Economy
Alaska Towns Freeze Gas Prices
by Angela Denning-Barnes
Listen Now [4 min 30 sec...link to NPR]
Morning Edition, November 16, 2007 · Gas prices in Bethel, Alaska, a remote bush town, range from $5 to $7 a gallon. The only saving grace for residents there and in many of the remote towns in western Alaska is that gas prices aren't going up. They were locked in during the fall when an entire winter's fuel supply was shipped in by river barge and stored.
Angela Denning-Barnes reports from member KYUK in Bethel, Alaska.
Top 10 villages with the highest gas, heating fuel prices
____________
MARCH 18, 2009 - 11:15 AM
A recent report on Alaska heating fuel and gasoline prices shows what many villagers already know: That as oil prices dropped this winter, the costs in many rural communities remained high.
Of the 100 communities that the state Division of Community and Regional Affairs surveyed this February, here are the 10 with the highest gasoline prices and heating fuel prices:
Top heating fuel costs as of Feb. 2009:
1. Arctic Village (Interior) -- $9.50 per gallon.
2. Point Baker (Southeast) -- $8.80 per gallon.
3. Emmonak (Western) -- $8.71 per gallon.
4. Hughes (Interior) -- $8.55 per gallon.
5. Kokhanok (South Coastal) -- $8.11 per gallon.
6. Koyuk (Western) -- $8.06 per gallon
7. Saint Michael (Western) -- $8.06
8. Atka (South Coastal) -- $7.99
9. Stebbins (Western) -- $7.99
10. Gambell (Wesern). -- $7.88
...
Top gasoline costs as of Feb. 2009
1. Arctic Village (Interior) -- $9 per gallon
2. Point Baker (Southeast) -- $8.80 per gallon
3. Hughes (Interior) -- $8.50 per gallon
4. Kokhanok (South Coastal) -- $8.40 per gallon
5. Deering (Western) -- $7.82 per gallon
6. Saint Michael (Western) -- $7.80 per gallon
7. Toksook Bay (Western) -- $7.74 per gallon
8. Wales (Western) -- $7.73 per gallon
9. Stebbins (Western) -- $7.71 per gallon
10. Koyuk (Western) -- $7.71 per gallon
(Remember, these numbers only represent the villages that the state surveyed.)
11.16.2007
8.22.2007
Yukon Healing Journey - YRITWC
Yukon River Healing Journey to Begin on June 22 Opening Ceremony Hosted by Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation in Moosehide, Yukon Territory
1,500 mile canoe journey aims to unite cultures, protect environment, and address climate change concerns.
LINK TO: YRITWC HOME/WEB PAGE
At 1 pm on June 22, 2007, the Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation will host opening ceremonies at Moosehide, Yukon Territory, to initiate the Healing Journey, a celebration of culture, a call to action, and an urgent message to the world. The 1,500 mile canoe journey will head to St. Mary's, Alaska to celebrate the 10th Anniversary YRITWC Summit from August 9-13.
Moosehide, a traditional village, is located near Dawson, on the Yukon River.
Fulfilling an ancient prophecy of uniting the indigenous peoples through water travel, the Healing Journey participants will shove off with traditional canoes and contemporary boats and paddle for approximately seven weeks, visiting all indigenous communities along the way.
Visits will include a traditional meal and cultural exchange, dancing and drumming, and a talking circle to begin to mend the past and forge a commitment to a common future based on environmental stewardship and healthy communities. In honor of the Healing Journey, a traditional T’lingit dugout canoe has been carved by the Yakutat T’lingit Tribe and will be dedicated to the YRITWC in July during the nearly two month long Journey.
As the Healing Journey travels downriver, each participating community will share observations and concerns related to climate change, which will be documented and brought to the Summit in St. Mary’s. The Healing Journey will also draw attention to innovative solutions such as renewable energy and resource management based on traditional knowledge. One of the canoes will have a water quality probe that will take a continuous water chemistry profile of the entire journey as it travels downriver.
Harold Gatensby, a founding Board member of the YRITWC from Carcross-Tagish First Nation, stated, “The Healing Journey is the result of many years of hard work and commitment to clean water and healthy communities. We could not carry out this Journey without the support of all the First Nations and Tribes who are part of the Watershed Council.”
LINK TO: YRITWC BROCHURE (.pdf)
Jon Waterhouse, YRITWC Assistant Director and lead paddler in the Healing Journey, is from the Jamestown Sk’lallam Tribe in the coast Salish region. He said, “We hope to feed the interest of the youth to carry on this tradition of traveling by water and protecting our environment. The Healing Journey is for the whole watershed and beyond.”
The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council is an indigenous grassroots organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Yukon River Watershed. The YRITWC conducts research, provides technical assistance and training to facilitate the development and exchange of information, and strives to raise awareness about opportunities to promote the health of the watershed. The YRITWC is comprised of 65 Tribes and First Nations in Alaska and Canada who rely on the Yukon River basin for survival.
LINK TO: YRITWC STRATEGIC PLAN (.pdf)
The Healing Journey and Summit are being sponsored in part by National Geographic Society and IBM’s Genographic Legacy Fund, First Nations Development Institute, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Alaska Conservation Foundation.
Text originally published by John Graham
Photos from YRITWC website
View more photos from Matt here!
==============================
Listen to an audio transcript...Associate Director, Alaska Region, of the YRITWC speaking of the Journey...YRITWC appearing on Native America Calling, Aug. 2007.
11.25.2006
Food for Thought
Posted on November 23, 2006, Printed on November 25, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/44661/
http://www.alternet.org/story/44661/
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.
Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.
But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.
Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians' land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving "wild beasts" from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."
Thomas Jefferson -- president #3 and author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the "merciless Indian Savages" -- was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn't stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, "[W]e shall destroy all of them."
As the genocide was winding down in the early 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt (president #26) defended the expansion of whites across the continent as an inevitable process "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway."
Roosevelt also once said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important. We are told how crucial it is for people to know history, and there is much hand wringing about the younger generations' lack of knowledge about, and respect for, that history.
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
This is the mark of a well-disciplined intellectual class -- one that can extol the importance of knowing history for contemporary citizenship and, at the same time, argue that we shouldn't spend too much time thinking about history.
This off-and-on engagement with history isn't of mere academic interest; as the dominant imperial power of the moment, U.S. elites have a clear stake in the contemporary propaganda value of that history. Obscuring bitter truths about historical crimes helps perpetuate the fantasy of American benevolence, which makes it easier to sell contemporary imperial adventures -- such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq -- as another benevolent action.
