Communication and Action

We know a great deal about what doesn't work for the inner city and the truly disadvantaged. (See What Doesn't Work.) We know a great deal about what does work, and can find the funds, if we so choose, to replicate what works to scale. (See What Works.) And we have the knowledge for how to build the capacities of and replicate organizations that have been successful in implementing what works at the grassroots.(See Lessons for Capacity Building and Replication.)

Given that we know all of this, what is the problem in America? The problem is lack of political will and lack of action by our leaders. For example, at the federal level, too much legislation in recent years has sought to expand funding for what doesn't work (like tax breaks for the rich and prison building for the poor) and to reduce funding for what does work (like preschool and safe havens). Nor has any federallegislative strategy been proposed to replicate what works to a scale equal to the dimensions of the problem.

To create political will and get action, we need to:

Recognize that there already exists considerable public support for what works;
Pursue campaign finance reform as the reform that makes all other reforms possible;
Develop a communicating what works movement that better informs the public about what works. Pursue both conventional media strategies and alternative media strategies. Secure adequate funding fora communications strategy; and
Seek a new political alliance and voting majority.

See the Citations at the end of this section. For more information, visit the web sites of the Benton Foundation, the Center for Community Change, the Children's Partnership, Common Cause, the Development Training Institute,Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the Ford Foundation, the National Center for Children in Poverty, Public Agenda, Public Campaign, and TomPaine.com.
Our main headings in this portal are as follows:

Public Support

Over the last decade, considerable support has been expressed by the public for the kind of policy articulated under What Works.

For example, national surveys conducted from 1988 to 1994 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago show that a substantial majority of Americans want to see more money spent on improving the nation's educational system and on reducing crime and drug addiction.1

In 1992, immediately after the Los Angeles riots, The New York Times and CBS News asked Americans in a nationwide poll: "Are we spending too much money, too little money, or about the right amount of money on the problems of the big cities, on improving the conditions of blacks, and on the poor?" Sixty percent of respondents said that too little was being spent on urban problems, 61 percent said that too little was being spent on improving the conditions of African-Americans, and 64 percent said that too little was being spent on the problems of the poor. The pollsters also asked: "To reduce racial tension and prevent riots, would more jobs and job training help a lot, help a little, or not make any difference?" Seventyeight percent of respondents said that more jobs and training would help a lot.2

In 1995, a national Harris poll for Business Week revealed that 72 percent of the respondents surveyed believed the federal government to have the responsibility for "a job for those willing to work." Seventy-fivepercent believed that the federal government should provide "child care for lowincome working mothers."3

Complementary findings come from a 1996 poll of voters sponsored by the Children's Partnership, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Coalition for America's Children, the National Association of Children's Hospitals, and the National Parent-Teacher Association. Seventy-six percent of the voters polled in that survey said that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supported increased funding for children's programs. Sixty-five percent favored proposals for children and families, even if this would mean slowing down deficit reduction. Sixty-four percent said that government should play a large role in solving problems facing children. Sixty-two percent said that they would oppose a balanced budget amendment if it required cuts in children's programs.4

In 1998, in the first national sampling of attitudes on surpluses after the federal fiscal year 1999 budget surplus was projected, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that the largest group of respondents, 43 percent, called for using any extra money to invest in Social Security, Medicare and education. (Thirty percent backed paying down the debt, and 22 percent favored tax cuts.)5

In 1998, a referendum passed in California to add a 50 cent tax on cigarettes and to use the money for education and other investments in human capital. The referendum was successful in spite of $30M spent by the tobacco companies to try to defeat it.6

In 1999, the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University identified segments of the voting public that can be targeted with success in campaigns to reduce young child poverty. For example, one of these voter groups consists of "natural givers" -- mostly women, baby boomers and persons who have higher income and education levels. Another voter target group that can be impacted, based on Columbia Center research, consists of "work-ethic subscribers." They tend to be high school graduates with lower incomes. They have a strong moral imperative for reform, coupled with the beliefthat those who are helped should return the favor.7

What are the means through which this public opinion can better be mobilized to change the will and action of leaders in the legislative and executive branches of government?

There are no easy answers to this question. But we offer two points of departure. The first is campaign finance reform. The second is a communicating-what-works movement.

