Politicians are the friend who hits you up on Facebook Chat only once in a while, only when she needs something. A couple weeks ago, she needed your vote.

She’s been doing her own thing in Washington, D.C., busy with her lobbyist friends there. She didn’t leave you a birthday shout-out on your Wall this year. She must’ve forgotten. But remember that time, sophomore year, when she helped write the education appropriations bill? Man, it seems like yesterday.

Congresspeople, governors, even mayors across the country have incorporated social media in their election campaigns. President Obama’s social media-infused 2008 campaign brought out more than half of potential voters between the ages 18 and 29, continuing an upward trend in youth participation in presidential elections. Candidates this year hoped to use Facebook and Twitter to keep us involved.

That didn’t really happen. One in five of us voted this year, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. This turnout is comparable to recent midterm elections.

Still, politicians need us young people. Despite the perpetual lack of policies to benefit young people, they need us. We have low voter turnout – probably because we are rarely on the agenda – but they need us to vote sometime. They want our participation now so that as we “grow up” and start caring about issues they care about, we’ll give them our support.

Representative democracy may not mean much to us as young people, but when we become “adults”, it’s supposed to be important.

Theoretically, social media could make politics important to us now. A candidate – a young person, for instance – could run a successful Web-based campaign on the cheap. A Facebook page is free, and with a flip phone and a little flair for PR, a candidate and his or her team could create a dynamic page that effectively presents the candidate’s platform.

Hordes of young people had joined Facebook before the site opened its membership and your mom and your city councilperson created pages. We should have Facebook politics on lock.

We’re missing a couple things, though – money and power. Without the passive consumption many politicians get from TV ads, the main thrust of organizing a grassroots campaign is getting a candidate’s name out there, which requires a full-time team of very active and committed supporters. And they need to eat and pay bills.

For many of us, our student-loan debt is greater than what we’ll make in years at our jobs. Even if we have great, original ideas about leading in our communities, we often need financial support to get anywhere.

In politics, getting money usually involves seeking out people in positions of power. And that money comes with strings not to make the people in power look bad. For example, if a campaign gets money from labor unions, it’s a good idea not to step on toes of Democrats, who the big unions support religiously.

Not stepping on Democrats toes means staying near the political center and maintaining the system as it is. In the end, young people don’t need the status quo. We have no voice in the status quo.

Social media will not make the American political system more democratic. Facebook, Twitter and the others are simply another way for candidates to reach potential voters.

So, when the 2012 presidential campaign starts up next year and your politician friend hits you up again, think of the benefit she gets from your support. Then, think of the benefit you get from your support. Do they match up? Can you post on her Wall and let her know how she can help you?

Effective community organizing involves collecting input from as many stakeholders as possible, then reaching consensus around how to achieve change. The political establishment, however, doesn’t work that way. This was President Barack Obama’s mistake in leading his party, and it resulted in the Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives.

As a young person, Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, which is probably where he learned the progressive rhetoric that got him elected. His presidential campaign promised a lot, and after eight years of George W. Bush, boy did Obama sound smart and well-intentioned.

“Yes we can” sounded genuine, even if it was a slogan stolen from the immigrants’ rights movement. The election of Barack Obama was going to change everything.

Along with the White House, in 2008 Democrats took control of both houses of Congress. Obama’s first 100 days were set to change the tides of American domestic and foreign policy. The world celebrated.

Those were happy times for liberals.

Then, KABLOOEY! They ended as quickly as you can say bipartisanship.

The disintegration of Barack Obama has been pretty incredible. From the outset of his run for president, his unwillingness to confront blatant racism hurt his effectiveness. Even before the rise of the Tea Party, his middle name – Hussein – compelled several racists to conflate his name with terrorism.

Of course, this and much more nonsense spewed from Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and their Tea Party fools. One noteworthy contribution from Tea Partiers was that Obama was the socialist, fascist Antichrist.

