A rude awakening in election year: critical voices for the mobilization of the constitution are getting louder.

Animation 1 – Why is the United States the only country doing nothing about global warming?

Animation 2 - And why are we still the only rich country without universal health care?

Animation 3 – Mr. President, when you claimed that Irag had nuclear weapons in last years State of the Union address, did you know it was a lie?

Animations 1, 2 and 3 – Mr. President, where are you?

New initiatives such as ‘Wake Up’, or ‘Move On’ are trying hard to mobilize young voters. Rarely have attitudes and popular culture of America’s younger generations been more politically active. The common slogan: ‘Go and vote!’

Public - What’s the problem?

Public - There’s no problem, we’re here to vote!

Toure - Many people walked away from the 200 elections saying ‘my vote doesn’t count’, ‘they don’t count all the votes’, ‘it doesn’t matter if I vote’ so it’s more essential than ever to motivate people to the interest and the excitement of voting!

This time around, it is being made easier to register – including here in Harlem. Turnout will be a key factor in deciding the election, and in particular will hinge on the votes of America’s African American, Latino and other previously disenfranchised voters. Writer Toure thinks America’s stars of popular culture have a big role to play.

Toure - People like Puff Daddy, Russell Simmons, using their power to, and with the media and organization, to say ‘hey, it’s cool to vote, and it’s important to vote!’.

Russell Simmons - The most important thing we can do as an American is vote.

Russell Simmons, from rap super group ‘Run DMC’ is also politically active with his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network as well as the ‘Wake Up Everybody’ campaign, as is international popstar Puff Daddy.

Toure - Puffy is running around everywhere wearing T-Shirts that say ‘vote or die’. You know, I mean like, that can’t make the message more clear!

One of the key individual contributions in getting people to vote is that made by Laura Dawn, of internet organization ‘Move On’.

Laura Dawn – People have to wake up and pay attention and take responsibility and get educated and participate. And if the internet can make it as simple as clicking a button, well then that’s great.

‘Move On’ is, worldwide, the largest direct-action platform on the internet. More than three million people can be informed and mobilised through email and blogs.

But as well as cyber activism, ‘Move On’ also travels around the USA trying to get people to take politics seriously. Since 1996, ‘Move On’ has organised campaigns, culminating in a worldwide memorial to the 1000th soldier killed in Irag.

Laura Dawn – When you come to the website you become a ‘Move On’ member, and you receive emails in the mail telling you what’s going on, like, ‘this vote is going to happen in congress, here’s what we think you should do; here’s the number for your senator, here’s a place to call, here’s an email, just click send’. We give people actions.

Jeff Goldfarb – The democratic capacity of the internet is that it facilitates a specific type of power, and that’s the power of people, meeting each other, talking to each other, and developing a capacity to act in concert. And this woman right here; I don’t know if you can do this; Hannah Arendt, in considering the alternatives to totalitarianism in the twentieth century, highlighted that capacity.

Laura Dawn – ‘Move On’ has now made it possible just for regular citizens to come together and form a lobbying group like that so when a congressman or a senator gets a petition with a million signatures, or five hundred thousand calls or emails from a group of citizens, they’re paying attention to that.

Jeff Goldfarb – It’s not simply the candidates or the parties reaching the population, the population can actually form a candidate, the population…it’s not just simply a question of ‘use radical politics, the old model of the party agitator, the party agitator goes out to the masses to mobilize the masses’. Well, in some ways, now the masses have a capacity to actually mobilize the party leadership.

President and co-founder of ‘Move On’ is Wes Boyd, a former dot.com entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. There are no company offices and the only official address is their web address.

Laura Dawn – The organisation is run very lean for a very long time – there’s no office, everyone works from home, we email each other, we talk via phone, we do phone conferencing, IM’s and everybody talks online but there’s no…I haven’t even met a couple of members of ‘Move On’. We talk all the time, I think they are lovely people, but I could walk by them in the street and probably not know them.

A possibility to meet other ‘Move On’ members comes from regular ‘Living Room Cinema Parties’. At hundreds of locations across the USA thousands of people meet to watch the same film at the same time. Today it’s ‘Outfoxed’ – the much hyped and hugely critical documentary about Fox news. Worried about the sanitising effect of the US media, it meets with the majority of members’ approval.

Terry Hasan – You almost feel like, ‘Oh God, Jeez, maybe I’m alone’, ‘am I the only one that thinks this way, ‘cause clearly no one else thinks this way ‘cause the media’s not showing it’. And then when you sit in a room with thirty-thousand people, or when you walk down the street with five hundred thousand people, or you go to a meeting with forty people, you….it reminds you, ‘no, I’m not alone, that the media is really reflecting their own collective conscience and ‘collective’ being a very small group of executives.

‘Move On’ not only organize these meetings, but also helps fund and produce independent documentary. For ‘Uncovered – the whole truth about the Irag War’, two thousand eight hundred house parties were organised, and within three days thirty-thousand DVDs were sold, raising over one million dollars for the anti-Bush campaign.
The work ethic of the members is also impressive – most members offering around ten hours a week for unpaid work. It seems many more would sign up too.

Terry Hasan – People in this country are so utterly fed up that they will give up their time, and they will sacrifice time at the office maybe, and so on and so…maybe other places, going to the movies or God knows what else. ‘Cause they’re so fed up. And accepting that we are a capitalist country in ethos, it makes it more impressive that people are willing to give up their time.

Six weeks before the election, ‘Move On’ takes five hundred volunteers from Wisconsin to train them in voter mobilization in the endangered Swing States.

At the same time, prominent directors such as Richard Linklater produce TV commercial for ‘Move On’, paid for by donations. The newest hit in the long series is ‘Jimmi the taxi-driver’.

Laura Dawn – Grass root internet advocacy groups could play a wonderful role in American politics, for instance, if Bush did lose in the next election, I think that ‘Move On’ and groups like ‘Move On’ could exist to continue doing what they’ve been doing, letting the president and the representatives know that this is how the people feel, this is what the people want.

Bruce Springsteen is headlining at the ‘Vote for CHANGE’ concert tour, another of ‘Move On’s’ projects. The list of performers reads like a who’s who of modern music: R.E.M, the Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam, and Babyface. As is the case for ‘Wake Up Everybody’, stars throw their market value into the fight for democracy in the world’s oldest secular democracy.