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My election to State Legislature in November of this year as a Green-Rainbow  candidate will greatly advance the prospects for single payer health care in  Massachusetts and in the United States.

(Update: July 7, a non-binding policy question on single payer health care will be on the Nov 2 ballot in the 4th Berkshire District.  Read more…)

There are many groups advocating for single payer, but they often focus their efforts on lobbying incumbents to co-sponsor a bill, or they focus on educating a few candidates seeking the few open seats that arise.   They are not making progress.  We are further than ever away from the kind of health care security that citizens in most other advanced democracies enjoy.

My election will be a more powerful boost to the cause than would be the garnering of even twenty more co-sponsors to the bill.  History has shown that co-sponsorhip is not enough; leaders must be vocal and strong because the opponents are vocal and strong.  Most of the so-called “supporters” of single payer health care are silent on the issue, except for when they’re asking for votes.

Continue reading Single Payer Health Care – A Candidate’s Statement

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Last week Governor Patrick and the Democratic Party leadership came a step closer to realizing their dream of bringing big gambling operations into Massachusetts.  After concerted arm-twisting by the Democratic Party leadership,  the House of Representatives  voted by a 120 to 37 margin to pass a bill authorizing two casinos and 750 slot machines.

Continue reading The Casino Vote
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I went to a talk by David Broder on the health care battle at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Thursday, April 15.  It was a small group with plenty of time for questions.  It turned out that among the other people there were Scott Rasmussen, the pollster, generally assumed to lean Right, Ernest Istook, the former Republican Congressman and present Heritage Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School fellow, and Roger Porter, Kennedy School prof and former Reagan and GHW Bush official (I’m always amazed at how liberal Harvard is).

Broder had a few introductory remarks about the differences between the Clinton attempt at reforming health care and the Obama success.  He credited Rahm Emmanuel with understanding Congress much better than Ira Magaziner did and pointed out that Obama made his push in his first year, with all his political capital intact, while Clinton began his health care initiative in his second year.

Then he took questions.  

Continue reading The Columnist, the Pollster, and Me
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If you were mad at all about Bush’s violations of civil liberties when he was president, this will get you fuming:

In a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted a former senior National Security Agency official on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007.

The official, Thomas A. Drake, 52, was also accused of obstructing justice by shredding documents, deleting computer records and lying to investigators who were looking into the reporter’s sources.

“Our national security demands that the sort of conduct alleged here – violating the government’s trust by illegally retaining and disclosing classified information – be prosecuted and prosecuted vigorously,” Lanny A. Breuer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

This is not just a single instance of outrage.  It is a microcosm of the Obama presidency, the political success of corporate America, and the failure of its opposition.

Continue reading Obama DoJ sends NSA whistleblower to the slammer…are you mad yet?
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A propos of nothing in particular, here’s a digest of some April news regarding food ‘n farming. I post not to make any particular point, except, perhaps, that there aren’t too many hard-‘n-fast points to be made in this area (or, better, arena, since everywhere you turn in this debate someone’s ready to stick a pitchfork in your ass). There’s a lotta folks from along the political, sociocultural, and planting spectrum who seem fixated on  solutions that arise from ideologically-fixated positions, from biotech-will-solve-all-our-food-problems to only-100%-organic-locally-sourced will do, but man, if there’s one area where we need a lot less ideology and a lot more pragmatism, it’s in feeding ourselves. Me, I tend not to be overly religious about these matters–I don’t oppose GMOs on principle, I’m no wussy vegan, and I love the olive oil that comes from halfway around the world. But even I know that our current practices are currently unsustainable for more reasons than I’ll bother enumerating here–and that our current system of livestock production is a bloody goddamned disgrace. That’s enough for me to support a wholesale agricultural revolution

If anything, a cursory review  

Continue reading Oh, Just Shut Up and Eat: Recent News from the Food ‘n Farm Front

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This article was written in response to this post at GreenChange.org

“We are neither left nor right; we are in front.”

-a Green slogan

I learned more about the Green Party from two old books* and two old white dudes** in my local chapter than anywhere else. I joined the party in 2001 and voted for its presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000, but it took me over ten years to even begin to get a sense of what it’s really all about.

There are some major things that distinguish the Greens from simply being more progressive than, or to the left of, the Democrats. I’d say the single-most important point is that the Green Party is an ecological political party, trying to establish an “ecological politics” in a country whose politics — left and right — has a fundamental disconnect with reality.

I hope to develop a better understanding of what ecological politics means in practice and theory both, but my simplistic version is that Greens view our economic, social, and political structures as complex systems of interrelated parts, all of which are ultimately woven into a greater fabric of natural systems — the environment our human-constructed systems are fully dependent upon, the solar system, and beyond.  

Continue reading Beyond progressivism: Toward a new politics and a new economics
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This is a fascinating interview that really gets down to the crux of what we’re facing, and how far we are from even understanding what it is that we’re facing.

His dismissal of Avatar notwithstanding, read this interview to the very end (it’s long).

Two small excerpts:

On action and knowledge during the 70s being stymied:

The one thing that was missing in that dialogue in the Seventies and Eighties was that nobody was really talking about strategy. How do we convey this as a message? We made the assumption, at least I sure did, that all people needed were the facts, data and logic. That meant more articles, more books, and then pretty soon they’ll see what’s at stake. I think we missed the whole issue of how you motivate people and how you actually move the dialogue. I don’t know that even if we had tried to do that, I don’t know that we could have done. I know that I went to meetings in the Seventies and Eighties, talking about the politics of these things and I don’t think people got how important the political dimension was, even at the local scale, the national or global scale, I don’t think people were understanding it.

Continue reading Must-read interview of David Orr by Rob Hopkins
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Dear Representative Story,

Don’t you understand that  gambling brought down the world economy back in 2008?  Gambling is a form of inebriation.  The police tell us in ads on TV and on billboards not to let our friends drive drunk.  Why the heck should we then let the whole society drive drunk by basing our resources to fund government on gambling?

Continue reading Casinos and Lotteries Are a Fraudulent Way to Run a Society
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Dear Representative Story,

Don’t you understand that  gambling brought down the world economy back in 2008?  Gambling is a form of inebriation.  The police tell us in ads on TV and on billboards not to let our friends drive drunk.  Why the heck should we then let the whole society drive drunk by basing our resources to fund government on gambling?

Continue reading Casinos and Lotteries Are a Fraudulent Way to Run a Society

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Apparently inspired by certain Democrats voting against the health insurance reform, the Service Employees International Union – a union representing over 2 million workers – is surprisingly planning to work against Democrats this election season.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to Democrats, if not the Democratic establishment itself, will be in North Carolina.  The national SEIU is working with the State Employees Association of North Carolina, its state affiliate, to form the North Carolina First Party.

Continue reading SEIU challenging Democrats who voted against health bill, forming third party in North Carolina
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