voting

"Poor people thought that they could only enter politics through different sorts of tactics. They had to be noisy, they had to get people's attention, they had to make trouble. I've come to the conclusion that they're right, that lots of people only have real power when they make trouble," says Frances Fox Piven, the most dangerous woman in America according to Glenn Beck. Frances and renowned public intellectual Cornel West held a "Fight Back Teach-in" this week that was streamed online to the public and to over 200 college campuses around the country. Their aim was to provide more information to counter the lies about the need for "austerity" for working people, and to help sustain the growing movement around the country fighting back for working people. Laura sat down with Frances and Cornel after the teach-in to talk austerity, Obama, poor people's movements, and why it's time for progressives to make some trouble. Then, activists in San Francisco tell Twitter and other big corporations to pay their fair share when they move into a community.

"These kids can do the maths, they know that young people, poor people are clearly not the priority of this government anymore. Something else is," says Laurie Penny of the latest round of student protests in the UK. The protests may be leaderless, she notes, but they're anything but random--students have focused their ire on corporations such as TopShop, run by tax evaders who then turn around and advise the government where to cut.Laurie, a columnist for The New Statesman, has been attending protests and university occupations over the last week, and joins us fresh from the latest round, where teenage students managed to elude being "kettled" and march through the streets of London instead, bringing their message to the masses.

Greg Mitchell takes us back to the origins of media campaigning with Upton Sinclair's bid in California's 1934 gubernatorial race. If you thought the media frenzy, voter intimidation and character defamation that characterize today's elections is a hallmark of these modern times, think again. Mitchell is The Nation's Media Fix blogger and author of The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics.

Candidates have been in their districts, making nice to likely mid-term voters. They're more scarce than general election voters, and typically a more polarized bunch. What if there were more of them and more low-income people, particularly women, were in the mix? In a country where 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential election, a few million more voters sprinkled across the states, just might make a difference. In a handful of swing states, voting rights groups have sued and won voting rights for hundreds of thousands of low-income people, two-thirds of them women, in the last few years. Distributed by Tubemogul.