Hey everyone,
I had an idea the other day, and I’m going to put it together. Basically, I’m creating a map of people all over the nation who are willing to donate something – their home, some food, some time, etc – to resistance to war, big business’ greed, and other injustices. Google Maps makes this surprisingly easy, and although I’m not entirely sure how to do it, I’m sure I’ll figure it out as I go.
All I need now is names. If you’re interested in being listed so that people can contact you if they need some help in your area, please email me at rossmlevin at gmail dot com. Or just put the info in the comments, if you want. What I need is:
Your name
What you’re willing to provide
Your contact info (email and phone are preferred, but whatever you want to put is OK)
Your zip code
I don’t want to get too specific, because we all know how snoopy the CIA is 😉
Seriously, though, if this comes together I think it could be a useful tool for activists all over the place. Say you’re traveling to Philadelphia to help out the striking nurses at Temple University and you need a place to stay for a few days – you could check the map and see that, hey, rossl lives near Philadelphia. Then you could call me up and see if it’s all right if you crash at my place for a few days while you’re helping these nurses.
In short, if this works out, it could potentially make organizing these things easier. In a best case scenario, that would mean more action is taken.
Continue reading Help me create democratic infrastructure with google mapsFrom: Green-Rainbow Party of Massachusetts
April 2, 2010: For Immediate Release
Contact: office@green-rainbow.org
Green-Rainbow Party Regional Conventions provide a great opportunity to meet fellow Party members and supporters in your community, share your ideas, discover ways to support action on your key issues by working with others…
…and to get involved playing an important role in an important, high-profile campaign! This year’s slate of six regional conventions will feature appearances by gubernatorial candidate Jill Stein; Rick Purcell, candidate for Lieutenant Governor; Nat Fortune, running for Auditor of Massachusetts; and other candidates for local legislative offices. Our conventions serve as intimate forums in which to meet Jill and to hear her unique and inspiring message:
Continue reading GRP 2010 Regional Conventions to Feature Appearances by State, Legislative, and Local CandidatesUpdate: June edition of We, The Media has been posted.
Update: May edition of We, The Media has been posted.
Green Mass Group is proud and humbled to have entered the emerging arena of people-powered media. We have big designs on a grassroots, decentralized, and democratized truth-telling apparatus working in synergy and solidarity with other institutions of the same nature. We see a variety of important institutions in existence that need to be supported and nourished, and we dream of a slew of other institutions that do not yet exist. We hope to play a small part in organizing the voices of the people of the Commonwealth and beyond into a beautiful and powerful chorus that reflects and articulates our deepest desires so that they may become reality.
Email from Jill Stein, 4/2/10:
Dear friends and supporters,
Please join me in welcoming Rick Purcell as my Lieutenant Governor running mate! As my lieutenant governor, Rick will mobilize grassroots support across the state for our campaign for a healthy, secure green future. He’ll also galvanize opposition to the corrupt status quo at the root of the many crises we currently face. We’ll be joining Rick in his hometown of Holyoke this Saturday for an official announcement. See below for biographical information on Rick. Saturday’s event will also mark the kickoff of our signature gathering campaign. For those who have been anxious to get involved, now is the time! See below for details on the lieutenant Governor/signature drive kickoff event, including ways to get involved in signature collection if you can’t come on Saturday.
In other news, our campaign is eligible to receive public financing from the state this year. As you may know, public financing loosens the grip of wealthy special interests on our political system, and makes it possible for people powered campaigns like ours to compete statewide without being hijacked by deep-pocketed special interests. As a longtime advocate of public financing for political campaigns, it’s an honor to be asking you to help us qualify for matching funds. If our campaign raises the minimum required to qualify ($125,000), the state will match that amount and everything we raise over it DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR!! So if we can raise $250,000, we will be able to mount a half million dollar campaign! And Massachusetts politics will never be the same. Please be as generous as you can, and give today so that we can take advantage of yet another amazing opportunity.
Upwards,
Jill
I support an effective public transportation system centered on the residential, employment, and business corridors of Berkshire County. Employers tell me that for many workers and job-seekers, reliance on a private automobile and the lack of other options prevents people from gaining employment, getting to work, and can cause disruption other workers’ schedules when something goes wrong. Individuals tell me that for many of them a private automobile is a major debt-inducing financial burden. We all know that encouraging use of public transportation is good for the environment and for lowering our carbon footprint.
