No blank check for Wall Street is a multi-partisan group of people demanding accountability for Wall Street for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. We welcome those who oppose a bailout as well as those support a bailout with accountability.  Please see our website for more. Our Facebook feed is the best way to track what’s happening; updates on the campaign’s progress in the first comment.
Also posted on Pam’s House Blend
A couple days ago, I launched the No blank check for Wall Street activism campaign by creating a Facebook page and a web site. The goal of our campaign is to send politicians a strong message:
- Wall Street firms and executives should be held accountable, and should not be allowed to profit from misdeeds
- Any government spending or loan guarantees to Wall Street as part of a recovery package must not be a blank check; it must involve meaningful oversight, accountability, and fair compensation to taxpayers.
To start with, we’ll give politicians feedback directly on their Facebook pages with a wall-writing campaign. (If you’re not on Facebook, don’t worry, there are still ways for you to get involved.)Â Most politicians’ Facebook pages are usually fairly quiet. When they start seeing 10, 20, 50, 100 messages a day, all letting them know that we don’t want a blank check for Wall Street, they’ll take notice — and so will the media.
Here’s how you can help:
- most importantly: let your friends and family know – by email, text, twitter, IM, or phone. feel free to cut-and-paste as much of this as you want!
- If you’re on Facebook: sign up as a fan and start writing on walls
- If you know somebody on Facebook: please forward them the link and ask them to join us
- If you blog: please mention No blank check for Wall Street and link to the Facebook page and our wiki
Now’s the time to act. Please join us!
jon
PS: the easiest ways to stay in touch are via our Facebook feed or our announcements email list. And if you’re on other social network sites instead (Yahoo!, MySpace, SecondLife, YouTube), stay tuned: we might do something there as well.
jon | 26-Sep-08 at 2:23 am | Permalink
A quick update on the campaign so far, following yesterday’s Organic growth, our first tweet, and viral email. First of all, we’ve got a logo — thanks to Bobby McArthur for the excellent work! And we’re up over 350 fans, despite once again getting virtually no links. Decent progress, and while it’s slightly less than we had hoped for, it’s a solid core to go on to the next stage.
In the broader picture, there were a couple of major stories on online activism about the financial crisis, Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej’s Online activists rise against the bailout on Politico and Sarah Lai Stirland’s Online Bailout Outrage Jumps Into Streets, and Into Lawmakers’ Inboxes on Wired’s Threat Level. Interestingly, despite our impact with Get FISA Right and the parallels between the FISA situation and the bailout, neither mentioned anything about social network activism. Instead, the focus is on BuyMyShitPile.com, TrueMajority’s “protest kit“, the fake Nigerian spam email, and Bernie Sanders’ online petition — now up to 22,000 signatures.* There’s clearly room for something complementary.
The central challenge for No blank check to Wall Street right now: how to build momentum?
One thing that will be helpful is a focus on action. The wall-writing campaign leverages the direct communication of Facebook in a unique way. And while it’s no substitute for phoning politicians, wall-writing also has some major advantages: you don’t have to spend time on hold, voicemail doesn’t get filled up by people leaving long angry rants, and press and activists get to see how much feedback the politician has gotten. Get FISA Right prototyped this briefly with its 50-state strategy, and initial results were promising; this time, the approach is a lot simpler.
How to get enough people involved to get to critical mass? The hook of taking a new “web 2.0” approach for direct communications with politicians is one more potential reason for bloggers and journalists to cover this, so maybe we’ll start to see some links. Fingers crossed. We don’t want to rely on this, though, so it’s also a good time to crank up the viral email campaign.
Another interesting opportunity: there are quite a few Facebook groups related to the bailout — clearly some latent energy to tap. With a specific action, we might be able to get these groups involved in the campaign; so I’ll send mail to some of the admins and ask for help.
One of the major complications in all of this is that external events are so up in the air at this point (there’s a deal! no there’s not! it’ll be done by Friday! no that’s just a high-level agreement!) that it’s very hard to project what timeframe we’re working towards here. There are so many factions involved, and the details clearly matter, that it’s certainly imaginable that negotiations will stretch on through next week. The longer No blank check to Wall Street has to grow, the more it benefits from network effects — and the more likely that it breaks through and goes viral.
Although it sure would be a lot more likely if anybody linked to us.
jon
* and talk about a wave of blogging: according to Google, there have been 5600 blog hits for “Sanders petition” in the last 24 hours alone. By comparison, Get FISA Right only had 216 blog hits on July 2, when it hit #1 on my.barackobama.com. Another example of the gap between blogs and social networks I talked about in Reflections?