Press Releases: Numbers game

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If you take a close look at the latest polls, you will find that supporters and opponents of November's same-sex marriage referendum question are locked in a neck-and-neck battle. The state's major media outlets, however, did not report the news this way. In fact, they got it backward. Here are some samples:

PORTLAND PRESS HERALD "A new poll shows an edge for supporters of same-sex marriage in Maine's Nov. 3 referendum, with 51.8 percent of those surveyed saying they plan to vote to uphold the law legalizing it and 42.9 percent planning to vote for repeal."

BANGOR DAILY NEWS "The results of a new poll released Wednesday show growing support among voters for Maine's gay marriage law."

LEWISTON SUN JOURNAL "Mainers planning to vote on Election Day favor keeping Maine's law allowing same-sex marriage."

WGME "A slight majority of Mainers support same sex marriage."

MPBN "A majority of Mainers in a new poll say they're ready to uphold the state's new gay-marriage law by voting 'no' on the people's-veto referendum question."

At first glance, they'd all appear to be right. The poll itself, by Pan Atlantic SMS Group in Portland, says 40.9 percent of people surveyed said they would vote to repeal the new same-sex marriage law; 2 percent said they were leaning toward repeal the law; 50.6 percent said they would uphold the law; 1.2 percent said they were leaning toward upholding it; 5.2 percent said they were undecided.

The total of all those wanting to repeal the law is 42.9 percent, and those who would uphold it is 51.8 percent.

The key fact, though, is the survey's margin of error, plus-or-minus 4.9 percent. All of the news outlets reported it, but failed to accurately describe what it means: it's a statistical dead heat.

If you take the numbers for people saying they plan to vote a particular way, those in favor of the law are between 45.7 and 55.5 percent of the likely voters; those desiring repeal are between 36 and 45.8 percent.

That 0.1 percent overlap is bad enough, but when adding the "leaning" voters in to each category, the media outlets failed to recognize that the dead heat actually gets closer: voters plus leaners favoring the law are between 38 and 47.8 percent of the population; voters plus leaners for repeal are between 46.9 and 56.7 percent of likely Maine voters -- an overlap of 0.9 percent.

Now you see: It is quite possible that the poll has found more people wanting to repeal the law than supporting it.

And it actually gets worse. Patrick Murphy, Pan Atlantic's president, says it is a nationally accepted fact among pollsters that surveys unavoidably under-report the number of people who oppose same-sex marriage. The reason is that people who oppose it fear being thought of poorly by the person interviewing them, and so they answer that they will support it. But when it comes to actually voting, they vote the way they feel, not the way they said they would. (Pollsters call this the "Bradley effect," after an African-American man who led in the polls but lost to a white man in the 1982 California gubernatorial election.)

And while many pro-marriage young people may be landline-less and therefore left out of the survey, Murphy says the 18-to-34 age group was properly represented in the survey, and studies have shown that young people with landlines are not statistically different from young people who have only cell phones.

All of this gets us to a position that is radically different from what the mainstream media told you. The real story should have been: A new poll shows voters who oppose same-sex marriage outnumber supporters in Maine. While the results themselves show a statistical dead heat, survey experts know that opponents are often under-counted because of unavoidable imperfections in the polling process.

Gatherings: Join the Scooter Rally!

Published in the Portland Phoenix

If your current ride is a bit too motorized for Critical Mass, but still not loud enough for Laconia's Bike Week, don't miss Monday's scooter rally, starting at noon at the East End Beach parking lot in Portland.

Phuc Tran, local tattoo artist and scooter-souper, has been flyering scooters around town for a couple weeks now, trying to get a group of "like-minded scooter riders" together. Tran and about 10 or so others went on regular rides together over the summer, and now they want more company.

It'll work better if people bring vehicles with engines at or below 150 cc, because bigger ones make it hard for the smaller types to keep up, Tran says. (Apparently, alternative transportation does have its limits.)

"I think scooter/moped riders are a self-selecting group," he says, and hopes to meet more people who are actively "choosing to ride a scooter" rather than a bike or a motorcycle. If the group is large enough, it might spawn a future ride to benefit a local charity.

"Hopefully the weather will hold out," Tran says, adding that he's not sure what route the group will take, but is coming up with something he hopes people will enjoy.

Scooter Rally | October 12 @ noon | East End Beach parking lot, Portland | Free 

Protestors vs. Police: Anarchists claim victory in G-20 marches

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Safely home after protesting for two full days, and being among the first American civilians ever attacked with a sonic cannon, two Portlanders are calling their efforts a success.

