The Field on the Narcosphere

By Al Giordano

US officials and commercial media organizations are popping champagne corks prematurely over a reported US-brokered “deal” to return Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to (limited) power, but the two sides that reportedly signed the agreement already disagree over what exactly it says.

Reuters reports that coup “president” Micheletti has agreed to step down:

”I have authorized my negotiating team to sign a deal that marks the beginning of the end of the country’s political situation,” Micheletti told reporters on Thursday night.

He said Zelaya could return to office after a vote in Congress that would be authorized by the country’s Supreme Court. The deal would also require both sides to recognize the result of a Nov. 29 presidential election and would transfer control of the army to the top electoral court.

If approved by Congress, Zelaya would be able to finish out his presidential term, which ends in January. It was not clear what would happen to other elements o f the agreement if Congress votes against Zelaya’s restoration.

(Bold type mine, for emphasis.)

But Micheletti’s claim that a Congressional vote to restore Zelaya would require Supreme Court authorization is a flat out lie, according to a source with Zelaya inside his Brazilian Embassy refuge in Tegucigalpa: “That is what the golpistas have put out, but that is NOT the accord… The Supreme Court gives its non-binding opinion to the Congress, but the key is that all of this takes time, time that the golpistas want to keep taking.”

While there is some healthy distrust already over whether Congress will gin up on its end and really vote to restore Zelaya, that probably will be easier to accomplish than many believe. Two words: Pepe Lobo. The National Party candidate for President, Lobo is leading in the polls. He obviously wants very much for the November 29 “elections” to become internationally recognized elections. His party holds 55 of 128 seats in Honduras’ unicameral legislature, just ten short of a majority. There are at least 22 Liberal Party members that have publicly indicated they want Zelaya back as president, plus 11 minor party legislators most of whom are likely to go along with such a deal. Faced with such a patchwork majority, look for most of the 62 Liberal Party members in Congress to fold and go with the flow. The Congressional vote is not likely to prove a stumbling block to implementing this agreement.

The real problem could be the authoritarian Supreme Court. Micheletti’s invention of a non-existent clause in the agreement, one that requires the court’s approval of it, points to where the stalling tac tic will come from. This is the same Supreme Court that carried out the coup d’etat on June 28 and has micro-managed the regime’s affairs all summer and fall on a level that would not be appropriate or legal in most countries. Because Honduras’ 1982 Constitution is such a self-conflicted document with many articles that contradict each other, the court has been cherry-picking which laws to discard and which to interpret, often badly.

What the summer of 2009 in Honduras has demonstrated is that democracies need not only worry about excesses of executive branch power. In this case, it is the judicial branch that proved the primary and most dangerous usurper of democracy.

If Micheletti keeps insisting that this so-called “agreement” requires Supreme Court ratification, look for this game to go into extra innings before any resolution can happen.

On the other hand, if Secretary Clinton and her team of negotiation babysitters got their ducks and supreme court members in line ahead of time – reflecting a level of attention to detail that they haven’t displayed all summer long – then, yes, this deal would be likely to succeed.

The devil will be in the details, and their implementation. Until it’s clear that the Supreme Court or Congress won’t stand in the way, there is no deal.

And I’ll repeat: The problem won’t likely come from Congress, but, rather, a continuance of the real problem all along: the despotic, arbitrary and anti-democracy tendencies of the Honduras Supreme Court.

Update: Pepe Lobo weighs in, exactly as we predicted he would:

"We are willing to be cooperative in Congress with the agreement of the negotiators," Porfirio Lobo, a National Party lawmaker who is favored to win the Nov. 29 presidential elections, said Friday. "The best decision for Honduras will be taken."

(And it's worth noting, once again, how embarrassingly clumsy and wrongheaded the La La Land prognostications are from a certain golpista corner of the Ugly American diaspora of the expat community in Honduras. Last night, the anonymous blogger who calls herself La Gringa told her gullible readers: "presidential candidate Pepe Lobo is asking the Nacionalistas to abstain." The sheer stupidity and inability to deduce what is in Lobo's best interests is staggering, but also typical.)

Update II: Statement from the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat:

1. We celebrate the coming restitution of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales as a popular victory over the cruel interests of the golpista oligarchy. This victory has been won through more than four months of struggle and sacrifice by the people, that in spite of the savage repression unleashed by the repressive corps of the state in the hands of the dominant class has known how to resist and grow in conscience and organization becoming an uncontainable social force.

2. The Dictatorship's signature on the document that establishes "the return of the executive branch to its status prior to June 28" represents explicit acceptance of what in Honduras had been a coup d'etat that must be removed to return to institutional order and guarantee a democratic environment in which the people can make use of its right to transform society.

3. We demand that the agreements that are signed at the negotiating table be ratified expeditiously by the National Congress. In that sense, we alert all our compañeros and compañeras nationwide to join in the pressure actions so that the document is complied with immediatley.

