Occupy Sandy and mutual aid

Posted on November 26, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Piotr Kropotkin was an anarchist because he believed that absent government, people would help each other.  Born a Russian noble, Kropotkin renounced his title and spent his life as an activist and theorist, and proclaimed his allegiance to poor.  He saw government, which extracted wealth and started wars, as the problem.

The solution was in the people.  Everywhere Kropotkin looked, in Siberia where he worked as a scientist and bureaucrat, and in the animal kingdom, he saw Mutual Aid.  Absent government coercion, people helped each other, building sustainable and humane societies.

For one strain of anarchists, the work to be done was not only to resist government, but also to build alternative networks for addressing social problems.

Occupy activists in New York have worked to rise to the challenges of Superstorm Sandy.  Occupy Sandy is an effort at mutual aid, directed explicitly to the people most affected by the storm.  Occupiers have collected and distributed relief, including food.  And for Thanksgiving, Occupy Sandy organized meals in affected neighborhoods in New York City.  Occupy Wall Street has forged an alliance with the environmental group, 350.org, to organize for action on climate change while providing relief.

Maintaining a presence in Zuccotti Park is simple compared to building the infrastructure needed to take on a large relief effort.  Occupiers have been raising money and building the expertise needed to make these efforts work, organizing meals, entertainment, and fundraising efforts.

In the large wake of Sandy, all of these efforts are welcome, necessary, and possible.  Over a longer haul, it’s hard to see any of this working as an ongoing volunteer effort.  People have jobs outside the relief effort.  Those who stay inside the relief effort will specialize, develop relationships with funders (likely including government at all levels), and find routines to do their jobs more effectively.  It’s hard to balance advocacy and service.

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Occupy and the 2012 elections

Posted on November 23, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Unlike the Tea Party, the Occupy movement wasn’t visibly invested in the elections.  Occupy groups didn’t endorse candidates, even candidates who came out of the Occupations.  Occupy groups didn’t raise money for the elections, didn’t form PACs, much less SuperPacs, and didn’t buy television ads.  While the Tea Party’s showing was a disappointment to its activists–and still a threat to the Republican Party, the elections were more or less a sideshow for Occupy.

But politicians responded to the pressures of Occupy, at least for a while.  President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in early December as the encampments were evacuated, marked a dramatic shift in focus for the White House.  From a desperate and defensive focus on the deficit, Obama moved to talk about the problem of gross and growing economic inequality.  This was more difficult territory for his Republican opponents to address, as Mitt Romney demonstrated in his unfortunate remarks about the 47 percent of Americans who were addicted to government.  (It turned out that it was Governor Romney who won about 47 percent of the popular vote.)

From time to time, Occupy protesters would turn up at candidate events, including the national conventions.  They didn’t get much attention most of the time, but occasionally a well-choreographed mic check could fluster a candidate, as you’ll see in Michele Bachmann’s response to an unanticipated mic check below.

Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy didn’t divide its support among candidates for office.  Barack Obama was unchallenged for the Democratic nomination, and while Occupiers occasionally challenged him theatrically, they didn’t mount an organized effort to defeat him at the polls.  A few Occupiers ran for office, without much attention or success.  A somewhat larger group of regular politicians expressed their identification with Occupy, most notably Massachusetts new senator, Elizabeth Warren.  But these candidates used Occupy to amplify issues they already cared about, and defined Occupy in their own terms.  Senator Warren, for example, campaigned for strong regulation of Wall Street, not the end of capitalism.

Occupy pushed Obama to the left, and that helped him; indeed, when Romney tried to move a little to the left, that helped him as well.  Occupy may be able to claim some of the credit.

Over at Mobilizing Ideas, Jen Schradie credits Occupy with the formulation and passage of Proposition 30 in California, which provided a temporary tax hike that would forestall even more extensive cuts to public education.  Championed by Governor Jerry Brown, the proposition raised income taxes only on the very wealthy, but also provided for an increase in the sales tax for everyone.  Schradie sees a worker-student alliance that forced the trustees not to raise tuition–this year, and will provide a basis for further action.