Any attempt to complicate this story guarantees hostility from mainstream culture. After raising the barbarism of America's much-revered founding fathers in a lecture, I was once accused of trying to "humble our proud nation" and "undermine young people's faith in our country."
Yes, of course -- that is exactly what I would hope to achieve. We should practice the virtue of humility and avoid the excessive pride that can, when combined with great power, lead to great abuses of power.
History does matter, which is why people in power put so much energy into controlling it. The United States is hardly the only society that has created such mythology. While some historians in Great Britain continue to talk about the benefits that the empire brought to India, political movements in India want to make the mythology of Hindutva into historical fact.
Abuses of history go on in the former empire and the former colony. History can be one of the many ways we create and impose hierarchy, or it can be part of a process of liberation. The truth won't set us free, but the telling of truth at least opens the possibility of freedom.
As Americans sit down on Thanksgiving Day to gorge themselves on the bounty of empire, many will worry about the expansive effects of overeating on their waistlines. We would be better to think about the constricting effects of the day's mythology on our minds.
AlterNet orginally ran this article on Thanksgiving 2005.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, "The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege" (City Lights Books).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
7.26.2006
5.22.2006
Much at Stake! Global Warming in the YK Delta
Much at Stake...Global Warming in the YK Delta
Dear Friends,
In the monthly report I sent you earlier today, I promised to forward the attached maps that show how many communities and how much critical habitat near Bethel and Kotzebue are underwater if either:
As you recall, in a study published in the journal Science last month, a team of scientists estimated that a sea level rise of from 4 to 6 meters could be dictated if we continue to increase CO2 emissions dramatically through the end of this century. Completed by ACE's GIS Center at the request of Susanne Fleek (ACF), the attached maps show the more conservative estimate: 4 meters.
Indeed, these cartographic images portray a dire, unacceptable scenario -- one that destroys numerous rural, culturally rich communities and much of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge's critical habitat for geese and other animals -- as well as other National Park, Refuge, and Native Village Corporation land. This would be tragic, costly, and, in some instances would cause irreparable and irreplaceable devastation and loss.
These inundation maps portray vividly one more reason why we need to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now. We can avoid this level of loss -- and we must.
In the next few days there will be several newspaper articles published in Alaska featuring these maps. I wanted you to have them immediately.
My best,
Deborah
Deborah Williams
Alaska Conservation Solutions
http://www.alaskaconservationsolutions.com/
Dear Friends,
In the monthly report I sent you earlier today, I promised to forward the attached maps that show how many communities and how much critical habitat near Bethel and Kotzebue are underwater if either:
- Sea level from global warming rises 4 meters (13 feet), or
- Sea level from global warming rises 1 meter, and you combine that with 3 meter storm surges (which many communities bordering the Bering Sea experienced last year).
As you recall, in a study published in the journal Science last month, a team of scientists estimated that a sea level rise of from 4 to 6 meters could be dictated if we continue to increase CO2 emissions dramatically through the end of this century. Completed by ACE's GIS Center at the request of Susanne Fleek (ACF), the attached maps show the more conservative estimate: 4 meters.
Indeed, these cartographic images portray a dire, unacceptable scenario -- one that destroys numerous rural, culturally rich communities and much of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge's critical habitat for geese and other animals -- as well as other National Park, Refuge, and Native Village Corporation land. This would be tragic, costly, and, in some instances would cause irreparable and irreplaceable devastation and loss.
These inundation maps portray vividly one more reason why we need to act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now. We can avoid this level of loss -- and we must.
In the next few days there will be several newspaper articles published in Alaska featuring these maps. I wanted you to have them immediately.
My best,
Deborah
Deborah Williams
Alaska Conservation Solutions
http://www.alaskaconservationsolutions.com/
5.15.2006
Tooth and Nail, Pt. 1: Battle over legality of dental therapists continues
Tooth and Nail, Pt. 1: Battle over legality of dental therapists continues
REPOSTED FROM KTUU: Tuesday, May 9, 2006 - by Rhonda McBride
View the Video
Anchorage, Alaska - America’s first dental therapists are trained in New Zealand to help save teeth in rural Alaska, where the rate of tooth decay is twice the national average. Today they’re fighting a lawsuit from the American Dental Association.
Alaska’s dental therapists say they felt right at home in New Zealand. It’s a land a lot like Alaska -- rugged and remote.
Toksook Bay, a village on the Bering Sea, is one of the first communities in the United States to have a dental therapist. Lillian McGilton spent two years in New Zealand learning to do what people here need the most: basic dentistry. Yet the American Dental Association is suing, to keep her and other therapists from practicing.
“They don’t know me, they have not been to Otago University and, a lot of them just go on what they hear, and a lot of that information just is not accurate,” said McGilton.
According to the American Dental Association, Alaska is the only state that allows this type of dental care. It is not the only one fighting tooth and nail; the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium is biting back.
The debate has spilled into the headlines, letters to the editor, newsletters and television ads. Both sides have spent tens of thousands of dollars to win in the court of public opinion. One of the few things they agree on is that this money won’t cure a single toothache.
Now the battleground has moved outside Alaska. The controversy made a splash at a national dental conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. It’s hard to imagine why dentists from all over the country would even care about Alaska’s dental therapy program, but in Little Rock, a piece of the puzzle is revealed.
“We owe a great deal to these intrepid young Alaskans for what they have done,” said David Nash, DMD, University of Kentucky.
Most of those in the audience are rooting for Alaska’s dental therapists. They work in public health dentistry, and the ADA’s lawsuit has raised their interest in the program.
Aurora Johnson, a dental therapist from Unalakleet, tells people what it’s like to work out of school woodshop turned into a makeshift dental clinic.
“The air, the cold air was just coming right through,” said Johnson.
Most of the people here have never met a dental therapist before, including the man leading the charge against them: Bob Brandjord, president of the ADA. Initially Brandjord wasn’t invited to sit on this panel -- not until the ADA agreed that nothing said here would be used in its lawsuit.
“This is the first time that anyone from the American Dental Association has heard a presentation about our program,” said Ron Nagel, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
The presentation is often sort of a Bush Alaska 101. The geography is hard to grasp, let alone how dental therapists fit into the picture. That’s why Dr. Myron Allukian organized this panel. He’s the former dental director for the city of Boston and he has taught at Harvard University.
