>> what role can we play. >> the first is to get educated about it and let me do a shoutout to these two guys. if you want to get some background psychiatrist, one that you could do is google david corn and read what he has written in the last 20 plus year you'll get quite an education or you can go to the progress blog i can say lee and his team are breaking news at a rate that is outrageous compared to the mainstream media. you have a group of folks who are pounding away and breaking stuff once a week and it's just awesome. [applause] >> so i agree everything that's been said. one thing david said one thing the citizens united did enacted a shift not among the corporate class but the deep pocket and the old rules of restraint and as bad as things were there were self-imposed restraints and deep pockets those self-imposed rules

of restraint no longer applied and we see them fritter away more and more. there's a culture move going along on the corporate class. i don't think the public sentiment needs to be shifted. the public actually gets this pretty well. you guys all get this. you get 90% of people who think that big business has too much power in washington, d.c., in polls. 90% is an awesome number. 80% of the population thinks the earth revolves around the sun. think about it, right? okay. 90% is amazing. 70% of tea party self-five-day forecast tea party people think the united decision was wrong. so what we don't have is the way david people we don't have people against it and they are not mobilized. all we have against all this money is all of our collective people power. if you're passionate about climate change or you want safe

water, you want safe food, you're worried about workers safety and you want to avoid another wall street collapse and you're worried about jobs issues and you want a fair education system and you want to bring down these outrageous for-profit colleges and do all that work but you got to do some work on the issue of campaign finance and overturning the citizens united decision. this is my first campus progress conference too but what i learned in my 90 minutes here or so is campaign progress loves a response. we created a website democracy is for people. it's a really radical notion, democracy for people not for organizations. go there and sign up and we'll get you engaged and tell you what you can do, doing as much as you want to do to work on a constitutional amendment to deal with the influence of money and politics. since it's a radical motion and i know this is a radical audience let me see you can do democracy is for people. if i get a chance at a couple times and i feel like i went home and i did my job.

democracy is for people. forget the word. democracy is for people. democracy for people. now, if you go out and you sort of chant that to people in the street we will build a movement. [applause] >> yeah. [applause] >> so we only have a few moments left and one thing and i want to get to ask you all about what you think -- what we have in store for the 2012 elections. but one point i think that is interesting and is important to remember when we talk about sort of the cultural shift i think a lot of times when we heard death panels and a lot of rhetoric that happens around climate change and even unions when i talk to my family and friends at home back in michigan, you know, it can be daunting. it sounds like that they might agree with whatever they're hearing but a lot of it is because there's so much misinformation out there so it's our job, you know, to educate ours but also to educate our family and our friends, people we care about on a lot of the

misinformation that's out there. i think that's one of the most important and maybe simplest roles we can play. so i'll kind of throw it out to you and anybody can jump in here but what do you think -- is in store for us in the 2012 election with citizens united and with, you know, all of the presidential candidates talking about the millions and almost million they're raising on a daily basis? >> well, it's already here. i mean, robert talked a little bit about the run-up in 2010. that was like really early preseason. and you had people like tom perilo a congressman who supported health care reform, cap-and-trade and he came from a republican kind of conservative district and from the moment he got into office, really, after 2008, he won by just a couple hundred votes there were these ads against him, you know, by citizens for a better health care saying that he was destroying the health care

system. and they were relentless and relentless and they went on for two years and he ended up losing one of the many democrats that lost in december and it was a warm-up and you see people like karl rove who's advising two of these independent pacs who are now -- you know, we used to at least wait until the election year. but that i have running ads against democrats now, and then the democrats are responding. billy burton who used to work as a secretary. president obama says he'd rather not see this but i think he doesn't want to see the democrats at a disadvantage. so by the time we actually get to november, 2012, there'll be tens much billions of dollars of special interest money flowing into the system and in some ways it gets candidates. i think even republicans and democratic candidates alike because it may sub assume them and they may lose control.

