Birthday Wish: Raising Money for JwJ and ForwardSTL

Last year for my birthday, I raised $942 from 34 people for the amazing organization Missouri Jobs with Justice. My fundraising was in part a response to the intense media coverage provided to the tea party's anti-transit campaign despite the fact that the campaign only ever had 25 people at a rally and could only raise $750 for their cause .

This year, I'm doing something a little different, but related. First, I am again raising money for Missouri JwJ, because I still believe them to be the most effective group at strategically working for change that protects and improves the lives of working families. Here's what I wrote about them last year:

First of all, Missouri Jobs with Justice is an amazing group. They do not just fight against symptoms, but work to address the structural problems that lead to economic injustice in our society. They led the effort to raise the Missouri minimum wage back in 2006 and have defended it from right-wing attack in the state legislature every year since. They stopped Ward Connerly from even being able to get enough signatures to get an anti-Affirmative Action initiative on the ballot. They helped coordinate the Missouri push for health care reform. And they've trained thousands of people to organize for social change. Any money that goes to Missouri JwJ will be used strategically and thoughtfully to fight for a more just society.

This past year, JwJ played a crucial role in educating voters in St. Louis and Kansas City about the importance of the Earnings Tax and the disastrous consequences of eliminating it. They have also been working hard to protect the minimum wage, to protect workers' right to organize, and to fight against plans to put in place tax structures that primarily punish the poor and middle class while lowering taxes on the wealthy.

However, in addition to raising money for JwJ, I am also raising money this year to pay for facebook advertising costs for a new venture, ForwardSTL.org. ForwardSTL was created by local bloggers based on the idea that our local media does not give enough of a voice to progressives, activists, and people who are interested in using new approaches to move the region forward. The site serves as a vehicle for highlighting interesting news and analysis not only from mainstream media sources, but also from citizens who write about their own experiences with activism, who share their analyses of politics, or who take video and photos of local events. In short, it's a way of building up our own citizen's media that will help to give a voice to perspectives that are not adequately covered in the traditional media. It is not competition against the local media, but rather a way of filling the holes in the coverage (such as, for example, the fact that many in the local media ignored a 4,300 person pro-union rally several weeks ago). And, I think you will find, it is something that is available to benefit any local social justice organization or any activist, as the site is specifically designed to share the content that you create!

Anyway, I hope my friends and fellow fighters of the good fight can help pitch in to two endeavors that I believe can fundamentally change the St. Louis region for the better by clicking the donate button. The ability to effectively organize and the ability to effectively communicate are two necessary components of any movement designed to facilitate positive change. We have all of the talent, energy, and experience we need to make St. Louis better: we just need to do it.

Thank you for your consideration,

Adam

Note to Media: We Beat the Tea Party!

My birthday has passed and I can now officially say that I raised more money in two weeks for my birthday than the entire St. Louis Tea Party's "Stop the Prop" campaign that resulted in a wave of media hype and predictions that Prop A would go down in flames. In their two month campaign, the St. Louis tea party was only able to raise $870 in donations from about 25 people to oppose Prop A. In the two weeks prior to my birthday, I raised $942 from 34 people. Yet the media, in all of its extensive coverage of the Prop A opposition, never once questioned whether the tea party opposition was really a legitimate group with "grassroots" support and even used the occasion to hype up what a "political force" the tea party was. In fact, even after Prop A passed with about as big of a margin as one could imagine in St. Louis County, the media was still making excuses for the Tea Party by saying that they only had $900 against the large money in support of Prop A.

Well, that excuse is no longer available to the tea party. I, someone who is not connected to the political establishment who has no particular fundraising ability, was able to out-raise their opposition in 1/4 of the time period, simply with the help of a few of the good people I know. The prop A opposition promoted their efforts on the radio, on a huge number of local and national blogs, including Gateway Pundit's blog (which is one of the top ten most read political blogs in the country), through their email lists, and via friendly media coverage. I promoted mine only through my blog, facebook and twitter accounts (and a few friends who reposted the info). Yet my side raised more money from more people.

The excuse that the tea party didn't have enough money no longer is coherent. The fact that they didn't have money was a symptom of their lack of ability to organize on this issue, not a cause. If they were able to organize on this issue, they would have raised more money. Period. So there are two options left to explain the tea party's huge defeat. One, maybe they picked a great issue but are just completely inept at organizing. Or two, maybe the exclusive leadership of the tea party picked the issue without consulting their base and then found out the hard way that this was not really an issue that their membership cared about. The latter explanation certainly appears to be the suggestions of friend-of-the-tea-party Jay Stewart on the Hillbilly Logic radio program (2/3 of the way through). Either way, however, it is now beyond argument that the tea party failed massively on this initiative, and it would be nice if the media started reporting it as such.