“To me, we’re one dental family and we should be working together,” said Allukian.
But when it comes to expanding the role of dental workers, Allukian is often at odds with the ADA.
“I’ve fought these battles over and over with organized dentistry,” said Allukian.
Allukian got the American Public Health Association to pass a resolution supporting Alaska’s dental therapists. It’s his way of pushing the ADA.
“Any time there’s a new concept, they have a very slow learning curve. And they oppose these new concepts. Then 10, 20 or 30 years later, they’ll say, ‘Gee that’s a good idea,’” Allukian said.
Allukian says this battle is similar to one the American Medical Association fought years ago to block nurse practitioners and physicians assistants.
“You go to the AMA now and say, ‘We’re gonna eliminate all nurse practitioners,’ they’d fight tooth and nail to keep the nurse practitioners, because they’ve been a great adjunct,” said Allukian.
“I think we have been portrayed basically unfairly in most of the debate and we are not stagnant, we are not stick-in-the-muds about trying to improve our delivery of dental care,” said Brandjord.
The ADA’s main objection is that dental therapists are allowed to do what are called irreversible procedures, like fill cavities, do tooth extractions and pulpotomies, a nerve treatment similar to a root canal.
“If we could resolve the issue about irreversible procedures, we would have no problem. We support everything else in the program,” said Brandjord (right).
But it’s a program the ADA knows little about.
“I think they should go to New Zealand. I think if they went to New Zealand, they’d see how dental therapists work,” said Lyndie Foster Page, New Zealand dentist.
Page helped to train some of Alaska’s dental therapists, including Aurora Johnson.
“I just wanna seem them go and make a difference. Get out there and maybe just show some of the Americans that it can work, like we have in New Zealand,” said Page (left).
Dental therapy has a track record that goes back to World War I. They were called dental nurses back then and traveled New Zealand on horseback. Today they’re in every public school.
“New Zealand is not a very litigious country, but still there are complaints about dentists. There are complaints about doctors. So if there were serious complaints about dental therapists in the past, these would have been acted on,” said Page.
“Organized dentistry in America is very ethnocentric. I’ll put it that way. Our profession has certain attitudes and values. And now we think the time has come to be sure that we have evidence of what dental therapy is doing around the world,” said Nash.
Nash is heading up an international study on dental therapists, to find out how therapists might help millions of Americans who can't afford treatment.
“I think for the people of the United States, the future of the oral health of their children is at stake,” said Nash.
So in a handful of Alaska villages, a national experiment is taking place. It’s one that the American Dental Association says puts people at risk, and one that national public health experts say is full of promise.
REPOSTED FROM KTUU: Tuesday, May 9, 2006 - by Rhonda McBride
View the Video
Anchorage, Alaska - America’s first dental therapists are trained in New Zealand to help save teeth in rural Alaska, where the rate of tooth decay is twice the national average. Today they’re fighting a lawsuit from the American Dental Association.
Alaska’s dental therapists say they felt right at home in New Zealand. It’s a land a lot like Alaska -- rugged and remote.
Toksook Bay, a village on the Bering Sea, is one of the first communities in the United States to have a dental therapist. Lillian McGilton spent two years in New Zealand learning to do what people here need the most: basic dentistry. Yet the American Dental Association is suing, to keep her and other therapists from practicing.
“They don’t know me, they have not been to Otago University and, a lot of them just go on what they hear, and a lot of that information just is not accurate,” said McGilton.
According to the American Dental Association, Alaska is the only state that allows this type of dental care. It is not the only one fighting tooth and nail; the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium is biting back.
The debate has spilled into the headlines, letters to the editor, newsletters and television ads. Both sides have spent tens of thousands of dollars to win in the court of public opinion. One of the few things they agree on is that this money won’t cure a single toothache.
Now the battleground has moved outside Alaska. The controversy made a splash at a national dental conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. It’s hard to imagine why dentists from all over the country would even care about Alaska’s dental therapy program, but in Little Rock, a piece of the puzzle is revealed.
“We owe a great deal to these intrepid young Alaskans for what they have done,” said David Nash, DMD, University of Kentucky.
Most of those in the audience are rooting for Alaska’s dental therapists. They work in public health dentistry, and the ADA’s lawsuit has raised their interest in the program.
Aurora Johnson, a dental therapist from Unalakleet, tells people what it’s like to work out of school woodshop turned into a makeshift dental clinic.
“The air, the cold air was just coming right through,” said Johnson.
Most of the people here have never met a dental therapist before, including the man leading the charge against them: Bob Brandjord, president of the ADA. Initially Brandjord wasn’t invited to sit on this panel -- not until the ADA agreed that nothing said here would be used in its lawsuit.
“This is the first time that anyone from the American Dental Association has heard a presentation about our program,” said Ron Nagel, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.
The presentation is often sort of a Bush Alaska 101. The geography is hard to grasp, let alone how dental therapists fit into the picture. That’s why Dr. Myron Allukian organized this panel. He’s the former dental director for the city of Boston and he has taught at Harvard University.
“To me, we’re one dental family and we should be working together,” said Allukian.
But when it comes to expanding the role of dental workers, Allukian is often at odds with the ADA.
“I’ve fought these battles over and over with organized dentistry,” said Allukian.
Allukian got the American Public Health Association to pass a resolution supporting Alaska’s dental therapists. It’s his way of pushing the ADA.
“Any time there’s a new concept, they have a very slow learning curve. And they oppose these new concepts. Then 10, 20 or 30 years later, they’ll say, ‘Gee that’s a good idea,’” Allukian said.
Allukian says this battle is similar to one the American Medical Association fought years ago to block nurse practitioners and physicians assistants.
“You go to the AMA now and say, ‘We’re gonna eliminate all nurse practitioners,’ they’d fight tooth and nail to keep the nurse practitioners, because they’ve been a great adjunct,” said Allukian.
“I think we have been portrayed basically unfairly in most of the debate and we are not stagnant, we are not stick-in-the-muds about trying to improve our delivery of dental care,” said Brandjord.
The ADA’s main objection is that dental therapists are allowed to do what are called irreversible procedures, like fill cavities, do tooth extractions and pulpotomies, a nerve treatment similar to a root canal.
“If we could resolve the issue about irreversible procedures, we would have no problem. We support everything else in the program,” said Brandjord (right).
But it’s a program the ADA knows little about.
