thank you thank you all for being here drizzle never kept people in seattle away and there are a lot of friends here a lot of supporters people we work with over the years but this is a different kind of presentation i'm not going to go into a huge rendition of all the things that are wrong with this world of ours because i'm going to be animated by two little statements of ancient vintage one it was marcus cicero over two thousand years ago own ancient rome when he defined freedom as participation in power you notice he didn't just define freedom is from repression and harassment all kinds of bad things of arbitrary power he defined it positively as well freedom is participation in power and the second insight came from of fourteenth century china under the ming dynasty when one of their famous philosophers said to know not to do is not to know to know and not to do is not to know that is particularly appropriate for millions of americans who see things that are not right to see the drift of our country here and abroad heading toward serious complications and tragedies for our descendants if not for ourselves and who display great concern but that concern is often not translated into action and in this context civic engagement that's the difference between someone who is just concerned but someone who believes that to know and not to do is not to know now i'm going to just start with three little stories because before we get civic engagement we have to have it of civic personality you can't just say something is terribly wrong and you go into temper tantrums because you so worried about it you lose your physicist was at a gathering and someone came up to him and said mr newton why are you so much more brilliant than the other scientists and he looked at the person he said i'm not so much more brilliant than the other scientists but perhaps i can hold on to a problem in my mind and concentrate on it longer than most of then pull out the word concentration concentration now we move to william blake who is a famous artist and poet in england over a couple centuries ago and he was at some get together and someone came up to him said mr blake with whom are you living now and blake looked at the person and said with whom in my living i'm living with my imagination so pull out the word imagination the third was a statement very modest by albert einstein but he was making a point he said quote i have no special attributes i have no special assets i just have a passionate curiosity and pull out the word curiosity so we have concentration imagination curiosity we're all able to reflect those traits and put content into them and there really is sort of the infrastructure that we fill with the the facts the data the statistics the trends the tragic results or the beneficial  results and before i lose that reference to history let me just share with you a story about eugene debs the great leader of working people a poem but eight hundred twenty five in america and he is a kind of person he took a train from philadelphia to speak to an audience in the open fields in chicago and one hundred fifty thousand people showed up so he's pretty well several times i can share his experience the the the interest scene tidbit here is that near the end of his career which is about one hundred twenty five he was really pretty exhausted he was asked by a reporter mr debs what's your greatest regret you've been fighting for the working person all these decades what's your greatest regret and he said my greatest regret he said my greatest regret is the american people under their constitution can have almost anything they want but it just seems like they don't want much of anything at all that goes to the expectation level the grimmest and most effective controlling process by the few over the many is not outright brutality it's lowering  keeping expectation levels so so minimal that the very imagination or speak the very view that things could be different doesn't cross their mind that was the status say of slavery or the status of this of the surf in the middle medieval periods so with that background let's start with what there is a major public opinion behind in this country and a lot of these are left right support one of the biggest divide and rule tactics that's going on in his country is that constant drumbeat every day we are a highly polarized society we are blue state we are red state where conservative be we are liberal and we just can't get together that may be true in reproductive rights school player prayer gun control and some other issues but there are  huge number of transformational issues that there is heavy left right support behind you right here in washington state you're going to have initiative to take the minimum wage to thirteen dollars and fifty cents outside of seattle where it's going to fifteen there is a heavy left right support in fact there's almost no over opposition to this on television i'm told and it's going to win with the super majority throughout the country it comes in and the polls seventy five to eighty percent in terms of a significant restoration of the minimum wage adjusted for inflation which would be eleven dollars plus additional increase to reflect a tiny bit of the worker productivity increase since one nine hundred sixty eight but there's more there's left right support to preserve and defend our civil liberties even when we're attacked like nine eleven not to give up our liberty for security as benjamin franklin once said those who prefer security over liberty deserve neither and there's strong left