Campaign Finance Reform

Without real political finance reform, only limited progress is possible. Today, the economic system in America runs the political system. We have a one-dollar, one-vote democracy, not one-person one-vote. The stranglehold of big money on the American political system and the public agenda is illustrated by the following practices:8 •

Lavish corporate subsidies to our 2 major political parties.
The contribution of as much as $1M to national campaigns by individual foreign interests.
The virtual elimination of competition by congressional incumbents whose huge campaign war chests have ensured them a re-election rate of over 90 percent.
Corporate sponsorship of the carefully scripted, plastic, made-for-television national conventions of the 2 major parties.
Ongoing mobilization of special-interest money by members of Congress and shakedowns of rich people by elected officials dialing for dollars.
The purchase of legislative and regulatory "relief" by lobbyists who represent the interests that get the politicians elected and re-elected.
In many ways, clean money campaign reform, as pioneered in the state of Maine and as advocated at the national level by Public Campaign, is the reform that makes all the other reforms possible. The model provided by Maine recently gained momentum when a federal district court upheld its constitutionality.9

Strictly limiting campaign contributions and providing a system of public financing for congressional campaigns, like that available for presidential campaigns, will not guarantee replication of what works to scale. Nor will shorter campaigns, as in England, combined with equal amounts of publicly financed television time for all candidates. But such reform will help level the political playing field. It might allow campaigns to be based more on issues than on money -- and to better take into account the interests of the poor, working-income people and middle-income people.

If we can, eventually, be successful with real campaign finance reform, then perhaps more people can be elected to Congress with backgrounds as community activists, teachers, nonprofit community development corporation directors, community-based bankers, youth development advocates, practitioners of prevention and treatment, public education reformers, persons who advocate for the elimination of racial biases in our sentencing system, and individuals who fight to reduce the prison-industrial complex.

To increase the chances for success, established progressive foundations and new foundations created from information technology fortunes need to better finance the work of nonprofit organizations fighting for campaign finance reform, like Public Campaign.

Communicating What Works

To change the will and action of our leaders and, if necessary, to bypass them through grassroots action and referendums, we need reinvigorated advocacyby national and local nonprofit organizations. The goal of the advocacy should be to better inform the public that we already know what works and what doesn't, so that our local and national policy can be to replicate what works to scale and stop doing what doesn't work.

We must organize to elect candidates who will pursue what works. But we also must create and finance a permanent national movement that communicates what works so that organizers in any locality can draw on it at anytime. The what-works message should be directed to national, state and local legislative and executive branch decision-makers as well as to private sector decision-makers.

A communicating-what-works movement can learn from the success of those who have advocated so effectively over recent decades for tax breaks for the rich, prison building for the poor and disinvestment from the inner city. Such advocacy has been well funded. For example, over the 1990s, the richest conservative foundations in America made over $1B in communicationsand media grants to conservative think tanks.10

The largest such tank in America has used its money to help develop a large staff of analysts and fellows. Many position papers, articles and books are produced. When such material is completed and approved, it is networked via a sophisticated communications office to every appropriate Member of Congress and every appropriate Congressional staff member. It is networked to newspaper editorial page editors, op-ed editors and columnists across the country, as well as to talk radio and talk television. The think tank has a television studio on its premises. There, its associates can practice their own seven-second sound bites.11

As Columbia University Professor Herbert Gans has written, such well-financed think tanks have been successful in promoting into public dialogue unsubstantiated concepts that nonetheless have influenced policy decisions controlled by legislators. An example is the term "superpredator," which was given to young African-American men in a book associated with one such think tank. Promoting racial stereotypes and fear of violence, that false notion has been linked to "3 strikes and you're out"-type sentencing policy, racially biased drug sentencing, and the resulting prison building that profits a white male-controlled prison-industrial complex.12

Because of the considerable influx of money for media advocacy from conservative foundations in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a proliferation of articulate conservative electronic media voices over the two decades that has not been matched by sufficient numbers of articulate media presenters advocating what works.

In addition, the media often reinforces what doesn't work and insufficiently covers what does work.

Thirty years ago, there were 3 main networks -- NBC, ABC, and CBS -- and none of them had other major media holdings. Today there are 7 main networks (including the quasi-non-commercial PBS) plus another 50 or so commercially viable cable channels. The original 3 networks all have been sold at least once. Excluding PBS, all of the main networks now are owned by massive transnational media conglomerates. The U.S. media system is dominated by 9 multinational corporations. They own all of the major Hollywood film studios, most of the television production studios, all or part of each of the 50 most lucrative cable television channels, a majority of the U.S. cable television systems, most of the major television stations in the 15 largest U.S. markets, and 4 of the 5 firms that sell nearly 90 percent of the music in the United States. They have large holdings in radio broadcasting, book publishing, magazine publishing, amusement parks and Internet websites.13