“I think they should go to New Zealand. I think if they went to New Zealand, they’d see how dental therapists work,” said Lyndie Foster Page, New Zealand dentist.
Page helped to train some of Alaska’s dental therapists, including Aurora Johnson.
“I just wanna seem them go and make a difference. Get out there and maybe just show some of the Americans that it can work, like we have in New Zealand,” said Page (left).
Dental therapy has a track record that goes back to World War I. They were called dental nurses back then and traveled New Zealand on horseback. Today they’re in every public school.
“New Zealand is not a very litigious country, but still there are complaints about dentists. There are complaints about doctors. So if there were serious complaints about dental therapists in the past, these would have been acted on,” said Page.
“Organized dentistry in America is very ethnocentric. I’ll put it that way. Our profession has certain attitudes and values. And now we think the time has come to be sure that we have evidence of what dental therapy is doing around the world,” said Nash.
Nash is heading up an international study on dental therapists, to find out how therapists might help millions of Americans who can't afford treatment.
“I think for the people of the United States, the future of the oral health of their children is at stake,” said Nash.
So in a handful of Alaska villages, a national experiment is taking place. It’s one that the American Dental Association says puts people at risk, and one that national public health experts say is full of promise.
10.25.2005
Alaskans can learn from PETA
Every Alaskan has been affected by the PETA. Their radical approach to influencing the minds and opinions of the masses is far-reaching. The progressive animal rights organization has a ruthless approach for getting coverage in the mass media -- with enviable results.
Rural Alaskans (Native and Non-native alike) can learn allot from PETA's approach to politicizing their interests and opinions. Media IMPACT at all costs! No-one is spared! This article is a behind the scenes look at the organizations radical activist approach.
disclaimer: alaska exposed is by no means a supporter of PETA! Not a chance in hell! This article is NOT AN ENDORESEMENT of the organization and is reproduced only to provide insights into their media techniques and strategies.
Reposted From the Alternet Archives:
AlterNet
PETA: Whatever It Takes
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on October 5, 2005, Printed on October 25, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/26094/
For the record, I am neither a vegan nor a vegetarian. Nor am I an honorary member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). One of my best friends is, however, and he works at the PETA headquarters in the decrepit asphalt Venice of Norfolk, Va.
I started following PETA's activities because of my personal connection to it, and as I did, I became engrossed with its media tactics, which, to sum them up would be to say they say and do anything at all to draw attention. It sounds simple and obvious enough -- anything at all -- but it clearly isn't, or other groups would be following its lead. Other than the ACLU, which progressive advocacy group (yes, PETA is progressive) garners a regular share of news coverage across the country on a daily basis? Not a single one.
PETA goes after places, people, events and ideas of social meaning and finds a way to seize the headlines -- or create its own. It will do whatever it takes to expose people to its point of view. When PETA asks an agricultural town to change its name from say, Cowtown to Liberated Cowtown, it knows that a bored reporter in the surrounding region will fall for it and write a story about it, and that a bunch of readers sick of stories about septic tanks and cattle prices will fall for the headline. Somewhere in that story will be the sentence: "A PETA representative told the mayor that killing animals is wrong."
With that sentence, PETA scores a victory.
So PETA sends vegetarian chefs to Camp Casey; runs semi-nude pictures of Pamela Anderson with anti-fur captions; and urges the USDA not to rebuild animal labs at the Katrina-devastated Louisiana State University. And every time PETA gets mentioned in a story, it's a win for the organization -- and some real animals might be saved in the process.
Because the truth is, this animal rights thing is a tarpit. The more people are exposed to it, the less comfortable they are with the concept of animal suffering. That's the premise, anyway, and I think it's true.
PETA does have an activist bent in addition to its propaganda arm -- real people doing real things to stop the suffering of specific animals -- and it has a record of winning in that regard. But because of the fight it's up against -- the ubiquity of animal consumption across America -- this thing can only be tackled in degrees by exposure to propaganda about it.
Here's the other thing: PETA doesn't care about its general reputation. PETA is just a vehicle for the animal rights movement, and the staff is fully aware of this, so there's no such thing as bad press, and there's absolute indifference to folks who don't like the group's tactics. Anything at all that gets PETA in the headlines is a win for the animals.
From that perspective, the pundits and authors who tangle endlessly with PETA's campaigns end up working as suckers for the cause. Take Kathryn Jean-Lopez, a writer for the conservative National Review, who was shocked, appalled by PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign. Jean-Lopez fell for it badly, offering sentences to the animal rights movement on a silver platter. Perhaps her best was, "I'm not going to deny that a cattle slaughterhouse isn't disgusting." Her blinders were on so tight she managed to bump right into the anything at all approach without seeing it: "PETA issues its own reads of the Koran. It toys with the Book of Mormon. Few beliefs are spared PETA's offensiveness."
Too true. PETA doesn't care about Joseph Smith and his Book of Moroni. It cares about animals.
The freakish volume of activity that spills out of PETA is jaw-dropping. Just follow the goings-on of its website (or any of its dozens of spinoff sites) -- it unleashes hordes of powerful propaganda, from press releases and videos to images and investigative reports to photogalleries -- anything at all, and piles of it. I set up a visit with PETA's headquarters to see how it works.
Anything for the animals
Norfolk is primarily a shipping and Navy base city laid out over a system of ports, rivers and canals. It's got a nuked-out downtown typical of most American cities with a healthy dose of Southern racial segregation and poverty surrounding it. Thousands of jar-headed Navy boys fill the streets at night, clogging the bars and restaurants (many of which offer vegan cuisine as a result of PETA's local influence). The PETA building sticks out from all this. It sits on a small inlet on the Elizabeth river right by a small bridge heading into downtown. It's a modern, shiny, blue-green, five- or six-story glassy blot with a big, fat PETA logo right at the top. Inside about 180 staffers churn out the cause.
When you're writing a story about an organization, the last person in the world you want to get your information from is a member of the communications staff. But in my case that's exactly who I wanted to talk to. My first interviewee was Colleen O' Brien, PETA's communications manager.
As bluntly as possible, I asked her about PETA's sending vegetarian chefs to Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas during Bush's August vacation: Do you feel like you made a good return on that investment? After all, PETA is not Morgan Stanley; while it's a $25 million a year operation, it still has to pick its battles.
