Not many politicians, even progressive ones with a strong sustainability commitment, would try to live on today’s food stamp budget. Hats off to Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker for this bold step–showing his colleagues what it’s actually like to be poor.
Of course, he can go back to his regular life any time he wants. An option not open to very many of those who live on SNAP assistance.
Here are six resources from major organizations like the National Association of School Psychologists and American Academy of Pediatrics to help children deal with grief. Thanks to Bob Korngold who posted these on a discussion list for self-publishers, and to the person in his Montessori community who compiled them. I personally have not vetted them.
The National Association of School Psychologists — A National Tragedy: Helping Children Cope
American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry – Children and Grief
Massachusetts General Hospital for Children — Talking to Children About a Shooting
Child Mind Institute – Caring For Kids After A School Shooting
As for what I consider some of the deepest wisdom about the whole problem of violence–with sources ranging from President Obama to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, see my roundup post from earier today, “After Newtown: The Best Voices.“
I am going to let others speak for me this time.
President Barack Obama, at the Sunday vigil:
“These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. … Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
Former US Senator Gary Hart—”Real Minutemen, Rise Up,” on Huffington Post:
Let’s have a new, sober, serious, non-paranoid gun organization whose members are the sane, thoughtful, responsible sportsmen who share the belief of the vast majority of Americans that assault weapons have no place in U.S. society. These mature minutemen also share the belief that state licensing of weapons, checks for criminal and mental backgrounds, and elimination of unregulated gun shows are necessary for a secure society.
We continue to spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, of tax dollars to achieve the elusive goal of national security. The movie-goers of Aurora, the little children of Newtown, were not secure. Those children are just as dead as if al Qaeda had killed them. Killing children is not a political issue: it is a moral issue.
The militia of the Constitution, now the National Guard and Reserve forces, are composed of serious, responsible citizens. Many are hunters and fishermen. They do not require an organization with a central message of paranoia to represent them. They should now form their own organization to speak for them and the great majority of gun owners would join them.
Juan Cole—”Questions I ask myself about Connecticut School Shooting“, Informed Comment
Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings? He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire. Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?…
What in the world does the 2nd amendment have to do with these incidents? Do they look like a “well-regulated militia” to you? Semi-automatic weapons are the 18th-century equivalent of artillery in terms of their ability to kill. Do you think people should be allowed to have artillery pieces in their back yards, too? Is this some sort of sick joke, that you are telling us our children have to die because the Founding Fathers wanted madmen to have high-powered weaponry?…
Why aren’t there more class-action lawsuits against the people responsible for the proliferation of high- powered weaponry in our society? Lax gun laws and inadequate security checks in Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky and 7 other states meant that they supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states in one recent year. The guns aren’t randomly acquired, and they aren’t used or Saturday night specials. They come disproportionately from specific states…
Why doesn’t anyone on television news ever simply give this statistic: In one recent year, there were 39 murders by gun in the UK, but 9,000 in the United States? Why is it wrong to let Americans know how peculiar is the situation Americans have to live in?
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center (from his 12/16/12 newsletter,not yet posted on his website):
The address and phone number of the NRA (National Rifle Association) are 11250 Waples Mill Rd, Fairfax, VA 22030; (703) 267-1000. Please call…through the week. (In Jewish tradition, “sitting shiva” to mourn the dead takes seven days.). If you get a busy signal, Good! That means many people are calling; please keep calling for as long as you have the time. When you get through, ask for Wayne LaPierre (NRA’s executive director) and when you reach his office begin reading the names of the Newtown Connecticut dead that are listed above. When you have read some of the names, say that you insist the NRA announce it supports a Federal law prohibiting assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons and supports a Universal Background Check. This should not take more than five minutes. When you have done this, please drop me a note at Office@theshalomcenter.org
George Lakoff, “The Price of Our Freedom,” Huffington Post:
Total registration, just like with cars. An end to automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And an end to blaming massacres on crazies. Gun massacres require guns that can massacre. Eliminate them.
Filmmaker/Activist Michael Moore, in a speech Friday night in NYC:
Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country… We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.
And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.
Later today I’ll post some resources for helping children deal with grief.
“Framing” is the way you position an issue, ideally in terms that are easy to grasp. Alan Grayson is one of the few on the left (Van Jones is another) who are really good at framing. Look how he describes the impact of Walmart’s low wages as an attack on taxpayers, on Cenk Uygur’s national TV show—something people on the right can relate to. (The full transcript is at that link.)
As you pointed out, the average associate at Walmart makes less than $9 an hour. I don’t know how anybody these days can afford their rent, afford their food, afford their health coverage, afford their transportation costs just to get to work, when they’re making only $9 an hour or less.