I’m not convinced.  Governor Brown negotiated a poll-tested proposal with the California Teachers Union, which spent and advertised heavily.  The victory (54.7%) was significant (maintaining an enrollment of 32 in my daughter’s 3rd grade class), but voters resoundingly rejected a more progressive and more permanent solution to the ongoing California budget crisis for education (Proposition 38, which was trounced).  Proposition 30 was a temporary relief from a crisis in public higher education, but hardly a massive progressive victory.  It was exactly the kind of pragmatic stopgap solution we’d expect from a centrist governor, and absolutely not the kind of visionary change in direction we’d expect from a successful social movement.

But passing Proposition 30–and reelecting President Obama–were still infinitely preferable to the alternatives for most Occupiers.  It’s not really clear how much Occupy had to do with these outcomes.  The higher-than-expected turnout of young voters in one hint of potential influence.

The indirect influence, however, makes it hard for Occupy to enforce claims on the president or Congress.  As the campaign continued, Obama ran against Romney more than for a broad new agenda.  He now has some political space to define just what that means.  If President Obama pushes for strong investment in public goods, including education, and a more progressive tax system, that would support the Occupy case. If instead we hear about grand bargains and cuts in entitlements, well, that’s another story.

And the next question will be whether Occupy can reemerge to maintain a voice for Occupiers’ ideas.

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Workers of the world (at least Europe) unite

Posted on November 14, 2012 by David S. Meyer

For Marx and Engels, “workers of the world unite” was invective.  Today it’s descriptive.  Across Europe, but particularly in countries implementing harsh austerity regimes,

Confrontation in Madrid

workers are taking to the streets, sometimes landing in violent clashes with police.

The global financial crisis that started in 2009 has been much worse in most of Europe than in the United States, and Germany, which houses the strongest economy in the Euro, has demanded strict austerity from economies in trouble.  Governments in Southern Europe, in response to these pressures, have tried to cut state spending, eliminating jobs, cutting pensions and public works, and enacting reforms that have hit working people more heavily than creditors.  The promise is that strict fiscal discipline will save the Euro, help the governments of the richer countries convince their publics to pay for financial bailouts, and ultimately restore economic health.

But most of the people in the countries that have borne the worst of the crash see austerity

protesters throw gas bombs in Athens

as bringing high unemployment, reduced services, including education and health care, and an overall decline in the quality of life.  They see the young people who can leaving the country for better opportunities elsewhere, perhaps never to return.  “Ultimately” seems a long way away, and those who look beyond their own struggles observe that austerity doesn’t seem to be generating jobs anywhere.

demonstrators try to block trains in Belgium

Today, very large numbers have poured out into the streets, including hundreds of thousands in Madrid,  with tens of thousands in virtually every major city in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece, and smaller sympathy demonstrations in France, Belgium, and throughout the rest of Europe.  Although the overwhelming majority of the protesters are nonviolent, there are millions of people in the streets across Europe, and they’re angry.  They’ve shut down mass transit and production; it really is a general strike.

Austerity and anger created the opportunity for protests to spread, but they still have to be organized; the large trade unions have taken the lead in organizing and coordinating activities.  Labor has been much slower to build alliances across borders than business and banking, so these responses to the financial crisis may be a critical turning point for politics and governance.

Will it matter?  How?

The Wall Street Journal cites analysts who say that organized labor, declining in size and power, will have little impact in staving off austerity, that the disruptions will be a sideshow on the way to a better way.  But the San Francisco Chronicle has published a Bloomberg report announcing that the European Commission has promised more bailout aid and no new cuts–at least immediately.

The protests make it harder for elected governments to do what Germany is telling them they must do.  They are also demonstrating–to Germany and the rest of the world–why it’s so hard.  They may well strengthen the spine of politicians (watch France’s Francois Hollande) inclined to stand up against the austerity regime.

One certainty is that what analysts and politicians say is impossible today may be radically different tomorrow–depending upon how long these demonstrators can stay out in the streets.