this is one of the fears that people have is that the actual candidates will lose total control of their own races. that the messages will be dictated by people who come in with these billing ad campaigns and they'll pick key races, key seats, key committee chairman and you can put 1 or $2 million in and totally blow them out of the water. so that's going to happen. it may have an impact on the presidential race but really in these congressional seats and some senate seats that are totally going to go up for grabs and the koch brothers are already going to have so much influence. members of media and democratic members and others are making decisions calculating, do i want -- how much of a target do i want to be next time out? so we're going to see a big impact. >> it's going to be important --

it sounds like news and ads happening. >> outside of ads, number 1, i think that obama is going to be outspent because these ies are going to outspend him. >> tell them what that. >> all these independent expenditure campaigns but what won't be on tv and what the media will not report is that citizens united -- part of the decision opened the door to something else other than unlimited corporate spending on ads and that sort of thing. it opened the door for corporations to coerce and manipulate their employees, their customers, their vendors, their contractors, their subcontractors to support candidates that the business picks and this was in a confidential memo circulated last year among republicans and was actually at a presentation that this was one of the hidden benefits of citizens united and

with a bunch muof hedge fund managers and this was tested that some of the big manufacturers in the midwest, the koch brothers, a few other companies tested it out. they sent out mailers to their employees telling them who to vote for. they had closed coercionist talking about how it will destroy the economy and the country but this is just the beginning. the chamber of commerce is already working on this and, of course, their membership includes all the biggest fortune 500 companies. so they're going to be manipulating you when you buy things to go vote for a certain candidate and they're going to be manipulating if you use possibly facebook and these social networking platforms and it will be very sut. this is the civil rights struggle of our time as robert mentioned but unlike, you know, the factory bosses bringing in

the pinkerton, the corporate lobbyists have catchem. they can look beautiful. they know how to use the right words to talk to you and manipulate you. so this is a much bigger, possibly more difficult struggle, and i'll just leave it at that. >> i agree with all that but i brick also the rise of a counter-citizens movement that you are all going to join by logging on at democracy is for people.org. >> and, unfortunately, we are -- that's all the time we have for this discussion but i want to thank all of our panelists for being here. obviously, this is a really important issue. something that doesn't get talked about a lot like lee said in our classrooms but it's something we all need to be paying attention to. and i think it's important to remember that democracy is for america -- is for the people. thank you. >> now more from the campus progress annual conference. this panel talked about how

young people can begin careers in political activism. it's a half hour. >> i'm so excited to be here today. ink got here -- i ran from a convening that has a bunch much civil rights activists, snicc all these amazing leggedary activists and one of them pulled me on the side on my way out and i was telling the panel to moderate and you don't understand how lucky you are and how lucky your generation is to be able to make a living off of your passions to be able to make a living off of making the world a better place. that's a rather new phenomenon. and i looked at her, yes, it is easier now than it has ever been. but that doesn't mean it's easy and so that's what this panel is about. it's going to be talking about some of the challenges and barriers we're going to try to stay away from cliches and many

say follow your dream and reach for the stars. that's great. it's wonderful. it feels good but there's some real practical challenges and practical questions that i'm sure many of you have and i know -- and since we don't have time for q & a, we'll bring that up. and how do you make social change and social good your full-time job and career. to my immediate left is jessica matthews. she's the her new company uncharted play and i'll tell you what they do, to her left is victor and he's the senior communications advisor for the office of the secretary and undersecretary of commerce. big impressive title. and then all the way on the end but last but certainly not least my former colleague during my campaign progress says natasha bowen and i'm going to ask you

the most basic question, briefly what do you all do and how do you get there? and i'll start with you. >> hi, everybody this is a contest for speed contest and let us know if we go too fast. my name is jessica matthews i'm 23 years old and i am an inventor i think it's a cool thing to be do that. it's very bill nye and i put it out. i started in college without a science background. it's called soccket. stores like a portable generator to power small electrical appliances that are critical to the developing world. [applause] >> thanks. yeah, my parents like it, too. so, you know, the idea for us -- we noticed -- we don't want to

