The Unpopularity of The Can Kicks Back, Part II: Campus Chapters

April 19th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Alternative Parties | Politics - (2 Comments)

“The Can Kicks Back” depicts itself as a movement of young people who all “individually” decided that taxing more poor people, taxing corporations less, and cutting social programs was a keen idea. The operation is actually one of a constellation of political corporations funded by the billionaire soak-the-poor advocate Peter G. Peterson, sharing funding streams and a Washington DC office with its brother groups “Campaign to Fix the Debt” and “The New America Foundation.”

Yesterday, I shared one indication of the unpopularity of The Can Kicks Back with actual people; despite gaining repeated promotional coverage in more than 20 major media outlets, the twitter account of The Can Kicks Back has less than a thousand followers. Today, let’s look at another indicator of this group’s unpopularity: its effort to build campus chapters. The Can Kicks Back has a specific goal in mind for college students:

The Campus Program of The Can Kicks Back envisions having a presence on at least 300 college campuses across the country by the end of the spring semester in 2013. It all starts with one student, stepping up and speaking out as TCKB’s Campus Leader. These leaders are charged with serving as a point of contact for our campaign, organizing volunteers on their campus and managing the campaign locally.

The pitch is backed up by promises to actually send chapters money. It’s rewarding campus organizers by flying them to Washington DC for pre-arranged meetings with Senators and House Republican leadership. All the highly motivating incentives are in place; now The Can Kicks Back just needs to find young people willing to take them.

The end of the spring semester of 2013 is right around the corner. How is that plan coming along?

Not so well. As of today, The Can Kicks Back reports the existence of just 52 chapters. In contrast, the Go Fossil Free campaign started by 350.org has 328 campus chapters nationwide.

Of those 52 chapters, how many are active? The Can Kicks Back has paid for the NationBuilder service, which creates a separate web page for each active campus chapter and assigns chapters “political capital” points for using the NationBuilder accounts to send messages, announce events and recruit others:

Leaderboards, gamification and your own political currency

Customize public leaderboards for top commenters, social media supporters and other fans and friends of your efforts. Your supporters can earn and spend “political capital” for spreading the word about your site on Twitter and Facebook and recruiting new signups.

TCKB Flaccid FunkOf the 52 named chapters, only 17 have NationBuilder pages. Of the 17 chapters with NationBuilder pages, only 10 chapters have done anything more than sign up to obtain a page (earning 5 political capital points).

The 10 active campus chapters of “The Can Kicks Back” are, in order of the political capital (pc) points earned in the NationBuilder system:

Hofstra University: 202 pc
Notre Dame University: 145 pc
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis: 94 pc
Lebanon Valley College: 94 pc
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill: 85 pc
University of Wisconsin – Madison: 77 pc
SUNY Old Westbury: 24 pc
Emory University: 22 pc
Fairleigh Dickinson University: 22 pc
George Washington University: 22 pc

This is hardly a populist wave sweeping across the nation and exciting the young’uns. Even with promises of money and junkets to DC, college students appear to be largely uninterested.

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350.org Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign Hits American Campuses (at least on the Internet)

January 23rd, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Activism | Economy | Environment | Questions - (1 Comments)

In the 1980s, nearly two hundred colleges and universities across the United States agreed to divest — that is, stop investing their endowment funds — in businesses involved in the deeply racist Apartheid regime of South Africa. In this decade, the Fossil Free movement is organizing students and faculty on college campuses, who are in turn pressing their university administrations to divest from businesses that make their profits off of traffic in fossil fuels.

Fossil Free says there are 210 campaigns on its campus action page, but when I actually count the campuses on the list I come up with 122. Frustratingly, 350.org, the organization that is sponsoring Fossil Free, is not publishing a list of those who’ve signed the petition, or even a count of how many people have signed the petition at each campus. I therefore can’t tell you whether the campaign is succeeding or not, or where it is succeeding most.

If you know something more about the Fossil Free divestment movement, whether it’s an internet-only movement or features student-run, campus-specific actions, I’d appreciate it if you’d share that information with me.

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Green Party and Occupy have most educated Facebook Fans (Americans Elect and No Labels the least)

August 5th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Alternative Parties | Americans Elect | Democrats | Media | Politics | Republicans - (6 Comments)

Within the Facebook corporation, there are entire divisions dedicated to the analysis of the connections and communications of users, using unrestricted access to the entire Facebook dataset. If you have a Facebook page for your cause or organization, you can use Facebook Insights to see a far more limited breakdown of information about the people who like or read the posts on your page. Individual people who use Facebook and don’t have a Page cannot access any accumulated information about the people who are their Facebook “friends” (unless they visit each of their friends’ pages in turn) or about Facebook users in general.