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The Tea Party and the 2012 elections: part III

Posted on November 14, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Tea Party groups supported Republican nominee Mitt Romney and many Congressional candidates.   They lost the presidency.  They made no new gains in Congress; some Tea Partiers lost their seats, and some–like Minnesota’s Michele Bachmann, barely held on.  It wasn’t a good election for the Tea Party or for the Republican Party.

But this doesn’t mean that the Tea Party hasn’t–or won’t–exercise influence.

Movements, when they’re successful, change the boundaries of the political debate.  The Tea Party couldn’t do much to undo the federal rescue of the financial industry, the auto bailout, or the fiscal stimulus of 2009-2010.  The election means that their prospects of repealing President Obama’s health care reform have evaporated.

But the Tea Party also pushed for rejecting government action to address climate change, limiting taxation, and a forceful response to the budget deficit.  Partly in response to the movement, President Obama made somewhat less than half-hearted efforts to address climate change.  Borrowing Tea Party rhetoric, he cut spending and oversaw a temporary cut in the payroll tax, talking about the deficit and the federal debt almost incessantly.

Now that the election is over, it remains to be seen whether Barack Obama will recover the political courage his most vigorous–and disappointed–supporters imagine.  Superstorm Sandy has given him an opportunity to return to climate change, and the upcoming “fiscal cliff” will force him to negotiate about tax cuts and the deficit.

The bargains he negotiates with Congress will be a clear reflection of the extent of Tea Party influence.  In the past, he has been willing to trade the increased taxes on wealthy people he campaigned on (in 2008 as well as 2012) to keep the government operating.  His negotiating position should be stronger now, and we can watch to see whether the strong efforts have so shifted the boundaries of political debate that he’ll cut government spending without standing strong on the need for taxes.

Social movements can exercise influence even in losing campaigns.

And, mostly, the 2012 elections have undone little done by the 2010 elections.  In fact, Democrats face an uphill struggle in winning Congressional seats because those swept into office in 2010, particularly at the state level, did their best to establish a longer-lasting partisan advantage.  Coming in concert with the 2010 census, they were able to do quite a lot.

In most states, the legislature is responsible for drawing electoral districts for both the state legislature and the Congress.  Partisan legislatures gerrymander when they can, seeking to maximize the payoff from the votes they can mobilize.   With great computer programs, lots of data, and a rather polarized electorate, it’s fairly straightforward to project partisan votes from most populations.  Gerrymanderers pack as many of the other side’s voters into a district as possible.  If you can ensure that a district will vote 80-90 percent Democratic, for example, you have fewer Democratic voters to worry about in

Pennsylvania, Republican districts in red

other districts.  (Democrats do this too, when they have the chance; after the last census, however, the Republicans, having won several state legislatures, had much better opportunities.

So, more voters chose Democratic rather than Republican candidates for the House, but the Republican Party will nonetheless enjoy a majority of roughly 30 members in the next Congress.  In Pennsylvania, above, which President Obama carried by more than 5 points, Democrats carried 5 of 18 House districts.  In Ohio, below, which Obama carried by about

Ohio, Republican districts in red

2 points, Democrats took 4 of 16 House districts.

The electoral maps in many states present a difficult set of obstacles for the Democratic Party, and the Tea Party can claim some credit.  These are among the longer term consequences of political movements.

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The Tea Party and the 2012 elections, part II

Posted on November 13, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Tea Partiers are frustrated about the Republican defeat in the 2012 election, and angry at politicians and pundits who blame them.  All their energy, effort, and anger produced contentious campaigns, but also the reelection of President Obama and Democratic gains almost everywhere.  It may be even worse.

Tea Partiers themselves divided over the need to pick true champions of their positions (e.g., Tea Party Patriots) or strong candidates (e.g., Tea Party Express).  But there wasn’t much agreement on how someone would demonstrate either fealty to a movement that included many divisions or even viability in the general election.

Confusion about the issues was everywhere, but mostly glossed over in mainstream media reports.  The Tea Party had emerged in 2009 in response to the federal bailout of the financial system, the economic stimulus bill, and President Obama’s health care reform.  The money for the first two programs was already spent (and the financial sector bailout money mostly recovered) long before this campaign, so it wasn’t clear what was to be done, save not to do it again.  And all of the Republicans were united in opposition to “Obamacare,” promising to repeal it.