When we add to these 9 firms another 15 or so companies, we have a total of 2 dozen firms responsible for nearly the preponderance of our media system. In a nation of more than 260 million people, that is a very small number. And it is shrinking rapidly. In 1969, for example, about 100 or 150 companies were responsible for the same amount of media as these 2 dozen companies own today. This is enormous market power in a few hands. It gives these media giants tremendous leverage over audiences.14

There is unremitting pressure for profits. Most Americans prefer to get their news on local television. To maximize ratings and profits, local managers often will follow a policy of, "if it bleeds, it leads." Crime and violence on the 5 p.m., 6 p.m., 10 p.m., and 11 p.m. local television news are thought to be the best way to maximize ratings, profits from commercials, and the television manager's job security.15 For example, a recent study of television reporting in Philadelphia found that almost one-third of the stories on the local news were on crime and three-quarters of the crime stories were featured during the first segment of the news shows, before the first commercial.16 Similarly, a recent study of local news broadcasts on 26 stations in California found that violence was the single most frequent story featured. More than half of the stories on youth involved violence, and more than two-thirds of the stories on violence involved youth (even though Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics show that juveniles represent less than 20% of the arrests for violence.)17 As the California study illustrates, lead stories often target young minority males, who are demonized as offenders. "Welfare mothers" can be portrayed as inadequate parents.

Not only is violence perceived by station managers to hold viewer interest, but it also is cheap to produce. As former NBC News president Lawrence Grossman has observed, "The crime scene, marked off in yellow police tape, doesn't move; no matter when the reporter arrives there's always a picture to shoot, preferably live. No need to spend off-camera time digging, researching, or even thinking. Just get to the crime scene, get the wind blowing through your hair, and the rest will take care of itself."18

George Gerbner, Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunications at Temple University, has observed that the result of the present violent and negative news programming can be the "mean world syndrome." That is, too often, the average, tax paying citizen concludes that the world is pretty mean and gloomy. In such a mean world, there are few policy answers -- except, of course, negative solutions, like prison building (which enhances the white prison-industrial complex and so helps make the rich richer and the poor poorer).19 The mean world syndrome helps explain why, after the South Central Los Angeles riots in 1992, a majority in a New York Times/CBS poll said the major obstacle to doing more was "lack of knowledge." (See What Works.)

What to do to reverse the mean world syndrome? Patricia McGinnis, President of the Council for Excellence in Government, funded by the Ford Foundation, talks about the need for "spreading the word about what works most effectivelyin government."20 To spread the word, we recommend a national communicating-what-works campaign. It should be led by national and local nonprofit organizations -- groups that are carrying out, replicating and advocating for the urban, education, employment, economic and criminal justice reforms set forth in this update.

As part of a communicating what works campaign, we recommend conventional media strategies as well as alternative media strategies.

Conventional Media Strategies.

One model is the kind of Television School run by the Eisenhower Foundation and other groups for the executive directors of national and especially local nonprofit inner-city nonprofit organizations. Each Eisenhower Foundation Television School begins with strategic communications planning. A television camera then is brought in, operated by a wise, African-American cameraman off duty from NBC.

Each nonprofit participant must first sit in front of the camera and, in a minute or two, present the mission of his or her organization. Each then must undertake a friendly interview with a reporter. Next, each must undertake a hostile interview -- and finally be part of a press conference in which the trainers act as unpleasant reporters.

Each round of such training is videotaped, replayed and critiqued in front of all the other participants. It is hard and stressful work. But, not surprisingly, nonprofit organization personnel respond well and learn quickly. Few have thought of communications as part of their mission.

We need to expand such training greatly. If a thousand nonprofit organizations could receive Television School and strategic communications training andretraining each year and if communications directors could be hired back home for clusters of local nonprofit groups, there could be significant impact nationally. More media-savvy nonprofit groups could be heard. They could put market pressure on local television stations that do not incorporate segments on what works and that continue "bleeds/leads" programming. They could teach private sector leaders what works and help elect public officials who campaign for what works.

There are local television stations that have made the changes recommended here, like KVUE in Austin, Texas.21 These models need to be communicated, shared and replicated more widely around the nation.

