Now available !… the stenograph record of the last public meeting of Boston City Council, email city.council at cityofboston.gov
If you’re deaf, have hearing loss or have some cognitive difficulties the stenographic record of the public meeting of Boston City Council is a great resource.
Continue reading Now available !… the stenograph record of the last public meeting of Boston City Council…The Urban Ring is a planned public transport service to encircle central Boston, connecting the existing subway line ‘grid’ so as to allow quicker routes around Boston’s center. It is expected to move 40,000 passengers each day in phase I, to about 275,000 per day in phase III in 2025, speeding commutes and relieving central Boston’s transit system congestion.
Because most business doesn’t know now what to do with capital, interest rates are near historic lows, so it’s a great time to raise building capital via municipal bond sales.
And it is a great time to hire transit system builders, amidst this seemingly endless recession, and to thus stimulate the greater Boston economy.
The land-owners of the to-be-connected new stops on the Urban Ring stand to gain tremendously in financial terms from the Ring’s connecting these sites right to the existing subway and busway system, and it would thus be fair to partly fund Urban Ring construction by taxing the increase in land value created at and near these new stops with special taxation zones. This funding method is addressed at: http://www.vtpi.org/smith.pdf
Continue reading Now is the Time to Start Building the Boston Urban Ring Transit Line.I just stumbled over this group, just after stumbling over Blue Mass Group, where I recently posted on how Mass might raise revenues now.
I was surprised to discover little support among BMG respondents for raising Mass revenues now.
While I see Mass education, police and fire as in desperate straits, others at BMG saw a Mass state revenue returning to the historical 15% of state GDP
as healthy.
I’m curious – Here at Green Mass Group, what do we think about the existing level of taxation?
Continue reading Mass State Revenues: too much, enough, or too little?Ten years ago, this blogger had the honor of spending several weeks among the Oglala Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. At the time, the Tokala Oyate (or “Kit Fox Society,” which serve as contemporary tribal warriors) had physically occupied a section of Badlands National Park that ‘overlaps’ the Pine Ridge Reservation. The occupation occurred after the National Park Service proved unable to prevent the looting of bones from Lakota graves on a landform called the Stronghold Table. Through much of modern history, the Lakota people have displayed a willingness to put themselves at risk and physically intervene in instances of social injustice.
This week was no exception.
On Monday, residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation learned through social media contacts that enormous trucks loaded with oil pipeline components related the Keystone Pipeline/Canadian Tar Sands Project were headed towards the reservation and set to pass through the Oglala Tribal lands. “We did not know where the equipment was going, but we knew that these trucks were too huge, too heavy, and too dangerous to pass our roads. We thought the equipment may be going to the Tarsands oil mine, or other oil mines in Canada,” Lakota matriarch Debra White Plume said.
Continue reading Lakota Grandmothers Stop Keystone TrucksGreat speech by John Nichols of the Nation:
Continue reading John Nichols at Stein HQ opening in Madison, WISample ballots for Primary Day
President
State Committee Man
State Committee Woman
Ward Committees
http://sampleballots.blogspot.com
Vote for UMass Permaculture as College Campus Champion of Change!
You have to sign in and thus provide your email address, and you may use all 3 votes to support the UMass project.
From John Gerber, Professor of Sustainable Food and Farming at UMass Amherst:
Continue reading Help send UMass to the White House – vote by midnight Saturday (3/3)!
The UMass Permaculture Project was selected from among 1400 nominations as one of 15 finalists in the White House Campus Change Challenge. After a week of online voting we were leading the nation (until yesterday), when the University of Arkansas got a story in USA Today and picked up thousands of votes. We believe that with a last minute “push” we can retake the lead in the balloting.If you are willing please vote for us here and ask a few friends to help us out.
Our students have done a terrific job trying to change the culture on campus to be more supportive of local food and farming. This would be quite a tribute to their hard work.
by Richard Hugus
March 3, 2012
New York City appears to be going all out to win a world award for racism and bigotry. On February 24 the New York Post published a cartoon (1) depicting three men with long noses, long beards, turbans, and dishdashas assembling bombs in a locked upstairs tenement room. One of the men has a bomb strapped to his waist. He is looking out a window at an New York Police Department car in the street. The cartoon shows him speaking into the phone: “Hello, AP Press? . . . I’d like to register a complaint against the N.Y.P.D. for spying on us.”
Continue reading NYPD’s Police State Stretches All The Way To BostonFrom the Green-Rainbow Party:
Vote in the Green-Rainbow Primary on “Super” Tuesday, March 6.
On March 6 you will have a chance to vote for peace, compassion, economic justice, women’s rights and environmental sanity. All you have to do is go to the polls and take a Green-Rainbow ballot. This opportunity is open to any voter who is registered in the Green-Rainbow Party or is un-enrolled (independent).
By taking a Green-Rainbow ballot, you’re saying no to politics as usual. You’ll be joining the growing number of voters who refuse to endorse bailouts, sellouts, negative advertising, trashing the environment, troop surges, attacks on Social Security and Medicare, piling college debt on students, state-sponsored assassinations, and sending American jobs overseas with ‘free trade’ treaties.
Continue reading Calling all Independent and Green-Rainbow voters in MassachusettsSAMPLE
PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY
DEMOCRATIC OFFICIAL ABSENTEE BALLOT
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
PRESIDENTIAL PREFERENCE
BARACK OBAMA
STATE COMMITTEE MAN
CALVIN T. BROWN
BRIAN J. CORR
STATE COMMITTEE WOMAN
LESLEY REBECCA PHILLIPS