right support against those provisions in the patriot act that allow the government to search your home and not you for seventy two hours to get into your medical financial library records without probable cause which is the key in the fourth amendment and his very strong support for that the bloated military budget you wouldn't think so there you go you go to the various concentrations of opinion on this and while conservatives may like a bigger budget and some progress is none of them like bloated inflated corrupt redundant military budget that isn't even audit of all it's the only department in the united states government that cannot produce data to the government accountability office of the us congress to get audited and it's violating federal law since one thousand nine hundred two you'll get a good left right that was illustrated by congressman ron paul and congressman barney frank right left in congress they developed a caucus to reduce the bloat in the military budget there are others as well cracking down on corporate crime is all kinds of corporate crime against consumers against homeowners member the robo signatures in the whole mess with the derivatives and and phony mortgages and overextension of credit cetera and foreclosures there's corporate crime against workers occupational disease hazards not paying overtime so forth there's corporate crime against the environment we know that many ways these are all reported the interesting thing here is that there's so little done about corporate crime that even major media that resists that rely on corporate advertising think nothing of reporting it because they know that nothing's done about it anyway so why would be advertised to be that upset and you see it with the wells fargo situation and you see it with insurance scams you see it now with scamming where there computerized systems allow sellers to sell you things you never knew above in never won it but they appeared on the bill and if you started messing around in complaining they said watch out for your credit score your credit rating  this corporate crime against the government sixty billion dollars is the estimate looted from medicare by the vendors around the country sixty billion any recover about five billion a year because the same lobbyists make sure th fauresmith budgets against corporate crime are miniscule there are enough federal cops on the corporate crime b and then there's the criminal genet crimes these are technically not crimes because the corporations excluded this kind of behavior when congress was contemplating a statutory law so they're not technically crimes but they fit the common  premeditated behavior resulting in the lost of innocent life or the loss of property and somehow it never was protected by a criminal statute but what do you call for example what's going on now in military policy in foreign policy where you have private contractors a shooting up people doing things that only the military was supposed to do encroaching on public functions such  military activity and increasingly doing more and more of what corporations were never permitted to do and doing it under a kind of protective immunity because they're under sort of diff department of defen contractors and read stories about what's happened in iraq and afghanistan and in the light graduated from harvard law school and i just wrote a column recently ny said harvard law school should sp split its curriculum into two one is harvard law school new study statutes do just the decisions they tweak them here and there and have good discussions with their professors and the other curriculum is harvard law in very very major respects right now it is presents a doctrine that a president can it can kill anybody in the world who the president thinks is a suspect never mind  pushbutton of that end and virginia become the executioner become the prosecutor judge jury and executioner all in secret and they can vaporize seven or eight young men in yemen standing there they don't even know their names but the algorithmic models say these fifty age group and their gestures and so on pushed a button and they're gone this is organized murder now all wars are murder but they're supposed to be illegal under international law if you're attacked you can fight back and lot of people die but this is now completely out of control and it's bipartisan and it's partly partly out of control because congress has surrendered its constitutional duty to declare war and if it doesn't the presidency cannot go to war cannot engage in military attacks unless it is imminent threat and imminent threat is not defined very rigorously as days it almost as defined by oratory the tasco to the united states so there is a lot of left right support criminal justice reform fifteen legislatures of pass juvenile justice reform because liberals conservative lawmakers got together solar energy big big left right support if they had to choose a solar energy or fossil fuel nuclear hands down and solar it doesn't matter whether it's republican it doesn't matter it's liberal or conservative the koch brothers are putting money in state legislatures in the south to get a sales tax on solar panels guess what they're losing because there's no such thing as a republican solar panel or democrat solar panel and this includes wind power of course and the various forms of renewable energy forthcoming geothermal and the like another one is standing to sue there's a doctrine that says you as a citizen cannot sue the government for raw corruption for misuse of resources for any kind of agreed