4. We reiterate that the National Constituent Assembly is an absolute aspiration of the Honduran people and a nonnegotiable right for which we will continue struggling in the streets, until achieving the refoundation of society to exist in justice, equality and true democracy.

"AFTER 125 DAYS OF STRUGGLE NOBODY GIVES UP"

Tegucigalpa, M.D.C. 30 de octubre de 2009

(Translated by Narco News.)

Update III: I've now uploaded a .pdf copy of the agreement signed in Tegucigalpa.

Update IV: And now, in English.

By Al Giordano

Prior to October 20, just a week ago, the “conventional wisdom” among Washington DC-centric pundits and bloggers was that the so-called “public option” on the upcoming national health care bill was dead in the water.

Since October 20, the same voices have shifted to a presumption that the public option – in which the US government would create its own health program (much like it already has for members of Congress) to compete with private insurance companies, bring their prices down, and offer another option to citizens – is now a done deal and the remaining question is what kind of public option will be approved by Congress.

What changed on October 20 to so radically shift the beltway CW?

315,023 phone calls – deployed by Organizing for America, President Obama’s grassroots political arm – that flooded the US Capitol switchboard in a single day: that, and that alone, is what shifted the ground beneath the health care debate. Those that participated in organizing that warning shot know it even while many who did not lift a finger for it look for other explanations for this positive shift in the discourse.

Opponents have framed the public option as a stealth first step to a national “single payer” plan of universal national health care administrated by the government, and they may well be proved right about that in years to come. Meanwhile, the fact that the President, years ago as an Illinois state senator, supported a single payer solution, has been bandied about by some proponents this year as evidence that he either sold out “the base” (what some white college educated progressives call, um, some white college educated progressives) or that his attention to practical realities somehow indicate that he lacks a political backbone.

It’s been an entire summer of silliness from both of those camps; from the “Obama is a socialist” club to “Obama is another Bush” chorus, the infantile nature of so much of US politics has been on full display with the health care debate as its fulcrum.

Although during this same Summer of Shove of 2009, the President was repeatedly clear on his desire for a public option in the health care law that has eluded every administration since that of Harry Truman in the 1940s and 50s, he was accused again and again of not really wanting it or seeking it. Daily Kos blogger Brooklynbadboy offers an entertaining inventory of pundits and bloggers who “declared the public option dead.”

Among them are those like the whiny voice of blogger Jane Hamsher - still bitter that Obama beat her candidate Clinton in the primaries - who on August 17 declared, “Many people are rightly upset that the White House is sending stronger and stronger signals that they are willing to jettison a public option.  What was once the defining feature of the Obama health care plan has now been dismissed with a bipartisan flourish.” Then on September 10 repeated, “the White House has been trying to get out from under th e burden of supporting the public option for weeks.” Then on September 18 re-repeated, “President Obama has been desperate to ditch the public option for weeks.”

Such prattling has been duly featured at the Huffington Post along with daily “reports” (read: rumors based mainly on the statements of unnamed sources inside the beltway, but played as hard news) to feed the HuffPo editorial line, which goes like this: Obama doesn’t want a public option on health care and so “the base” (white college educated progressives, especially of the blogging tendency) has to “make him do it.”

That narrative has been a good example of the typical self-aggrandizing attempt by a certain tendency to insist that the story is about them (most of whom already do have health insurance, by the way, and don’t mix very much with we hoi polloi that do not).

I’ll offer an alternative view, informed by my study of Obama’s political modus operandi and my bias and experience that community organizing usually proves a thousand times more effective on any matter than poutrage blogging or its corresponding activist circle jerk: Almost none of those complaining voices participated in Organizing for America’s October 20 day of action that had set a goal of 100,000 phone calls to Congress demanding health care and exceeded that goal three times over. If any of the poutrage bloggers even mentioned it, much less promoted it or urged readers to join in that show of grassroots muscle, I didn’t notice, and probably you didn’t either.

The poutrage bloggers are evidently hostile to the entire idea of community organizing; that ordinary people can make extraordinary things happen by reaching outside of the beltway, recruiting each other, and deploying such human forces strategically and surgically to impose public opinion onto Washington from outside of it. History now reflects that those 300,000 plus phone calls to Congress on October 20 marked the turning point in the quest for a public option on a Capitol Hill where some key Senators had to be dragged kicking and screaming into getting out of its way. Suddenly, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who only began publicly touting the public option after his and other senators’ phone lines were lit up – is being proclaimed by some as the hero of the story who somehow got out in front of the White House in its favor.

Suddenly Reid – the schlamozel of so much poutrage blogging before - is their standard bearer, only because he serves their narrative that seeks to reserve credit for themselves for the coming public option health care program, and glances jealously at the President and his allied Organizing for America, who they see as competition over credit for organizing the the members of the poutrage club did not do.

