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THE SAN DIEGO CLEAN ELECTIONS INITIATIVE
FINALLY, REAL CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM!

We, The San Diego Alliance for Clean Elections, a non-partisan, all volunteer organization, are proposing a new municipal law that would provide a voluntary program of public campaign financing for qualified City Council and Mayoral candidates who pledge not to accept private contributions or use their own money. If we obtain the required number of valid signatures, this measure will appear on the November 2002 ballot!

Public funding is optional; if a politician chooses to run as a Clean Money Candidate for city council ,  he/she will be required to obtain 300 signatures from registered voters within his/her district, accompanied by one five-dollar donation, or 1,800 signatures citywide for Mayor to qualify for public funding. This is to insure that a candidate and his/her agenda have real    support in the community. The candidates will receive funds based on an average of previous winning campaign budgets.

The Clean Elections Fund is CAPPED at 0.5% of the city's general fund budget per year; at the current time, this amounts to approximately THREE DOLLARS PER SAN DIEGAN!! Only three dollars per year gets you your voice back!

In the current system, anyone who wishes to run for office must solicit money from individuals or groups, or be lucky enough to possess the necessary funds themselves. Once in office a candidate may feel an obligation towards important benefactors and this can affect the way they vote and therefore the way they spend our tax dollars. The Chargers Ticket Guarantee is a recent example. There are a lot of qualified leaders out there who are not millionaires, and campaigning for "money" is very time-consuming and distasteful to many. Wouldn't it be nice if any qualified person could run for office, and candidates could spend their time campaigning for us? Think of it, NOW would have an opportunity to run more feminist candidates without the money chase.

The state of Maine passed a Clean Elections law four years ago; today, more than one third of the Maine State Legislature ran as publicly funded, Clean Election candidates - Republicans and Democrats alike. Of all the publicly funded candidates who ran for office, over half won their election! Arizona and Massachusetts passed this same legislation in 1998 and several other   states have launched initiatives. We would be the first city in the country to create a municipal Clean Elections Ordinance.

We need your help to collect the 96,000 signatures required before May 24th, a gargantuan task for an all volunteer effort. We have petitions ready with supportive materials to help you in signature gathering. Training is available for signature gatherers. Call Cathy O’Leary at 858 385-0419.

 FOR MORE INFO., GO TO OUR WEBSITE: WWW.CLEANELECTIONSANDIEGO.ORG

Abortion Rights and Reproductive Freedom

In 1967 NOW became the first national organization to call for the legalization of abortion and for the repeal of all anti-abortion laws. Since then NOW has been fighting for full reproductive rights for all women, including poor women and young women. NOW won a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court victory in the 1994 case NOW v. Scheidler. The ruling affirmed NOW's right to use federal racketeering laws against anti-abortion extremists who organize campaigns of fear, force and violence to deny women their right to abortion. In April 1998, a federal jury returned a unanimous verdict confirming NOW's charges that Joe Scheidler, Operation Rescue and other defendants are racketeers. NOW's litigation and lobbying are part of Project Stand Up for Women, which has trained thousands of abortion rights supporters to serve as clinic defenders. Find several documents related to this case at http://www.now.org/issues/abortion/scheidlr.html.

NOW's advocacy efforts to ensure access to abortion for all women include lobbying against restrictions on Medicaid funding, parental involvement, elimination of abortion from federal government and military health insurance coverage and abortion procedure bans. Likewise, NOW's commitment to full reproductive rights led to work against child exclusion measures in the 1996 federal welfare repeal and coerced sterilization.

Fom the Desk of Charles R. Castle
Please write your legislators in DC asking they support the overturning of
the global gag rule. .

I thought you would be interested in the following release.

===================================================

SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE APPROVES BOXER BILL TO REVERSE THE BUSH GAG RULE ON INTERNATIONAL FAMILY PLANNING

The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations approved legislation by
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) that would permanently reverse the
gag rule imposed on international family planning groups by
President Bush.  The global gag rule, also known as the Mexico
City Policy, denies federal funding to organizations which use
their OWN funds to counsel women about reproductive choices,
lobby for reproductive rights or provide abortions.

"I am very pleased that my colleagues on the Foreign Relations
Committee approved this bipartisan bill to reverse the Mexico
City Policy," said Boxer.  "This is a step forward in our fight
to end this policy, which is resulting in more back-alley
abortions and less family planning around the world."

While the Boxer bill would reverse the Mexico City Policy, it
would not change the prohibition on U.S funds being used to
provide abortions.  That prohibition has been law since 1973.

"The President's gag rule is not stopping one single abortion.
Instead, it is increasing the number of deaths by denying poor
women access to care," stated Boxer. "My bill would right this
wrong by lifting this anti-democratic gag rule, and I look
forward to pushing for its passage on the Senate floor."

The Boxer bill has 31 bipartisan cosponsors, including
Republicans Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).
Congresswoman Nita Lowey has a companion bill in the House.

ACTION: Please let the FCC know that lifting the cross-ownership ban to allow further media consolidation will not serve the public interest.

FCC reviews include a mandatory public comment period to give Americans a chance to weigh in on proposed regulations. The comments received are often few and are overwhelmingly drawn from media companies and industry trade organizations.