O' Brien started by spinning me, saying, "Vegetarianism is a cruel-free way of living." She said PETA went into Camp Casey with a non-partisan agenda -- "Those folks were out there, hungry" -- and gave them a vegetarian alternative to eating "decomposing corpses." After I let her go on with this for a while (and yes, putting her quotes in this article is a successful advancement of the animal rights agenda), I tried to bring her back to the issue of whether PETA had mercilessly seized on the fact that hundreds of bored reporters were in Camp Casey, looking to add color to their stories about a poor mother who lost her son in an awful war.
Then she said what I was looking for: "What sets PETA apart from a lot of other groups, is that we have a special relationship with the media. We don't have budgets for the placement of ads like, I suppose, some other groups. We have to do stunts to reach the greatest number of people."
So was the Casey stunt a success? "We had some write-ups," O' Brien said.
Looking back at the coverage from Camp Casey, I found a few mentions. Like the 16th sentence in a Sheehan article from the Des Moines Register: "But instead of corn dogs and funnel cakes, they ate veggie burgers grilled by PETA members and free meals cranked out by a volunteer-staffed kitchen." Corn dogs vs. veggie burgers: you couldn't ask for a better contrast for those Iowa readers.
I reached back to something for O' Brien that I knew had been a massive publicity success: the fax PETA sent to Yasser Arafat in the spring of 2003 asking him to stop using donkeys as portable bomb devices. A donkey strapped with explosives had recently exploded on the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion, killing only the animal.
There's no more dependable source of pious reporting and righteous outrage than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And with that letter, PETA struck gold. Network and cable television anchors just couldn't resist a bite on it, including Fox News' Brit Hume (who used the incident as a platform to pop in Ari Fleischer's Orwellification of the term "suicide bomber"):
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has faxed Yasser Arafat protesting the use of a dynamite-laden donkey as a homicide bomber. The group, which complained about the exploding ass but not about the coincidental murder of Israelis, urged Arafat to, quote, "Leave animals out of this conflict."
That's a towering home run for the animal rights movement. A deadpan, Reagan-faced anchor put the Fox watchers on full alert with the mention of Terror, their favorite topic, and also heard a funny pun -- dropping their drawbridges to the unconscious wide open. And then an invading direct quote from PETA sprinted right in.
Of course, PETA didn't get anything close to a promise from Arafat, and it didn't really matter. The point is it siphoned piles of headlines and TV coverage away from a bunch of cynical demagogues in the Middle East and in the direction of the animal rights cause. All it took was a fax with an absurd request to the head of the PLO.
I asked Colleen O' Brien if PETA had put out that letter because the organization truly cared about that dead donkey or for that matter, donkeys in Palestine. She said it was about that donkey and the donkeys of Palestine, but also the way we think about donkeys in general. She more or less agreed that while the letters, stunts and investigations were contextually about instances of animal suffering, they were more about the soft sell to change mass behavior. Not that leather jacket or evil clothing factory, rather the existence of leather jackets, evil clothing factories and the whole clothing market for that matter.
I pressed on with my big Lightning Strikes question: "It's Anything At All, isn't it?" Anything at all to get coverage, so that humans stop making animals suffer; any propaganda, any picture, song, performance, that makes an impact. Anything, right?
I wish she had said, "Yes. Anything." But I did get a nod in the affirmative. "Look, we're living in a time when the media is titillating," O' Brien said. "If we could sit down with CNN with an investigation, we would. But the reality is that it's not like that. It's a tabloid media." Her hope was to provide "images that stay in people's heads."
A glorious tour
After O' Brien left the conference room, I looked out the windows facing the main office. Dozens of PETA staffers sat in a large room, earnestly staring at their computer screens. Handbills and stickers from past campaigns covered the walls, desks and hard drives. One staffer's "companion animal" sat in the aisle with its tail wagging in pure bliss. A mock-up poster of Wendy from Wendy's looked on approvingly, her cleaver fresh and dripping from her latest bovine carve-up session.
Next to speak with me was "Karin Robertson," manager of PETA's Fish Empathy Project. There are quotations around "Karin" because her real name is GoVeg.com. She had it legally changed from Karin Robertson back in 2003, a move that produced piles and piles of headlines (and now a mention here). It still gets a mention pretty much anytime GoVeg's Fish Empathy Project gets in the news.
After we talked about the horrors of the way fish are treated and how they have feelings etc., we came to GoVeg's approach to dealing with the media. GoVeg told me that it's almost impossible to get the press to deal with an issue directly. "They only come up with as many sound bites as possible." I agreed.
"That's why," she said, "we work really hard to make a concise point." A high-vitamin-content sound bite. That's what happened with Brit Hume and the exploding ass, and it's also what happened with GoVeg's project to get the Long Beach California aquarium to stop serving fish.
The sound bites PETA constructs have metrical rules as tight as a haiku. And they must draw on the essential tools of rhetoric -- metaphors, powerful images, etc. -- or fail; everything has to be in that sound bite or else the soft sell is a failure. GoVeg's sound bite in this case hoodwinked poor Amanda Covarrubias at the L.A. Times, who put it in the first sentence of her article: "An animal rights group wants the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach to gut its cafeteria menu of fish and seafood, arguing that 'serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show.'"
At least a dozen other major media outlets ran with that quote, including The New York Times and, of course, Fox News.
GoVeg took me on a tour of the rest of the building. There was a room for the Writers Group -- a bunch of staffers whose duties include writing letters to the editor and coordinating volunteers to do the same. She pointed outside to the dog park that's open for the local community to use. The park, of course, sports a message board with plenty of animal rights information for visitors to read.
We also saw the stockroom, where five staffers were busily filling up packets to mail off to PETA's army of volunteer activists.
The stockroom was filled with marvelous propaganda covering the full spectrum of Anything At All. There were hundreds of small stackable plastic tubs, each with labels like, "306 MOD Caged Chimp Stencil" or "STU 224 Question Authority: PIG." Inside each tub was an exquisite means of communicating the animal rights agenda.
In one drawer I found some wonderful imitations of those 1980s Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Written in fluid Spanish, they had been designed for Hispanic children. Some caring genius at PETA called the cards Chupaleches -- "Milk Suckers."
Part of PETA's Eche La Leche (Ditch Milk) campaign, the Chupaleches on the four-card set I took home feature Ling Ladron De Leche ("Ling the Milk Thief"), a lacto-fattened girl who sports a guilty look on her face as she squats behind the legs of a pissed-off cow and drinks from its udder. The Ling card brilliantly communicates dozens of key things; primarily, that if you tried to get your milk from its true source, you'd find yourself like Ling; eyes averted from the quarry, sucking on the teats of a livid heifer.