A back door method to data mine Facebook -- use the admin screen of your Facebook pageFor people who maintain a Facebook page, however, there is a curious back-door method for getting fairly broad information about Facebook users. When we log in to our Irregular Times Facebook page, for instance, we see this solicitation, inviting us to create an advertisement on Facebook. By clicking on the solicitation (or finding the “Create an Ad” option under the “Build Audience” tab at the top), we’re taken to a screen on which we can build an advertisement — and in so doing find out a surprising amount about trends among Facebook users.

The Common Sense Coalition and Americans Elect are two purchasers of Facebook advertisementsDon’t get me wrong — Irregular Times has never advertised on Facebook and has no intention of buying any Facebook advertisements. We don’t advertise generally speaking, and the price Facebook asks for every time someone clicks on an advertisement — around $2.00 — is far more costly than any benefit we’d reap from someone’s eyeballs. The entities that have so much money to burn that they’re willing to pay two bucks for every time someone clicks an advertisement are almost always inhuman entities — corporations like WalMart that sell things or corporations like The Common Sense Coalition and Americans Elect that are hawking ideas.

But here’s the trick: in the act of building up a price quote for a hypothetical ad, Facebook provides counts of all sorts of people who use its service.

For instance, Facebook tells me that there are 446,660 people who have liked Occupy Wall Street or one of the other Occupy pages on the Internet. Such numbers are already public. But if I’m on Facebook’s build-an-advertisement page and looking for a market to target, Facebook also tells me that 242,240 of these people — 54.2% of them — are college graduates. That information is not otherwise public.

If I act as if I’m interested in purchasing an advertisement, I can further compare that information to other movements and parties in the United States. It turns out that the Occupy movement has the highest proportion of college graduates among its fans among all the movements and parties listed below:

53.4% of those who like the Green Party Facebook page are college graduates
52.3% of those who like the Democratic Party Facebook page are college graduates
48.1% of those who like the Libertarian Party Facebook page are college graduates
41.5% of those who like the Republican Party Facebook page are college graduates
39.7% of those who like the largest Tea Party Facebook page are college graduates
38.3% of those who like the No Labels Facebook page are college graduates
34.0% of those who like the Americans Elect Facebook page are college graduates

That’s multivariate data, and that’s where data we can sneak from Facebook begins to get interesting.

It’s worth it to pause and ask whether any old person should be able to obtain such information (and more, as I’ll describe later) willy-nilly by following the path to Facebook’s advertising widget for page holders. In fact I invite your ethical musings on the subject. What’s worth noting is that this information has been available to corporations and the wealthy for quite some time; this backdoor method directs the flood of “big data” more democratically.

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Gainesville State College Of Censorship

February 10th, 2011 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Media | State and Local - (0 Comments)

What did the Confederate States of America stand for?

Some people today like to think that the battle flag of the CSA, the Stars and Bars, was just a representation of Good Old Boys, chewing tobacco, music with fiddles in it, saying yeehaw, and drinking whiskey.

A more honest history remembers what that Confederate battle flag really stood for: A civil war that killed huge number of Americans and slavery. Even after the civil war was done with, the Stars and Bars stood for racist oppression through organizations like the KKK, through Jim Crow laws, and through ad hoc lynchings to enforce Southern racist ideology.

That’s the symbolism of the Confederate flag that art professor Stanley Bermudez attempted to communicate in his painting interpreting the flag:

For a short while, this painting was displayed in the Roy C. Moore Art Gallery at Gainesville State College down in Gainesville, Georgia. People in Gainesville who saw it were outraged, though.

Were the people of Gainesville outraged at the history of slavery, treason and violent racism in their community? No. They were outraged that anyone would dare to remind them of that history.

So, the administration of Gainesville State College censored the painting. They forced it to be taken down.

It’s abhorrent for a college that is supposed to be educating young people to use censorship to try to hide history from its students instead. Worse than that, it’s a downright stupid tactic.

Thanks to the decision of the Gainesville State College to censor honest depictions of the Confederate legacy, this painting is now receiving much more attention than it ever would have gotten if it were simply allowed to hang on a wall in a single art gallery down in Georgia.

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Hamilton, Oberlin, Vassar and Wesleyan Lead Colleges on Sweatshop-Free Front

August 29th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Activism | Ethics | Moral Values | Shirts - (3 Comments)

Alta Gracia brand shirts are unique in the world of collegiate gear for their transparently ethical production. They aren’t made in the USA, and in fact are made in the Dominican Republic, which in the past has signified sweatshop production. But Alta Gracia shirts are made under an arrangement between student activists, rigorous independent inspectors and Knights Apparel to provide a living wage of 338% minimum wage (based on an independent market basket analysis) plus a variety of other worker benefits and protections (see here for documentation).

