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without, necessarily, without a national referendum. Yes, I do believe
in that. I want the….
Kall: Great!
Wolf: ....people to have as much power as a lobbyist. Absolutely. I want Congress to worry about the people and worry about what the national referendum will view. Absolutely. There are many other examples. I want there to be like the equivalent of a 311 phone call you can make. It’s so confusing right now and it’s so not transparent. If I have an issue, like I want a greenbelt around my town. Do I call the city council, do I call the state legislature, is it a federal issue? You know, who knows? And this is one reason people give up. It’s been made deliberately opaque. I want there to be a national 311 where operators are standing by to tell citizens, “Well, this is how you take this action, this is where you go, this is how you get it done, this is how it can support you.”
I want citizens to write the op-eds. As you know there’s a section in the book on ‘become a media yourself’, write the op-ed, here’s how you do it, pitch it, do radio, do television, here’s how you do it, frame the story, here's how you leak to a reporter who’s on background, off the record, on the record. Many, many changes. But this is just the beginning because the ideal is that everyone reads this book and looks around them and thinks, “Ha! This is an institution that’s missing. I can create it,” because I also offer people steps like ‘start your own political movement,’ ‘fund raise for your own nonprofit,’ and so on. It’s... the only thing that can save us from this descending repression is millions of people taking these steps. Because it... history is clear – they cannot control us when we are running through their hands like sand. They cannot control us when millions of people are saying, “No,” and taking action and building their own power.
Kall: You know what I’ve found, in my experience in working with
activism, is there’s the power curve law or the 80/20 rule where 20% of the people do 80% of the work; although it’s really more like 2% of the people do 98% of the work. And I don’t think that people don’t want to do it; I think they don’t know how. And I think your book gives them a lot of ideas and practical things that they can do to go further. A lot of times I send out a daily newsletter through http://www.opednews.com and I’ll sign it off, “Do something extra today.” I mean, it’s so easy to just spend five minutes making an extra phone call or just doing something that takes you out of your ordinary, and all of a sudden you’ve gone from being a spectator to being a revolutionary.
Wolf: I totally hear you and I love it that you’re doing that, but what I also now feel is that the kind of activism we’ve been expecting of ourselves, like – understandably, I mean, this is how it was set up – make a phone call, or, e-mail your Congressperson, or, at the most hold a meeting. That should be just the very beginning of this incredible dance. And really….
Kall: Absolutely.
Wolf: ...interesting, “OK, what... should I run for office? Well, how do I do that? OK, well, here’s Curtis Ellis, he can tell me how to run for office; he has a campaign network, I can call them.” Or, “Do I have a friend who would be a terrific Congressperson? OK, well, let me get that ball rolling.” Or, “Do I want to write a law? Well, how do I write a law? Let me call the Initiative and Referendum Institute.” In other words, what I’m trying to do is bump up people’s sense of what their job is. Their job is supposed to be to lead. That’s what the people are supposed to be doing.
And definitely to lead a revolution, because we’re seeing with this financial meltdown and these horrific, kind of secrets being revealed as deep, deep corruption in these ossified institutions and the system is imploding, morally and politically and economically. So at a time like this we have to build alternative structures to save ourselves, but also to kind of create a better America. And yeah, I want people to kind of look at themselves in the mirror and think, “I’m not going to wait for Barack Obama or John McCain to save me. That’s a stupid way of thinking. I’m going to save myself and save my community.”
Kall: Yeah, you don’t want to wait for them to do it, that’s for sure.
Wolf: That's for sure. You know what else I've been thinking...
Kall: It’s not an age-related thing, either. You know, with sports you got to be young to get things done, but when it comes to being an activist you can wake up at seventy, eighty years old. One of our most active, productive editors is eighty-six years old. We have forty-four volunteer editors and Margaret Bassett, she’s amazing what she does. And she’s an inspiration to so many people and if you’re seventy-four years old and you’re retired and you’re on a disability, there are still so many things that you can do and that’s how we get to those millions of people that the government can’t all control that you just described.
Wolf: Right, right. The other thing that happens when millions of
citizens say “no” in various ways, is it does shift the atmosphere in that when that happens, judges adjudicate differently and politicians kind of conclude different outcomes. I mean, citizens have so much power that they don’t realize, even if it’s just in kind of speaking up or writing an op-ed or submitting an op-ed or... You see, I'm obsessed with op ed's. We have this program at the Woodhull Institute, that I co-founded, that has trained thousands of ordinary citizens in op-ed writing and they’re placing op-eds left and right, and they’re turning into pundits and they love it.