Which brings us to the next media sensation in the debate as health care legislation rounds third base and heads toward the home plate: What is looking increasingly like an “opt out” provision in the bill which would gain the remaining stragglers among Democratic US Senators who have been hostile to the public option all summer long. It is a compromise – as legislation always involves – that would allow individual states (presumably via state legislatures, although the final bill hasn’t been written yet) to “opt out” of the public option on health care.

“Opting out” is perhaps not the right term for what would happen if, say, Oklahoma’s - or another state's - legislature and governor availed themselves of that provision. What they would really be doing, in effect, is prohibiting their own citizens from benefiting from the national public health care program, imposing only private insurance company options upon those citizens.

What nobody has mentioned so far – so let me please do so – is the political trap an “opt out” provision would set for health care opponents, particularly those in the Republican Party.

Let’s imagine that after more than 60 years of failure, Congress finally, this fall, approves a health care bill and that it has a public option but also with the “opt out” provision for states. Americans throughout the land – particularly the tens of millions without any health insurance at all and the many more who are unhappy with their private sector health plans – will feel a great wave of relief and hope for improvement of their own families’ daily lives.

Any state legislature and governor that then decides to “opt out” – thus denying their own citizens the option to sign up for national government sponsored health insurance – will then have provoked a lasting political storm upon themselves. It will become very personal, as people realize that Governor Smith or State Senator Jones directly denied their children what other Americans have won.

In the 26 states – 24 of them west of the Mississippi – that have statewide referenda processes, any state that opted out would be subject to public referendum campaigns aimed at reversing the opt-out. These would be a community organizer’s dream and an anti-public option politician’s nightmare. Even in those states without referendum processes, the public ire would be focused on those state legislators and governors that denied their own citizens access to what citizens in other states will have: a federal health insurance option to compete with those offered by the big insurance companies.

All political hell would break loose in any state where the legislature and governor opted out of national public health care, because they won’t really be opting out, but, rather, would be slamming a door on their own constituents. In those states, entrenched legislators once thought to be permanent in their seats would become electorally vulnerable. In the 2010 and 2012 elections many will be unseated by challengers who vow to return the stolen public health care option to the people. Such a dynamic would surely fall more heavily on Republicans, but also on some conservative Democrats as well.

The “opt out” clause, on a policy level, is a distasteful compromise, but on the level of electoral politics it is pure political gold, especially for pro-public health care Democrats. It could lead Republican legislatures and governors in key states to be replaced by Democratic majorities. It would become the battle cry to register millions of non-voters from the most marginalized sectors of society – those without any health insurance at all, first and foremost – to inundate the polling places in years to come.

In sum, as the various compromise options on getting a public health care option through the US Senate go, the "opt out" public option is the one that most sets a trap for opponents for years to come. It is a dare, really: Go ahead and try to deny your own state’s citizens what millions of Americans have now won for their families and themselves. You’ll be sorry if you do.

It is a long distance runner’s strategy, made possible on a single day – October 20 – by the unsung organizers that flooded the Capitol switchboard. And should that be the result of the final legislation that comes through Congress, it will set in motion a chain reaction of political firestorms that offer state-by-state organizing opportunities to continue to change the political map in the United States for the better, and bring the entire country, step-by-step, closer to a future single payer health care plan.

Update: And right on cue, another embittered Clinton '08 supporter (indeed, the rocket scientist staffer behind the then-Senator's lackluster "online" campaign, outgunned and outmaneuvered at every step by Obama's), Peter Daou, unwittingly reveals that, yes, it's all about who gets credit! Ha ha. His spiel is titled, "Don't Bother Waiting for Bloggers to Get Credit for the Public Option." Hey Peter, don't break your typing arm by trying to pat yourself on the back. And notice that he doesn't even mention the 315,023 phone calls generated to Congress a week ago? He could have just as well typed, "LA LA LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING!"

Update II: Andrew Sullivan, on the other hand, sees and hears the same train comin' down the track.

By Al Giordano

A company called the Audit Bureau of Circulation measures how many actual newspapers are sold by US dailies and has just released its September 2009 six-month report. Newspaper companies pay the Audit Bureau to conduct this measurement to be able to show potential advertisers how many readers - especially the upscale kind - their ads will potentially reach.

The latest audit brings, not surprisingly, very bad news for the American newspaper and its corporate model of journalism.

Of the 25 most widely read newspapers in the US, all but the Wall Street Journal – treading water at 2,024,269 readers, the Journal is now the de facto top daily in the country (but that, with only a tiny elite of 0.6 percent of US residents reading its pages) – have lost significant readership since a year ago, according to the Audit Bureau.

USA Today’s circulation dropped 17.5 percent in one year to 1.9 million, sinking it to second place. Reportedly the paper can no longer afford to artificially boost its circulation numbers by providing a free copy at your hotel room door and then counting you as one of its “readers.”

The “big three” dailies are in an ever-faster free fall: The third place New York Times’ readership fell 7.3 percent and is now at under a million readers a day. Fourth place Los Angeles Times, now at 657,467 readers, lost 11 percent of its customers. And the fifth ranked Washington Post, at 582,844 readers, lost 6.4 percent.