try to fix all the energy problems we simply want to address them, raise awareness about the global energy problems but, specifically, we wanted our means of addressing this problem to be fun. and i think that says a lot about our generation. i can't stand to be bored and i don't think your life needs to be a constant reminder what you lack. when we came up with the soccket it wasn't to be better than hand creeks but to be fun. why can't you start to address the problems you have, why can't that be something that can boost your happiness? and in that same vein empower you to start thinking why not versus why and make these people in these resources of poor communities. and i founded a company with my -- one of the coinventers named julia silverman called uncharted play and i run an innovative play where we produce fun products and services that address real world issues. >> that's awesome.

awesome. [applause] >> hi, i'm victor meyer. i'm 25 years old. i'm from california. and like many of you -- yes. throw it up. throw up the west side. i think like many of you, i majored in political science in college and thought that the next step -- the natural next step was law school. and somewhere along the way i came out on the dc and i worked on the hill and i just got this feeling in me, this itch i wanted to scratch and i was part of a team and i think i -- i started to realize that when i had a moment that there was something else drawing me away from a natural path like law school. i was really to take a leap of faith on an idea and i know that sounds generic and all of those moments us included we're still young so don't shy away from taking something even if it doesn't sound as concrete or guaranteed as law school so i

actually abandoned that path and came to dc to work for a couple of different politicians as well as political organizations and that's how i got to where i am now and i have to say every now and then my parents try to forward me articles from aol or in carta and i don't know why they're still using in carta about the price differential in salary and things like that, about my career choice. and i'll say this you're going to face moments where there's differences in terms of payment and you're going to have make really intense financial decisions but if you have that feeling, just be willing to take a leap of faith on it. >> that's great. [applause] >> i'm really, really excited to be back. i used to work here and i used to take naps in the back this room here after working 24/7 shifts on this conference. i'm natasha and i'm 28 years old

and i'm based out of new york and i'm a farmer. >> new york. i'm from new york. >> and sometimes i have to repeat myself. i'm a farmer, i grow food. i'm a female farmer and i'm a brown farmer. [laughter] >> now i put emphasis on those things because agriculture is so lost. it's so distant. it's so far from our minds. even though we all eat food it's become a lost art. it's become a lost place of work. even recently there are discussions picking up speed around how we grow our food with the organic food movement the locavore food movement and the fancy progressive way of saying everyone should have a fair slice of this food movement pie. even with all of these movements there's still this niche of voices that still is not being heard. there's still very old initials

within the food system that make people really uncomfortable like racism in the food system. when we're talking about fair food distribution and we're talking about who has access to farmers markets. who's getting the same loan as their neighbor farmers. so all of these issues are still sitting in the dark. and it's really -- if you really want to follow your food, i really feel it's important to go right to the root of our food system. our ancestral farming traditions of our people. practices that were here way before the movement picked up, right? women farmers who make up 80% of farmers worldwide and brown farmers people of color of farming who also hold the dual titles of being in the majority and farmers worldwide but also having the bad end of the stick in this global agriculture business so those are really the issues we're calling to me as an environmental activist, as a health activist and just as a person of color who wanted to get my crutchy on and get

connected with the land. [laughter] >> i was like where are all the brown people at? so that's kind of what i focus on. outside of a day-to-day basis, upstate in new york with a corrective farming group we grow 108 different varieties of food on 3.5 acres of land and we do grow intensively and extensive. i write on my blog brown girl farming and for environmental publications and the color of food where we're trying to raise the voices of farmers of color and environmental issues led by people of color. >> that's great. [applause] >> so i want to kind of -- i kind of want to ask you and vickrum i want to get everyone to talk about it. where is that moment? what was that moment that kind of helped you transition from maybe a traditional path, whether it was law school, medical school, natasha i know you were actually working in kind of traditional

