Advocacy Tactics Roundup

Discussion on the Columbia Heights email list has gotten a little heated over the value of picketing the opening of the Giant Supermarket because of the Giant-Horning illegal seizure of public space. Some people say yes, others don't want to hurt Giant's feelings. Among other things, I wrote this:

"IMO (forged by working for a consumer group that had some Nader-lineage), if you think that you have to roll over and take it so that they come, that hardly encourages companies to respect community needs, character, and concerns, just because you are seemingly desperate for places to spend your money.

Frankly, law breakers don't have "clean hands" and if the city wanted to play hardball they could deny the Certificate of Occupancy outright. If you don't stand up, you have no leverage whatsoever. And companies know that most people don't care enough to challenge them to begin with."

So for the roundup:

1. Today's Washington Post has an ad on the Federal page, a page with a high readership amongst federal workers, including those who work for Congress, by Mother Jones Magazine about their June issue and the article within about ExxonMobil and the way it supports "junk science and fake journalism" by supporting organizations that produce reports supporting their positions. Click here for "As the World Burns." (Note to Mother Jones: speaking of information architecture, if you're gonna pay for an expensive ad in the Washington Post, put your website URL in the ad, and reconfigure your home page to direct people to the article, perhaps with a special Flash feature. Otherwise you're wasting your money--unless everyone runs out to buy the issues at newsstands.)

2. Not quite so hard-hitting, yesterday's NYT has a similar type of ad on the op-ed page, paid for by JPMorgan, part of a series that supports nonprofit organizations. Yesterday's solicited funds for the Central Park Conservancy. Note that Coldwell Banker (Don Denton) on Capitol Hill provides a similar opportunity to Capitol Hill area groups, in the back page ads that they run in the Hill Rag and the Voice of the Hill.

3. Yesterday's Times also reports an interesting advocacy tactic in the "Arts, Briefly" column:

Telling It to City Hall, 21st-Century Style

Landmark West, a neighborhood advocacy group, passed out prepaid cellphones yesterday morning in front of 2 Columbus Circle, urging passers-by like Stephanie Rosenblatt (below with Mireille Martineau of Landmark West) to call Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to request a hearing on the 1960's building. Landmarks West said that about 200 people made calls and that one woman got through to the mayor. On Thursday at 6 p.m., the group plans to form a "circle of support" around the building's famous lollipop base to bring further attention to its efforts to persuade the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold a hearing on the building, designed by Edward Durell Stone to house the modern art collection of the businessman Huntington Hartford. It is to be reconstructed as the Museum of Arts and Design, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture in collaboration with Gary Edward Handel & Associates. ROBIN POGREBIN -- I think this is an interesting idea--war dialing whomever on whatever. It's certainly not a new tactic, but we need to be reminded from time to time.


Protest sign in Brussels, calling for a UK vote on the EU Constitution. (Reuters photo.)

4. Usually you see this more as ad signs tooling around city streets, from such companies as Street Blimps, advertising on buses, and the home painted buses, usually related to religion or some other transgression on the city's streets. But pro-city advocates can use this technique also.

5. Robert Kuttner, editor of the American Prospect, writes in the column "Head in the Sand," that our leaders are not dealing with issues that matter--"SOMEWHERE, in a parallel universe, real leaders in a country very much like our own are dealing with real problems. Imagine what America might be like if our top officials were addressing the genuine challenges that confront us."

One point on "the list of things to do is" "Repairing American Democracy" where he says:

"In that other universe, the president surely would have enlisted America's allies to combat terrorism. Had war between the United States and Iraq come, it would have come with the full participation of the world community, so that Iraq's reconstruction and the burden of keeping it secure would have been broadly shared instead of falling upon American taxpayers and GIs...

Repairing American democracy. American citizens still have no assurance that their votes will be accurately counted. Big money is crowding out citizen participation in politics more grotesquely than ever. More ominously, our ability to decide to rise up and throw the rascals out is being eroded by partisan trickery."

6. While looking for a photo, I found this photo from a section on "Teaching with documents" on the Howard University website:

Howard University website, Teaching with Documents.

Now I suppose what matters most is getting a good deal on a Michael Graves-designed appliance.