use effort because you're considered not having enough of the stake to persist the lawsuit that's coming out of medieval england completely antiquated but it's become a doctrine of judicial abdicati and convenience so you can't even get through the door and plead in court with the evidence you can't even get through the door no standing to sue that comes in over ninety percent when you explain it by ninety nine of the above so people can go and vote no confidence for those on the ballot that comes in off the charts left right that way binding on the above gets more votes than the other candidates on the ballot it cancels that line and you have new elections in say thirty days of new candidates it's a way of registry no confidence in gerrymandered or other kinds of corrupt electoral practices breaking up the big new york banks that are too big to fail george will conservative congress writes several times if these banks are too big to fail they're too big to exist again left right support in my book unstoppable so over there the emerging left right alliance to dismantle the corporate state there are twenty four areas of convergence and the importance here is not only it fights the divide and rule strategies they're often unscrupulous manipulative but it produces a political movement that is unstoppable i have seen members of the senate and house receive delegations of left right like to stop the breeder reactor program  eighty three in tennessee and when they see that delegation the office is composed of liberals and conservatives they turn pale they don't know how to game and they don't know how to manipulate it so if we really want to get things done in this country let's pick some of those major issues and these are major issues getting rid of crony capitalism or corporate welfare left right support these are not my minor issues then we can get things really done list goes on but i hope i have made my point to get to my next point now when you look at all these changes that need to be made and this country's full of problems it doesn't deserve and full of solutions it doesn't apply that are on this show housing public transit energy new kinds of tax codes new kinds of finance seen for small business that sector that when you ask well how do we get these what's the one institution that we have to have a laser beam focus on to get it done because you know you've been parts of these rallies here in seattle antiwar rallies or or climate change rallies or whatever and we've all participated in these rallies they're usually on weekends they usually are very effervescent need charge people up and monday morning there's cleanup and all that energy goes into the ether because it is not laser being focused on what the most powerful institution of congress is congress five hundred thirty five people we know their names it's not a faceless bureaucracy in the executive branch we know their names they want arvo they don't want to primary challenge they don't want strong citizen organization back in a district that nullifies no matter how much money they raise because money is not votes monies to get votes by t advertisements and slogans and all the things that cater to a small number of voters whose minds are not made up and eighty percent of voters in this country are hereditary voters they vote republican or democrat because their grandparents voted republican democrat and so that twenty percent is targeted anees ads relentlessly again and again and if people do not make do not do their homework they're very vulnerable to the various emotional and often grotesquely distorted appeals regarding who's running against whom the interesting thing by the way just as a side light if you want to make sure  that you shift the balance of power with your center representatives so they cannot manipulate you so easily do not confront them with one issue if you say to a senator i'm pro choice or you say i'm pro li and you don't see anything else they know how to deal with you you can see if taken a position would if you come up with fifteen twenty issues and you start saying things like i want to patriot act revise i want t hartley law repealed strict control against forming unions i want consumer protection in the financial area in a way where i can join with other consumers and tip the balance against some of these banks and even the go cheap directly with them in a way you go into it the more issues you put under the table the more you control the dynamic and the less they controlled the dynamic that was the entry congresses the khyber pass where millions of people as warren buffett said how come we can't control five hundred thirty five people because we haven't organized minimally to do so and what's what's important about that is here's how minimal it is now we all have hobbies most of us and they're all kinds of hobbies stamp collecting some people collect cars that's fairly expensive coin collecting they collect feathers they collect dolls from sicily they collect all kinds of things or you know bird watches i'm in total of bird watchers the diligence up at five in the marshes the not killers camera points tablets connect with everybody else i'm up to twenty four i got thirty eight got to get up earlier the energy is awesome i'm told there are five million serious bird watches in the united states i don't count one hundred serious congress watchers i count political clubs you know they're trying to get elected but citizen watchers to try to get the general interest going full time pay there is one hundred of that's shocking because if you come