Beyond that, Tea Partiers seemed to agree on limited government, limited debt, and limited taxation, in general, and Constitutional principles–although they differed on what that might mean.  All of this still seems fairly vague, and all of the Republican candidates could support these positions–at least abstractly.  The early emergence of the Tea Party explicitly avoided divisive social issues (read: abortion and same sex marriage) and military and foreign policy.  National Tea Party groups (with the notable exception of the relatively small Tea Party Nation) put immigration on the back burner, with some of the core groups interested in promoting a guest worker program.

Rep. Ron Paul carried a mostly limited government vision of the Tea Party into the Republican primaries (save on abortion), but he was alone.  The Tea Party’s demands were redefined, by the national Republican Party, the candidates themselves, and mass media, as a resurrection of the old economic conservative/social conservative alliance, bizarrely tied to an aggressive and expensive foreign military policy and including a nasty nativist element.

A government that uses drones to assassinate enemies abroad (including American citizens), increases surveillance on American citizens, and spends 4 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on the military is NOT a limited government.  Rep. Paul said this over and over again, but he didn’t win any primaries, and Governor Romney kept him from a favored speaking slot at the convention–because Paul would say the same things again.  (This isn’t a tough prediction; Ron Paul has been saying these things for thirty years.)

So the Republican Party had Tea Party energy and anger, but draped them over an old–and eroding–political coalition.  All of the self-described Tea Party Republican candidates (except Rep. Paul) supported low taxes, low debt, and low spending, but none was willing to articulate the massive cuts that would actually add up to a government that could be funded with very low taxes.  And all of them supported harsh restrictions on immigration, opposed same sex marriage and abortion, and vigorously rejected cooperation with elected officials who might disagree with them (read: Democrats and less committed Republicans).

Amy Kremer

So, after the election, Tea Partiers got neither office-holders nor a clear articulation of their views.  The electoral defeat has put divisions within the movement in high relief.  Tea Party Express leader Amy Kremer called for an end to recriminations within the Republican Party, and a cease fire of the “circular firing squad,” noting that the Tea Party and the Republican Party needed to address their electoral weaknesses with gays and ethnic minorities:

The people of this country sent a clear message to our elected officials that we want a government that works to protect the interests of working-class citizens of every race, gender and sexual orientation.

But Kremer’s position wasn’t widely shared within the Tea Party.  Tea Party Patriots

Jenny Beth Martin

leader Jenny Beth Martin announced that the movement had to be stronger in dealing with a Republican Party that sold them out.  In a statement posted on their website, the Tea Party Patriots announced:

Today, Tea Party Patriots, the nation’s largest tea party organization, criticized the Republican Party for hand-picking a weak, Beltway elite candidate who failed to campaign forcefully on America’s founding principles – and lost.

“For those of us who believe that America, as founded, is the greatest country in the history of the world – a ‘Shining city upon a hill’ – we wanted someone who would fight for us,” Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots.  “We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America’s founding principles, who inspired millions of independents and ‘Reagan Democrats’ to join us, and who fought his leftist opponents…

“What we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party.  The Presidential loss is unequivocally on them.

“With the catastrophic loss of the Republican elite’s hand-picked candidate – the tea party is the last best hope America has to restore America’s founding principles.

Tea Partiers are no doubt prepared to carry on the struggle for America and against President Obama and the Democratic Party.  For a while, however, they’ll be heavily engaged in a struggle against each other.  The Tea Party name is likely to survive, but it’s far from clear who will own it, much less just what issues it will advance.

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The Tea Party and the 2012 election, part I.

Posted on November 12, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Post-mortems on the 2012 election are everywhere on the right right now, in all kinds of different forms:

Analysts wonder why the internal polls that left conservatives confident of the outcome up until Tuesday night and Karl Rove’s televised meltdown about Ohio were so wrong, when every public poll aggregator (left, right, and non-aligned) predicted a secure win for President Obama.  No credible answers yet, but it’s a victory for the stat geeks.