The card next to Ling is Andrea Anti-Lactosa, who sits on the toilet clutching her stomach as she deals with the consequences of having poured a whole quart of milk down her gullet. The empty milk container rests at her feet looking like the murder weapon in a crime scene. On the back of Andrea's card is a mockup of a Wanted! notice, which reads: "Blow your nose, it's dripping out! Andrea's got milk, but she also has painful and foul-smelling gas. The faster she quits milk, the faster her family and friends can breathe in peace."
Something a child can understand.
PETA wins
GoVeg also took me to a library and reference room filled with shelves of black binders. Each binder contained pages of clippings of PETA's successes, starting from its humble origins in the basement of founder Ingrid Newkirk's house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It was a glorious hall of fame.
It takes a powerful cause to assemble a clipping collection like this; to persuade someone to change their name; to work tirelessly for very little money (most salaries at PETA are between $28-32k). Applying such tactics to a cause less visceral than animal rights, but just as valuable -- like, say, lower carbon emissions at the 17 most polluting coal plants in America -- isn't as easy. But as an outpouring of a wider environmental movement that does anything at all to change hearts and minds? I think so.
I headed back to the conference room for my third and final interview, with Dan Shannon, the manager of peta2 -- the youth outreach arm of PETA. Shannon is a bright and lucid fellow. After a few minutes with him, it was clear to me that if PETA's approach was a dazzling testimony to what an understanding of mass media in the 21st century can do for a cause, peta2's is a refined, clinical application of that method.
I asked Shannon how he uses the web to get to young folk. He told me that web videos were the latest means of reaching kids he was trying to master. "We promote them virally." He told me the single biggest success for peta2 so far came when one kid with a blog on the popular myspace.com put up a link to PETA's frightening Inside the Chinese Fur Trade video, which was in turn linked to and emailed around in a blizzard. "Three hundred thousand people watched that video, and it came from this one kid."
We talked about the successful peta2 street teams -- groups of young volunteers who protest in their local areas with coordination from HQ. Shannon said the inspiration for this model wasn't pulled out of some progressive handbook; rather it was copied from a model of what record companies have been doing to promote album sales. "It's the companies that do these things. ... They spend millions figuring it out, and I'm thinking, all right, thanks for the idea!"
Who does peta2 go after with its finite budget? "The kids who are savvy." That's the same group Pentagon recruiting manuals tell you to hoard like dragons: the influencers.
It was a delight to be in the presence of a winner. How rare to see a non-profit group beating our commercial society at its own game, in aid of something that is truly good for the world. My visit confirmed for me what I had come to believe as a casual observer: PETA is the most successful, iron-fisted, 501c3 I have ever witnessed; and the only one to make it out of the progressive slums and wage a winning battle at the mass media level.
In tragic contrast to PETA are the scores of non-profits that, despite good faith and hard work, watch their resources sink into the sand, their messages ignored by the public and the media. When I asked Colleen O' Brien why other progressive causes don't adopt PETA's approach, she gave me an absent look. "Their tactics are different from ours ... It could be that they are hesitant." That's all I could get out of her.
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/26094/
Rural Alaskans (Native and Non-native alike) can learn allot from PETA's approach to politicizing their interests and opinions. Media IMPACT at all costs! No-one is spared! This article is a behind the scenes look at the organizations radical activist approach.
disclaimer: alaska exposed is by no means a supporter of PETA! Not a chance in hell! This article is NOT AN ENDORESEMENT of the organization and is reproduced only to provide insights into their media techniques and strategies.
Reposted From the Alternet Archives:
AlterNet
PETA: Whatever It Takes
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on October 5, 2005, Printed on October 25, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/26094/
For the record, I am neither a vegan nor a vegetarian. Nor am I an honorary member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). One of my best friends is, however, and he works at the PETA headquarters in the decrepit asphalt Venice of Norfolk, Va.
I started following PETA's activities because of my personal connection to it, and as I did, I became engrossed with its media tactics, which, to sum them up would be to say they say and do anything at all to draw attention. It sounds simple and obvious enough -- anything at all -- but it clearly isn't, or other groups would be following its lead. Other than the ACLU, which progressive advocacy group (yes, PETA is progressive) garners a regular share of news coverage across the country on a daily basis? Not a single one.
PETA goes after places, people, events and ideas of social meaning and finds a way to seize the headlines -- or create its own. It will do whatever it takes to expose people to its point of view. When PETA asks an agricultural town to change its name from say, Cowtown to Liberated Cowtown, it knows that a bored reporter in the surrounding region will fall for it and write a story about it, and that a bunch of readers sick of stories about septic tanks and cattle prices will fall for the headline. Somewhere in that story will be the sentence: "A PETA representative told the mayor that killing animals is wrong."
With that sentence, PETA scores a victory.
So PETA sends vegetarian chefs to Camp Casey; runs semi-nude pictures of Pamela Anderson with anti-fur captions; and urges the USDA not to rebuild animal labs at the Katrina-devastated Louisiana State University. And every time PETA gets mentioned in a story, it's a win for the organization -- and some real animals might be saved in the process.
Because the truth is, this animal rights thing is a tarpit. The more people are exposed to it, the less comfortable they are with the concept of animal suffering. That's the premise, anyway, and I think it's true.
PETA does have an activist bent in addition to its propaganda arm -- real people doing real things to stop the suffering of specific animals -- and it has a record of winning in that regard. But because of the fight it's up against -- the ubiquity of animal consumption across America -- this thing can only be tackled in degrees by exposure to propaganda about it.
Here's the other thing: PETA doesn't care about its general reputation. PETA is just a vehicle for the animal rights movement, and the staff is fully aware of this, so there's no such thing as bad press, and there's absolute indifference to folks who don't like the group's tactics. Anything at all that gets PETA in the headlines is a win for the animals.
From that perspective, the pundits and authors who tangle endlessly with PETA's campaigns end up working as suckers for the cause. Take Kathryn Jean-Lopez, a writer for the conservative National Review, who was shocked, appalled by PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign. Jean-Lopez fell for it badly, offering sentences to the animal rights movement on a silver platter. Perhaps her best was, "I'm not going to deny that a cattle slaughterhouse isn't disgusting." Her blinders were on so tight she managed to bump right into the anything at all approach without seeing it: "PETA issues its own reads of the Koran. It toys with the Book of Mormon. Few beliefs are spared PETA's offensiveness."
