Asher Platts is a Steering Committee Member of the Maine Green Independent Party
In the past few months, I learned that I won a scholarship to attend Netroots Nation through the organization “Democracy For America.”
While in Minneapolis, I learned a lot and met with many amazing people from all around the United States, all working for a better country, through a wide variety of means.
The first panel I attended was on wage theft, which as a worker and lounge-chair economist was of particular interest to me. While I thought it was going to be about framing the argument around how average wages for working people have remained flat since 1965 while the cost of living and CEO pay has ballooned, I was surprised to learn that in addition to that, things are much more overtly terrible in the USA today.
Through abuse and intimidation, vulnerable low-income workers such as single mothers and undocumented immigrants are coerced into working without overtime pay, work off the clock, work full time without benefits, and much more, with the threat of being fired hanging over their heads. It was illuminating to learn that here in the United State of America, we have a dirty underground labor market, akin to slavery. In fact, there are instances uncovered by those on the panel that actually were legally prosecuted cases of slavery rings, where immigrants from eastern Europe are tricked into renting apartments from a temp agency, in which rent is purposefully higher than their wages, forcing workers into indentured servitude. What’s worst of all is that this occurs in plain sight, in places you wouldn’t think-- high end retail stores and shopping malls, in the high-rent districts of cities like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
I would be remiss in my duties as a Green not to attend the panel on Dirty Energy. There was little new information, though that didn’t make the stories of small victories from panelists like Tim DeChristopher, Mary Anne Hilt, and Michele Boyd, any less compelling. This panel was both encouraging and discouraging simultaneously. Encouraging because the energy issues that the Green Party has been pushing for years, issues on which Greens have been marginalized for being “extremist” or “soft-headed hippies,” are now being adopted by the progressive mainstream on the whole. It was also discouraging, because the Green Party has been pushing these issues for decades now with little electoral or legislative gain to show for it. Now that the issues are gaining mainstream traction, it is my hope that activists and organizations don’t become satisfied with action-less rhetoric from politicians in the Democratic Party, as is too often the case.
The main purpose I attended Netroots Nation was the wide variety of classes taught on campaign best practices put on by Democracy For America and Wellstone Action: online analytics and testing, advanced strategies for social media, power mapping and targeting, targeting without a model, and “constructing kick ass emails.”
I was glad to find that these classes offered for me a mixture of reaffirming what I felt instinctually were best practices, as well as both filling in gaps and illuminating new information, techniques, and free campaign services.
The last day of the conference, several volunteers and I headed to Hudson, Wisconsin to canvass in support of the recall effort against Republican incumbent Sheila Harsdorf. Shelia Harsdorf was one of the instrumental authors of that terrible bill in Wisconsin that stripped union workers the right to collectively bargain, and increased taxes on working families to pay for massive tax breaks to corporations, as well as grant Governor Walker the authority to give away public property without a bidding process. Despite the doubts of local organizers about “a bunch of bloggers” coming to help out, the 17 of us who came from Minneapolis to help in the canvass were able to knock on every door in the town of Hudson, Wisconsin in just 2 hours. I am proud to have helped serve in the recall effort, both because I hope that the people on the ground in Wisconsin who are fighting back against kleptocracy will be victorious, but also because we are fighting against the same bad policies here in Maine, without the benefit of a recall process. Their fight is our fight too.
Most of all, I’m excited and energized; I’m looking forward to bringing back with me from Minneapolis a honed set of campaign and organizing skills to aid in the fights that we face ourselves here in Maine, to build the Maine Green Independent Party, to push in coalition with others for meaningful legislative and electoral change, and to win victories for the people of Maine.