environmental organizing. when was that moment? but more importantly, how did you make the decision? like really practically because i often hear people talk about one morning i decided to do it and my brain doesn't work like that. my brain actually starts thinking about how am i going to live and pay my bills and what is my mama going to say? i want you all to talk about how you made the transition no matter how early it was, no matter how late it was. what was the decision-making process? >> i think for me it was -- i'm going to be realistic. so this ball wasn't invented because i wanted to change the world i didn't want to fail the class which is serious stuff when you have nigerian parents. i'm sitting down like a junior at harvard and we first said to create a system of mobile health records and our professor during the memory said, muwh and i was like -- i wrapped my whole group and we're going to figured this thing out and i locked in a room

and we pushed, pushed, and pushed and we came up with the soccket and none of us engineers, physics, high school, yeah we know how it's going to work. no engineers believed us. so we literally had to wikipedia, thank you jesus for the internet, everything and then build it ourselves. and then go to the engineers and say, see, and then all the engineers said, oh, for me the moment when i realized this is something i should do with my life came when i saw the change in people the minute i showed them the ball. i don't care if you're 50 or 5, you go to this community and you say first of all i'm going to give you a ball, not a bottle cap or whatever you've been quickly around. a ecofriendly ball and everything and by the way, after 15 minutes you get three hours of light. you know and they say, what? and all of a sudden the way they view function and the way they assume the world should be just changes. they immediately start to

question the status quo and in 20 minutes they go from awe your ball is great but i actually have all these other ideas. this inspiration is -- it's one thing to be an innovator it's to impose innovation and somebody coming out and being the change and i what i realized it could do that and that it was so much fun, and i love fun. and i love seeing people happy, i'm like i want the world to be a better place and if i have to -- you know, let me be the person who get it done. i mean, to say it was a moment of change. like i say, i'm only 23. in 20 years i'm still doing a boring job but the time is now to get the things done. >> i think it's important to talk about the job piece and as i know and you haven't looked at the entire agenda and you will be talking more about today what the impact of the recession has been on particularly our generation, our job prospects and our possibility and i look

at both of the you, where are the jobs around kind of what it is that you want to do and when none existed or if they didn't exist, how did you create them. vickrum, talk about the landscape of your field. >> there are two defining moments. one was like it's obvious we're at a time where you can communicate in a million different ways. there's so many different mediums that i'm sure are in the palms of your hands and i notice sometimes in high school if i would geek out for a moment and talk to my friend passionately about some issue that we were discussing on the debate team -- if i would talk to somebody who didn't really care they would say, wow, where you get that information or how do you know all that or just kind of stare at me blankly and say why are you such a nerd? when i was thinking about those issues these are every day issues that aren't that difficult to realize. they're just difficult to tackle, right. global warming you can rap about it and explain the problem.

the abortion the fundamental conflict there you can two binary sides of the issue but once you try to address it it gets harder so expressing the issue and getting people to care about those issues i saw to be a huge challenge because sometimes i would talk to somebody who didn't want to know about it and if i found a compelling way to make them care then i got a little excited about it. and i worked in my job to frame the messages of the administration currently to talk about certain issues related to intellectual property rights and innovation and the trade that comes from the country about that. so my desire to make sure that there was an easy identifiable and relatable way for people to just start caring about what i thought is really what drove me to it and i think the landscape is -- it's kind of interesting because of a speechwriter no one says i'm going to go to school for speechwriting there are many different paths to get there and there's no finite direction. i mean, you can lock in the circle of communications jobs out there or you can look in the circle of working on the hill

