Peter Rothberg | The Nation

Michael Moore's provocative, election-season documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 has been nominated by the People's Choice Awards as the American public's "Favorite Film of the Year." The five nominees for best film--also, Spiderman 2, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Shrek 2--were chosen from a poll of thousands of Americans in mid-to-late November. This year marks the first time ever that a doc has been nominated in the category.

The People's Choice Awards are considered, among all the awards shows, to be the one which most accurately reflects mainstream public opinion in the United States, so it would be a big deal--at least on the culture front--for an avowedly left-wing film to win the contest. It would also help continue to establish political documentaries as commercially-viable products, which makes it much easier for small, independent films to find funding sources and distribution outlets.

And, in an age of ever-increasing media conglomeration, independent film is now filing a more vital niche than ever with films like Morgan Spurlock's SuperSize Me, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott's The Corporation and Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's The Take sparking, connecting with and contributing to grassroots movements for change.

As Moore says in an open letter asking the public to participate in the online voting which will determine the winner, the fact that a film about "Iraq, Bush, terror and fear" continues to resonate throughout the country shows that "the election has not altered or made irrelevant, unfortunately, a single one of these issues."

So click here to cast your ballot today. Voting continues only through this coming Monday, December 13, at 3:00pm EST, so send an email to your friends and encourage them to vote too. The winners will accept their awards live on CBS on January 9.

Social Security is a very popular system. A pillar of the New Deal, it provides tens of millions of workers with a guaranteed retirement income as well as disability and life insurance during their working lives.

Moreover, contrary to conservative rhetoric, the Social Security system is extremely efficient. According to economist Dean Baker, writing recently in TomPaine.Com, the administrative costs of Social Security are just 0.6 cents of every dollar that gets paid out in benefits, a very low figure for a major government agency. Social Security also has a minimal amount of fraud and abuse, Baker adds, as numerous government audits have repeatedly documented.

Despite this track record, privatizing Social Security is one of George Bush's top second-term priorities. In the face of warnings from numerous economists of all political stripes, the financial industry-- which stands to make billions in new business on privatized retirement accounts--and the Bush White House have been on a steady propaganda campaign to convince the public that Social Security is on the edge of bankruptcy and needs a quick fix.

Click here to read Baker's explanation of why Social Security is NOT in crisis and check outEdith Fierst's Christian Science Monitor Op-Ed detailing why privatization would be the wrong remedy even if it were.

Bush's plans on this front are far from a done deal, and a well-organized public campaign is critical to stave off the possibility of some Democrats cutting a deal early--as they did on tax cuts (and as Ted Kennedy did on the Medicare bill).

So click here to join the Campaign for America's Future in pressuring Congress to hold firm on the issue. As CAF says, "We can do to Bush on Social Security what Harry and Louise did to Clinton on health care."

See below for an update

More than 10,000 activists from across the US--including actors Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon and musicians Amy Ray and Utah Phillips--will gather at the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, this Saturday and Sunday to call for the closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas.

A combat training facility for Latin American soldiers, the school has served as a de-stabilizing force in Central and South America since its formation in 1946--having trained more than 60,000 soldiers in courses such as counter-insurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. Graduates of the facility return to their countries to utilize their training domestically and are consistently cited for human rights violations throughout Latin America on behalf of repressive rightwing, US-supported governments.

From the slayings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in 1989 to the continued human rights abuses in Colombia, many of the most atrocious crimes of the past 50 years have their roots in the US-operated School of the Americas. The inhumane--and in some cases illegal--tactics taught at the institute have repeatedly been used against union organizers, educators, and religious workers.

Many American eyes were opened this past year with the Abu Ghraib revelations to the fact that the US does indeed use torture. The activists at SOA Watch have been in the vanguard of trying to halt the United States's role in propagating torture globally since the organization's founding in 1990. A grassroots group working in solidarity with the people of Latin America to close the military institute, SOA Watch stages an annual demonstration and rally and organizes lobbying, letter-writing and public awareness campaigns all year long.

Click here to learn more about SOA Watch, click here to make a contribution to support the group's efforts, click here if you'd like to join SOA Watch's Research Working Group and click here if you'd like to volunteer on one of the organization's campaigns.