to think of it what's at stake in terms of transforming this country and helping to transform the world by getting off their back or helping  to look at our grandchildren in the eyes when you're sitting on our lap and they're nine years old they're recovering aware of what's happening to the world and the climate change is hit and a dispersal of dangerous weaponries hitty and the global economy is on the precipice and the speculative engine that binges of other people's money likes mutual funds and pension funds so wall street practice and this nine year old you know has some sort of sense that things are going really bad fast and looks he says grandma grandpa what's going on what were you all doing when this started what is grandma and grandpa going to say well the little child we were otherwise busy otherwise busy what were you otherwise busy with when it comes to your city civic duties that child is going to be saying when it grows up so let's look at it very practically never has there been more than one percent of the people engaged throughout american history spread out among congressional lincoln called the public sentiment namely public opinion corporate and commercial interests were against the abolition of slavery think cotton plantations they said no they were against women's right to vote women wanted to get rid of child labor in dungeon factories among other things they said no they were against the farmers organizing in east texas in eighty eighty six for the great spread of the progressive movement to regulate bank interest rates and regulate river road freight rates that risk their livelihoods the banks in the river and said no they were against the right to workers in industrial areas to organize unions and corporations said none they were against proposals for social security medicare auto safety environmental health they said no they were against regulating the deadly coal mines which  they said no to progressive taxation to the forty hour week to unemployment compensation they said no but they lost eventually because a handful of people here there and everywhere zeroed in on congress or their state legislatures representing majority opinion and broke their opposition now i submit we don't have to wait that long anymore we have faster communications we have cheap communications and other advantages that our forebears didn't have when those farmers organized in a perfect populist movement in eight hundred eighty six in east texas they signed up two hundred thousand farmers in six months one dollar dues each that's fifty dollars today dirt poor farmers that was a lot of money and they did it without motor vehicles telephone no e mail no text message nothing but their head heart and feet the shame us we should be shamed collectively even though we may exempt ourselves because we're more active collectively we should be ashamed we're always preoccupied aren't we when you get called by when you call someone to come out for a march or a town meeting or court room where issues being and you call him to come out you're not changing your mind they agree with you on the issue and they say i'm sorry i don't have time or they tell you i may have time but i don't want to get into this thing i don't i don't know robert's rules and they t me to shut up and sometimes they throw you out of the town meeting and then also i don't like that language being used against me i don't like to be slandered and by the way if i had the time and i knew the techniques in the tools of getting democracy under way and i was not blistered by moonbeams it wouldn't change anything anyway that's the ultimate cop the big boys are going to do it anyway boeing is go exempt itself from washington state taxation anyway paul allen's going to make you pay for a base or a stadium anyway so why try why why why lose time you got better things to do well let's put down the figures ten there are two and a half million adults excuse me there are two hundred  twenty two hundred and twenty five million adults in this country  you take not ten percent of them not one percent of them just take twenty five hundred of them in each gresham district no big deal they could represent teachers mechanics neighborhood organizers lawyers business people you know one spread twenty five hundred decide they're going to have a congress watchdog club and it's going to revolve around a agenda of twelve transformational change changes that reflect majority opinion as i gave some examples long overdue some of them and then established in western europe progress fifty years over fifty years ago in western europe tuitions free higher education for  a higher minimum wage for all easier rules to form stronger labor unions than we had for all of that or public transit better public works four to seven weeks paid vacation paid maternity leave paid child care paid family sick full insurance nobody dies and was fear because they can't afford health insurance to get diagnosed and treated in time thirty five thousand americans die every year because they can't afford health insurance or they're pushed out of it and all these little trapdoors to get treated in time that's coming off a harvard medical school peer reviewed study that had a forty five thousand before obamacare what did they know we didn't know they were destroyed after world war two we were king one number one power what they knew was that they had multiple party systems  party do up early they had powerful cooperatives they had powerful trade unions they were is a wreck to them after world war two and they had higher expectation