here in charlottesville, and i do state-level work children's issues, and so i'm very intrigued and excited to have our panelists here today. here's the housekeeping part. please, this is the part where you don't assume that you've already turn off your cell phones you actually take them out and look at them and make sure they're off. if your phone does ring i know linda well enough that i feel like she may go out there and answer it for you. >> mockery. >> so you've been warped. [laughter] i guess that's my point. here's the part where you can take out your phones if you are on twitter and would like to tweet about our panel today while it's happening. i think we use the hashtag vabook 2015. so feel free to share all of the wisdom that our panelists will offer today on the interweb. what else do we have? supporting the festival this book festival is free of charge obviously, it's not free of cost.

we may be suspect of money in politics, but we certainly have no problems with money in nonprofit literary festivals. [laughter] so please remember to go online and give or pick up the giving envelope from the information desk at the omni and support this so we can keep this wonderful with festival going. lots of housekeeping. evaluations. there's not going to be a quiz at the end, but we do have program evaluations. they are available online and i think -- i don't know if we have paper copies of hem in the back. yes, we do. so please fill those out. and book sales. both of our authors today have been on other panels that have focused on their books, and we wanted to have them here to kind of take that a little bit further. but their books are available i think, here for purchase and for signing afterwards so, please, take advantage of that. and i think we are about ready to go. that is all of the business.

met me please welcome you all and introduce you first to zephyr teachout. she is the author of "corruption in america: from benjamin franklin's snuff box to citizens united." she is also an associate law professor at fordham law school, the former national director of the sunlight foundation and a former democratic candidate for governor of new york. please welcome zephyr. [applause] and linda tirado is the author of "hand to mouth: living in bootstrap america." she describes herself as a completely average american with two kids and up until recently two jobs. her essay, "why i make terrible decision decisions" was picked up by the huffington post, "the nation," and countless others and read by more than six million people and propelled her as quite a voice for people living in poverty.

so welcome to both our panelists. [applause] so i think since we want this to be a little more conversational than your average panel i have some questions to kind of kick us off. but we would also, if you all have questions during i'm not going to the hold it til the end. just wave or shout or in some way make yourself known. >> i'm going to need a dance. [laughter] >> linda's going to need a dance anyway, but if you have a question, you can try to do it that way too. and we will have someone come and bring a microphone, so just signal. so our panel is called organizing in the 21st century, and while you've both written on different issues, your common geography seems to be this terrain of economic inequality and its relationship to democracy. so let me ask you each to start by talking to us about kind of what you see has been going on

with organizing lately. so just in the last few years i can name a whole slew of organizing efforts that have gained national media attention. obviously, occupy, the reproductive rights protests in texas and even here in virginia, moral mondays in north carolina all the events of ferguson and the organizing it has inspired across the country, the student-led efforts against campus sexual assault and then even here recently close to home in charlottesville students turning to organizing in response to the violence against march kiss johnson. -- march keyes johnson. so both of you, why do we need organizing? what does it need to confront and why organizing as strategy? >> do you want to go first? [laughter] >> i'm going to have to think for a couple years and i'll get back to you. [laughter] no, why don't you go first. >> i would add to that list web site for 15, the campaigns

wake-up walmart. so as far as organizing we're remembering how to do it. that's great. but the truly effective stuff we've found is all internet based. a whole protest movement started because there was a hashtag it started on twitter and it is now in over 170 cities in the country. it is constant action by random people, just little groups of two or three or five or twenty that are super responsive whenever something goes on. you can get people out to say this is not okay with us as a citizenry, and you can mobilize those folks on the inside of a half an hour which is not a thing we could say even ten years ago. so, you know, as far as 21st century organizing, give me internet any day. like i'm from the internet. the internet is the only reason i have a career. it's about half of my spoken vernacular as a mean, and, you

know, those sorts of things are hugely important because organizing didn't used to be about populism. it used to be folks who knew what organizing was, would come down and say okay, we need all of you guys to go do this we need you guys to go do that and and now it really is a grassroots. it's coming up from the bottom. it's focusing we need to do something and getting together to figure out how to get it done. it's a really hopeful trend as far as i'm concerned. >> yeah. i -- so the questions were why. i mean right now we are very far away from the ideal of self-governing, that people actually have a lever over the power of their own lives. and there's a study that came out in may from princeton that you might have seen that told you what you probably already know but that the headlines were that the united states is now an oligarchy. ..