Republican strategists wonder about how much of the blame they can put on the Romney campaign and Governor Mitt Romney’s own deficiencies.

Republican funders are wondering how all their hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions failed to produce any of the outcomes they were promised by consultants, Superpacs, and–of course–Karl Rove.

And, along with many others, I’ve been thinking about what this all means about the Tea Party and its influence, lack of influence, and/or perverse effects.

Remember, the Tea Party was heavily invested in the electoral process.  Almost immediately after its emergence in 2009, the Tea Party renamed and infused existing national groups, and created its own new national groups.   Tea Party organizers allowed their grassroots groups to atrophy and focused on the elections, claiming massive success in the 2010 Congressional contests.  What’s more, Republicans gained control of more state legislative bodies in 2010, which proved critical to drawing Congressional districts that Republicans could win even in less auspicious times.

In the Presidential campaign, Tea Party groups dogged the Republican presidential hopefuls, forcing them to articulate clear positions on issues that Tea Partiers cared about–and articulate them forcefully.  Although the Tea Party groups didn’t always agree on preferred candidates, all of the Republican hopefuls (except for the short-lived Jon Huntsman campaign) courted them, and Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum enjoyed moments in the sun before Governor Romney–every  Tea Partier’s last Republican choice–claimed the nomination.  And Romney himself went after the Tea Party vote, emphasizing anti-tax, anti-spending, anti-conciliation, anti-science (climate change) positions that were at odds with his relatively short political record.  Governor Romney picked Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate in a clear attempt to solidify his support among the more conservative wing of the Republican Party (read: Tea Party).

And Tea Party groups held the Republican Party to a strict anti-cooperation line in government, encouraging gridlock; they also supported challengers in Republican primaries.  Sometimes, the insurgent candidate lost–after pulling the incumbent to the right (see Orrin Hatch in Utah); sometimes, the incumbent retired rather than face a primary and return to a deadlocked Senate (see Olympia Snowe in Maine).

Most visibly, Tea Party supported insurgents defeated candidates favored by the Republican establishment in primaries in Texas (Ted Cruz beat David Dewhurst), Indiana (Richard Mourdock beat Dick Lugar), and Missouri (Todd Akin beat John Brunner and another Tea Partier, Sarah Steelman).

Ted Cruz is now a US senator, but so are Democrats Joe Donelly (Indiana) and Claire McCaskill (Missouri) and independent Angus King (Maine).  Those are at least three senate seats Republicans had good reason to expect to win, but Democrats increased their margin in the Senate, taking advantage of opportunities the Tea Party helped supply.

After taking severe conservative positions in the primaries, Governor Romney tried to tack hard to the center during September, and made some gains, but every odd position he’d taken in the past was easily available on youtube.  Democrats were happy to provide the links.  In the last days of the campaign, it was President Obama who spoke about the Tea Party, which had become unwanted but unavoidable baggage for Mitt Romney.

The Tea Party’s success in the primaries forced Republican aspirants to toe some kind of harsh conservative line, one that was only trouble in the general election.  Republicans have yet to find a way to harness Tea Party energies and resources without imbibing the Tea–essentially, how to sell out their stalwarts.

At the moment, both Tea Partiers and the Republican regulars are frustrated–and angry.

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The Activists: documentary available on-line

Posted on November 5, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Michael Heaney, prolific political scientist and peace activist, who was last seen as a dancing vagina at the Democratic national convention, has announced the completion of a documentary he helped make.

http://vimeo.com/49732898

The Activists: War, Peace, and Politics in the Streets,  covers a volatile and difficult period for the American peace movement, activism since the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001.  This takes us through two wars, two presidencies, and campaigns and coalitions across the United States.  Available free on-line, the documentary takes the perspective of those brave people who have struggled to mobilize effective political action.

The film was shot between June, 2008 and March, 2010 in New York, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Tempe, AZ, Elgin, IL, and Washington, DC. It was created by Melody Weinstein, Michael T. Heaney, and Marco Roldán.