Being a socialist, of course, Obama took over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to redistribute wealth and not bail out the banks that made bad loans. And being a fascist, he pushed through his agenda without support of Republicans. And being the Antichrist, he has saved capitalism and brought upon us eternal ruin.

Nonsense. But effective nonsense.

Obama’s response: He tided to the political center, or even to the right, on several issues. He’s still a fascist to the Tea Partiers, but he’s a fascist that works with his opponents.

Unlike every other smart ruler – and stupid ones, too – Pres. Obama failed to leverage his party’s majority in Congress to get things done. Instead, feeling the Tea Party push, he worked with the Republicans, who rejected every one of Obama’s campaign promises.

His supposed bipartisanship was simply bad leadership, given the realities of the U.S. political system. It allowed his proposal for universal healthcare to be rewritten, stripped and changed again and again.

The time Obama wasted negotiating with his opponents who weren’t interested in negotiating could have been spent making more progress to fix a destroyed economy. While he has adopted a long-term approach to reforming the economy, voters often look for immediate action.

Instant fixes are hard to come by for a such a large-scale disaster. But doing more and showing the American people everyday what he was doing to help us might have saved the seats Democrats lost this election.

The president’s party, after all the negotiations and compromises, is extremely weak. The Democrats got caught up in party bickering. They lost their seats in Congress because they were getting next to nowhere.

Pres. Obama has overseen deadlock on Capitol Hill for the past two years despite a Democratic majority. Now that Democrats have lost the House, the rest of his term will likely be more of the same.

Keeping with tradition, Republicans are behind the times, and, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, that is leading to their polling higher in upcoming elections.

The study found that because Republicans are more likely to have land-based phone service rather than solely cellphones, polling companies are better able to reach Republicans. Some, such as the Rasmussin poll, only contact participants by landline phone and miss people who use only cellphones.

Young people, black, Latino and poor people are more likely to use only cell phones – and are more likely to vote Democratic.

As a result, poll results are slanted toward conservatives. The Pew study found that polls that called only landlines gave Republicans a 12-point lead in upcoming elections. Polls that called cellphone users gave Republicans a seven-point edge.

Laws forbid automated dialing for cellphones, and many of the big polling groups depend on computers to call poll participants.

We have interviewed quite a few young people about the upcoming election, and we’ve found a lot of apathy toward and misunderstanding of the political process Sadly, many high school government classes don’t give students a sense of real-world political participation, focusing instead on vocabulary and the rigamarole of passing a bill if the president vetoes it. That’s not very useful information if, say, you’re trying to make Canton a better place for young people.

As the polling problems demonstrate, many of us are left out. We need better access to our candidates and elected officials, and we need to know how to push them to make the changes that need to be made.

We also see some hesitation or fear of becoming politically active among young people. Politics is something we shouldn’t talk about. We’re told it’s impolite. So we balk at talking about issues that impact our lives.

For those of us who may feel alienated by politics, bad polls are another reason to ignore elections. It’s kind of like watching the Browns game when they’re down by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter. Maybe they’ll find a way to pull it off, but what’s on Comedy Central?

Polls are not helping us. Why vote if your guy is down in the polls? He’s not going to win anyway, right? If he’s not going to win, why follow the race, why educate yourself on the issues? Why participate in politics at all?

Ideally, we wouldn’t understand politics by who wins and loses. Instead, making good decisions about social spending should benefit us all. Learning about the issues and not what flawed polls say will happen on Election Day is the way to make democracy meaningful.

The investor protection clause in the Korean-US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) – now pending in Congress – could be the biggest boon for big business since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and could clear the way for similar agreements with Colombia and Panama.

On June 26, President Barack Obama said he would take steps toward ratifying the Korean agreement, which the Bush administration negotiated in 2007. The agreement is set to increase exports and jobs in certain sectors of the US economy. At the same time, however, imports will also increase and the US trade deficit with Korea will grow.

Arthur Stamoulis from the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, hosting a panel discussion on KORUS on Oct. 7, cited estimates that the FTA could double the trade deficit and eliminate over 800,000 US jobs.

