04/24/13 - Philly Rootstriker/MOPWG Meeting Recap
Philly Rootstrikers
Money Out Of Politics Meeting Notes – 4/24/13, 7PM
Philly Rootstikers/Occupy Philly Money Out of Politics Working Group
Mission: Philly Rootstrikers educate people in the Philadelphia and surrounding areas about the corrupting influence of money over government.
#1 Goal: Each Philly Rootstriker will engage one person each week in discussion about the corrupting influence of money and its affects. The goal of this discussion will be to provide enough information and/or argument that the person will agree to talk about the discussion with one or more other people.
1. Rootstrikers Action: On The Record
Some people have written and read their letters to their Congresspeople.
Some have given Sheppard their letters to put up on the Rootstrikers site and to mail and email them. Sheppard mailed his out this week. If you have your letters ready for mailing, please do so this week, so they all can arriver around the same time.
Next we'll email the letters. Then we're going to work on talking points to use both when calling our Congresspeople to get their public stance on the corrupting influence of money and to see if we can arrange a meeting with them. These talking points can also be used for discussions with other organizations and the general public.
2. Rootstrikers Action: BizVizz Action
On Sunday, May 19th, around dinner time (4 or 5), Rootstrikers Street Team will be using a smart phone app to conduct and video tape an action involving supermarkets, and other stores.
We'll be focusing on the South Philly Columbus Blvd area, specifically the Walmart, Home Depot, SuperFresh, Shop Rite, and Target in that area.
The app is called BizVizz, which allows you to scan a bar code of a product, then it provides the amount of campaign spending by the product’s company. Rootstrikers is collecting the company info and other applicable data for us to use in conversation and materials. Rich Justice suggested to use the iphone to scan an iphone product to show what Apple contributes.
Rootstrikers is presently working on producing a standard flyer, that would be front & back and folded in half. This would be formatted so it could be used for multiple actions.
For the Action, we will engage customers inside, but mostly outside, the store to ask if we could scan some of their products with the app. We would then inform them of the amount of money the companies of the products checked gave to politicians. We would end the discussion with the customer with additional info about the corrupting influence of money and Rootstrikers if they seem interested. We would also give them the flyer made up for the action. Between conversations, we can flyer cars to make sure we're using all of our time to get the word out.
People’s Court of Public Opinion
Conduct a trial in a public space. We would put on trial a "monied-interest" like a corporation or other campaign funder. We would pick the accused, ideas were Comcast, AT&T, Wells Fargo, GE, Lockhead Martin, Fracking Co's, Walmart, etc. We would have different people take on different roles: judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, defendant, plaintiff, witnesses, and have the crowd act as jury. It was also suggested to have a "foreman" for the jury, which would be someone who facilitates the crowd, aka jury.
It was suggested to reach out to the Wells Fargo 9 to allow them to repeat their testimonies. It was also suggested to reach out to PHARE, since they have already conducted street theatre and other actions against Wells Fargo. Sheppard will try to reach out to them to see if their interested in either writing and participating in the parts of the "People's Court" or at least willing to provide us advice to make the action more successful.
We need to check permit and public spaces rules, since we'll be doing this outdoors. However, there is not a lot of concern about this since the actual people doing the parts would be a smaller number of people then what warrents a permit, yet we don't know if the crowd would count. Also, we'll need some kind of amplification for those playing parts in the "People's Court".
It was suggested to send summons to the company we put on trial and to local politicians to see if they would actually show or send someone to actually defend their position. Not likely, but the thought was to also send these "summons" to local press for printing. In the summons, we considered giving the recipient an "out" by asking them to send a statement on their position at least, which could be read during the trial.
We thought about doing this action in June before it gets too hot. It was also suggested to put on trial mutiple companies and groups, and make this an ongoing action. Also, Rootstrikers might like to incorporate this idea with an action associated with the upcoming Supreme Court Case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
4. We also talked about engaging Ward Leaders and Committee Members for the different Wards in Philly. This would be done to promote the ballot initiative, for us to be educated on the community and for the community to be educated on our cause, and to potentially grow the MOP Voter Bloc.
Since this email recap is already too long, I'll update you on the Philly Ward interaction as it takes shape.
Hope to see you at the next meeting! We have a lot to do!
Sheppard