Whenever an organization claims that one its core missions is to achieve a living wage and economic justice for all, but it then proceeds to advertise a whole slew of time-consuming, unsalaried professional jobs in media and graphic design, you can pretty much assume that it's the same old neoliberal bullshit dressed up in the usual shiny progressive veneer. As long as you're "passionate" about social and economic justice, the stilted pitch implies, the need to eat and pay rent becomes superfluous.
Such is the disillusioning case with Nick Brana's "Movement for a People's Party" PAC, which burst upon the scene last summer to much fanfare and special appearances and endorsements by the usual YouTube celebrities and everybody who's anybody on the progressive scene. Yours truly, usually a tad on the cynical side, was initially so impressed by all the earnest enthusiasm that I posted their entire five-hour streamed inaugural marathon right here on these pages, and also signed up for their email list.
At first quite sporadic, these emails have begun arriving in my inbox at a faster clip in the past few weeks. All of them ask for a 10 dollar donation through a fundraising app. A reader of this blog was getting the same emails, so he emailed me, asking if I'd look into the group.
My advice: donor beware. First of all, this is not a political party. It was incorporated in 2017 in the State of Michigan as a non-profit political action group called People For a Working Democracy. According to the most recent IRS filing available online, in 2020 it collected $75,000 in small donations in the last two months of the year. The group spent the bulk of this money on trademarked merchandise, legal fees, web services, a donation processing app, logo design, video conferencing fees and other business-related services. No donations were used for candidate recruitment and training, which was the stated goal and purpose of the People's Party PAC. To be fair, they were still setting up shop at the time. The real tell won't come until the 2022 filings, with donations and media presence largely expanded and when details like salaries and expenditures for candidates and local campaigns must be reported under law.
Let's talk more about the money. The recent MPP emails mostly come from Zeynab Day, just hired by Brana to be his PAC's executive director. Until this past February, Ms. Day had been employed by a different PAC called Brand New Congress (BNC), itself an offshoot of the Justice Democrats PAC, which is most famous for recruiting and training Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of The Squad.
According to a post on her Twitter account, Day was fired as BNC's communications director because of the abuse, inequity and rampant miscommunication among its Board of Directors, salaried workers and unpaid volunteers. She wanted to be transparent about it, but she didn't really communicate whether or not these nonspecific workplace issues and anonymous staff complaints had anything to do with conflicts between the salaried employees and the unpaid volunteers.
Before herself becoming a top salaried internal employee of Brand New Congress, Ms. Day had been listed by the Open Secrets website, which exposes the money in politics, as the group's top "vendor/recipient," collecting $96,693 for her consulting work for the PAC in 2020.
Anyway, let's get back to the job listings at the MPP PAC. Before you can even apply for an unpaid position, you must first read the section about being a good person who is always kind to her fellow workplace "beings."
Without the People's Party sternly admonishing its worker-peeps to "avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual," who knows what mayhem might otherwise ensue in the paid/unpaid workforce? Most potential bosses, after all, only brag that they are equal opportunity employers, not the referees in a boxing ring or wardens in a prison on the verge of an inmate riot. I wonder if mass mayhem has been a problem in the past, or whether the MPP PAC staffers are only paranoid about being viewed as either bullying Bernie Bros, or their Bro-victims in waiting. Could they really be so terrified of having their very souls sucked out of their bodies by spiritual abusers?
So just in case you do volunteer, only to later feel like the soul is getting sucked out of you so hard that you want to assault the "being" in the next cubicle, you will be duly and cordially invited to appear before the People's Party "Regenerative Culture Circle." This mental health opportunity applies to suckers and suckees alike. You will have the free choice of offering testimony in front of the Full Circle, or you may engage privately with one special counselor in order to reach specific goals, ranging from Support to Prevention to Intervention to Redress to.... Transformation.
If you want even more cult in your culture, let it also be known that the People's Party PAC will tolerate no criticism either of itself or of its paid or unpaid workers to people outside of the Circle of the organization. Job applicants are also admonished never to bring any of their violent tendencies outside of the healing safety of the cult party.
As we strive to grow the movement, we also look to minimize the risk of government repression. In a nonviolent and open setting like ours, it is unacceptable and unsafe to discuss or engage in actions that involve violence or property destruction. Governments have a long history of heightened repression to those actions.
To that end, the People's Party takes a tip from the same neoconservative US surveillance state which it purports to despise, and adds this nugget to its Volunteer Manifesto:
We affirm the need to balance transparency and security. Anyone bringing another individual to a demonstration or other action should provide the details necessary for risk assessment (tactic, tone, etc). However, it should be remembered that this is a public organizing space, that our ability to vet participants is limited, and that actions can be and have been compromised by excessive transparency.
Now that we've all gone perfectly clear, can we please, please, please finally check out those unsalaried jobs and their stringent requirements?
Your wish is my command, but let's keep this inside info just between us for now, okay? They want to get the word out, but not to get it out to the wrong people.
Position title
Social Media Contributor - TwitterDescriptionThe People's Party is looking to recruit passionate people with significant social media experience who would like to contribute their time on a volunteer basis to build a new major political party.
