed Citizenry We can no longer accept the premise that we can cast a single vote and expect our elected representatives to fix our problems and guide our Country down a Just and noble path while we go about our lives other activities. Our Country and our challenges are too large to put our future in the hands so few and ask them to deal wisely and fairly while the majority of us pay attention to other things. The news media though it’s more diverse than ever before is run as a Corporate for profit enterprise. There is little profit in taking the time and spending the money to inform citizens about complex and important choices and challenges facing every American. The people can little afford to take the time to sift through the entertainment and frequently biased “news for profit” choices we are given so we can know what is about happen to us if our representatives fail to succeed. So rather than having a Free Press we have an Expensive and purchased Press that has sold us out to the highest bidding corporate sponsor. We must therefore take matters into our own hands as responsible participating citizens and work to inform ourselves and our neighbors by become our own reporters. We can learn to interview our elected representatives, local business owners, educators, healthcare providers and neighbors and tell the “real” story about the crises and challenges we face as Americans. We can ask the “really important” questions that reveal the true costs of living in a society where the rules are bought and bent by those with the most power, wealth and influence. We can share these reports by writing our stories and interviews on our news network website, reporting on our local radio programs and uploading videos to resources like youtube. Let us meet in local gatherings as friends and neighbors and activists and work collaboratively to participate in our own solutions. So we have taken the steps to become citizen reporters and informed about our own problems at the City, State and Federal level and we have worked to educate ourselves about who our elected representatives are and where they meet. Then as local groups we can attend these governmental open hearings and use the information we have learned in our investigations and interviews to address our concerns with the people we have hired to represent us. Let us speak to them not as servants we expect to solve our every problem but as partners we will work with to solve them together! AREAS OF UNITED COMMITMENT AND FOCUS There are many areas where we can work together to create a more fair and just society together. When we do so we will be up against well funded organized interests who seek to cash in on Americans rather than invest in us. We must form our own coalitions to oppose them and push back their gains in: >The Supreme Court Maintain a Democrat in the White House to preserve the chance to reverse Citizens United and protect Womens Choice over their own bodies and preserve privacy rights and repeal the Patriot Act, to stop Corporations from completely claiming all Constitutional Rights previously Only given to human beings. >Our National Media We must massively fund and expand Public Radio and TV and make lying to voters on TV during campaigns illegal to protect the voters rights to a fair and free election. We must push the narrative by doing our own research and investigations and bringing the most important stories to light so our National Media can begin to ask the right questions. Creating our own Network of Citizen Reporters we can tell the real and important stories of everyday people who are suffering the impact of a broken and rigged system. We can tell these stories with Blog Articles, with videos uploaded from our cell phones to your Youtube Channel and on our own Radio Broadcasts and Podcasts. We can make the stories of the truth of life in America today interesting, dramatic, even humorous to get our stories told and shared! We must be be the Free Press! >Our Universities and Public Schools A well informed educated citizenry is the foundation of a free democracy. Higher Education should be publicly funded from K to BA Degree! A college education is the only path to economic upward mobility and building an expanding Middle Class and is a matter of National Security as much as the National Military is. Ideas should be discussed and promoted to reduce or forgive Student Loan Debt and create a program where employers can pay into a College Fund for employees and have it be tax deductible! >Our State Senators and Governors Mansions We must elect people to the Executive Branches of our States who believe in and defend the Public Commons and investing in a well educated middle class that enjoys a living wage, Equality and a sustainable environmentally friendly community. >Monopolies in Telecommunications, Banking and Energy Monopolies are antithetical to a free democracy and free market. The consolidation of wealth in fewer and fewer businesses and Citizens Uniteds license to use that wealth to influence our electoral system spells the end of our democracy. >Stop Foreclosures The Banks have gambled recklessly on our economy and having lost they’ve bullied the American people via our Government into making good on their losses. As a result the entire economy has suffered a massive blow which caused millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules to lose their jobs and not be able to keep up with their mortgage payments. Many of the Banks then participated in mass fraud with illegal “Robo-Signing’ of foreclosures and fraudulent statements to the Property Title offices. Work must be done in every municipality to help people who are victims of this behavior keep their houses and to hold the offending Banks responsible for this egregious crime against our communities. >Corporate Responsibility We all support Corporations either by investing in them directly or by being customers of them. In many cases do to the emergence of monopolies and as a result our limited choices as consumers we have little to no choice of where we can spend our money. But we can vote with our dollars and as recent boycotts from Rush Limbaugh to ALEC have shown these actions can be effective! In California the formation of a new type of Corporation known as the B Corporation let’s Corporate Charters put other factors besides shareholder profits as their top priorities. This means a Corporation can put their customers, their workers and the environment on an even basis with shareholder profits whereas the standard Corporation must by law put shareholder earnings above everything else. We must do what we can to see that the B Corporation becomes the new norm