So anyway, thanks to my great group of friends and fellow fighters for a better world for the donations to a noble cause. Joan, Margaret, Brenda, Barbara, Lara G., Julie, Jonathan, Mark, Craig, Anna, Bunny, Sean, Paddy, Sally, Ian, Nick, Sonia, Michelle, Jill, Joe, Maggie, Tom, Liz, Mindy, Ben, Jen, Annette, Lara C., Indio, Jessica, Amy, Jimmy, Adam H., Steve, Matt, and Luella: your donations are greatly appreciated and I know they will be used wisely in the fight for economic justice. It feels great to have such a supportive group of friends!

The Beat the Tea Party Fundraising Challenge!

As I did in 2009, I have been planning on using my upcoming birthday as a way to raise money for a good cause. However, this year I thought up a twist that I believe makes the project especially fun and important. My plan is to raise more money for a good cause ($751) than the Tea Party Prop A opposition, from a larger number of contributers (25), and to end with a pro-transit rally with more people (30) than the tea party ever got to attend an anti-Prop A rally. This is partly just a fun way to motivate people to donate to a good cause, but I think it also can help to raise awareness of just how misguided the media coverage of this issue was. If that's all you need to know, please click here to donate to my favorite local group, Missouri Jobs with Justice. If you'd like to know more, please read on.

First of all, Missouri Jobs with Justice is an amazing group. They do not just fight against symptoms, but work to address the structural problems that lead to economic injustice in our society. They led the effort to raise the Missouri minimum wage back in 2006 and have defended it from right-wing attack in the state legislature every year since. They stopped Ward Connerly from even being able to get enough signatures to get an anti-Affirmative Action initiative on the ballot. They helped coordinate the Missouri push for health care reform. And they've trained thousands of people to organize for social change. Any money that goes to Missouri JwJ will be used strategically and thoughtfully to fight for a more just society. I should note that I'm a student/youth co-chair for Jobs with Justice, but I don't get any money from them. In fact, I spend my money to be a sustainer for the organization because I believe so much in their mission.

Second, I've detailed extensively in the last week how the St. Louis media created an anti-Proposition A narrative based entirely on their exaggeration of the influence of the St. Louis Tea Party, and then started using this artificial narrative to predict that Prop A would fail. If it weren't for the hard work of a lot of people and the power of social media, it's very likely that this media narrative could have caused Proposition A to lose.

The local media presented the tea party's John Burns as a sort of folksy hero who went "toe-to-toe" with Chesterfield Mayor John Nations, portrayed the anti-Prop A group as an active movement, and described the tea party opposition as "spirited." Yet they failed to do basic fact checking on the litany of false claims coming from John Burns and the tea party. With the exception of the Riverfront Times, they failed to discuss John Burns' history of unethical activism tactics, including his accusing Washington University of fraud and attempting to sabotage an LGBT rally (these tactics turned out to be relevant as Burns and Gina Loudon tried a similar stunt on election day). They never once used any metric to evaluate the scope or organization of the opposition, and instead took the tea party's word that this was a massive movement backed up by intelligent arguments. John Nations Op-Ed showed the shallowness and falsehood of the tea party arguments, and the massive Prop A win of 63 - 37 showed the shallowness of the tea party's "organization." Yet even now, the media is still all-too-happy to go along with the Tea Party spin of what happened.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident, but in fact is part of a pattern of the St. Louis media exaggerating Tea Party influence, failing to fact check tea party claims, and providing cover for extremist behavior. Recently, we saw the St. Louis media (with the exception of Chad Garrison and Jake Wagman) cover up the fact that the tea party burned pictures of Representative Carnahan at a anti-health care rally. They failed to report on the tea party carrying a coffin to the home of Carnahan for three days until the national media outlet Politico covered it. In fact, in almost every possible instance, they've gone out of their way to present tea party arguments to look as reasonable as possible even while the same people they're interviewing are writing absurd and inflammatory things on their blogs. They have also accepted without any critical thought or search-for-supporting-evidence exaggerated claims about the success of things like the Tea Party buycotts, and have even passed on numbers for tea party rallies that are larger than the holding capacity of the space they were held at! And all of this for a group that has openly stated their desire to put the mainstream media out of business!

So I'm asking you to get twice the bang for your buck. First of all, you can donate to a group that has a proven track record of efficiently using resources to work for a better world. Second, you can send a powerful message about the absurdity of our local media's pandering to the St. Louis Tea Party. I'm not a well-connected operative; I'm just a graduate student who's been in St. Louis a little more than four years. But I'm confident that I can raise more money from a larger group of people, and put together a larger gathering than the Tea Party prop A opposition that caused a media frenzy. We don't need to just talk about how absurd the media coverage of the tea party is: now we can prove it!

It's time to shift the narrative back to reality. Please click here to donate.

Update: found this very nice exception to my media analysis written by KMOX's Mike Kelly.