Too true. PETA doesn't care about Joseph Smith and his Book of Moroni. It cares about animals.
The freakish volume of activity that spills out of PETA is jaw-dropping. Just follow the goings-on of its website (or any of its dozens of spinoff sites) -- it unleashes hordes of powerful propaganda, from press releases and videos to images and investigative reports to photogalleries -- anything at all, and piles of it. I set up a visit with PETA's headquarters to see how it works.
Anything for the animals
Norfolk is primarily a shipping and Navy base city laid out over a system of ports, rivers and canals. It's got a nuked-out downtown typical of most American cities with a healthy dose of Southern racial segregation and poverty surrounding it. Thousands of jar-headed Navy boys fill the streets at night, clogging the bars and restaurants (many of which offer vegan cuisine as a result of PETA's local influence). The PETA building sticks out from all this. It sits on a small inlet on the Elizabeth river right by a small bridge heading into downtown. It's a modern, shiny, blue-green, five- or six-story glassy blot with a big, fat PETA logo right at the top. Inside about 180 staffers churn out the cause.
When you're writing a story about an organization, the last person in the world you want to get your information from is a member of the communications staff. But in my case that's exactly who I wanted to talk to. My first interviewee was Colleen O' Brien, PETA's communications manager.
As bluntly as possible, I asked her about PETA's sending vegetarian chefs to Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas during Bush's August vacation: Do you feel like you made a good return on that investment? After all, PETA is not Morgan Stanley; while it's a $25 million a year operation, it still has to pick its battles.
O' Brien started by spinning me, saying, "Vegetarianism is a cruel-free way of living." She said PETA went into Camp Casey with a non-partisan agenda -- "Those folks were out there, hungry" -- and gave them a vegetarian alternative to eating "decomposing corpses." After I let her go on with this for a while (and yes, putting her quotes in this article is a successful advancement of the animal rights agenda), I tried to bring her back to the issue of whether PETA had mercilessly seized on the fact that hundreds of bored reporters were in Camp Casey, looking to add color to their stories about a poor mother who lost her son in an awful war.
Then she said what I was looking for: "What sets PETA apart from a lot of other groups, is that we have a special relationship with the media. We don't have budgets for the placement of ads like, I suppose, some other groups. We have to do stunts to reach the greatest number of people."
So was the Casey stunt a success? "We had some write-ups," O' Brien said.
Looking back at the coverage from Camp Casey, I found a few mentions. Like the 16th sentence in a Sheehan article from the Des Moines Register: "But instead of corn dogs and funnel cakes, they ate veggie burgers grilled by PETA members and free meals cranked out by a volunteer-staffed kitchen." Corn dogs vs. veggie burgers: you couldn't ask for a better contrast for those Iowa readers.
I reached back to something for O' Brien that I knew had been a massive publicity success: the fax PETA sent to Yasser Arafat in the spring of 2003 asking him to stop using donkeys as portable bomb devices. A donkey strapped with explosives had recently exploded on the road between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Gush Etzion, killing only the animal.
There's no more dependable source of pious reporting and righteous outrage than the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And with that letter, PETA struck gold. Network and cable television anchors just couldn't resist a bite on it, including Fox News' Brit Hume (who used the incident as a platform to pop in Ari Fleischer's Orwellification of the term "suicide bomber"):
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has faxed Yasser Arafat protesting the use of a dynamite-laden donkey as a homicide bomber. The group, which complained about the exploding ass but not about the coincidental murder of Israelis, urged Arafat to, quote, "Leave animals out of this conflict."
That's a towering home run for the animal rights movement. A deadpan, Reagan-faced anchor put the Fox watchers on full alert with the mention of Terror, their favorite topic, and also heard a funny pun -- dropping their drawbridges to the unconscious wide open. And then an invading direct quote from PETA sprinted right in.
Of course, PETA didn't get anything close to a promise from Arafat, and it didn't really matter. The point is it siphoned piles of headlines and TV coverage away from a bunch of cynical demagogues in the Middle East and in the direction of the animal rights cause. All it took was a fax with an absurd request to the head of the PLO.
I asked Colleen O' Brien if PETA had put out that letter because the organization truly cared about that dead donkey or for that matter, donkeys in Palestine. She said it was about that donkey and the donkeys of Palestine, but also the way we think about donkeys in general. She more or less agreed that while the letters, stunts and investigations were contextually about instances of animal suffering, they were more about the soft sell to change mass behavior. Not that leather jacket or evil clothing factory, rather the existence of leather jackets, evil clothing factories and the whole clothing market for that matter.
I pressed on with my big Lightning Strikes question: "It's Anything At All, isn't it?" Anything at all to get coverage, so that humans stop making animals suffer; any propaganda, any picture, song, performance, that makes an impact. Anything, right?
I wish she had said, "Yes. Anything." But I did get a nod in the affirmative. "Look, we're living in a time when the media is titillating," O' Brien said. "If we could sit down with CNN with an investigation, we would. But the reality is that it's not like that. It's a tabloid media." Her hope was to provide "images that stay in people's heads."
A glorious tour
After O' Brien left the conference room, I looked out the windows facing the main office. Dozens of PETA staffers sat in a large room, earnestly staring at their computer screens. Handbills and stickers from past campaigns covered the walls, desks and hard drives. One staffer's "companion animal" sat in the aisle with its tail wagging in pure bliss. A mock-up poster of Wendy from Wendy's looked on approvingly, her cleaver fresh and dripping from her latest bovine carve-up session.
Next to speak with me was "Karin Robertson," manager of PETA's Fish Empathy Project. There are quotations around "Karin" because her real name is GoVeg.com. She had it legally changed from Karin Robertson back in 2003, a move that produced piles and piles of headlines (and now a mention here). It still gets a mention pretty much anytime GoVeg's Fish Empathy Project gets in the news.
After we talked about the horrors of the way fish are treated and how they have feelings etc., we came to GoVeg's approach to dealing with the media. GoVeg told me that it's almost impossible to get the press to deal with an issue directly. "They only come up with as many sound bites as possible." I agreed.
"That's why," she said, "we work really hard to make a concise point." A high-vitamin-content sound bite. That's what happened with Brit Hume and the exploding ass, and it's also what happened with GoVeg's project to get the Long Beach California aquarium to stop serving fish.