The discussion featured David Delk, a trade activist, Portland State University professor Barbara Dudley and Mitch Besser, an unemployed software engineer.

Delk spoke about the investor protection agreements in KORUS and past FTAs. The investor protection agreement under the Central American FTA has allowed the mining company Pacific Rim to sue the government of El Salvador over environmental laws the company claims inhibit its ability to make adequate profits.

The mine in question in the suit, located along the country’s major river, is just one of 29 sites in El Salvador operated by Pacific Rim.

Investor protection allows multinational corporations to challenge the sovereignty of states. Enacting laws to promote the livability of the planet could be beholden to profit margins.

But Barbara Dudley pointed out that investor protection could go beyond environmental degradation. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) has expanded to include services, including financial services.

The current financial collapse is the result of deregulation of the US financial market. Now, there have been calls for oversight. FTAs, though, could give signatories excuses not to regulate, possibly leading to further financial meltdowns.

Mitch Besser spoke next, sharing his experience of having his job outsourced to China.

KORUS, like all other FTAs, is a horrible, potentially disastrous idea. But there has been resistance to its ratification. The Korean teachers’ union has led a 10-day strike that prompted the entire cabinet, which advises the president, to offer their resignations.

Stamoulis from the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign said that if opposition in the United States can hold off Congressional approval of the agreement, it may be dead in the water by June 2011, the start of presidential election season.

He urged members of the audience to contact Sen. Ron Wyden, who chairs the subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness.

Free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama are next in line for ratification.

In 2006, shortly after coming out on top in a controversial election, Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched an all-out attack on drug trafficking. Calderón had expressed outrage at the impunity of drug cartels. To reassert control, he deployed the national police across the country.

Nearly four years in, this round of the drug war has killed 30,000 Mexicans.

Last year alone, drug violence was blamed for 2,600 deaths in Ciudad Juárez (the border town mirroring El Paso, Texas).The violence in Juárez is so bad that the city’s leading newspaper, in response to the shooting death of a photographer and fearing further cartel retribution for unfavorable articles, published an editorial asking the cartels what is safe to print.

The United States began funding the battle in 2008. Mexicans are dying every day, but there is little evidence the counter-narcotics agreement between the U.S. and Mexico – the Mérida Initiative – is achieving its stated goals.

One of the goals Calderón outlined at the outset of his offensive was to reduce police corruption, particularly as it relates to the drug trade. The police have been involved in drugs since the mid-1970s when the Security Directorate began taking bribes from traffickers. In fact, the head of the Mexican anti-drug office, a former army general, was arrested for his involvement with the Juárez Cartel in 1996.

And police complicity in the drug trade continues with the current campaign. In 2008, four top anti-drug officials were arrested for helping smugglers avoid arrest in return for money. Investigative reporter Bruce Livesey has said that the army today is helping the Sinaloan Cartel fight the Juárez Cartel.

The language of the Mérida Initiative, which critics call Plan México because of its similarities to Plan Colombia, ostensibly supports Calderón’s anti-corruption goal, devoting $70 million for institution building and “professionalizing” the police. The problem, though, is that training in being professional is coming from US contractors. In fact, contractors were caught on film teaching a Mexican police force torture techniques in 2008.

The main thrust of Plan Mexico is militarization. So far, Congress has approved a total of $1.4 billion to go to Mexico for the project. That money will buy 26 armored vans, at least five Bell helicopters, at least three Black Hawk helicopters and up to four maritime patrol aircraft, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

The budgetary breakdown in the same report shows that, as of September 2009, $670 million was earmarked for militarization while $35 million was set aside for institution building.

Another $200 million, used in similar ways, is going to Central American and Caribbean countries.

Is it working?

Evaluating Plan Mexico may be premature. Various material factors determine production and distribution of illegal drugs, and politicians traditionally have used large seizures and short-term decreases as proof that policies work.

