This is a public service announcement
With guitar
Know your rights all three of them
I was honored to receive in the mail today an individual gift membership to Common Cause, given to me personally by a Common Cause Massachusetts board member who follows my campaigns.
It has moved me to forward the gesture to another.
Continue reading Common Cause Gift ChainSince it seems that we can’t expect too much out of the international or national policymakers for the next couple of years, I’ve been thinking that the next logical step for 350.org and the climate movement is to do it ourselves. That could take the form of an ongoing global brainstorm on local, practical solutions where people who are working on projects can report their successes and failures, trade ideas on what works and what doesn’t, and help us all climb the learning curve faster as well as replicate successes quickly and modify them appropriately for different local conditions.
There are a number of people already thinking and working along these lines (appropedia, globalswadeshi, the coalition of the willing, global system for sustainable development…*) but they are dispersed, not networked, and there is no central nexus you can point people to. This is something that needs to be done in order to make do it yourself climate change happen. If done right, it would eliminate a lot of unnecessary duplication around the world and could build a community of practitioners that could be brought to bear on specific areas and problems like an Emergency Rescue Squad or ecological SWAT team.
Continue reading DIY Climate Change: Ongoing Global Brainstorm
That afternoon seeing
the small child play in the snow
watched over by his father,
I remembered I’d never seen a snowman
here.
In the fading winter light,
I went out to the same little plaza
and with a gloved hand
lifted three small lumps of snow,
delicately, each in one piece,
and placed them
one on top of the other
to make a tiny snowman,
something like a Jizo,
the roadside statues seen
in Japan to remember the souls
of dead children and the aborted.
Yuki no Jizo
Jizo of snow
It was Martin Luther King Day
in Martin Luther King Plaza
right beside the library.
January 19, 2010
revised December 25, 2010
Ask your favorite Boston City Council candidate… about an open City Council http://anopenbostoncitycouncil…
Continue reading Ask your favorite Boston City Council candidate…Report: Austerity Policies Worsen Racial Economic Inequalities, Hit Blacks and Latinos Hardest
United for a Fair Economy Releases State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom? for MLK Day
by United for a Fair Economy, reprinted from Common Dreams
BOSTON — The official unemployment rate is 15.8 percent among Blacks and 13 percent among Latinos; Blacks earn only 57 cents for each dollar of White family income, Latinos earn 59 cents; and Blacks have only 10 cents of net wealth while Latinos have 12 cents to every dollar of net wealth that Whites have. As documented in the “State of the Dream 2011: Austerity for Whom?,” this is the precarious state in which Blacks and Latinos find themselves as the nation, still struggling amidst the Great Recession, remembers the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was gunned down while leading the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.
“Austerity measures based on the conservative tenets of less government and lower taxes will ratchet down the standard of living for all Americans, while simultaneously widening our nation’s racial and economic divide.” said Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the report.
and Spawned a Global Crisis
{ Cross-posted at Blue Mass Group }
Excerpted from THE MONSTER: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America–and Spawned a Global Crisis by Michael W. Hudson. Published in November by Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Michael W. Hudson. Reprinted with permission of Times Books. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Bait and Switch
A few weeks after he started working at Ameriquest Mortgage, Mark Glover looked up from his cubicle and saw a coworker do something odd. The guy stood at his desk on the twenty-third floor of downtown Los Angeles’s Union Bank Building. He placed two sheets of paper against the window. Then he used the light streaming through the window to trace something from one piece of paper to another. Somebody’s signature.
Glover was new to the mortgage business. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t held a steady job in years. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew about financial sleight of hand-at that time, he had a check-fraud charge hanging over his head in the L.A. courthouse a few blocks away. Watching his coworker, Glover’s first thought was: How can I get away with that? As a loan officer at Ameriquest, Glover worked on commission. He knew the only way to earn the six-figure income Ameriquest had promised him was to come up with tricks for pushing deals through the mortgage-financing pipeline that began with Ameriquest and extended through Wall Street’s most respected investment houses.
Continue reading How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America…I don’t ordinarily pass around online petitions. They’re of dubious efficacy, and too often reek of slactivism.
But I know that this one comes with a strong real-time effort behind it. It’s the real deal. And I’m especially impressed in that it adheres to my dictum, “for every `no,’ a `yes'”–meaning that every time we oppose something, we offer up a viable alternative. Peter Vickery’s editorial in The Daily Hampshire Gazette–you can read it here–does just that:
So, if you live in MA–I’d urge that you read the editorial, and read, sign, and FORWARD (to EVERYONE you possibly can) the following petition:
Continue reading Support Efforts to Turn Coal-Burning Power Stations Into Cleaner-Eneregy Suppliers“Make a financial pledge to our station in the next hour if you support Single Payer Health Care!,” is a popular line that listeners hear to drum up the number of ringing phones during a fund drive.
A local NPR affiliate is preparing a pledge drive soon. Because voters in the 4th Berkshire District approved the non-binding ‘single payer’ health care question by the second highest margin in the state last year, with well over 70% approval, it’s a sure bet that the affiliate will dedicate several hours of pledging to the issue.
I attempted recently to find out from the station how many additional pledges are generated during the time slots that are devoted to ‘single payer’ health care, but it didn’t seem that any records like that are kept. Without such data to communicate to lawmakers and advocates the pledge drive has little real effect in advancing the legislation which the callers presumably favor. The fundraisers certainly know that support for the issue is strong, though. They will reasonably continue with this tactic as long as it is viewed to bolster fund-raising.
As several of us in the Green-Rainbow Party are planning to participate with MassCare in “Lobby Day” on Beacon Hill, which is devoted to securing legislative co-sponsors for the single payer health care bill, it got me thinking …
Continue reading A Tectonic Pledge(Cross Posted from “Daily Kos”)
I am an extremist. I have been since the Vietnam war caused me to cut short my postdoctoral training In Israel and come home to my first faculty job at SUNY at Buffalo in 1965. Before that I had been a USMC officer, a “born again” Christian and generally a true believer in our American myths. Listening to international news during the Gulf of Tonkin incident and contrasting it with Voice of America and Armed Forces Radio versions made me very concerned. I immediately became more concerned when I got back to the USA and found that the propaganda I had heard from the VOA and AFR were the story being told everywhere and basically the only story. I rose quickly to be leader in the anti-war/civil rights movement and as my friends were beaten by police for expressing their views and as the underground press and other organs became the only source of an opposition view, I became more extreme. It was the Democratic Party we were up against. Read on below and I’ll explain why our extremism was and is fundamentally different from what we see today and why the absence of any real left thinking here has poisoned the well so badly.