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Crisis and opportunities: Superstorm Sandy and climate change

Posted on November 1, 2012 by David S. Meyer

Catastrophes can be opportunities for activists prepared to exploit them.  Hurricane Sandy looks like a good chance for climate change activists to put their concerns on a national political agenda that has been incredibly inhospitable.  Their challenge is to attach an explanation for an event to an analysis of an ongoing problem–and a program of solutions.

For decades, environmental activists have been working with increasing intensity to bring public attention to the problem of climate change.  In most of the rest of the world, they’ve enjoyed some success, with governments of the left and right undertaking steps to reduce the increase in carbon they produce.

Their efforts in the United States have enjoyed less success.  In 1992, President George H. W. Bush mocked his opponent’s running mate, Senator Al Gore, calling him “ozone man.”  The issue of climate change didn’t play much of a role in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, nor in his presidency.  When Vice President Gore ran for president himself–against another George Bush, he mostly stayed away from the issue, even though he had a long record and a great deal of knowledge about it.  He saw no electoral benefit in talking about steps to confront climate change, and a great deal of risk.

Mobilizing on behalf of policies to confront climate change a hard sell for most citizens.  Temperature changes of a degree or two don’t seem all that significant to most people most of the time, and hardly as urgent as bad roads, ongoing wars, or taxes.  Effective remedies will cost money and cause some reconsideration of what’s convenient.  Candidates for office don’t like to promise to raise gas prices, for example.

President Obama has apparently made the same electoral calculation as Vice President Gore.  Governor Romney has been more likely to raise the issue, and only in derision.  Indeed, he backed away from his own climate record in Massachusetts, knowing it would be toxic in the Republican primaries and knowing that it would hurt him among hard core conservative activists financed by Koch brothers groups.

Over the past four years, climate change activists have tried to find ways to confront a recalcitrant ally in the Oval Office, and a public that is hard to awake, much less mobilize.  A few dramatic events, including protests against the Keystone pipeline, broke through national news, but more important over the long haul was building organizations and infrastructure to make a broader effort. Meanwhile, conservative groups have worked hard and successfully to undermine the idea that organized science might have some insights into the climate.

Sandy’s devastating impact on the Northeast, still developing, may have opened a window of opportunity for the activists to reach a broader audience.  Of course, you can’t explain a particular event with reference to processes that have played out for decades, but we want easier explanations for crises.   Climate change didn’t make the storm, but it did mean that water levels in New York Harbor were higher than in years past before the storm, that surface temperatures in the Atlantic were unusually warm, and that a potentially ameliorating ice block by Greenland was severely diminished.  And these points were made by weather reporters, not just political figures.

Suddenly, climate change is on the electoral agenda; New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has worked hard to maintain a non-partisan image, just announced his endorsement of Barack Obama’s re-election, citing this issue, no doubt recognizing that as unlikely as purposeful environmental action from the Obama administration might be, it’s certainly more possible than from an administration staffed with climate skeptics.

The benefits of sudden events come to those who have prepared.   The nuclear power accident at Three Mile Island swelled the attendance at a Washington rally that had already been scheduled. The challenge for activists, not just in the next few days, but after the election, is to keep the urgency of the issue as alive as concern about the storm and flooding at the moment.  The work they’ve done in the past should help.

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Calm before the storm

Posted on October 29, 2012 by David S. Meyer

While Hurricane Sandy slowly approaches, climate change activists appeared in Times Square, holding the parachute above.  It wasn’t a huge turnout, of course, but New York City is basically shut down, including Wall Street and the Subway system.

Linking a particular weather event to a longer term process of climate change is more a rhetorical device of the religious right than of these activists (on-line minister John McTernan blames “the gay agenda” for the storm), but Hurricane Sandy presented an opening.

An opening in what?

The presidential election campaign crowds out both movement events and coverage of movement events.  It also crowds out issues.  Both major party candidates have spent the past few weeks trying to avoid sounding like the activist bases of their parties, seeking to reach some imagined middle of the political spectrum.  350.org, a climate change advocacy network, notes that this is the first set of presidential debates since 1988 when climate change was not treated as a serious issue.