The Alta Gracia line of shirts has been made available for colleges and universities across the United States to sell collegiate-branded apparel, starting right now. Last week we learned that an encouraging 20 out of the 25 top-ranked national universities in the USA either are selling Alta Gracia shirts right now or are scheduled to begin sales within the next month or so. But the rate of adoption among America’s top 25 ranked liberal arts colleges is not nearly as high. Of the 25 liberal arts colleges most highly ranked by US News & World Report, only 4 colleges are offering Alta Gracia shirts for sale now: Hamilton College, Oberlin College, Vassar College and Wesleyan University. These institutions are the leaders in their class and deserve congratulation. None of the remaining 21 top liberal arts colleges have even made a commitment to sell Alta Gracia shirts, not even reputedly lefty colleges in the list like Amherst, Carleton, Grinnell, Smith or Wellesley.

In the collegiate world, there is constant chatter by administrators about what is and isn’t being done at “competitor colleges” as presidents and their staffs chart out strategic plans in attempts to get ahead of the competition. If you care (as a student, a professor, an alumnus or even a “townie”) about treatment of workers who provide the economic basis for college education, and if you find your prestigious institution’s name in the “NO” list, then take a trip to the college president’s office and let him or her know how the school can do better…

… and if you’re a local member of Students Against Sweatshops, get ready to raise a little ruckus.

Honor Roll: Liberal Arts Colleges in the US News Top 25 who are offering Alta Gracia shirts for sale
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Hamilton College
Oberlin College
Vassar College
Wesleyan University
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Laggards: Liberal Arts Colleges in the US News Top 25 who are not selling Alta Gracia shirts and have no public plan to add Alta Gracia Shirts to their collegiate shops
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Amherst College
Bates College
Bowdoin College
Carleton College
Claremont McKenna College
Colby College
Colgate University
Davidson College
Grinnell College
Harvey Mudd College
Haverford College
Middlebury College
Pomona College
Scripps College
Smith College
Swarthmore College
US Military Academy
US Naval Academy
Washington and Lee University
Wellesley College
Williams College
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Horowitz’s Turn-In-Your-Professor Page Slips Down the Memory Hole

January 15th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Liberty - (0 Comments)

Five or so years ago, right-wing wag David Horowitz created a special web page with a form for college and university students to report their professors for the offense of making statements with which the students didn’t agree. Students would turn out in droves, Horowitz said, to rat out their undergraduate instructors for exposing them to different ideas.

Most of the students who filed reports on this page complained, in incorrectly-spelled run-on sentences, that they’d gotten bad grades for their excellent papers. Others entered satirical false reports. In 2008 the reports stopped coming in altogether.

Some time during the year 2009, Horowitz’s turn-in-your student web page disappeared altogether, sliding down the memory hole. Why, it’s as if the whole enterprise never existed! What a comforting thought.

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I’ll Pay For Up To 100 Percent Of Your Next Pizza

September 26th, 2009 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in War and Peace - (18 Comments)

Driving through the misty Mohawk River valley, a commercial on the AM radio gave me more confirmation that the military doesn’t have much respect for the people it asks to kill and be killed. The National Guard promised that it will pay “up to 100 percent” of the cost of a college education for those who enlist.

It seems that the National Guard has a new mission that requires special skills like the ability to work free of little distractions such as mathematical reasoning. “Up to 100 percent” would include absolutely nothing.

I wonder what other interesting little promises military recruiters are making these days.

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Colleges With True Green Vision

March 3rd, 2009 | Posted by The Green Man in Activism | Environment - (0 Comments)

Yesterday’s protest at the DC coal power plant was a smackdown of the claim that people have stopped caring about climate change because the economy is falling apart. The nonviolent activism refreshed the passion of Americans on issues of clean energy.

It turns out that this protest wasn’t an isolated event. It was connected to a student activist effort called Power Shift ’09. As part of Power Shift, large numbers of students from colleges across the country traveled to Washington D.C. or phoned in from where they lived to lobby members of Congress in favor of true clean energy initiatives.

Power Shift took note of which colleges its activists came from. The following were the top 5 schools in terms of registered participation:

University of Vermont
Middlebury College
Connecticut College
University of Maryland College Park
Oberlin College

A lot of high school juniors are trying to figure out right now where they’d like to go to college a couple years from now. For those who think they might be interested in careers related to clean energy and climate change, it looks like the schools listed above would be good places to focus on. They’ve proven to be home to students who are interested in integrating their scientific education with environmental activism.

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