Erik Ose is a writer and political activist in Chapel Hill, NC. His columns have appeared in NC newspapers such as The News & Observer, and elsewhere including The Hill and Salon.com. He is a long time grassroots community organizer, and veteran of several large-scale voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns.
In 1990, Erik co-founded Musicians Organized for Voter Education (MOVE), a NC-based youth voter outreach project that became one of the inspirations for Rock The Vote. In 1996, he served as Director of the NC Participatory Democracy Project, adding 10,000 voters to the rolls for the '96 Gantt-Helms U.S. Senate race. In 2004, he worked as a Voter Registration and GOTV Coordinator for the NC Democratic Party. During this election cycle, he ran a record-breaking VR drive that resulted in more than 1/4 of all new voters registered by the NC Democrats. In 2008, he co-founded Voters for Obama, a grassroots group whose website launched on President's Day (Feb. 19) and helped voters nationwide generate an estimated several thousand e-mails and phone calls to Democratic superdelegates urging them to support Barack Obama.
Contributors
Mike Hummell is a progressive blogger living in Lawrence, KS, the blue dot in a sea of red. He is proud to be a husband, father, Union member, feminist, Occupier, equal rights supporter, small business owner, and homebrewer. Born and raised in Iowa, he has been addicted to politics ever since his mother took him with her to the Iowa caucuses as a child.
Mike worked at Hostess Brands until 2012 when hedge funds bankrupted the company to break the Bakers Union, pocketed workers' pension contributions, and sold off the brand names for a massive profit. Their plan worked with the help of anti-worker rules that apply to companies in bankruptcy. When the hedge funds refused to negotiate with the Union, lying about it in the media, Mike was compelled to go public with the truth. His blog Bluebarnstormer at DailyKos helped change the Hostess bankruptcy discussion and forced the company's CEO to publicly acknowledge the theft of worker's pensions. It taught him hard lessons about the failure of the media and government to do their jobs.
Since then Mike has been actively writing about worker's rights and progressive causes. He has appeared on multiple radio shows from the left to the right of the political spectrum, and given public talks on the Hostess bankruptcy and the lack of worker protections in the U.S. He produced the documentary "Inside the Hostess Bankery, Who Keeps the Dough," and covered Kansas politics for the PAC Stop Brownback. Tired of choosing between the lesser of two evils, he believes the Democratic party must move to the progressive left, where it belongs.
Casey Gane-McCalla is a writer, rapper, producer and actor, and the assistant editor for NewsOne.
Ethan Wenberg is an illustrator and cartoonist whose work explores the dark corners of the American Dream.