The sixth and seventh place finishers – the New York tabloids, the News and the Post - hover near half-a-million readers apiece. That means in what used to be a “newspaper town” of the Big Apple, if we combine the entire circulations of the Journal, the Times, the News and the Post, even including their national circulation, together they don’t reach even four million readers in a metropolitan area of 18 million.

It’s over. The advertiser-funded model of daily newspapers is now circling the drain.

Today’s Audit Bureau numbers also disprove one of the theories that newspaper ideologues have floated in recent years: that the larger “regional” papers – like the Timeses of NY and LA and the Post of DC – would emerge to gobble up the readers of other dying dailies in geographic proximity to become healthy regional giants. The data clearly demonstrates that that ain’t happening at all.

When the topic comes up, this final generation of daily newspaper editors and reporters typically takes its hands off its eyes and ears just long enough to blurt out a rant about how “bloggers” can never replace newspapers. But before one can engage them with, say, real facts (those mere props in the US daily newspaper mythology) about other news sources that are growing and thriving today (like this online newspaper you're reading right now, much more diverse in our models than blogs only), and the different methods we use to investigate and report the news, these Cro-magnons typically go back to the monkey-see monkey-do pose as if in tantrum to express that they’re not listening.

In their increasingly public ruminations about why this is “happening to them” there is zero self-reflection about the biggest factor behind their demise: That they have lost credibility with their former public. Asking “why” just isn’t done in polite company. The big dirty secret that they must deny at all costs is that they did this to themselves by abandoning the interests of the majority of the public in favor of targeting only those readers with expendable cash that advertisers want to reach.

Which is why it is particularly poetic that, for example, the Miami Herald, which had transparently become what I’ve long called “Oligarch’s Daily” in its efforts to pander to the wretched refuse of the oligarch diaspora in Southern Florida, saw its circulation fall over the last year by 23 percent to just 162,260: it now reaches only three percent of its 5.4 million metropolitan area population. Those numbers simply are not sustainable to keep fielding a gaggle of professional simulators like Frances Robles to pretend to be “journalists” in order to disinform the US public about events in Latin America. The pink slip begins its inexorable journey into hers and others’ hands. It truly is only a matter of time.

There are days when this online newspaper exceeds the daily readership of most of those US dailies, and we’re not even close in sheer numbers to those like Markos Moulitsas and Andrew Sullivan who out-gun all of them every single day in circulation.

And yet while the US version of the newspaper is dying, we’ve written about print news projects in Latin America that are growing while their north-of-the-border counterparts are shriveling up. The daily Por Esto! in less than two decades became the third largest daily in Mexico by opening its arms and doors to the larger community and hosting public assemblies to listen to its readers rather than just talk at them.

Today, Narco News correspondent Belén Fernández reports on the fast growth of Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ El Libertador (and the efforts by the coup regime to buy its loyalty and then to shut it down when it could not be bought), now with a daily readership of over 80,000 in a country of 7.5 million. By the numbers, it already enjoys a larger percent of the national population’s readership than the largest daily in the US, one which was founded in 1882.

Some of us professional journalists, allied with the lay citizenry in our distrust of the advertiser model of media, saw this coming years ago and set about building the authentic journalism renaissance from below. Our work is an international hemispheric laboratory in creating what will replace the old model of daily newspapers. We do it without investors or advertisers. That you, kind reader, are here reading these words is your first evidence that it is working.

And every time a daily newspaper of the obsolete model lays off another round of reporters, more of them come to us to study and learn the craft anew from this very different and opposite angle: from below, as opposed to the top down model that encrusted around them and doomed the previous version of their careers.

Truth is, there is a direct correlation between the space in the media sphere that gets freed up every time a daily newspaper loses circ or dies and the increased reach that we and others have as we replace them with a better more people-powered model.

So don’t mourn the American daily newspaper. Anything you liked about it will continue but from a different set of new media. The time will come when one or more of those publications, or a new one yet to come in the US, will turn to the models that work for the daily Por Esto! or El Libertador or others South of the border, kissing their slavish dependence on advertisers goodbye and throwing their lot in, instead, with the larger multitudes of society.

The garden of authentic democracy grows stronger when the weeds are pulled out of the soil. And so day in, day out, we tend to this garden, water and feed it, watching the seeds we planted and protected grow bigger and stronger than the former parasitical vines and weeds that society mistook, based only on their size, for the garden itself. It’s all good: Evolution wins again.

By Al Giordano

Reporting throughout Honduras over the past 118 days of resistance to the coup d’etat, we heard the same thing from the people on the ground wherever we went: That whether or not President Manuel Zelaya returns to the post he was elected to serve, that whether or not “elections” happen on November 29, that whether or not the world views them as legitimate, all of that is secondary to the people’s primary demand: for a new Constitution and a constituent assembly (“constituente”) of elected representatives from every sector of society to write it democratically.

