• how to run a successful political
campaign on a shoestring, not running away from your principles
• how "community policing" has been
a blame-shifting device used by city police to punish those who rent
to poor people
• how a group of stigmatized landlords
in a one-party town beat Minneapolis city officials at their own game
• how leisure-starved Americans are
growing poorer as they work harder to get ahead
• how a general reduction in work hours
would enhance, not hinder, advancement of wages & living standards
• about a possible way out of the ills
of globalization through international cooperation
• about the role of racial and gender
politics in keeping working Americans divided, unable to challenge
their bosses
• about the record of group violence
including black Americans and the Ku Klux Klan
• about the great importance of media
in political affairs and how to cope with hostile media
• about the art of politics in a culture
of popular entertainment - viz. Jesse Ventura
• about the triumph of a college-educated
career failure after he fought the politicians and drug dealers
• about the need for a politics of
total change and its immediate feasibility
• about the possible role of Minnesota's
Independence Party in leading American third parties to electoral
victory
Brandishing a picket sign emblazoned
with statements of two issues that were totally outside the political
mainstream, the author waged a campaign for U.S. Senate which captured
8,482 votes, or 31% of the total, in the 2002 Independence Party primary.
He placed second to the party-endorsed candidate (who had 49.5% of the
vote) despite a lack of resources and a ban on news coverage of his
campaign by the state's largest newspaper. This event could mark the
beginning of the end for political control by race/ gender- manipulating
corporate and professional interests.
Many observers believe that Minnesota's Independence
Party is in the best position of any U.S. third party to break loose
from the pack and do what the Republicans did to the Whigs in the 1860s:
displace one of the nation's two major parties. It elected a Governor
of Minnesota (Jesse Ventura) in 1998 and briefly sent another of its
members (Dean Barkley) to the U.S. Senate. Its candidate for Governor
in 2002 (Tim Penny) received a "disappointing" 16% of the vote. Micah
L. Sifry has written: "The IP has carved a real foothold in state politics
... The fact that the IP's slate of legislative candidates got, on average,
11% of the vote is another sign that a bloc of voters have begun to
align their political identities around the IP." (The Nation,
12/30/02)
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