Wearing black T-shirts reading "The G-20 is full of jagoffs" (a common Pittsburgh insult, apparently), Paul McCarrier and fellow Portlander Jordan (whose last name we are withholding) recounted their experiences in the Phoenix office on Monday, just hours after returning home (see "Protestors Head to the G-20 Summit," by Jeff Inglis, September 25).

During an unpermitted march on September 24, police used a sonic cannon (technically known as a Long-Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD) in an attempt to disperse 1500 or so marchers protesting against capitalism and G-20 policies they say harm the world's people. A high-volume combination of high and low pitches, the sound made McCarrier "sick to my stomach and weak" when it was directed at where he was standing. Jordan, who was not targeted directly, says the low frequencies bounced off buildings and echoed throughout the area. "You can feel it in your skull, rattling your eardrums around," he says. (Hear a sample of the sound, recorded by McCarrier, at thePhoenix.com/AboutTown.)

But both pronounced the device a failure, because it did not break up the march. Police also used rubber bullets and pepper gas (a vaporized form of pepper spray).

While police were eventually able to split up the march, protestors regrouped a short while later and continued on their way, according to news reports from Pittsburgh. "It was empowering," McCarrier says of his realization that a group of unarmed protestors was able to stay on the streets in the face of overwhelming police strength. (And in the face of emergency ordinances that allowed people to openly carry assault rifles but not gas masks or PVC pipe.)

They were able to do so, McCarrier says, by being collaboratively organized and by using technology, such as Twitter and text messages, similarly to how Iranian protestors communicated back in June.

The following day, protestors also succeeded at keeping the streets, even as violence flared. It began peacefully enough, with Buddhist monks and others marching to protest the harsh military junta ruling Burma. Even that group was surrounded by armed riot police, to intimidate "anyone who wants to even be associated with any sort of dissent or protest," McCarrier says.

Later in the day someone broke a window at a BMW dealership, and that likely provoked a startling move, caught on a bystander's video camera: Military personnel clad in camouflage snatched a protestor off the street in broad daylight, stuffed him (without bothering to search or handcuff him) into the back of an unmarked car, and sped away.

"They probably did that to scare the shit out of people," McCarrier says. "It was after that that people started throwing rocks at the cops."

"We stretched them thin," says Jordan, noting that on Friday night, police radios carried messages indicating vehicles had run out of fuel and officers' radios' batteries were running low. At one point, dispatchers announced that cops were no longer responding to calls throughout most of the city, to be able to focus on activities in the university area. There, police surrounded dormitories and fired pepper gas through the hallways and into the courtyards.

McCarrier says police also fired pepper balls, which the Boston police stopped using in 2004 after one killed a 21-year-old college student celebrating the Red Sox clinching the American League pennant.

A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter covering the protest and police response was arrested, according to the paper's report, which described police surrounding a group, ordering the people to disperse but giving no route for them to do so, and following them even when they tried to leave.

But despite the difficulties, "the anarchists won," McCarrier says, basing his claim on the fact that marchers were in the streets for more than 12 hours on both September 24 and 25. Police spent an estimated $32 million on security and equipment for the weekend, which amounts to roughly $16,000 per protestor. McCarrier and Jordan say that money could have been much better spent helping the people who live in Pittsburgh and building up community organizations.

They are both looking forward to future opportunities to exercise their "rights to freedom of speech and assembly," and wondering what the police will do differently next time.

Press Releases: Freedom isn’t free

Published in the Portland Phoenix

Campaign-finance reformers often object to the idea that money equals speech. But even for progressives, it does indeed. "All our donations dried up" after Obama was elected, says Matt Power, producer and editor of LibertyNewsTV, a five-year-old monthly half-hour progressive news-and-commentary program based in Portland and aired on public-access channels in Maine and around the country. The program being distributed for October will be the series's last.

The election of the president who promised change suggested "the adults were in charge again," Power says, and so support dwindled for a program that often attacked George W. Bush and his policies.

For example, FreeSpeechTV, a clearinghouse for progressive videos, used to give Power $1600 a year to support LibertyNewsTV's $8000 annual budget. For the coming year, though, it offered $75, Power says. "That's a sign of the times right there."

But he's not done making videos, and has plans to create a progressive-themed series for the Web or broadcast. "We need to create different versions of reality" to show "a positive vision of what the world could be," he says. Specifically, as Marxist as it may sound, "What would make the most people the most happy?"

Power draws inspiration from Michael Moore, who he says has "managed to break out of the documentary mold" by "introducing whole new ideas that people have never even heard before."

If a donor appeared and wanted to bankroll LibertyNewsTV again, he would go right back to it. But since that seems unlikely, he's submitting all the past episodes to the Internet Archive (archive.org) so the public will be able to access them in perpetuity.

