When we go to the grocery store, we're seeing huge increases of 20, 30, even 40% in the prices of milk, bread, eggs, pasta-- There's the food crisis. Ethanol from corn sounded like a good idea on paper, but it has become a disaster. Fields previously used for wheat and other food crops are being converted to corn fields, and this has led to massive food price increases. All across the world, food riots are exploding, creating instability, even taking down the government of Haiti over the weekend. It looks like the ethanol solution does not work and is making things much worse.
There are sooo many progressive issues that can use clarification. This protracted conflict between Clinton and Obama offers a great opportunity to get the candidates either on the record or to show that they are obfuscating and avoiding-- doing the smoke and mirrors thing.
Be a dynamic progressive activist. Most progressives I know did not start out supporting Obama or Hillary. Unless you plan to go third party, you will probably be supporting one of these two candidates, probably Obama. So let's get out there and pepper them both with questions that will nail them down on the issues we care about.
Plan and script your question. You won't get to ask any more than one in this election. But you can do a few and share them with your group. Plan them as a team. If your team gets lucky, a few members will each get to ask a question. So don't sit next to each other, fan out through the crowd.
Start off with the basic issue. Then open the question innocuously, talking about some aspect of life we all can relate to. Want to talk about phone company spying? Start off by talking about a phone conversation with your mother, or child. Then segue into the hard question. Then quickly, before Obama or Clinton thinks your finished, re-state even more clearly, so there's less waffle-room. Once you've come up with a script, develop very brief notes you can put on a card that fits in the palm of your hand-- a 3 by 2.5 card..
Make sure you speak loudly and clearly.
Dress conservatively. Don't stand out as strange. Part of the goal is to get on national TV and look credible, not like a kook. If the media ask about who you are, tell the truth. You don't have to talk to them, but if you do, they may use the footage, if you speak in plain English, without political jargon, and come off as a regular person, not an overly intense, angry political operative or activist.
Remember, the goal is not to get either candidate in trouble. The goal is to push the candidates-- to either move to the left or clearly state their positions on progressive issues. We can do this, people. We can use the corpstream media to amplify our message and nail down the candidates' positions.
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