and those Corporations are supported while others are not. Corporations are Not People and people and their needs and human dignity and fairness must come before profits. >PLEASE ADD YOUR AREA OF FOCUS HERE! RESOURCES WEBSITE Every local Charter Organization or Group of the Fairness Action Network will have access to the National Organization Website where their group will have its own Community Group where it can: Share and upload Flyers and Documents such as group rosters, lists of local elected officials and their meeting places and times and more. Their own Blog where they can share updates on their meetings, write about issues they care about and are working on, share news about local events in their communities and more. Events Listing and RSVP software where they can list their meetings and let people RSVP to them and coordinate their events! Fundraising software that allows the group to raise funds to fund their local efforts! A Forum where they can post topics of importance to them and follow up on issues easily. A Newsletter so they can keep their members up to date on meetings and projects and news! MEDIA GUIDE Every local Charter Organization will in their handbooks have a list of suggested Books and Movies to use in their groups for Discussion Nights. What Movies and Books do you recommend we start this list with? Gasland- a great documentary about the issue of Fraking. More? More? More? ACTIVISM TUTORIALS Video and written tutorials will be created and shared that help people learn how to get involved in speaking out and showing up and helping make a difference! These could be created by all members and uploaded to the National Website in our Wiki Page so it can be shared easily. These could include but not be limited to: How to join an Occupy Event and participate. How to do a Mic Check as a protest How to write a letter to the editor How to call into radio talk shows and get your point across effectively How to talk to the Media if you are ever interviewed How to show up and speak at public hearings How to make signs How to register to vote and register others How to work with and influence your local political party How to work on community sustainability projects like community food gardens How to phone bank and canvas during elections How to stage public events that are safe and effective How to write and send a press release and increase the chances the press show up! How to hold a meeting in a respectful orderly way that encourages free speech How to have an open mic night to attract new members and ideas Compiling a list of who your elected representatives are and where and when they meet publicly. People such as City Council, School Board, State Assembly and U.S. Congress. How to grow and or find affordable nutritious food and make it available to hungry people in one’s community. How to interview elected officials using cell phone cameras and upload the videos to our Youtube Channel. How to fight illegal and immoral home foreclosures and help organizations doing this. Where to find organizations providing health services for women and the uninsured in your area and how to support these organizations. How to hold a local “Meet Up” where people can talk and learn together in a respectful atmosphere. Working to get local and state resolutions that Corporations are Not people. How to hold movie discussion nights and compiling a list of informative powerful videos to show at them. How to find out what people’s strengths are in your groups and keep them interested. How to talk to the media and get your point across and look and sound good doing it. Holding Direct Protest Actions that “change the conversation” politically. And more! Please add more! ? ? VIDEO REPORTING AND SHARING Every chapter will have the ability to create their own Radio Broadcast via internet Radio software. They can use this to produce their own radio show interviewing their members and guests about the areas of focus they are engaged in. Archives of these shows can be uploaded to their group Blog to share with their members and the general public! Members would be encouraged to share these broadcasts on Twitter, Facebook and via email. A user guide can be produced and made available for Chapters giving them an outline of how to present a short radio broadcast. Members could record videos using cell phone cameras or other devices of their meetings or events or interviews with community members and upload these to a Youtube Channel. Creating compelling personal stories on video is a very powerful way of getting our messages out to the world! POSTSCRIPT ABOUT THE NAME My first thought after talking with my friend Lisa, was the central focus and theme of this effort could revolve around the idea of Equality. This is after all what we need and want is a Country that respects the Equal status of everyone and preserves and equal level playing field that gives everyone equal access to opportunity and a dignified life! Then I remembered a conversation I had with one of my conservative cousins recently where he remarked, “Equality? They tried that in Soviet Russia making everyone get the same pay and that didn’t work then and it won’t work here in America!” as I heard the FOX Tv echoing in his brain. I explained that Equality did not mean equally handing out resources and salaries but it meant ensuring fair and equal access to opportunity for all. The point is given the massive disinformation efforts by the FOX and Right Wing Radio folks around the word Equality too many people can read into it their own misconceptions and that creates a bigger hill for us to climb to achieve our goals. However it’s my experience that every American understands the word FAIRNESS and what it means and that if you took a Poll you would find near unanimous agreement across party lines that life should be Fair in America for everyone. That is why I am suggesting and recommending we use the title Fairness Action Network. Yes, it also has the added benefit of creating the acronym of FAN as in “Be A FAN- Join the Fairness Action Network!” which is very “brandable/memorable”. A focus on creating more Fairness in how we treat each other resonates well whether it be for Womens Rights, Marriage Equality and LGBT rights, Living Wage Jobs and fair labor practices, treatment of Seniors and Retirees and everything else we care about! Fair is Fair! And for those people who say “Life isn’t Fair” I say Life is what we make of it! So those are my thoughts on how we might build a new country from the grass roots up. Love to read yours sometime.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 21:05:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015