And who ends up paying for it? It’s the taxpayer…The taxpayer pays the earned income credit. The taxpayer pays for Medicaid. The taxpayer pays for the unemployment insurance when they cut their hours down. And the taxpayers pay for other forms of public assistance like food stamps. I think that the taxpayer is getting fed up paying for all these things when, in fact, Walmart could give every single employee it’s got, even the CEO, a 30% raise, and Walmart would still be profitable… I don’t think that Walmart should, in effect, be the largest recipient of public assistance in the country. In state after state after state, Walmart employees represent the largest group of Medicaid recipients, the largest group of food stamp recipients, and the taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear that burden. It should be Walmart. So we’re going to take that burden and put it where it belongs, on Walmart.
Consider framing for wide appeal when you develop your organizing messages. If you plan carefully, framing can play a major role in the debate. I credit a lot of the success of Save the Mountain, the environmental group I started in 1999 that beat back a terrible development project in just 13 months, to the careful attention I paid to framing, starting with the very first press release and continuing through the whole campaign.
22 years ago, the first known CSA (community -supported agriculture farm) organized in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, US; now, there are somewhere between 4570 and 6500 US farms selling shares ahead of the season.
During the same period, the number of farmers markets in the US exploded roughly 500 percent, from about 1350 to 7864. The local food sector in general has seen an astounding 24 percent annual growth for 12 consecutive years! This while the economy for the past several years has been far from robust.
All the above stats come from this slowmoney.com summary of a talk by Gary Paul Nabhan, considered by some “the father of the local food movement.” And the article didn’t even mention such numbers as the growth in Fair Trade and organic, or the way terms like “locavore” have entered our vocabulary.
In short, despite the defeat of GMO-right-to-know legislation in California, sustainable foods are definitely on an uptick.
Triple Pundit speculates that Romney, newly reinstalled on Marriott’s Board of directors, may become much greener again, as he was in the old days before he went out looking for the Neanderthal/climate denier vote.
As a Massachusetts resident, I didn’t find him all that green as governor but lightyears ahead of the positions he took as presidential candidate.
Our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, runs a political column by a local conservative, Dr. Jay Fleitman. I know him a little; our kids went to preschool together, back in the day.
And thus I can say that Jay is a bright guy—and in person, quite pleasant. But you wouldn’t know it from his columns, which closely parrot the right-wing talking points of Fox News bloviators and the more extreme Republican politicians, whether or not they have a basis in fact. His writing is very typical of those who claim to speak for Republican voters these days.
Sometimes, I write letters to the editor debunking his statements. But I can’t rebut yesterday’s column that way, because I recently submitted a letter on another topic; the quota is one per month. Fortunately, I have no quota on how often I blog.
His column was called “Not an Accidental Republican.”
He writes:
Unemployment is crushing in the black population after four years of this president…yet 97 percent of blacks voted for Obama.
Where did this crushing unemployment come from? From the wildly unregulated chaos of Wall Street under George W. Bush, undermining both the Main Street economy—rewarding “job creator” companies through tax loopholes for “creating” jobs overseas—and the housing market, writing mortgages that no reasonable person could justify and frequently yanking those mortgages without anything even close to due process (often in communities of color). Bush inherited the strongest economy of my lifetime, if I’m not mistaken—and, not coincidentally, a country at peace. He gave the megacorporate multinational foxes not just the keys to the henhouse, but to the entire farm. And he wrecked the economy, the peace, and our status among nations.
Has Obama fixed the economy? No. He’s made a start. But he’s too timid, too much of a closet 1970’s-style Republican to do what needs to be done. A massive federal jobs program focused on clean energy and infrastructure repair would be a long step forward, but he’s not willing to take it. (I’ve been advocating such a plan for years.)
My wife has another great solution to the unemployment problem: provide tax breaks around job creation only when a job is created in the U.S. Voila—jobs in the private sector, in this country.
Describing the reaction of a young Democrat who was interviewing him, Jay writes,
I think that he was taken aback by the perspective that there is nothing particularly enlightened or sophisticated in the notion of a big centralized government intruding widely in society, that this is an old model found throughout human history with varying degrees of despotism.
That which makes the American experiment so unique was the founding of a government with a primary directive of protecting the degrees of freedom of its citizens. And yes, it is his political party that is the party of enlarging government.
Hmmm, let’s see…what’s the biggest expansion of federal government authority and what are the most obvious instances of U.S. government despotism in recent years? Oh yes, the Department of Homeland Security including the TSA…the imprisonment without trial, waterboarding and other torture at places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram…the crackdown on dissent at home in violation of the First Amendment…and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—sovereign nations—under false pretenses. Who was president at the time? Well, what do you know; it was George W. Bush. Why didn’t Jay speak out against these appalling attacks on liberty?