Update, November 22

At least 20 people were arrested yesterday while protesting the School of the Americas. Charges filed against the demonstrators range from trespassing to "wearing a mask," a violation of a rarely invoked 1951 law originally aimed at fighting the Ku Klux Klan. Those arrested were among about a record 16,000 people who demonstrated outside the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, calling for the school to be shut down.

The sublime (and sublimely troubled) singer/songwriter Gil Scott-Heron wrote in 1981 at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution of waking up one day to find "Winter in America."

This morning in late 2004, at least in New York, a similar feeling is palpable. Yesterday's election did see record-turnout, yet, even without many of the expected polling irregularities, Bush won the popular vote. Young people did support Kerry in expected overwhelming fashion. The problem was that the youth demographic hit the polls in far fewer numbers than predicted despite the attention lavished on students by pollsters, the media, the Democratic Party and celebs like Michael Moore and Sheryl Crow.

Sure, the Bush campaign's unprecedented--at least in modern history--dishonesty helped win lots of votes. And the culture wars killed the Dems in numerous battleground states. But there must be something more. If not enough people saw through the Administration's hypocrisies--despite the remarkable, progressive organizing that went on to raise awareness of how the Bush agenda is crushing America--then there's more going on than just Karl Rove's brilliance coupled with a virtually bottomless war chest.

Regardless, as David Corn writes in his Nation weblog, now "there will be no good-bye to reckless preemptive war, an economic policy based on tax breaks tilted toward the wealthy, a war on environmental regulations, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, excessive secrecy in government, unilateral machismo, the neocon theology of hubris and arrogance, a ban on effective stem cell research, no-bid Halliburton contracts, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and much more."

In other words, being a progressive is now a much more important job than ever before. So, it's a good time to single out a few of the many public-interest groups who are now the only bulwark we have against an increasingly emboldened Bush team set out to impose its fundamentalist agenda on a divided nation. Please join, volunteer with, make donations to, praise often and otherwise support these organizations with all your might.

Bush's judicial appointments--Supreme Court and appellate--will likely be among the most damaging consequences of his second term. The Alliance for Justice has been on the front-lines of judicial fights since 1979 in an effort to promote a fair and independent judiciary.

The future of reproductive choice is also now in question. Both Planned Parenthood and NARAL-Pro Choice America will fight to the death to defend rollbacks on women's reproductive freedoms--whether they come in the form of the quiet de-funding of state-based health programs or the anticipated selection of anti-choice justices when vacancies on the Supreme Court open up.

Even if evangelical Christian John Ashcroft is pushed out of the Justice Department as some rumor-mongering has it, the wall between church and state will likely become much lower in the next four years. As Esther Kaplan writes in her invaluable new book on the relationship between Bush and the Christian right, in his first term, "Bush bucked up the movement...from his efforts to block abortions and gay marriage to his expenditure of significant political capital to support abstinence education, church-based social services and socially conservative judges." God only knows what he's planning for his second go-around.

People for the American Way has been sounding the alarm on the unprecedented influence of the Christian right on the Bush White House and is well-placed to expose the slow creep of the evangelical movement into the machinery of government.

In his first term, Bush's assault on the environment was so blatant and relentless that, as Mark Hertsgaard noted in a Nation story, "even American television now reports it as a simple fact, like gravity. " We can only imagine the plans of an Administration unencumbered by the burdens of a re-election. Fortunately, there are numerous good environmental groups operating currently, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club being among the most well-known and effective.

Further consolidation of the media was a major goal of Bush's first-term. A popular rebellion against Bush's FCC chairman Michael Powell was able to defeat Powell's clumsy efforts to rollback virtually all media regulation in June of 2003. The Free Press Media Network, founded by The Nation's John Nichols along with Robert McChesney to generate policies that will produce a more competitive and public interest-oriented media system, was in the forefront of organizing public opposition to Powell last year.

Needless to say, this is a very incomplete list of both issues and organizations. There are thousands of groups bracing to redouble their commitment to economic justice, peace and the environment over the next four years. It may be "Winter in America" but, as Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote the day before the election, "a grand coalition of progressivism" has developed over the last two years and no matter how we feel today, it won't go away. It also won't grow without your help, so support these groups--and others like them--today.