Public service announcements on what works can be part of a conventional media strategy. However, we have seen little scientific evidence that public service announcements by many national nonprofit organizations have had much of an impact. Instead, we propose funding and evaluating of local nonprofit organizations to tailor local what-works messages that are delivered by local youth. To employ the previously demonized as the message senders conveys a powerful message in and of itself. Here the model is the youth media enterprise of the Dorchester Youth Collaborative in Boston, which already has been evaluated as successful, as part of amore comprehensive strategy. The Collaborative's positive youth messages have been seen and heard locally in Boston and distributed nationally through Blockbuster Video. A limited distribution, Hollywood-financed, sociallyrelevant motion picture has been made.22

We recommend that nonviolent commercial advertisements for teenagers be included in a conventional media strategy. On television today, commercials are the primary vehicles for celebrating success, while news programs predominately are filled with images of failure.23

Accordingly, we propose that corporate commercials be integrated with messages on what works. This can be a win-win strategy. Corporations can sell their product at the same time that basic what-works messages are generated.

Alternative Communication Strategies.

Yet we are realistic about the limitations of mainstream television, radio and newspaper media in communicating what works. That is why we recommend alternative venues, including, for example, in-person town meetings, electronic pamphleteering and interlinked community web sites.

Town meetings have the advantage of direct communication without the filter of the media. They engage the audience and can help attract more citizens to join a local coalition that advocates for what works. Local and state legislative and executive branch officials can be invited, as can candidates running for office. Local nonprofit advocacy organizations can propose more of what works, less of what doesn't, and then ask officials to go on record with responses.

Religious services and accompanying social functions are forms of town meetings. There is vast potential, we believe, for the clergy to communicate what works and the immorality of what doesn't work. A well informed clergy can make powerful use from the pulpit of the policy successes and failures documented in this update.

As a supplement to in-person meetings, "low-tech" pamphleteering can be useful to deliver messages to people in the community -- and, perhaps, to involve youth as the pamphlet distributors. When Bill Moyers resigned from commercial network television, he stated that corporate control had destroyed broadcast journalism and that one recourse was to "return to the days of the pamphleteer."24 Low tech advocacy venues are well known to grassroots inner-city community organizations. However, many local inner-city nonprofit groups have lost their street organizing skills since the 1980s. We need to revitalize advocacy and street organizing by local nonprofit groups.

And, we need to integrate "high-tech" pamphleteering with town hall meetings on what works. "Any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from a soapbox," Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has written in the first Supreme Court decision that dealt with the First Amendment and the Internet. Through the technologies of on-line publishing, "the same individual can become a pamphleteer," he concluded.25

Nationally, nonprofit organizations need to construct much more sophisticated web sites than at present. The sites should summarize what works and doesn't work based on scientific evaluation. The sites should tailor much of their information to local, grassroots inner-city nonprofit groups. The groups, and especially the inner-city youth they serve, should be taught how to access what works information and how to use it for advocacy.

Locally, a new generation of advocacy-based, community web sites is needed. The community web sites should be run by inner-city nonprofit groups and involve youth. The sites should link up nonprofit advocacy organizations with citizens who can help to communicate what works to local public and private leaders. The outcomes of town meetings can be summarized on such community web sites. Plans for upcoming town meetings can be communicated. Each community web site can serve as an ongoing town meeting, continuing to debate reform, discuss budget priorities, organize against "bleeds/leads" television stations and generate new, proactive communication strategies. We already have evidence that many people want to convene with their geographic neighbors, both online and in person, and community-based web sites linked to town meetings would do just that. Partial existing models include community web sites in locations as diverse as San Francisco, California; Blacksburg, Virginia; and London, England. For example, in London, Microsoft supplied computers, Internet access and a way for persons in specific communities to communicate with one another online.26 Much more is possible, we believe, and it could reduce the "digital divide" between the haves and the have-nots -- as well as advocate for what works.

If such an Internet advocacy strategy is developed for inner cities, it might be linked to the new Internet service being offered by the AFL-CIO to union members. The service will seek to diminish the "digital divide" by providing workers with Internet access and by functioning as an organizing tool.27

Like Internet-based community networking, local cable programs with call-ins can help publicize a local what-works advocacy campaign, provide ongoing information and attract more citizens to support the advocacy.

Funding for a Communication Strategy

As with campaign finance reform, funding for a communicating-what-works movement needs to come from established foundations. The Ford Foundation's Excellence in Government funding is an example of what needs to be done. Some of the initiatives funded by the Soros Open Society Institute and the W. T. Grant Foundation are other examples. Perhaps the new foundations being generated by information technology fortunes can play a role. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has heavily financed computers in inner-city schools, and its recent commitment of $1B in scholarships for aspiring minority students in poor neighborhoods was the largest education grant in American history.28 The AOL Foundation has a promising new grant initiative that seeks "innovative ideas for tapping the power of the online medium to empower disadvantaged populations and communities."29 We call on the new information age foundations and more established progressive foundations to convene a national conference on communicating what works, media training and Internet advocacy.