A little bird flew by my window this morning - the date the "talks" for a negotiated solution to the Honduras coup definitively broke down and ended - and suggested the following strategy idea, one that has been under discussion in important corners of the Honduran civil resistance: Why wait for an illegitimate regime’s permission to hold the referendum that the coup was designed to stop?

The coup was held on June 28 precisely to stop a non-binding referendum – one that asked if Hondurans wanted the right to vote for or against a new Constitution – but the regime’s own insistence on holding faux “elections” on November 29 inadvertently provides the people with the opportunity to do the very thing the coup was intended to stop: To put up ballot boxes outside of every “official” polling place and survey the people on that original question.

Now that the Honduran civil resistance and its diverse social movements are so much better organized in every town and city than ever before, the little bird asked, why not utilize the November 29 date of the regime’s sham “elections” to hold a real referendum? The suggestion is to place a “First Ballot Box” (“primera urna”), outside of every official polling place, that asks the first question anew: “Do you favor convening a national Constituent Assembly to democratically write a new Constitution for the Republic of Honduras?” “Yes” or “No?”

That little bird must have likewise carefully listened to the voices from below.

We heard it - and reported it to you - from the northeastern cities of Trujillo, Tocoa, and Saba and the nearby farms of Guadalupe Tepayac. We heard it throughout our reporting from coastal La Ceiba and from the Afro-Honduran and Garifuna communities throughout that coast. From the popular barrios of San Pedro Sula and the highway blockades of Comayagua the same central demand was on everyone’s lips: ¡Constituente! From the colonias in resistance throughout greater Tegucigalpa, ¡Constituente! From the western mountains of Santa Rosa de Copán to the fields and jungle outposts of Olancho, the same demand: ¡Constituente! That is what a majority of the Honduran people seek and that is precisely what the coup d’etat – supported by only 17 percent of the public, according to the COIMER & OP poll – was executed to try to stop.

It was this yearning for a new Constitution – and President Zelaya’s endorsement of the people’s desire to vote on it – that provoked the coup d’etat on June 28. That was the date that Hondurans were scheduled to vote on a non-binding referendum – a “consulta” – about whether they would like to cast ballots on November 29 into a “fourth ballot box” (“cuarta urna”) for or against such a constituent assembly to democratically remake the Constitution and the nation.

The coup on that date not only illegally removed the President from the country, it not only shut down the two most trusted TV and radio news networks in the land, but it also unleashed a wave of violent military and police attacks on the referendum ballots and boxes throughout every municipality in the country to prevent that non-binding consulta from happening. Why did they attack cardboard boxes? Because the oligarchs and the minority 17 percent of Hondurans that are with them knew full well that the results of that referendum would have demonstrated that an overwhelming of majority of Hondurans want to vote to construct a new Constitution. And that national expression of popular will would have created unstoppable momentum toward that goal.

And since the current Constitution – drafted in 1982 by those in power, including current coup dictator Roberto Micheletti – allows for a fixed playing field in which the few control the resources and freedoms of the many, the one thing the coup regime can’t tolerate is that the Constitution be rewritten to become one that is of, by and for the people. That small group in power knows very well that the majority of the people no longer want the few to decide everything for them.

What the little bird proposes would be a textbook “dilemma action,” in which a civil resistance puts the regime on the horns of dilemma in which it has no good options to respond.

If the Honduran social movements were to schedule their own referendum on that same November 29 date – a parallel vote, with a new ballot box outside of every polling place in the land for voters to deposit their decision on whether to convene a constituente for a new Constitution – the regime would be left with two very bad options. Sure, the regime could send its soldiers and cops to attack the peaceful process and the citizens that carry it out. But that would lead to startling news images of violent repression on Election Day itself, and a subsequent guarantee that no nation in the world – much less, the majority of the Honduran people - would be able to recognize the November 29 official election as legitimate.

Or, the regime could alternately let the peaceful action happen, in which case the resistance could then count the votes announce the results of its national survey on Election Night – which would likely be overwhelmingly in favor of a new Constitution and a constituente to get them there – and thus place the constituente back at the front of the national agenda at the very time when the regime’s sham “election” will have culminated and played itself out.

If the last 118 days of resistance and repression are prologue, it’s probably likely that the imbecile regime of Micheletti and his Simian Council will opt for Election Day images and videos of its police and soldiers attacking something as wholesome and non-threatening as ballot boxes from every corner of Honduras. That would certainly end its claims to be democratic or civil or legitimate, and make it impossible for the world or the Honduran population to accept the regime’s “election” results as legitimate.

The little bird added that it would not be recommended to call the authentic referendum the “cuarta urna” or “fourth ballot box,” as it was referred to last June. That title came from the way Honduran elections are structured. The first ballot box was to be that where people would have deposited their votes for President (and for the Central American Parliament). The second ballot box was for Congress. And the third ballot box was slated for municipal offices. The coup regime – especially since its September 29 “state of siege” decree suspending Constitutional freedoms of speech, press, assembly, transit and due process – has already made it too late for fair and free elections to culminate as soon as November 29. Therefore, its first, second and third ballot boxes are no longer legitimate.