Once again, Obama’s failings here are in not doing enough. He broke his promise to close Guantanamo, and he has taken his time about winding down the wars—to name two among many examples.
By the way, I asked, if we don’t have the fiscal conservatism of Republicans, then who did he think was going to be stuck with the $16 trillion debt? It’s not my generation, as we’ll be skating into Medicare, Social Security and retirement. It will be his generation, so what were they possibly thinking with over 70 percent voting for Obama?
Again, this is the Republicans’ debt. Bill Clinton left not just a balanced budget but an actual surplus, which Bush utterly squandered (wars and attacks on civil liberties are expensive, and so was the decision to slash revenue). If Republicans are serious about ending that debt (which would be a good idea), why are they so resistant to raising revenue?
During the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, when both Jay and I were born, the top-earner tax rate was 91 percent; it was 50 percent during Reagan’s first term. So why is it considered so burdensome to bring the top income tax rate back from today’s 36 percent up to the 39.6 where it had been under Clinton (a time of enormous, unparalleled prosperity)? Also, let’s not forget that the income for many high-net-worth U.S. citizens is actually a good deal lower, because much of it is taxed at a much lower rate as capital gains—this is how Mitt Romney got away with paying about 14 percent. And don’t get me started on the way many highly profitable U.S.-based corporations pay little or even nothing in taxes.
The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. right now is beginning to look like some kind of Third-World banana republic. The income inequality, or disparity, is obscene. Social services have been slashed by successive presidents from both parties for 30+ years, since Reagan took office; the poor have been disproportionately hit by programs to shift money from the have-nots to the haves. Taxes for high-income earners are actually far lower in the U.S. than they are in much of Europe; Germany, Portugal, Austria and the United Kingdom all have high-earner tax rates of 45 to 50 percent. France’s 40 percent maximum tax rate kicks in at just €69,783 ($91,083.52) per year.
Why do we need taxes? To pay for three things:
If you support the idea that governments should provide those services, you have to support paying for them—and you cant keep funding them disproportionately out of the torn and ragged pockets of those who have the least. If we stopped getting into wars and funding a military many times larger than even Russia’s, we wouldn’t have created the debt (again, this happened during the Republicans’ watch).
It’s time for people like Jay Fleitman to stop throwing red herrings around, to stop whining about the Democrats who are trying to clean up the Republican mess, and to come together as a nation to solve our problems. A fair revenue program is a logical step to move forward.
Scary article on Huffington Post: Duke Energy’s Oconee nuclear power plant is at serious risk of flooding–and the NRC has lied to Congress about it. The plant is only 11 miles downstream from Jocassee Dam, whose likelihood of failure has been estimated at a completely unacceptable 1 in 163 per year. If Jocassee fails, it could generate a 16.8-foot wall of water at Oconee–which is only built to handle a 5-foot flood.
This highly dangerous nuclear power plant plant should be Shut. Down. Now. Fukushima completely eliminates the “it can’t happen here” argument.
Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?
This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.
Davis argues compellingly that a lot of our difficulties with reducing waste, reducing raw materials, and reducing carbon impact stem from the way we’ve historically designed our machinery from the premise that raw materials will be not only abundant, but very pure. These 19th and 20th-century machines need a constant stream of very pure raw materials, and that is unsustainable. In fact, he cites a contract between a town and a trash-to-energy incinerator that inflicts monetary penalties on the town if it fails to supply enough trash. Can you say “goodbye, recycling!”?
He proposes that as a society, we change our society’s thinking about this: that we design machines that don’t require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, but instead can use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:
In contrast, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.
Yesterday, I got into a heated discussion with a very conservative neighbor about the potential for clean energy in this country. He doesn’t think it’s practical to power the whole country through solar, wind, small hydro, etc. I do—but only if we first reduce our energy loads, and I argued that we can easily cut energy use in half or more with today’s technology.
So I appreciated the timing of these two articles on Triple Pundit that crossed my desk this morning.
First, deep conservation can save us 50 percent on existing buildings, 90% if incorporated into the design of new buildings. I know of a solar house built in 1983, long before solar and conservation technology evolved to today’s sophistication, that was pretty darn close to net-zero energy. If we’d mandated this in the early 1980s, we wouldn’t be facing the climate crisis we have today. And second, the price of solar continues to fall.
I live in a house built in 1743, which we solarized. It has both solar hot water and a small PV system–and we hope to tie in to the cow poop-powered methane generator that our farmer neighbors are building for their farm that was established in 1806. My neighbors across the street from the farm put geothermal in their 1747 home and use it for heating, cooling, and hot water.
And we live in Massachusetts, a much cloudier and colder place than many other parts of the US, and the world. Similarly, cloudy, cold Germany is a world leader in solar. If we can do it—so can you.