It is projected that Hispanics will outnumber African-Americans by 2010. As part of communicating what works, we recommend that leading progressive and new information technology-generated foundations fund a national dialogue among Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and Asian-American nonprofit organizations to promote common solutions around what works. William Julius Wilson at Harvard's Kennedy School argues, wisely we believe, that a vision of interracial unity is more important now than ever.30

In sum, through campaign finance reform and a communicating-what-works movement, we can increase the likelihood of a political system with more players who will appropriate enough funds to replicate what works. And we can create a better environment for a new political alliance and voting majority.

A New Political Alliance and Voting Majority

Ultimately, through campaign finance reform, a communicating-what-works movement, and related grassroots advocacy, we need to create a new voting majority, a new political alliance in America. The alliance must bring together middle-income Americans (who often need 2 or 3 jobs in the family to make ends meet), wage earners (who need to be reminded that their CEOs earn on the average 419 times as much as they do), and the poor (who suffered in the 1980s and hardly improved in the 1990s). (See Trends.)

What are the common grounds for such a new political alliance? One common ground is resentment over an unfair economic deal. We know from Sophie Body-Gendrot at the Sorbonne that large majorities already exist in 5 European countries and in Japan that want public policies to reduce economic inequalities.31 And now we have at least some evidence that middle- and working-income Americans appear to be resentful of CEOs with excessive salaries and stock options, according to surveys by Alan Wolfe at Boston College. Such rewards to CEOs are perceived by many middleand working-income people interviewed by Wolfe as disconnected from the efforts that go into securing them. Like "welfare mothers," the wealthy rewardees are perceived by many as not earning their money. This, suggests Wolfe, makes the rich politically vulnerable, especially given the enormous income, wage and wealth gaps that have opened in the 1980s and widened in the 1990s.32 (See Trends.) Middle-income and wage earner families, including those with both parents working, may respond to messages like "reduce affirmative action for the rich" and "get corporations off welfare."

Resentment over an unfair economic deal is not the only common ground that middle- and working-income people share with the poor. They all share, as well, a vulnerability to the technological global marketplace. As Jeff Faux has observed, middle-income people, wage earners and the poor all need education and re-education, job training and re-training, to compete.33 Can we secure a voting majority around government-facilitated education and training? The answer may be yes, based on new national surveys of voters by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press34 and especially by Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril.35 For example, the Cantril surveys show voter disagreement philosophically on the role of government in the abstract. But the Cantril surveys also identify majorities in terms of voter support for specific, pragmatic government investments. Such investments include increased spending on Head Start, teacher subsidies, college student aid and job training. The Cantril findings fit well into our frame of program-selective urban and criminal justice investments based on more of what works and less of what doesn't, along with our recommendation of an economic investments based on the elimination of child poverty and the creation of full employment, especially for the hard to employ. (See A National Policy Based on What Works.)

The challenges within America require vision, not incrementalism and policy bites. Vision is needed from the grassroots to the White House. We need big solutions to big problems. That is what America always has been about. It is about dreaming and trying to fulfill those dreams, however long they may have been deferred.

In the words of historian James MacGregor Burns, "While centrists cautiously seek the middle way, leaders in science, technology, education, entertainment, finance and the media pursue their own transforming visions."36 Isn't it time to replicate what works to scale through the transforming visions of grassroots movements and, perhaps, even of our political leaders?

Citations

1. William Julius Wilson, "The New Social Inequality and Affirmative Opportunity." in Stanley B. Greenburg and Theda Skocpol, eds., The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

2. Peter Applebone, "From Riots of the '60s, A Report for a Nation with Willand Way for Healing," The New York Times, May 8, 1992; Robin Toner, "Los Angeles Riots Are a Warning, Americans Fear," The New York Times, June 14, 1992.

3. Business Week, "Portrait of a Skeptical Public," Business Week, November 20, 1995.

4. Children's Partnership, Next Generation Reports. (Washington, DC: Children's Partnership, April, 1997).

5. Susan Page and W. Welch, "Poll: Don't Use Surplus to Cut Taxes." USAToday, January 9-11, 1998.

6. Faux, Jeff, manuscript for The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility (Washington, DC: The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 1999).