A Civil Society-driven referendum or consulta would become, thus speaks the little bird, the de facto First Ballot Box, La Primera Urna.

The regime says it wants an election campaign between now and November 29. The little bird says, “why not give them one?” Why not give them posters that say “Vote Yes on the Primera Urna?” Why not go door-to-door and house-to-house campaigning for it? Why not hold “Vote Yes” Campaign rallies in every city and town? And why not organize it all at the local level in Honduras’ 394 municipalities, and even further down to the election district level?

Each such rally, every such poster or flyer, would serve up a challenge to the illegitimate regime: Let it happen, or plague its "elections" with the stain of its own violent and repressive tendencies.

The coup regime’s investment in its November 29 “election” as its last gasp for national and international legitimacy unwittingly puts the national resistance in the driver’s seat on that date. A strategy of direct interference with the regime's phony “election” (say, one of attacking the regime's own ballot boxes) would be seen, the little bird says, as offering mixed signals and confusion over which side authentically supports democracy. But a strategy of putting up parallel ballot boxes, near each of the regime’s polling places, would either succeed in making the very referendum that the coup mongers feared on June 28 happen for real, or it would cause that regime to ham-handedly make the photo and video images from its own election day that define it to the nation and the world those of its own troops attacking and destroying ballot boxes.

If the regime attacks ballot boxes, it loses. If it more wisely allows the very referendum the coup was designed to prevent happen, it also loses. That would make the previous six months of coup government irrelevant, and an abject failure. Because the very next day, on November 30, the center of the national agenda will remain, and more strongly become, the public demand for a new constitution - and a constituent assembly to make it democratically so.

Thus spoke a little bird.

By Al Giordano

It is a herald of the hour we live in that the New York Times has to lay off eight percent of its news reporters but the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism is out scouting and recruiting for a different kind of journalism that is growing and on the ascent.

Recently asked by reporter Mike Miliard of The Boston Phoenix (my alma mater) to define authentic journalism, I said: “A journalism that doesn’t pander to the interests of the advertisers. That doesn’t go out and look for the more upscale readership in order to please those advertisers, but rather serves people — in a way that the people come to believe and to know that the newspaper, or whatever media it is, is part of them and serves their interests.”

There are also some darn entertaining quotes in Miliard's story from an official journalism school spokesman trying to spin his way out of what is obvious to all: that authentic journalism rises at the very moment that official forms of journalism are falling down.

The School of Authentic Journalism, begun in 2003, has trained and formed ranks that are building that journalism of the future across international boundaries. And for ten days on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, from February 3 to 13, a volunteer faculty of 48 professors on the themes of journalism and civil resistance – with hundreds of years of gumshoe experience between us – are going to share skills and knowledge and coach 24 scholarship recipients in this craft.

We charge zero tuition. For some of the scholarship recipients across this hemisphere and world, we pay your airfare to travel to and from the school. We feed and lodge you. We teach (and we also learn from) you. What do we ask in return? Only that you go out into your communities and the world and do this vital work of authentic reporting on the many kinds of struggles for authentic democracy, justice, freedom and human rights.

There are no restrictions on who can apply for these scholarships. You don’t need to have graduated from any other kind of school. All an applicant needs to do is speak either English or Spanish and complete a ten-page application in either language with an essay requirement and tell us honestly about your work and yourself. Some of the questions we ask on that application are the same ones we asked seven years ago, because they worked to help us find the colleagues of talent and conscience that would then go out and do this work and who have, in so many cases, done it so effectively since, with our newspaper’s team and with other media.

2009 will be remembered as the year that the commercial media woke up to the fact that an authentic media from below – one that involves the people rather than treats them as mere consumers – is now better able to report from the ground level during civil resistance movements than the big networks, wire agencies and newspapers are able to do. This became crystal clear in June of this year when regimes in Iran and Honduras tried, and failed, to stop the flow of information and images about what was really happening in those countries. Especially in lands of state censorship of the media, it is this journalism from below that breaks the information blockades and reduces the commercial media to a dependence on reports from media like Narco News, from YouTube videos and from Twitter tweets and so many other vehicles for ground level reporting.

What was a well-kept secret in recent years as we helped to build it under radar is now out of the bag: What was once the future is now. But this sudden "discovery" by the commercial media up above also means that we all have to become better, faster and more coherent at this work of news reporting – written, online, documentary and viral video – and that goes for our j-school professors as well as our students (which helps explain why so many talents of great accomplishment volunteer their time and pay their own way to get to the school: it’s an important tune-up and upgrade for us, too).