Both President Obama and Governor Romney see only risks in talking about climate change now: climate change skeptics could find evidence that President Obama might take action on the issue if he mentioned the phrase.  And Governor Romney might remind swing voters somewhat sympathetic to science about the positions he’d taken during the Republican primary campaign.

So, climate change–and the environment in general–is an uncontested issue in the national election.  And that’s not all: you’ll recall that the presidential debate on foreign policy also omitted discussion of immigration, the drug war, and the prison at Guantanamo Bay (yes, the one candidate Obama had promised to close).

The only mention of the US use of military drones for assassination came from Governor Romney, who announced his support for President Obama’s mostly unarticulated policy.

But back to the earth:

Hurricane Sandy offered a bit of a break in the electoral action, and environmental activists have tried to seize the moment, hanging their analysis onto an important news peg and a tiny open window for discussion of climate change.

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Students are revolting: school lunches

Posted on October 17, 2012 by David S. Meyer

With the help of a sympathetic teacher, students at Wallace County High School in Sharon Springs, Kansas, produced the video above.  They say, in a much more entertaining way than I will, that they’re not getting enough food to live their healthy adolescent lives.

It’s the most visible protest of many local campaigns by students who want something different–or just more–at school lunch.

As Americans, we have to be proud of the stubborn ingenuity of our kids, standing up for what they believe.  At the same time, it doesn’t mean they’re right.

Here’s a story:

Some years ago, my wife complained to the director of a recreational program for my daughter about the cookies and punch snacks that they served.

“But the kids like it,” the director responded.

“I bet they’d also like cocaine,” my wife said.

OK, this is almost silly, but the fundamental problem is that everyone doesn’t always know what’s good–and that we allow ourselves to make decisions for some people in what we think are their interests .  For example: drivers, even skilled ones, have to obey the speed limit; we force children to go to school.  Mandating how federal money for kids’ food is spent is hardly a big stretch.

Controversy about school lunches is nothing new, nor is parody.  Food activists have picked the school lunchroom as one front in a larger battle against obesity (particularly childhood obesity) and malnutrition.  A stalwart in this fight is the Renegade Lunch Lady, Chef Ann Cooper, who moved her career from white table cloth dining to the cafeteria.  Working from the bottom up in sympathetic cities (first Berkeley, California, then Boulder, Colorado), Chef Ann works to bring fresh fruit and vegetables plus whole grains into the hostile environment of the public schools.  She wasn’t alone.

A smaller effect of electing Barack Obama as president was giving this healthy school lunch movement a national face.  First Lady Michelle Obama has used her platform to promote healthy food and fitness for America’s youth: just say yes to, uh, kale(?).

Perhaps more significant, Congress passed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set nutritional standards for government funded food programs.  You can find the details at the United States Department of Agriculture’s website.

Whole wheat flour appeared in pizza crusts, and even bits of green on the top of the pizza.  Unsweetened milk drove out chocolate, and fresh fruit replaced cookies for desert in complying school districts.

Students protested.

Most just threw out the food they didn’t like, and in most places it was exactly what you’d think the kids wouldn’t like: fresh fruit and vegetables and whole grains.

Surely this is demoralizing for the crusading chefs, but their recipe for success is pretty much the same as for parents trying to pack healthier food into their children at home: persist, and keep trying new recipes.

And some students went further, organizing Facebook groups and online protests, and boycotting the cafeteria.  The video was even bigger and better, and it got national play on network news.  Partly, it’s because it’s creative and funny.  Partly, it’s because it was a stick partisan adults could use for beating on the Obama administration. It’s safe to say that most of the grown-ups rallying around the hungry students haven’t been near a school cafeteria in many years, but there are other reasons to join in.  The grown-ups have other grievances with the president–and surely no stake in America’s children eating fries and chips.  This leads to the odd twist of grown-ups defending children’s right to choose a junky lunch (Tom Philpott at Mother Jones), even as they also defend government’s interest in prohibiting adult access to, say, abortion or same sex marriage.

Here’s Jon Stewart’s take.

This is a good story all by itself, but there’s a larger point: the effect of a protest is dependent upon how effective activists are in recruiting influential allies.  Such allies, of course, often have their own agendas.

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