To: US Social Forum Writers Network
From: Jackie Smith
Date: February 7, 2010
The unusual volume of emails you’ve received lately demonstrates our expanding capacities to reach a variety of media outlets with the help with Adele Nieves, the USSF communications coordinator. Thanks to all the writers who have responded to requests for material!
Here’s our regular writers “memo and muse,” which I hope will help inspire your efforts to get the USSF out there in public debate and discourse.
Our USSF writers network is now over 80 members strong! Please keep inviting creative people and writers you know to join us! We especially hope to recruit some youth to work with us and build their skills at movement media/communications work! Send people to the [USSF website (http://www.ussf2010.org)] and urge them to click “Get Involved.”
USSF Writers Muse & Information Februrary 7, 2010
- • USSF Registration starts strong. Talking points to help spread the word!
- • The “Tea Party movement” and the “fair and balanced” media
- • Presidents day is February 15
NEW RESOURCE PAGE: For more news and updates on the USSF, see: http://www.pitchengine.com/unitedstatessocialforumussf2010/us-social-forum-organizing-website-live/43110/
STORY IDEAS:
Help Promote USSF Registration
Within a few days of the launching of the official USSF registration, over 240 individuals and 60 organizations registered to attend the USSF in Detroit, providing over $8000 in registration fees for the work of the Forum. We’re hoping to boost these numbers even more dramatically in the coming days and weeks, and we need our writers network to help do this. Here are some ideas of how to talk to different people about the USSF and how it relates to their needs and interests:
- • A global movement for justice is rising, and the USSF provides the opportunity to take part.
- • The USSF is open to anyone and everyone who want to help craft real solutions to local and global crises.
- • The USSF is not a conference – it is a process, directed by its participants and attendees, to build an inclusive, free, democratic and international movement to transform the world.
- • Are you angry? Frustrated? Tired? Not sure how to move forward, but not ready to give up? Come to Detroit this June, meet other like-minded people from across the globe, and help create the new century’s blueprint for radical, revolutionary change.
- • Detroit is ground zero for the US economic crisis. What is happening in Detroit and in Michigan is happening all across the country, and all across the world. Detroit’s example sends a clear message: another US is necessary and we must start building it today. But the story is not only one of crisis and loss, but Detroit activists have inspired movements around the country to come to their home and witness their creative responses to crisis. Detroit is a model of a “Solution City” where alternative economic models, urban gardening, adaptive reuse, new educational models, and visions for a truly sustainable green transportation industry are being born and developed by local grassroots groups. More on this in a future writers muse.
The “Tea Party movement” and the “fair and balanced” media
The conservative/populist “tea party” movement has gained considerable mainstream media attention for its ability to mobilize relatively small numbers of very vocal activists in opposition to President Obama’s health care and other policy initiatives. The nascent ‘movement’ hosted its first national convention in Nashville Tennessee this weekend, receiving considerable additional media attention. However, the size and strength of this ‘movement’ is belied by the attention it has received—especially when one considers the size of social justice gatherings and protests which have gained far less media attention.
The “Tea party” convention attracted just 1,100 delegates (New York Times), despite a rather large operating budget that allowed organizers to pay Sarah Palin’s $100,000 speaking fee. No doubt the $500 registration fee helped keep some of the movement’s supporters away. Hopefully more were deterred by the exclusionary and segregationist language of this mobilization. The Guardian/UK reported that the Tea Party convention’s opening speech “preached bigotry bordering on racism.” (http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/06)
What is most disturbing about the media coverage of the “tea baggers,” however, is that it denies the American public the ability to consider the full range of responses Americans have had to the economic crisis. While conservatives are promoting negative, defensive and racist agendas, groups attending the US Social Forum have more constructive answers to the serious economic challenges our country faces. For instance, Detroit is being held up by Forum organizers as a “solution city” where alternative economic models, urban gardening, adaptive reuse, new educational models, and visions for a truly sustainable green transportation industry are being born and developed by local grassroots groups. The forum process is helping these positive efforts: by organizing to bring hundreds of bicycles to Detroit, potentially purchasing a building for community groups, bringing a new library to the city, planting dozens of urban community gardens, and much more.
February 15 is Presidents’ Day
The US Social Forum is an opportunity to mobilize a mass base of support for the progressive social change agenda that many voters had hoped for when they helped elect the nation’s first African American president. No president in history has advanced any major social legislation without extensive popular mobilizations demanding change. The most expansive social legislation ever enacted—FDR’s New Deal—only came after masses of people mobilized to demand greater government protections for our society’s most vulnerable populations. The 2nd US Social Forum will be urging President Obama to listen to the growing voice of civil society.
UPCOMING EVENTS/ Story opportunities
MARCH 8: International Women’s Day
MAY 1- May Day: - speak to the left, the progressives, the workers, consolidate support for USSF
MAY 31: Memorial Day - Veterans for Peace & Iraq Vets against the war plug USSF
TIPS FOR WRITERS: [“How to Pitch a Story” http://www.timeday.org/book-appendix-c.asp]
SEND YOUR SUGGESTIONS AND PUBLICATIONS TO: writers@ussf2010.org
This “memo and muse” available at: Writers Network Resources and Updates Wiki http://wiki.ussf2010.org/wiki/USSF_Updates