Some analysts – and some US politicians – argue that the intensity of drug violence in Mexico is positive; it shows that the police forces are putting pressure on the cartels. As a result, the argument goes, the cartels are fighting tooth and nail with the police to keep their operations running.

That car bombs in Ciudad Juárez have targeted civilians and that cartel thugs have massacred patients at drug-treatment centers might put that claim into question. The drug war affects everyone, not just drug runners and police.

Another criterion the government has used to justify the Mérida Initiative is a rise in cocaine prices – a sign that supply dwindled. Between October 2006 and June 2008, the US Drug Enforcement Agency reported a 25 percent increase in the price of a gram of cocaine. The Agency also found drug shortages in 38 US cities in 2007. Since, cocaine availability in most of the cities has gone back to 2005 levels.

The drug trade is hugely profitable, and cartels are capitalist ventures. Like any other business, drug cartels will, however they can, find ways to exploit the market. If that means establishing new transit routes or bases of operations, the profit motive compels them.

By the beginning of the 1980s, the Medellin cartel had established a smuggling route through the Bahamas and on to Miami. When Bahamian officials, after reports of corruption, stopped looking the other way, the cartel changed tactics. New overland smuggling routes opened though Mexico.

Today, the Zetas, a drug gang run by former army commandos, has begun recruiting and setting up camps along the Caribbean coast in Honduras and Guatemala, according to a report by the University of San Diego and the Woodrow Wilson Center. The Sinaloa Cartel is operating along Guatemala’s Pacific coast.

Drug policies based around increased policing and militarization have failed again and again. Without an effective and sensible policy targeted at cutting drug use in the United States, demand remains constant.

Expanding on a a failed counter-narcotics strategy

The Mérida Initiative’s predecessor, Plan Colombia, illustrates the failure of militarized drug policy. Since 2000, the United States has given Colombia $7 billion in military aid, making it the second largest recipient of aid, behind Israel. Like Mérida in Mexico, Plan Colombia focuses on military solutions.

But the money spent on defoliants, combat equipment and training under Plan Colombia has been a waste. Coca cultivation topped 100,000 hectares in 1998. The plan went into effect in 2000, and cultivation remained above that mark through the decade.

The Colombian military is being pushed to get results after 10 years of US funding. Such pressure has incentivized the killing of civilians. Instead of ensuring the safety of civilians, the military has begun shooting alleged guerrillas and lumping non-combatants in with the statistics they put forward to justify funding.

What Plan Colombia has done is set up the potential for the country to serve as a military proxy in the region. Seven billion dollars has bought the United States close friends in Bogotá, friends eager to let the US military operate from six Colombian bases.

In a region closing to the neoliberal model, troops on the ground in Colombia represent a danger to progressive movements in Latin America. In Mexico, the nascent Mérida Initiative poses a serious threat to popular organizations working for justice just south of the border.

If I made $50 million a year, I’d paint the world rainbow colors. Maybe. Maybe I’d use it more productively. Maybe I’d fund a battalion of paid volunteers working to end racism, sexism and homophobia.

I don’t make $50 million a year, but Fred Hassan does. What has he done for the money? As the former CEO of pharmaceutical giant Schering-Plough, he prepared the company for its merger with Merck and the laying off of 16,000 workers. Now that he’s with Bausch & Lomb, analysts expect Hassan again to prepare the company for a merger and again make out like a bandit.

If someone who cuts 16,000 jobs in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression deserves $50 million, what do the people scraping up rent and getting by on rice and beans deserve? Do we deserve our poverty? Do they deserve their wealth?

Before the crisis, millions of people in the United States were doing the things society tells us we should do when we grow up. They owned cars. They were making their mortgage payments..But since the crisis began, many working people have lost their homes and their jobs – largely because banking CEOs got (more) greedy and messed up.

Millions and millions of people work hard, making things and providing services corporations can sell for much more than it costs to pay them. Then they go home and raise children, which on its own is a full-time job. Parents are often workers, personal nannies, chefs, chauffeurs and tutors, all in one. Are their lives any easier or less valuable than those of CEOs?