About Us
Our aim is to represent the interests of the wide majority of the people and create a system to sustainably maximize well-being for ALL.
We believe we all deserve a system that honors everyone for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, the land where they happened to be born, or the numbers in their bank account. One that brings powerful law-breakers to justice. One that makes sure the planet and it's (sic) magnificent beings are cared for before any corporation exec’s profit margins. One where the power of our nation’s wealth serves all of us, not just failed banks or masters of war.
It is our goal to change hearts and minds, unify around a revolutionary progressive platform, and activate people to build a mass movement by organizing around progressive issues and initiatives with allied groups to network our movement, unions, and organizations into a coalition.
We are creating a culture of care, respect and healthy collaboration and teamwork. We embrace diversity and avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. We aim to foster a compassionate environment that supports and uplifts people. With these principles and goals in mind, we commit ourselves to our community guidelines.
We are currently building the party state by state and working on our first slate of candidates.
Responsibilities
- Attend bi-weekly Media & Messaging Working Group meetings
- Attend Twitter Circle meetings
- Create social media posts
- Curate content
- Research
- Write social media plans
- Manage social media accounts
- Work with the Creative Arts Working Group to create visual content
- Respond to social media messages
Qualifications
- You are passionate about building a major new political party
- You recognize that the current two party duopoly cannot be reformed from within
- You have significant social media admin experience, either from a volunteer or paid position
- You have experience as a Instagram admin of or contributor to a large account
- You have experience working on a team
- You're a quick learner
- You think outside the box
- You agree to our community guidelines
The positions described here are volunteer positions, to be performed on a purely voluntary basis, with no payment or expectation of payment from the People’s Party or anyone else. Volunteers selected for these positions are not employees of or independent contractors with the People’s Party.
9 comments:
Karen, thanks for researching Brana's promising PAC, which claims to be raising the long-awaited new party of the true Left, the passionate Left and the virtuous Left––the People's Party. So far, it's shaping up as yet another pack of political phonies (YAPPOP).
With apologies to Gen. Smedley Butler, Politics is a Racket. Becoming disillusioned with everyone spread out along the political spectrum––left, right and center––is to be expected.
Oh wait, most Americans got savvy generations ago and no longer bother to vote. The People's Party's re-education circles, uh camps, should fix that.
As the GOP is showing us, it is much easier to organize Americans around hate, anger, and breaking things than it is around tolerance, justice, and making things work.
As for organizing a new, major party, do we have any evidence from the last 100 years that such a thing is possible in our system? Such efforts remind me of those who think we can pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Not gonna happen.
P.S. Thanks for encouraging me to look up "veal pen" in the Urban Dictionary!
This is a money raising scam.
Using volunteer (slave) labor with cult like allegiance to the very nebulous "mission"
of a a third party (we'll make it up as we go") these people intend to raise money for an unwinnable cause, lining their pockets as they go.
Third parties have proven to be unsuccessful at best and divisive at worse.
I'm thinking reform should look like ranked choice voting, though I've only seen it on small scale elections.
What do others think about that?
Love your writing, Karen,
but I have to rise to the defense of Jesse Ventura. Although he wears his Seal pin, Ventura is not a war-monger. He was one of the few public figures to stand up in opposition to Operation Iraqi Liberation, a principled stand that cost him his perch next to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.
In 2020 Ventura offered to run as the Green Party candidate for President. Despite positions on the issues well to the left of most of the Green Party, the party opted for seppuku and nominated its good ol' boy no-name Howie Hawkins. Maybe they didn't like Ventura's position on gun control. Neither do I, but I can't dispute his reason for supporting gun ownership: the ever-increasing prospect of military law in the United State.
As that clip shows, Ventura's attitude is congruent with a rising faction of DSA, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus. I view this caucus as dangerous because, like Thomas Knapp on CounterPunch, they oppose the IRS with thinly-veiled social darwinism.
Ventura, on the other hand, has been advocating a Maximum Wage at least since 2015. He currently sets his max at $12M/yr--too high for me, but at least he recognizes its necessity. Besides, you've gotta love anybody who can humiliate Piers Morgan like this.
So I've also gotta love anybody who gives Ventura a supportive platform. Maybe, after Bernie betrayed Our Revolution after 2016 Nick Brana should have gone back to Michigan with his tail between his legs, but I'm sending him my $10 anyway.
Opportunism comes in many forms and fashions.
Like the caption to a current New Yorker cartoon, wherein a man, evidently interviewing a woman across a desk, says: “What makes you think you have what it takes to give us something for nothing forever?”
I must admit, while recruiting for a low paying non-profit residential care program for years, those thoughts went through my mind many a time.
$100K/yr to churn out PR dreck and beg for money?
"We believe we all deserve a system that honors everyone for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, the land where they happened to be born, or the numbers in their bank account."
Gee, seems some bank accounts are more equal than others.
Meanwhile ...
"Nancy and Paul Pelosi Making Millions in Stock Trades in Companies She Actively Regulates --
The Speaker, already one of the richest members in Congress, has become far richer through investment maneuvers in Big Tech, as she privately chats with their CEOs."
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-making-millions
July 15, 2021 ~ by Glenn Greenwald
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