The deadline for comment on the cable ownership cap has been extended to  January 4, 2002; More urgent right now are comments about the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban, which are due by December 3. The FCC has time-consuming requirements for email comments which require that people format their message in a certain way, FAIR created a form to simplify the process. You can submit comments to the FCC about cross-ownership at:

Dear FCC Chair: Michael Powell, The FCC is mandated to protect citizen's communication rights. A democracy deserately need diverse, independent media that provides forums for the multitude of differing opinions. Media concentration stifles free speech while profiting a few media oligarchs. Do not lift the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations. I also do not want one or two cable companies dictating America's programming and internet cable choices. Do not overturn the limits on cable system ownership! Do your job and stop media monopolies from destroying our democracy. 

Sincerely,

FCC Moves to Lift Cross-Ownership Ban. Just two days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FCC began to eliminate the last remaining shreds of regulation on media concentration. The FCC voted unanimously to "review" laws that prohibit the same company from owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same geographic area, and laws that limit the percent of the national audience that a single cable company can reach. FCC chair Michael Powell (Secretary of State Colin Powell's son), is mandated to conduct a serious examination of the electronic media marketplace so the public can better understand what the issues and options really are. 

Unfortunately, Powell is likely to deliver a deregulatory agenda that will ultimately sap the vitality of digital communications, and place most of the nation's media into the hands of 4-5 media oligarchs. The ownership rules on the FCC chopping block have been developed over the last 50 years. They have been an important safeguard ensuring the public's basic 1st Amendment rights. These policies help provide for a diverse media marketplace of ideas, essential for a democracy. They have not been perfect. But the rules have helped constrain the power of the corporate media giants. If further deregulation passes companies would have simultaneous control over a town's cable system, several of its TV stations, many radio stations, and its newspaper. One or two cable companies could dictate America's programming choices. And large TV networks such as ABC (Disney) and CBS, could dictate to every local station, telling them whether the station could air a political debate or not. Regulation policies have enabled some TV programming decisions to be based on how a given program might help a community, rather than on whether it sold more advertising for its owner. Independent and local affiliated stations create public service and news programming that is very different from network fare. These policies are a critical component in ensuring that the electronic media serve the public interest, still a bedrock requirement of our nation's Communications Act. Media corporations routinely make deals that violate existing law, so confident are they of the current anti-regulatory climate. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., whose recent acquisition of station operator Chris-Craft puts it in violation, giving it 2 TV stations and a newspaper in New York City. There are more than 40 markets with newspaper-broadcast combinations already, most 'grandfathered' in when the law was written in 1975. 

Other companies in violation of the law include the Tribune Co. which owns TV-broadcast combinations in Los Angeles, New York, Orlando and Chicago. Over the last 20 years most of the ownership safeguards have been eliminated, overturned, or severely weakened. The TV and cable industry, for example, was able to secure significant "deregulation" from Congressin 1996. Radio has also been deregulated, and has been transformed into an industry dominated by fewer and fewer owners and standardized, copycat formats. Unable to win all of its political agenda from the Congress and FCC, giant media companies such as AOLTW, News Corp. (Fox), GE (NBC) and Viacom (CBS) have now turned to the courts, arguing that the ownership caps impinge on their corporate "1st Amendment" rights, and should be overturned. 

These legal proceedings are part of a strategy by some of the biggest media companies to remove any stumbling blocks to their becoming even bigger, controlling more media outlets and broadcast spectrum. Their philosophy represents a real threat to our democracy. In essence, they are saying that the corporate 1st Amendment "free speech" rights of companies, such as Viacom, News Corp, AOL Time Warner, and General Electric/NBC, should prevail over the public's. Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which gave away 50 years of free HDTV spectrum to big TV stations. The value of this huge giveaway of taxpayers resources has grown in a few short years from $40 to $300 billion. This free spectrum gives TV stations dominance over the new digital media marketplace, leaving the people without any public interest benefits. 

The Internet and other digital communications are also at risk. The Net began as a medium that has been open, fostering innovation, competition, and diverse perspectives. But as the Net evolves into a broadband system, its principal access points to the home will be dominated by cable companies and their partners. AOL Time Warner and other cable companies are seeking to dramatically overturn the limits on cable system ownership so they can control the key access point for the Internet marketplace. Removing the cable ownership caps will allow AOLTW and a few others to be in a key position to dominate the digital future.

 Without ownership limits and other safeguards, the ability of new entrants with different perspectives, to innovate and compete will be severely threatened. Noncommercial and independent speakers are likely to be especially marginalized because these giants will control the operation of the residential broadband digital pipes. The so-called alternative medium found in the Internet will also become a victim of weakened or eliminated rules.  Contrary to industry claims, ownership rules neither ban protected speech nor "prevent competition." These rules do the reverse. What is at risk with the elimination of these rules is a more diverse commercial marketplace, in which independent programmers and alternative perspectives can potentially thrive. Unfortunately, this revolution won't be televised since none of these companies' news divisions will offer any serious coverage of this issue. And that is the kind of conspiratorial silence, under the guise of corporate "free speech," that our democracy simply cannot afford.

The Center for Digital Democracy intends to help lead the fight against the elimination of these rules. It is critical in the new digital era that we have a more open, diverse, and competitive environment. More expression is needed, not less. For more details see the Center for Digital Democracy's in-depth resources:

Media Watch: Challenging racism, sexism and violence in the media through education and action!

PO Box 618
Santa Cruz, CA 95061-0618
831-423-6355
http://www.mediawatch.com