7. National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University, Young Children In Poverty (New York: National Center for Children in Poverty, March, 1998).

8. Jill Abramson, "Money Buys a Lot More Than Access," The New York Times, November 9, 1997; Kent Cooper, Comments for the 30 Year Eisenhower Foundation Update of the Kerner Commission (Washington, DC: Center for Responsive Politics, 1998); Ruth Marcus, "Business Donations Show Money Follows the Leaders," The Washington Post, November 25, 1997; Jamin B. Raskin, "Dollar Democracy," Nation, May 5, 1997; E. Joshua Rosenkranz, "Campaign Reform: The Hidden Killers," Nation, May 5, 1997; Fred Wertheimer, "Unless We Ban Soft Money," The Washington Post, August 10, 1997; and Nation, "As Maine Goes..." Nation, November 29, 1999.

9. Ibid.

10. David Callahan, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, (Washington, DC: National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 1999.)

11. James Ridgeway, "Heritage on the Hill," Nation, December 22, 1997.

12. Herbert J. Gans, The War Against the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

13. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, Urban: University of Illinois Press, 1999 (a); Robert W. McChesney, "The New Global Media, "Nation, November 29, 1999 (b). pp. 11-15.

14. Ibid 15. George Gerbner, "Reclaiming Our Cultural Mythology," In Context, (1994), pp. 40-42.

16. Danilo Yanich, "TV News, Crime and the City," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, May 1995, pp. 6- 7.

17. Lori Dorfman, et al., "Youth and Violence on Local Television News in California," American Journal of Public Health 87, August 1997, p. 1311-16.

18. Lawrence K. Grossman, "Why Local TV News Is So Awful," Columbia Journalism Review, November-December, 1997, p. 21.

19. Gerbner, op. cit.

20. From the Ford Foundation, www.fordfound.org.

21. Joe Holly, "Should the Coverage Fit the Crime?" Columbia Journalism Review, May-June, 1996, p. 28.

22. The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, Youth Investment and Police Mentoring, (Washington, DC: The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 2000).

23. Gerbner, op. cit.

24. Fred R. Harris and Alan Curtis, eds., Locked in the Poorhouse, op. cit.

25. Joan Biskupic, "In Shaping of Internet Law, First Amendment is Winning,"The Washington Post, September 12, 1999, p. A2 26. Alan Curtis and Fred R. Harris, eds., The Millennium Breach, op. cit.; Non-Profits and Technology Journal, "Online Community To Tap for Non-profits," July, 1999, p. 1; Andrew L. Shapiro, The Net That Binds: Using Cyberspace to Create Real Communities," Nation, June 21, 1999, pp. 11-15; The Washington Post, "A Wider Net," The Washington Post, July 13, 1999, p. A18.

27. Frank Swoboda, "AFL-CIO to Offer Access To Internet for Members," The Washington Post, October 11, 1999, p. A8.

28. The New York Times editorial, "Bill Gates Shares the Wealth," The New York Times, September 20, 1999, p. A20.

29. AOL Foundation, AOLGrants@AOL.com, "Bridging the Digital Divide: Request for Proposals." 30. Nevares-Muniz, op. cit; Jorge Klor de Alva and Cornel West, "Our Next Race Question: The Uneasiness between Blacks and Latinos," in Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres, The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998): 180-190, pp. 186, 189.

31. Sophie Body-Gendrot, "An Outsider's Understanding of American Violence: Tocqueville Revisited," chapter prepared for the Milton S.

Eisenhower Foundation, To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility, (Washington, DC: The Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, 1999).

32. Alan Wolfe, "The New Politics of Inequality," The New York Times, September 22, 1999, p. A27.

33. Jeff Faux, "The Economic Case for a Politics of Inclusion," paper prepared for the Eisenhower Foundation's 30th Anniversary Update of the Kerner Riot Commission (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 1998); Jeff Faux, "You Are Not Alone," in Stanley B. Greenberg and Theda Skoopol, eds., The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997); and John Jeter, "Cities, Oldest Suburbs Becoming Allies," The Washington Post, February 22, 1998.

34. Sean Wilentz, "For Voters, the 60's Never Died," The New York Times, November 16, 1999, p. A 31.

35. Albert H. Cantril and Susan Davis Cantril, Reading Mixed Signals: Ambivalencein American Public Opinion About Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); David Broder, "Voters of Two Minds," The WashingtonPost, September 26, 1999, p. B7.

36. James MacGregor Burns, "Risks of the Middle," The Washington Post, October 24, 1999. P. 37.