(Disclosure: I appeared on an episode of LibertyNewsTV earlier this year explaining my "Take Back Barack" initiative, which suggested that Obama was drifting to the center and even the right, and that we needed to pressure him to stay progressive.)

• WGME Channel 13, Portland's Sinclair-owned CBS affiliate, sent a news photographer to the September 13 ANTI-SAME-SEX-MARRIAGE RALLY in Augusta, armed with a handheld video camera. He didn't conceal the camera, but neither did he disclose his employer, nor his intent to broadcast the footage he shot. Turns out, it was a pretty smart move ? absolutely newsworthy moments the station aired included Roman Catholic Bishop Richard Malone declaring that it was a "duty" of all good Catholics to oppose same-sex marriage, and saying that any Catholic who did otherwise was "dissenting from the teaching of the church." The station also got Marc Mutty, the diocese's spokesman who is on leave to run the anti-same-sex-marriage campaign, to admit that people who oppose marriage equality fear being publicly identified because they might be viewed negatively for their beliefs. "In today's society, being a bigot is a really nasty thing," Mutty said on camera, unintentionally hitting the nail precisely on the head.

• And for those arriving late, I reported (with help from Al Diamon and Lance Tapley) on the AboutTown blog September 9 that Richard Connor made no money as the middle-man in a real-estate deal by which New York developer John Cacoulidis bought the PRESS HERALD BUILDINGS near City Hall in Portland and a Portland developer bought a floor of the Chestnut Street parking garage. Rather, Connor paid $6.3 million and sold them right away for that exact sum. In all, he paid $17.9 million for the real-estate portion of the deal with the Blethens, and got back more than one-third of it right away. He'll get more when he sells the Kennebec Journal building in Augusta; he is planning on keeping the South Portland printing plant and probably the Waterville offices of the Morning Sentinel.

Global Outrage: Protestors head to the G-20 summit

Published in the Portland Phoenix

As President Obama prepares to ask representatives of the world's largest economic powers for more money to help reverse the global recession, thousands of activists will take to the streets to protest the policies of the G-20 and its members, who are meeting in Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday.

Paul McCarrier, a Portland activist and anarchist who also protested at the 2008 Republican National Convention (see "Judge Dismisses RNC Protest Case," by Jeff Inglis, February 6), helped organize a contingent from New England who have traveled to Pennsylvania and are already setting up for several days of community festivals, marches, and protests.

On the agenda for this week's official talks will be whether the G-20 nations, which include the US, China, Europe, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, will give as much as $1 trillion to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, international groups that invest in developing nations. Protestors, including McCarrier, will be arguing that those groups' projects "destroy local economies" by increasing dependence on foreign aid rather than teaching self-reliance.

"We need to stand in solidarity with people who live in the global South, whose lives are being destroyed," McCarrier says, explaining his motives for protesting. (Activists gathering are from many groups who represent a wide range of populist, anarchist, progressive, and other perspectives.) The 24 finance ministers and central-bank executives who sit on the G-20 board "shouldn't have the power to decide things for all six billion people," he says.

While activists and officials alike say they hope the demonstrations remain peaceful, McCarrier and others are anticipating aggression by police, and are bringing gas masks and other equipment for "defensive" purposes.

There will be thousands of police and National Guard troops stationed in Pittsburgh, according to plans reported in that city's alternative newspaper, City Paper, and its daily, the Post-Gazette.

Those officers have been getting trained by London police, which protestors object to because at the G-20 meeting in that city in April, police assaulted a man who was walking home from work; the man, who had not been involved in the protests but rather worked within a police-erected security cordon, died minutes later. Three autopsies have been done, and a London officer has been interviewed in the ongoing manslaughter investigation.

Pittsburgh city leaders have also taken some odd steps aimed at curbing demonstrations. The city council refused to ban the wearing of masks, but according to the Post-Gazette the council did approve special powers meaning police can cite anyone carrying PVC pipe, carabiners, and even gas masks in the city, if officers believe they will be used to disrupt public order.

Noah Williams, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project, says the city has ordered 1000 canisters of tear gas, "which is a strange move if you're not planning on using tear gas."

McCarrier is concerned that police will try to suppress the public outcry, noting that the city, as many cities do, requires a permit for a march. "You have the right to express yourself any way the government sees fit," he says wryly.

Williams says the groups he is coordinating with want to create "a space where the people the decisions are going to affect will have a voice," but admits he is not sure the G-20 delegates will get the message.

"They certainly have not shown a history of listening to the people whose interests they're supposed to have at heart," he says.

To follow G-20 protests and related news, visit resistg20.org and g20media.org.