levels they believed they should get something for their taxes other than military hardware other than corporate welfare we don't believe that we want lower taxes instead of saying what are we getting for our taxes half of the federal government's operating budget just think of this is no more soviet union half of the federal government operating budget is military and it doesn't even count the v so here we are you get twenty five hundred people you can start with one hundred letterhead you get you know fifth district washington state congress watchdog group and you send a letter announcing your existence to your two senators representatives and you say stay tuned we're going to get bigger and just as you can do your homework ahead of time here's the twelve transformational agend we want you pass enough is enough you've been delaying your gridlock you were two hundred twenty five days a year we pay you full time you spend an average of twenty hours a week going from your office on capitol hill to an office building to raise funds because it's illegal to dial in your office you should be on the job and it gets a slaughter and what's going on here is a bit of sophistication he's done we've got law professors and lawyers we've got community colleges and colleges we've got a lot of brain trust here we'll be sending you the draft legislation in due time and then you go to five hundred you get a little press you get an e mail you get a blood you go to a thousand you go to twenty five hundred in this is what triggers what triggers is that you all agree to volunteer about two to three hundred hours a year each behind this effort and to raise two to three hundred dollars each to open two offices in every congressional district two full time people and then you connect with it all over the country four hundred thirty five districts now i'm leaving out a lot mechanics here because we don't have the time but is that on doable for heaven's sake there are people who spend more money and more time on their hob and we can't spend that kind of effort the great work of humanity on earth which is the pursuit of justice without which is no freedom and no liberty for our posterity if not for us for the future this tortured planet and the people who are so much less able to live the good life than we are all over the world and the children that are in their midst horrifically misc treated and deprived another way to do is say isn't there some mega billionaire here in washington state whose whose whose board they're in their seventy's eighty's i mean how many five five star restaurant meals can you have with a little bit buno the lobsters and you've got grandchildren maybe great grandchildren you want to have some fun the joy of justice nothing can match it all right so or if you want to take a piece of it how about this the the defense budget as i mentioned is an auditor will for two million dollars i can guarantee in thirty six months that budget would be audible and you didn't want to raise two million bucks higher certain number of people with a strategy people who know public relations people who go up on capitol hill there's nobody opposed to it  secretary defenses are not opposed to nobody in congress opposed to how do you oppose auditing a budget that size right so you start out with a big advantage don't you the people who don't want it are lucky boeing raytheon because they like it the way it is not me after all nine billion dollars was lost in the first year in iraq by the pentagon they couldn't account for the air force keeps buying supplies that they have in warehouses around the world that they haven't audited example one example that's why this book is called it's easier than we think that's a title breaking through power it's easier than we think history shows it contemporary people show i have people in in washington many of them worked with me we started in with their own groups i don't believe in a big bureaucracy look at they've done dr sydney wealth comes  starts with me the health research group gets on the dunny show he says it just came out of the national institutes of health the tenth time and he and his eight staff have removed from your marketplace hundreds of over the counter and per script and drugs that were killing people or cheating people because they were ineffective for the purposes for which they are advertised one person a few people in his office lois gibbs comes out of love canal decades ago she was a housewife she was a mother of three was a housing project they didn't tell him it was already dead li toxic waste reservoir compliments of the departing hooker chemical company among others and she raised hell and she had became the leading grassroots organizer with thousands of little groups all over the country are preaching out of washington suburb with a million dollar budget to stop in their tracks toxic leaks and other things that were getting family sick one woman came out over an engineering student i was in overland speaking one summer of a spring and i heard a wheelchair coming after me as i was walking out the door and i turned and he said hello i'm ralph h paraplegic in a bicycle accident when he was in high school and rockford illinois and ice and he said can i go work with you this summer so sure what you want to do he says well i'm a kind of inventor and wheelchairs are terribly poorly constructed they break down they're not only expensive but they're controlled by a monopoly company in england the jennings corporation and i want to break it up and i  revolutionized wheelchair design he went all