ACTIVISM

Unity to host first Chautauqua in 80 years

By Noah Bruce

LET'S CHAUTAUQUA: Carolyn Chute and her Maine Militia will join with lefty-environmentalists in populism.

“Our priorities are that we want to dominate North America first, then South America, and then Asia, and then Europe.”
                                                   —David Glass, Wal-Mart CEO

As mass-demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Genoa, and Washington, DC prove, activists the world over are angered by the domination of corporations like Wal-Mart. (The IMF/WTO meetings scheduled for September 26 through 28 have been cancelled in light of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, thus plans for protests have also been cancelled.) According to populist radio commentator Jim Hightower, while this anger has resulted in “piecemeal efforts” to keep corporations at bay, there exists no unified front attacking the corporate structure itself.

This is where the Chautauqua series, kicking off in Unity Maine on September 21 through 22 comes in. What’s a Chautauqua you ask? A Chautauqua is a barnstorming, populist-tinged festival featuring speeches, workshops, music, food, and theater. Chautauquas were big around the turn of the century up until the 1920s. President Theodore Roosevelt once called Chautauqua “the most American thing in America.”

According to David Kubiak, whose group Big Medicine is organizing the event, the Unity Chautauqua, which will be held in conjunction with the Common Ground Fair, will be the first in about 80 years. After Unity, the festival will travel to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Austin, and Seattle.

Kubiak says the point of the gathering is “to get all kinds of groups up here, left, right and center (but mostly left and right), and get them to say ‘look, this is one place where we can all come together and profit if we can take corporations out of our politics.’ ”

One vital part of this Chautauqua is the unification of radically divergent groups through common corporate concern. Sponsors of the event include the environmentalists (Forest Ecology Network, Native Forest Network, Maine Green Party), labor (American Workers First, Greater Portland Labor Council, Maine Labor News), the Bangor Clean Clothes Campaign who oppose sweat-shop labor, the college-aged Maine Collegiate Campfire Collective, Maine Veterans for Peace, Maine Organic Farmers and Growers, even the gun-toting, black helicopter-fearing Second Maine Militia.

Kubiak says workshops will be used to get these groups to talk to each other and see “who our common enemies are and how they enforce their will and finally what their areas of vulnerability are . . . We’ll see if these groups are willing to donate 10 or 15 percent of their time to working together.”

Speakers at the conference are almost as diverse as the groups. Headlining the Chautauqua is author, radio personality, and ex-Texas commissioner of Agriculture Jim Hightower. Joining him are 91 year-old activist Doris “Granny D” Haddock who in 2000 walked over 3000 miles from California to Washington, DC to raise awareness for campaign finance reform; Carolyn Chute, the self-described “uneducated Redneck” author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and political leader of the Second Maine Militia; and performance artist Reverend Billy of the Stop Shopping Choir, who preaches in New York City stores like the Disney Store where he told shoppers, “We are in hell now — can you feel the evil? — and Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist.”

Like their predecessors 100 years ago, Chautauqua organizers want to strip power from the corporations and give in back to the working people. Indeed, the Populist Platform of 1892 reads like a manifesto from the Seattle Protests: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized . . . The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.”

According to the Chautauqua website (http://www.nancho.net/newchau/), organizers have a specific plan for attacking the corporate structure — they want to strip corporations’ constitutional rights, which were granted a century ago by a Supreme Court Decision. Corporations, the site continues, do not deserve the same rights as people because unlike people, corporations cannot be generally trusted “to act from an extended sense of self-interest that encompasses economic advantage, familial welfare, soýial justice, community well-being, moral values, spiritual/sensual response to the environment, etc.” Instead, corporations care only about profit and see the world either “as a food source or toilet.” If these rights are taken away, reason the organizers, corporations will lose their of Bill of Rights protection, welfare, and ability to own life forms, overwhelm local business, and corrupt politics.

The need for the Chautauqua in 2001, says Kubiak, is the same as it was 100 years ago. “In the past, the mass media did not take the populist message to the people. Today, the there is no mass media delivering the message, so it still has to be done directly and verbally.”