So, this is to remind that if you want to attend this ten-day intensive training session in authentic journalism next February, you need to complete the application by Sunday night, November 1, at midnight Pacific Time. To receive an application in English, send an email to app@narconews.com. To receive an application in Spanish, send an email to sol@narconews.com.

And if you can’t attend, this time we’ll be producing a series of viral training videos from the School’s sessions and posting them online for free, so the world can learn these skills, philosophies and ethics with us. If you share our belief that it’s important to scout, recruit and train the next generation of authentic journalists then please also remember that this school happens only because so many people like yourself donate what they can, large or small, to make it happen, and consider dropping a coin into the cup today, via The Fund for Authentic Journalism at this link.

Ten days, future School of Authentic Journalism scholars: that’s the window of time left to remain eligible for one of these scholarships. After November 1, the door closes for everyone else, and we’ll carefully study each application, conduct interviews with some promising applicants, and then announce the class of 2010 in mid-November. Some applicants complete the questionnaire and essay requirement in a day. Others take more days to do it. Both kinds have traditionally been chosen. But all have to meet deadline and get their completed applications in on time. The clock is now ticking: Ten days to shake your world… and everyone else’s.

By Al Giordano

Monday’s memorandum by the Obama administration that the federal government will cease wasting law enforcement, prosecutorial (and correspondingly court) budgets on arresting and raiding medical marijuana dispensaries and patients came as the next logical step in what has primarily been a textbook organizing campaign from below.

The history is instructive on how small steps lead to big change, and is worth study by all who clamor for progress on many fronts: from bringing about national health care to ending the US embargo of Cuba to immigration reform to overhauling an entire economic system, to each and every “issue” one might advocate.

Much of my work as a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s was in the realm of reporting on US drug policy and the movements that sought to repeal or reform it. In that I had a front row seat to the debates and discussions – always passionate, often rancorous – between advocates and organizations that worked to change those laws. There were natural tensions between, for example, those who saw drug prohibition itself as the cause of so much harm, violence and injustice and concluded (as I do) that repeal of prohibitionist laws against all drugs – including those which are addictive or cause clear risks to their users - is a necessary step for any society that yearns to breathe authentically free. Others, representative of tens of millions of Americans who use marijuana recreationally or medically, simply wanted to establish their own right to do so in peace, without much regard to the related societal harms on people that were not demographically like them.

Conferences would be held and those matters of philosophy and strategy would be argued strenuously but meanwhile the drug war marched on as a literal war – with its own armaments, POWs and death toll – by the US government against its own people and against many in other lands.

In the mid-1990s, some forward-thinking advocates of drug policy reform concluded that the big, central matter – whether recreational drugs should be legalized or not – was simply too big and confusing a matter for so much of the public to tackle all at once. Even the matter of legalizing relatively harmless marijuana was overwhelming in terms of public opinion. As the Gallup poll graph above recounts, in 1996 only 25 percent of Americans favored legalizing marijuana, with 73 percent opposed. Any organizing strategy under such overwhelming negative numbers that chose polarization over organizing was doomed to fail.

And so some pioneering voices and organizers set about on a path of incremental change. They chose to hit hard upon a brittle crack in the drug war artifice: that even if three-quarters of Americans did not then want cannabis legalized for everyone, a critical mass had grave misgivings about policies that persecuted people who were ill – with glaucoma, cancer, AIDS, MS and other ailments - and needed the plant as medicine.

The debates today over health care and other matters seamlessly echo those that took place among drug policy reform advocates in the mid-90s. Those who embarked on a strategy of incremental change were often vilified by natural allies who said that such a step-by-step path did not move fast or far enough. In some cases, entire organizations were shattered and splinter groups formed in their place, competing for the same supporters and funding. We all know how that story goes. Friendships in that milieu of drug policy reform, too, were lost in the divisions, egos and hard feelings. There have always been, and perhaps always will be, those who argue that by urging incremental change a movement abandons its core principles. But in the end, history moves one step at a time, and more often than not it is those who walk rather than sprint that emerge triumphant.

Thirteen years later, those who enacted the incremental strategy have proved correct, indeed, prophetic. In 1996 – over the objections of some pot legalization groups and individuals – citizens in California and Arizona placed medical marijuana referenda on their state ballots. The California measure – legalizing the possession of up to eight ounces or 18 plants of grass - passed with 56 percent support. In Arizona – thought to be a more “conservative” state – a measure allowing physicians to prescribe medical marijuana won 65 percent of all votes (there, the state legislature quickly repealed the new law, so citizens put it on the ballot again two years later and repeated their victory).