The sound bites PETA constructs have metrical rules as tight as a haiku. And they must draw on the essential tools of rhetoric -- metaphors, powerful images, etc. -- or fail; everything has to be in that sound bite or else the soft sell is a failure. GoVeg's sound bite in this case hoodwinked poor Amanda Covarrubias at the L.A. Times, who put it in the first sentence of her article: "An animal rights group wants the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach to gut its cafeteria menu of fish and seafood, arguing that 'serving fish at an aquarium is like serving poodle burgers at a dog show.'"
At least a dozen other major media outlets ran with that quote, including The New York Times and, of course, Fox News.
GoVeg took me on a tour of the rest of the building. There was a room for the Writers Group -- a bunch of staffers whose duties include writing letters to the editor and coordinating volunteers to do the same. She pointed outside to the dog park that's open for the local community to use. The park, of course, sports a message board with plenty of animal rights information for visitors to read.
We also saw the stockroom, where five staffers were busily filling up packets to mail off to PETA's army of volunteer activists.
The stockroom was filled with marvelous propaganda covering the full spectrum of Anything At All. There were hundreds of small stackable plastic tubs, each with labels like, "306 MOD Caged Chimp Stencil" or "STU 224 Question Authority: PIG." Inside each tub was an exquisite means of communicating the animal rights agenda.
In one drawer I found some wonderful imitations of those 1980s Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Written in fluid Spanish, they had been designed for Hispanic children. Some caring genius at PETA called the cards Chupaleches -- "Milk Suckers."
Part of PETA's Eche La Leche (Ditch Milk) campaign, the Chupaleches on the four-card set I took home feature Ling Ladron De Leche ("Ling the Milk Thief"), a lacto-fattened girl who sports a guilty look on her face as she squats behind the legs of a pissed-off cow and drinks from its udder. The Ling card brilliantly communicates dozens of key things; primarily, that if you tried to get your milk from its true source, you'd find yourself like Ling; eyes averted from the quarry, sucking on the teats of a livid heifer.
The card next to Ling is Andrea Anti-Lactosa, who sits on the toilet clutching her stomach as she deals with the consequences of having poured a whole quart of milk down her gullet. The empty milk container rests at her feet looking like the murder weapon in a crime scene. On the back of Andrea's card is a mockup of a Wanted! notice, which reads: "Blow your nose, it's dripping out! Andrea's got milk, but she also has painful and foul-smelling gas. The faster she quits milk, the faster her family and friends can breathe in peace."
Something a child can understand.
PETA wins
GoVeg also took me to a library and reference room filled with shelves of black binders. Each binder contained pages of clippings of PETA's successes, starting from its humble origins in the basement of founder Ingrid Newkirk's house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It was a glorious hall of fame.
It takes a powerful cause to assemble a clipping collection like this; to persuade someone to change their name; to work tirelessly for very little money (most salaries at PETA are between $28-32k). Applying such tactics to a cause less visceral than animal rights, but just as valuable -- like, say, lower carbon emissions at the 17 most polluting coal plants in America -- isn't as easy. But as an outpouring of a wider environmental movement that does anything at all to change hearts and minds? I think so.
I headed back to the conference room for my third and final interview, with Dan Shannon, the manager of peta2 -- the youth outreach arm of PETA. Shannon is a bright and lucid fellow. After a few minutes with him, it was clear to me that if PETA's approach was a dazzling testimony to what an understanding of mass media in the 21st century can do for a cause, peta2's is a refined, clinical application of that method.
I asked Shannon how he uses the web to get to young folk. He told me that web videos were the latest means of reaching kids he was trying to master. "We promote them virally." He told me the single biggest success for peta2 so far came when one kid with a blog on the popular myspace.com put up a link to PETA's frightening Inside the Chinese Fur Trade video, which was in turn linked to and emailed around in a blizzard. "Three hundred thousand people watched that video, and it came from this one kid."
We talked about the successful peta2 street teams -- groups of young volunteers who protest in their local areas with coordination from HQ. Shannon said the inspiration for this model wasn't pulled out of some progressive handbook; rather it was copied from a model of what record companies have been doing to promote album sales. "It's the companies that do these things. ... They spend millions figuring it out, and I'm thinking, all right, thanks for the idea!"
Who does peta2 go after with its finite budget? "The kids who are savvy." That's the same group Pentagon recruiting manuals tell you to hoard like dragons: the influencers.
It was a delight to be in the presence of a winner. How rare to see a non-profit group beating our commercial society at its own game, in aid of something that is truly good for the world. My visit confirmed for me what I had come to believe as a casual observer: PETA is the most successful, iron-fisted, 501c3 I have ever witnessed; and the only one to make it out of the progressive slums and wage a winning battle at the mass media level.
In tragic contrast to PETA are the scores of non-profits that, despite good faith and hard work, watch their resources sink into the sand, their messages ignored by the public and the media. When I asked Colleen O' Brien why other progressive causes don't adopt PETA's approach, she gave me an absent look. "Their tactics are different from ours ... It could be that they are hesitant." That's all I could get out of her.
Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/26094/
10.10.2005
Ya' Gotta Start Somewhere
This is the first alaska politics exposed posting...
Why not start with tribal sovereignty...and often misrepresented and mistaken concept affecting all tribal people in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.
Click to view our fearless leader expound on the intracacies of Tribal Sovereignty.
Links:
A Primer on Alaska Native Sovereignty...lots of links". By Douglas K. Mertz. Juneau: Law Offices of Douglas Kemp Mertz, 1991.
Another Mertz presentation...text: introduction, early developments,later developments, ANCSA, modern and present day interpretations
Berger Launches ANCSA Hearings, Focus on Native Sovereignty, The Arctic Policy Review/June 1984
Search alaskool.org for more information on Alaska Native Sovereignty
Why not start with tribal sovereignty...and often misrepresented and mistaken concept affecting all tribal people in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska.
Click to view our fearless leader expound on the intracacies of Tribal Sovereignty.
Links:
A Primer on Alaska Native Sovereignty...lots of links". By Douglas K. Mertz. Juneau: Law Offices of Douglas Kemp Mertz, 1991.
Another Mertz presentation...text: introduction, early developments,later developments, ANCSA, modern and present day interpretations
Berger Launches ANCSA Hearings, Focus on Native Sovereignty, The Arctic Policy Review/June 1984
Search alaskool.org for more information on Alaska Native Sovereignty
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