Clearly, Americans are re-thinking their relationship with the car. It’s seldom as advertised.
Two years ago my husband and I went from being a two-car family to a one-car family. Our local public transportation network allowed us to do that. As I began using the system regularly I applied to the Lenox Select Committee, which then appointed me to represent the town on the system’s board. This system, the Berkshire Regional Transit Authority, will benefit from a study conducted last year by the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, which advised it on developing revised routes and schedules in order transport residents and visitors to employment, business, cultural, and retail centers – where they needed to go and when they needed to go there. This study was long overdue because employment, shopping, and residential patterns had shifted considerably since the last comprehensive analysis of the system.
The study and planning is only the beginning. The funding ahd legislative championing makes it happen.
A public transportation network is a key infrastructure component for healthy, green, and forward-looking communities. When elected to the 4th Berkshire District State Representative seat this year, I will be a loud and strong advocate for public transportation.
For more information on my campaign, please visit:
http://www.scottlaugenour.org
Folks, a weekly email post from Ralph Nader, the patriot who’s been blowing the whistle on how the corporations have been taking away the citizens’ sovereignty, livelihood, health, liberty, and dreams ever since our American experiment began. – Larry Ely
A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.
One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?
Economic decay is all around. Poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, job export, consumer debt, pension attrition, and crumbling infrastructure are well documented. The self-destruction of the Wall Street financial giants, with their looting and draining of trillions of other people’s money, have been headlines for two years. During and after their gigantic taxpayer bailouts from Washington, DC, the banks, et al, are still the most powerful force in determining the nature of proposed corrective legislation.
Continue reading America In Decay Due to Its Own Ideological Blindness – NaderArundhati Roy:
…So the first message I would have to peace activists is — I don’t know what that means, anyway. What does “peace” mean? You know, we may not need peace in this unjust society, because that’s a way of accepting injustice, you know? So what you need is people who are prepared to resist, but not just on a weekend, not peace but not just on the weekend. In countries like India, now just saying, “OK, we’ll march on Saturday, and maybe they’ll stop the war in Iraq.” But in countries like India, now people are really paying with their lives, with their freedom, with everything. I mean, it’s resistance with consequences now. You know, it cannot be — it cannot be something that has no consequences. You know? It may not have, but you’ve got to understand that in order to change something, you’ve got to take some risks now. You’ve got to come out and lay those dreams on the line now, because things have come to a very, very bad place there.
Continue reading “What does `peace’ mean?” Arundhati Roy on “Gandhians With Guns”It was probably around thirty years ago that I went to a basement apartment near Harvard Square for a presentation by two people visiting from Auroville, a religious community and ecovillage near Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, India. The man and woman talked about their work planting trees and reforesting the area. They showed slides, focusing on a method they derived by trial and error to provide water for their saplings by molding bunds, small catchment basins just downslope from the tree to gather rainwater so that it could soak down into the roots. They talked about following erosion gullies upslope to where they began and using stones and pebbles to stop the erosion at the source. They said that after more than a decade of work, the weather had noticeably changed in the region and the seasonal rains had returned.
How did we get into this mess?
A little bit at a time and because everybody does it.
We get out of it just
that same way.
4/23/01 John Berry, in conversation
The phone rang yesterday morning a little before 10. The first thing I heard on picking up the receiver was a low din of voices, so I asked, rhetorically, if this was a personal call. It was “Phyllis” calling to ask if I would renew my $40 membership to WGBY-TV in Springfield.
I asked her if WGBY rebroadcasts the debates of candidates for statewide office that originate on WGBH-TV in Boston.
She said that WGBH and WGBY are sister stations. She may have been calling from the Boston area because she said she didn’t know whether “you in Western Massachusetts” or “you in the Springfield area” got to see those debates.
I mentioned that WGBH and WGBY are beneficiaries of the WGBH Educational Foundation, and she seemed to agree. But she was principally concerned with getting me to renew at the $40 level or higher with WGBY.
I told her I didn’t think I could renew because the last time Jill Stein ran for governor as the Green-Rainbow Party’s nominee, in 2002, she was excluded by the “Consortium,” of which WGBH is a part, from participating in the gubernatorial debates. That was the year Republican Mitt Romney was elected governor, garnering 50 percent of the vote to Democrat Shannon O’Brien’s 45 percent. Stein finished third in a field of five with 76,530 votes, or about 3.5 percent.
Continue reading Call from WGBY