Bookmark: MAP's link to shadow convention items:
http://www.mapinc.org/shadow.htm

Note: Shadow Convention websites:
http://www.drugpolicy.org/
http://www.shadowconventions.com/

SHADOW CONVENTION FOCUSES ON REBELS WITH CAUSE

Speakers At The Alternative Event At Patriotic Hall Rally Against The
Political Power Structure As a 1960s Mood Prevails. It Was An All-Out
Assault On Politics As Usual.

And a wildly enthusiastic audience at the alternative Shadow Convention
on Sunday night loved every minute as a parade of speakers lobbed
verbal grenades at politics and the Democratic Party convention six
blocks away took some direct hits.

As millionaire campaign contributors wined and dined party officialdom
around Los Angeles, speaker after speaker ridiculed them at the
Patriotic Hall event. Even the reception lounge was standing-room-only
as crowds of people pressed around the television monitors to watch and
listen to speakers like distinguished intellectual Cornell West, who
declared "a new day is dawning here."

The Harvard professor said the divide between rich and poor in America
is "not just an injustice, but a crime against humanity." He said:
"We're living in a time of commodification of everything and everybody.
We're going to fight back."

Arianna Huffington, Shadow Convention co-convener, opened the
gathering saying that the Democratic convention was going to be a
"focus-group-fixated fantasy."

But her convention, she said, "is going to be about reality. About the
reality that 1 in 3 children in Los Angeles County is living in
poverty."

The Shadow Convention, she said, "is about the cancer of money and
politics and the failed drug war that neither party wants to address."

Onetime Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart gave one of the most
eloquently critical speeches of the night.

"We sold our political birthright to the money-changers in the temple .
. . . Where today are the nation's prophets? I don't know. But I do
know they are not a few blocks from this hall attending cocktail
parties."

The Democratic Party, he said, "has become so beholden to special
interests that it cannot demand reform."

Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), a co-author of a campaign finance
reform bill, told the crowd that political conventions "are basically
corporate trade shows for the delegates where the real show is behind
closed doors."

"My friends, make no mistake--soft money is setting the agenda across
the country," Feingold said. "We have devolved from a representative
democracy to a corporate democracy. We do not have a system of one
person, one vote. This is a system of 1 million dollars, a million
votes."

But if the streets outside were relatively calm, it was the Shadow
Convention that seemed to have the air of protest Sunday night, with a
palpably 1960s mood.

Singer Merry Clayton, who belted out the famous backup on the Rolling
Stones' recording of "Gimme Shelter," set the nostalgic tone when she
opened the event with a gospel a capella version of Bob Dylan's classic
"The Times They Are A-Changin'."

But a note of pessimism crept into the speeches, too, as politicians
decried the popular cynicism with the electoral process they blame for
strikingly low U.S. voter turnout.

"Some say the times are changing, and we can never get them back,"
Feingold said. "Maybe that's true, in our brave new corporate
democracy."

Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) said he had taken some heat for planning
to speak at the Shadow Convention, a forum that plans to host views
criticizing what some see as both parties' failure to act on campaign
finance reform, on reducing the gap between rich and poor and on the
racial disparities of the drug war.

Wellstone said, "Let's leave with a whole lot of determination. When
this is over, I really believe we need to build an independent
political force."