Shifting from mere activism and advocacy to a referendum strategy also forced significant swathes of drug policy reform movements to enter a new phase: that of community organizing. Referenda in most states require the collection of signatures, which means advocates had to get out of the circle jerk cycle of endless meetings and internal debate and go out there, door to door, to recruit from the general public. Once they got the proposed laws on the ballot that meant campaigning for votes. This marked a paradigm shift in what had been a self-marginalized reform movement: a wake up call

In 1998, again by pursuing this strategy of community organizing, the states of Oregon, Washington and Alaska followed suit with similar measures. Maine followed in 1999. In 2000, Colorado, Hawaii and Nevada voters did the same. Since then, Montana, New Mexico, Michigan, Rhode Island and Vermont became medical marijuana states, and Maryland allowed medical use as a defense in court. Four of those states – California, Colorado, New Mexico and Rhode Island – have legalized clinics and dispensaries where cannabis can be distributed legally to the patients who need it.

During these years – and the battle has been particularly focused in California – the federal administrations of George W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton before him disrespected those expressions of democratic will and sent the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and federal prosecutors to raid medical marijuana clinics, arrest, fine and imprison providers and patients alike. And looking up again at that Gallup graph you can see how during those years public opinion on the larger question of legalizing marijuana for everybody that wants it has taken a fast turn toward outright repeal of prohibition.

The community organizing phase – that of referenda on the state level – quickly gave birth to a bona fide civil resistance movement: one in which tens of thousands of Americans openly committed nonviolent civil disobedience against federal law to implement the new state laws allowing distribution of medical marijuana to patients. The federal raids against cannabis dispensaries and patients provoked the public conscience and demonstrated the fundamental immorality and ineffectiveness not just of US enforcement against medical marijuana but also of pot prohibition overall. And public opinion on the wider question moved markedly toward legalizing marijuana.

In the Western states, according to Gallup, an outright majority of 53 percent of citizens now favor marijuana legalization compared to 46 percent against. Well, that makes perfect sense: that is precisely the cluster states that led the charge on the smaller matter of medical marijuana and where community organizing and civil resistance have garnered the most support and attention: thus, there is a causal effect of such organizing and resistance on public opinion.

With that shift in public opinion came a leading presidential candidate in 2007 and 2008 who pledged to end the raids of medical cannabis dispensaries in states that make them legal, and just ten months after his inauguration, President Obama has now made good on that promise, one that wasn't his idea but, rather, of his organizer's ear being able to hear the din that had been caused by the organizers from below. And with that paradigm shift in federal policy, expect to see public opinion continue to break steeply in favor of repealing the prohibition altogether.

The history textbooks will note forevermore, when looking back at how the United States repealed pot prohibition (something that will likely now come in most of our lifetimes) that it was the strategy of incremental change that opened the floodgates to fundamental change. The same will be said of how the US embargo of Cuba was ended (granting Cuban-Americans the right to travel there inexorably will extend that freedom to all US citizens). The same will be written of immigration policy. And – if you can weed through the griping about whether this year’s health care reform goes far enough or not – I think a similar path of incremental steps to change will provoke a very similar dynamic toward wholesale change. Short of revolutions – which happen when incremental change is made impossible by the authoritarian nature of regimes - that is how change usually happens.

There have been many, many unsung heroes and heroines of these organizing and resistance battles that in thirteen short years have changed public opinion on marijuana prohibition – often at considerable risk and sacrifice to their own freedom and safety – but a very special place in history will be reserved for Ethan Nadelmann, today the director of the Drug Policy Alliance. It is fitting that he is profiled favorably in the current issue of Newsweek. Back in the early 1990s, it was Nadelmann who coalesced and gave narrative to the disparate voices and advocates who sought to launch a strategy of incremental change, and not only on marijuana policy, but also with “harm reduction” measures regarding the problems prohibition has brought to users and to society when it comes to other drugs.

He and the tens of thousands of Americans that went door to door to put those referenda on the ballot, and who subsequently risked so much in their civil resistance to the federal clinic raids, have just stepped through the threshold of history, and from the momentum of this most recent triumph will live to struggle and usher in more sweeping changes to US drug policy as a result. This week's victory now provides a roadmap for organizers in each of the 50 states to further change policy by doing so at the state level. (No victory is ever final: It opens the door to the next.)

But there is also a lesson here for the cynics who, in lieu of participating in community organizing and civil resistance campaigns, preferred to talk trash against step-by-step movements for change on any policy front and pose as somehow more “radical” or “pure.” This latest paradigm shift in US policy did not come about because some marijuana legalization advocates complained that medical marijuana reform wasn’t somehow “enough.” Of course it never was the final policy goal for so many that did the heavy lifting to make it so. But baby steps have now made an evolutionary leap forward toward the bigger change. Thus, this is a good moment to point out that the whining and Chicken Little tantrums of some others on that front had zero impact on making progress happen. Their method of complain and bark orders from the sidelines proved, once again, completely inconsequential and only served as annoying distraction from those doing the real work and organizing.

It is by winning those step-by-step incremental victories – through proven methods of community organizing and civil resistance - that more fundamental change is made possible, indeed, likely to come faster than many dreamed just thirteen years ago. And whether your priorities are in the realm of drug policy, or health care, or foreign policy or anything else, there is something vital to be learned from this particular lesson in civics.