over the third world as a paraplegic teaching poor people how to build sturdy wheelchairs inexpensively from local materials and they began teaching him different improvements for which used very open and you know in the third world especially if you don't have a wheelchair it's a death sentence for many people and here is anybody  you ever see it on t v we own the public airways why don't we have our own audience network why do you give twenty four hours a day to the radio and t v stations who pay us no rent compliments of a supine congress an we have our own our own studios all over reporters producers you can't have a democracy without a democratic media and you can and and how do we pay for simple we charge the radio and t v stations rent we're the landlords they're the tenants look at cable t v six hundred fifty cable stations one more idiotically trivial after another we do not have a labor cable channel we do not have a student cable channel we don't have a patient cable channel we don't have a small taxpayer cable channel we don't have that value from the sports world when they're behind it they give up as a basketball team go to the coach in the third quarter half way through coach we're three points behind why waste the rest of the time let's  all right so we're near the end here and then there's a lot more in this book this is the shortest book i've ever written i pay attention to short attention spans  but it's full of real life examples real life necessities real life responses in fact when you organize this congress watchdog group and you some in your senators and representatives to your own town meetings though the formal summons lawyer like whereas congress is derelict congress is surrendered congress is this and that now therefore you are  summoned to meet your citizens back home with their agenda their rules and their location of public convenience the summons you can do your own summons but i rode it out for you you can fill in the blanks now i'd really like you to buy this is a six pack because i want to take it to your neighbors or your friends or give it to a grown up child or whatever put it in the library i'm not bragging about this there are a lot of good books around a lot of great documentaries around we live in a golden age but very little is happening these great books it expose terrible situations read the last two pages they leave you hanging until the people raisa the hollow where who's going to focus on the congress or the state legislature the khyber passes let me and understood know there is an aggressor way to start these groups there is an easy way where some multi billionaire says ok here's one hundred million bucks it costs one hundred million bucks to set these up in four hundred thirty five districts with the organizers the re hand you know the reach out and the full time offices to get underway kickstarter so to speak either way you will see such a fast changing congress  your mis of a gridlocked institution and i'll end with this no we proved to ourselves in the sixty's and seventy's when i went to washington having lost a lot of friends in car crashes and i was determined to get g m and the auto companies regulated there were no mandatory safety standards no seatbelts noir bags no padded dash panels no head restraints no decent brakes tires so on i connected with a few people around the country including insider engineers in the auto companies doctors dealing with trauma prevention and i was near remember very clearly my first night was in a y m c a and i ate my last hot dog at the white tower and i said to myself i was thirty years old i said how my going to go about doing it first i went up on capitol hill to the jurisdictional committees in those days if you got to cheer of the senate commerce committee who happen to be warren magnuson from the state of washington and who was one of the favored go to senators for business interests within five years he became the greatest champion of consumer legislation in the senate in american history because he was fearing a rumble from the people back here the rumble from the sixty's and he had some good staff like kerry grinstein mike purchase jerry lives here i then went to the house and congress in harrison west virginia you convinced those two in those days because of seniority they got it through the committee you get it through the committee you get it through the senate the congress well the president has signed it throughout the country i mean who wants to get killed in a otherwise preventable crash and he said he go with it then i had to get five or six reporters and i knocked on a lot of doors and i got a reporter for the new york times of that we can do it in your state capital you can do it in city hall some of you have done it at city hall people like nick hanauer and others taking the lead on the minimum wage and when it's done you say i didn't think it was that easy well it isn't easy if you just have one person and when you need ten or you have ten when you need one hundred the almost never need more than  less than one percent of the people with public opinion behind him and knowledge and strategy and laser beam focus on institutions and almost no special interests can stand in the way the presidential campaign is nothing more than a mirror of us we allowed to deterioration every four years we allowed a corporate debate commission to be set up funded by an houser bush or ford motor company controlled by the two parties and keeping third parties off the stage the only way they can reach tens of millions of people even though