and an assistant to maybe a press secretary and you can even start somewhere completely outside of the realm of washington and just work to articulate a cause or a passion or an advocacy but what i think where i got now is keep hustling. you have to keep talking to everybody around you that may be even remotely related to a passionate area or even remotely area to what you want to pursue. to me that started to reach out to speechwriters but it started by looking out maybe there's an interesting ad i saw on the metro for -- by bet or the state of virginia. can i literally google anybody who works in media and communication there is and ask them how they got to where they were? there's a reason why rick ross' rap song is a chart-topper every day i'm hustling because you cannot stop talking around anyone that's around you until you are able to tap the resources that you want. so i feel like if you're going after jobs, talking among one

another and get my card and i'm happy to sit down with you -- sit down with you but it really does begin by identifying areas where you think people can be useful and reaching out to them and not being afraid to actually talk to them about how they got to where they got and how you can get to where you want to go. >> natasha, in your answer can you talk a little bitber about how you made the discussion on transition into farming, can you talk about the economics on it because one of the common concerns i know many people have and i even had myself when transitioning into a social change career was, you know, we don't all have parents that can fund, you know, us figuring out what we want to do. we don't -- many of us worked multiple jobs in school, many go to community college so there's often -- when you talk about innovation and you talk about social change there's often this picture painted that it's only for the privileged. and that it's only for those that can afford the luxury of living their passions and their dreams so talk about the economics of your decision.

>> definitely. it's interesting that you bring that up because for me my answer would be i was on this path of going into for-profit industries they'll when i was in college i was not sitting here where you all are sitting right now. i was on my diploma, you know, get my picket fence, get my mercedes track because that was like the -- that was what was around me. that is what we were all driven to confine into. so my moment where -- i won't talk specifically how i got into farming just because we all have our issues and we can all say, you know, this is what's call to me and this is why i chose to go here but, specifically, this is a panel on careers and social change like taking that leap of getting into a field where it might be privileged to work for social change or you know you're not going to make no money working in social change like getting the courage to go after that for me was just a really simple question. it was -- you know i may be preaching to the choir but i want to bring this up because i

think it's still something you have to keep in mind when doing work, soccer change work. it's putting that question is, am i putting my energy into, you know, building the wealth to the capital food change that we have and putting my energy into building my own resume, you know, there's that fear of not making money, of what your mama is going to say. it's not about your individual goals. and you have to remember that in working for social change. this isn't about, you know, how many media hits i can get because i did this for these people. this is about the people. it's called social change for a reason. social is the people. so if you're ready to jump off that cliff for the people, the people are going to catch you every time. and so that's kind of like what keeps me warm at night when i'm like counting my pennies particularly in warming, there's not a lot of money but there can be if the people come together. and i know that sounds kind of

cliche but just put your heart into it and it will all fall in place. that may not be comfort for some but i really feel like having that network, identifying your meantors -- you talk about hustling but it's really about building those relationships because any social change movement that you're entering into right now, there are people there before you. you are not the first person to care about that issue. you're not the first person, you know, to invent something that's going to help people. there are people before you and you have to find those people and talk to those people and, you know, your cards will fall into place. and as far as, you know, the economic piece i hope i touched on that for you but it's some -- it's really more about just finding your network and just like not being scared to take that risk because you're not going to be alone. it's a hard road out there but you're not alone if you're -- your heart's in the right place. >> that's great. most of the questions thus far i've been pretending i'm in the head of somebody that's afraid to take the first step or take the leap.

but that's not this entire audience. i know campaign progress people real, real there's some folks in this room i know what i'm towing. and i have my plan and i have all the business cards and i've networked and have my idea. i want to talk on behalf of them for a second and say what are some of the common mistakes that either you all have made or you've seen people make where you're ready to do your social change work. you got what's in place. what's the pitfall to avoid? >> i'm just thinking about all the mistakes -- you're never going to be able to avoid all of them. the biggest thing i tell people the greatest thing of a great idea and the innovation is the execution. there has to be a certain sense of realism here. do not live in the clouds oh, i have these great ideas. i'm going to change the world. look at me and my super not caring about myself. in the end sometimes you have sit down and say, this is the world i live in. how can i work with the system a tt