In 2008, the average income for 20 CEOs of banks that got bailed out by the government was 34 times the US president’s $400,000 salary, wrote Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies. Census statistics from the same year put the average household income in the United States at $52,000.

This way of doing things defies any logic capitalism has for paying its captains of industry. One of the justifications for enormous executive salaries is the amount of stress executives carry. The centralized leadership of corporations means that the high-ups are responsible for the success of the business, and if they mess up, the fate of the business is on them.

But in the case of the bank bailouts, even when they messed up big time they got paid enough for two Learjets. Those of us who aren’t making millions of dollars, in effect, paid for their messing up and creating an economic failure that cost friends and neighbors their jobs.

Of course it’s not fair. For more than a century, business has gotten by through making the small class of bosses rich while the rest of us struggle. But that shouldn’t keep us from asking whether it’s the best we can do.

We need a radical change in the way we do things, not the slight nudge politicians sometimes offer. Let’s shift our priorities from rewarding the small number of top executives. Let’s reward everyone for being productive members of society. Instead of letting CEOs profit from cutting jobs, let’s give everyone jobs that fit their talents and interests.

It may take a lot – a lot – of discussions to figure out something better, but we need to open those discussions. As people, what do we all deserve, and do some people deserve more because they hold positions of power? Is placing power in the hands of a few wealthy people very democratic? What role do less wealthy people play in society?

What would the world be like if everyone had resources to support a decent standard of living?

I had never had a worse bladder cramp.

On a bus in Fort Wayne, Ind., I fidgeted because I hadn’t peed since Denver. I’d been through five states. Colorado and Nebraska had been pretty unimpressive. Iowa had a decent university, but, like Nebraska and unlike central eastern Oregon, its bland flatness reminded me I should have flown to Ohio. By the time we got to Chicago, I had been blinded by my urge to maintain dryness down below.

And now in Indiana the Lakefront Lines driver had said we were behind schedule and shortened our scheduled layover in Fort Wayne. But that didn’t make me have to pee any less.

I flagged down the driver from the back of the bus, where my wheelchair was strapped to the floor, where I was about to drench the back of a seat if he didn’t help me. When he came back and I told him I needed to get off, he told me he’d have to consult with the driver who was taking over for him.

Ten minutes later, the old, curmudgeonly replacement driver let me off, and I found relief.

The problem had started in Omaha. The bus I was riding made a scheduled stop to change drivers and clean the bus and, apparently, break it. When I and the other passengers re-boarded the bus, the new driver couldn’t find a way to release the parking brake.

After half an hour of wrangling with the bus, someone had an idea to take out another bus, one that had been in a crash but still ran. One small issue remained, though: The wheelchair lift didn’t work.

That the bus wouldn’t leave without me may have been reassuring had I been traveling with a group of friends. But as I looked around me, I saw a bunch of strangers who I’d been riding with from the West  Coast. And they were just as tired and frustrated as I was. And I was the issue keeping them from getting back to their trip.

So, as I predicted, a couple of the passengers came to me and spelled out the situation. They told me they’d lift me and my wheelchair onto the bus with their own muscles. When I told them how important my chair is to me, they persisted, assuring me everything would be fine. Eventually, they coerced me to get on the broken bus.

And I was on the way to Chicago on a broken bus with no opportunity to get off and use the bathroom. I realized that meant I should forgo liquids. On the dinner break somewhere in Iowa, I stayed on the bus. Fortunately, one of the other passengers bought something to eat for me.

We were late getting into Chicago. And I was even later getting off the broken bus. In Omaha, the driver had said that he could park beside another bus and use the lift on the other bus to get me off. That wasn’t the case.

Instead, a group of Greyhound employees stood at the door trying to figure out how to get me off the bus without assuming liability for me or my chair. So, they recruited a few men from my bus leaving from Chicago to lift me and the chair.

Once I got off, I was told to rush to my next bus, which would leave in a couple minutes. My struggle against my bladder continued.