public opinion polls want more people on that stage if only to reduce their drowsiness we're the ones we're the ones who let the two parties run away from us into the hands of wall street and the fact cats were the ones who are perfectly willing to be turned into spectators instead of to use jefferson's words participator we're the ones who are otherwise preoccupied and couldn't give a few hours a year to our citizen and electoral duties so you know we can talk all we want to about donald trump these elections were turned into entertainment years ago slogans silly talk inadequate questioning by the press all kinds of major issues off the table i've kept my my website open from two thousand and eight just to show you eighteen issues that the majority of people are worried about in this country some of them they support that were taken completely off the table for discussion by the republican democratic party's goatse vote nader dot org still on so when i hear a lot of questions about the campaigns what do you think hillary clinton hawkish hillary hillary of the war hillary the wall street democratic party no less donald trump failed gambling czar corporate welfare king cheats almost all his business connections he cheats his workers his creditors his suppliers his taxpayers teach he's a cheating donald very unstable everything is taken is a bruised ego gets up at three in the morning to attack the weight level of a former miss universe this is out of captain queeg it's out of dr strangelove except he wants to make peace with russia and hillary is went to pick a fight with russia on their western border which has been invaded twice and killed forty five million russians and we've pushed the nato military alliance we control into their western border and wondering why putin is upset and he wants to use it to suppress dissonance in his country this is a very dangerous situation and she's a leader of the pivot to asia which is a way of confronting china magic china having a pivot to the caribbean confronting china in ensuring another massive arms race another bloated military budget another no money to repair our schools and public transit and libraries and clinics and sewage and water systems while we blow up the infrastructure of other countries unconstitutionally illegally and in violation of international tre send a pledge around to your relatives workers neighbors to pledge three hundred hours or so to form this congress watchdog make it a model year the software capital of north america you know how to send it all over the world all over the country make it a model just like fifteen dollars minimum wage in seattle is being used as a model in other cities around the country lead the way pione yes my name's nick i was a national bernie sanders delegate i witnessed the facade of democracy that was the democratic national convention first hand it sounds to me like what you're describing with these congressional watchdog groups are essentially a political party like what is the difference in your mind between what you're describing and a powerful alternate political party and what do you think the manger blockers are in our system to make of an alternate party  problem i'm paul for most type parties there are huge ballot access barriers they harass petitioners under street the whoever party feels major party feels threatened by a third party in this case the democratic party here's what they did to us we were sued twenty four times in twelve weeks in the summer of two thousand and four to get us off the ballot that drained our resources and time enormous just imagine one time we were ordered to be in fifteen courtrooms in pennsylvania by monday morning we got the notice friday morning the second thing they do is they have these built in their ears you have to get tons of signatures and then they go on the streets any put fake names in so they can accuse you of fraudulent petitioning there are no there are no criminal penalties for this that's just politics you violated traffic ordinance you can get in trouble you finally systematically the right to give the voters more voices and choices on the ballot must his politics and the third thing that they do say keep you off the debate so so you can see how they can stop you for a long time with the congress watch local they can't stop you because you're working between elections you're basically pressuring them to change or else in a whole variety of ways just as a footnote to this input i'm not saying don't do it you're doing i he created burning created a great aura he organized a lot of young people the problem is when he folded as he told us he was going to do going to support democratic nominee said that day one he didn't leave his supporters with that much to do and i'm afraid it may dissipate unless our revolution or brand new congress efforts that can get some traction but remember one thing the real successful obvious in this country do not mess around with marches and demonstrations even i believe in marches demonstrations  to beginning you get people active energized to find new people for example if you ever see seen on television a massive march in washington d c down pennsylvania by the military industrial complex demanding more f thirty five more nuclear subs they are in in persona lobbying five hundred thirty five they know who they more military aid to israel crush the palestinians or more bazookas more tanks we want the right to have laser beam vaporizers now in person i'm lobby demonstrations they're very tightly organized back home in the congressional districts thank