Halfway to Fort Wayne, no dance could distract me from the urge to let loose. But somehow I made it.

In a few hours, I am leaving Canton, again on Greyhound. Given my experience getting here, I expect another eventful trip. Actually, my bus left Wednesday, but Lakefront Lines and Greyhound didn’t have buses set up for my chair. I had to delay my trip. Off to a great start, right?

5/18/10

I spent much of the last week coming to terms with a harsh reality – the reality that being a minority, people hate me and because of my minority status, I am less empowered to combat that hatred.

“Hey, wheelchair guy-” said this short, pudgy man in a mocking voice as I made my way out of the lobby of my building. “All we need is another wheelchair guy.” I’m the second non-geriatric “wheelchair guy” in my building.

I ignored the comment and continued to the store, thinking how incredibly confused this guy was. But I kept thinking about it.

And slowly, I decoded the message. He was calling me a cripple and implying that my moving into the building was a detriment to the other tenants. He was saying, “There goes the neighborhood.”

I had been laughing the comment off until then. “What an idiot!” I was repeating to myself. But then it kind of became un-funny.

Then I remembered one of my other run-ins with this jerk. Within the first couple weeks of moving here in February, I rode the elevator with this guy, a few of his pals, and my neighbor down the hall. The guy and his friends were playing with darts (just darts, no dart board), and for some reason were playing with them in the elevator.

While I was nervous just that these guys were screwing around with darts in a confined space, I became more nervous when the short, pudgy one said something about making me more disabled. After I got out of the elevator, I just shook it off, told myself those guys were awful and forgot about it.

I think minorities are often conditioned by society to think that reporting serious incidents like this is over-reacting. Well, that’s not that bad, we tell ourselves. Worse has happened. Maybe I’ll report it next time.

Next time came in that lobby last week, but soon after I realized this guy really hated me in a potentially dangerous way, I also realized why I neglect to report most harassment. The process of reporting it is in itself dehumanizing and invalidating.

I decided my first action against this harassment would be to talk to the management of my building. Consistent with my luck, the full-time building manager was on vacation for the week.

No one was in the management office, so I waited in the lobby a couple minutes to see if anyone would show up. A maintenance person whom I’d made friends with came by, and I told him what happened.

As I was telling him, the fill-in manager showed up. After I wrapped up my story, the maintenance person told me to wait there, and he walked 15 feet across the lobby to tell the fill-in manager my problem – and he got a couple details wrong.

They talked for a few minutes like I wasn’t there, and I heard every word. Then, the maintenance person came back to tell me what the manager said. Basically, the fill-in manager was hard and unsympathetic to my story. He said he wouldn’t do anything and I should file a police report.

So, because I wanted something on file in case the situation escalated, I called the cops that afternoon. And I waited. Over an hour later, the officer assigned to take my report said that his shift was ending and that I should have my building manager – not me – call back the next day.

My situation just wasn’t important enough, apparently.

At this point, the only people supporting me and telling me I was doing the right thing were my friends. The people with the power to help me didn’t seem to give a damn.

The next day, I called the cops again to file a report. Again, it took over an hour for them to respond. But two patrolmen showed up eventually, took my complaint, then, oozing machismo, one of them said my harasser would be sorry for targeting me.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I was hardly reassured. He seemed less interested in protecting me as a person especially vulnerable to attack and more interested in confronting the guy for picking on someone in a wheelchair.

Nonetheless I have a record of the incident. I really hope I don’t need it, but I have taken the first step to get federal hate-crime protection. The Obama administration expanded the 1968 hate crime bill last year to cover disabled people. In the FBI’s most recent report on hate crimes, police nationwide reported over 7,600 incidents, one percent of which involved disability.

My maintenance person friend said the guy was on his last warning from the building management before I complained. So maybe he’ll be evicted.

Either way, I’m no longer comfortable in my building, and I think few people understand, care to understand or care to care about empowering and supporting minorities, particularly disabled people. There are a few people, though, and those are the people I need to live around.