Category: Activism

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Today should have been the joyous 250th anniversary of the world’s first modern-state democracy. (Yes, I know, the structure borrowed heavily from the  Haudenosaunee Confederacy.) Instead, it feels all-too-much like a family gathering at the bedside of someone on life support, someone who may not make it too much longer.

Democracy has taken such a beating in the year and a half since an open fascist, racist, sexist, anti-planet, convicted criminal, self-dealing monster—the greediest and cruelest president in history, a man who has used his office not for good but for personal enrichment and war against his perceived enemies that this anniversary feels like a deathbed watch. He so embodies all the reasons the Colonies left the paternalistic mix of oppression and protection provided by King George that Andy Borowitz wrote this updated Declaration of Independence. Here are the first three of his long list of grivances:

  • He has engaged in corrupt schemes to profit from his office, plunder the Treasury, and steal from the taxpayers.
  • He has desecrated the People’s House and the nation’s capital.
  • He has perverted the Department of Justice to take revenge on his perceived enemies.

But the patient—our democracy—while bleeding profusely and crying out in pain, is not dead. We are in charge of the miracle cure, and it’s called nonviolent resistance.

And this powerful and honorable tradition, which has brought down many governments and reformed many others, goes back thousands of years. The earliest documentation I know of is from Exodus 1:1-19, which tells the story of how the midwives Shifra and Puah disobeyed Pharaoh’s command to kill the Hebrew male babies, telling him that the women gave birth so fast, they couldn’t get there in time. Which is why, today, I chose to wear a t-shirt that proclaims, “Resisting Tyrants Since Pharaoh,” even though the protest march I planned to wear it to was canceled due to an extreme heat advisory.

In recent days, we’ve seen the impact of nonviolent resistance. We’ve seen the impact of mass protests like No Kings in the slow and grudging willingness to resist at least a few of T’s irrational and unconstitutional demands from both the Supreme Court and the Republican majorities in Congress—both of whom could have easily reined in T’s authoritarianism and attacks on democracy just by holding to the settled body of law, as they were more willing to do during his first term. It’s too little and too late, but it’s a sign that the voices of ordinary citizens are being heard even when those in power claim to ignore them.

We’ve also seen the impact of courageous individual actions taken at great personal risk, such as USAF Major Jason Watson, who has 23 honors and decorations in his long military career and was arrested on July 1, in uniform, for holding a sign saying “Impeach Convict Remove” on the steps of the US Capitol. His action could not only cost him his job (three years before retirement). He could also serve considerable prison time and forfeit his retirement pay. Fully aware of the consequences, he carried out the action anyway, in the long tradition of people like Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers, vastly strengthening the peace movement during the Vietnam war) and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Also this week, we’ve had prosecutor Jack Smith finally talking about the cases against T that would have almost certainly resulted in another round of convictions had they been allowed to go to trial. Smith says openly and directly that he “will not be intimidated.” But if the treatment of James Comey, Leticia James, Mark Kelly, and others is any clue, it’s a pretty safe bet that he will be harassed in some powerful way by government stooges who act as if the First Amendment only applies to Trumpistas. The first link is to the video, the second, to a written summary.

These brave actions are perhaps even more important than the mass demonstrations—because they show raw courage and a willingness to sacrifice everything for what’s right. Many have died for these principles, both here in the US and elsewhere. To name four prominent non-US examples: Alexei Navalny in Russia, Salvador Allende in Chile,  Steve Biko in South Africa, Gandhi in India.

This is even more remarkable considering the level of repression this government has engaged in, including:

Yet, we persist. Millions of people in the US have participated in at least one No Kings march or at least one mass organizing call by a broad coalition of progressive groups (among them Public Citizen, MoveOn, Movement Voter Project, 50501, and several others) spearheaded by the Working Families Party. Voting turnouts are high, and many “safe Republican”seats have been switched. Numerous administration policies have been overturned or cancelled under public pressure, though not without doing substantial damage first. Activists from many groups have trained other activists in peaceful protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, finding levers to encourage noncooperation among the officials carrying out these brutal policies, and so much more.

And we have not only inspiration, such as the photos of protests around the country Robert Hubbell publishes daily in his Today’s Edition newsletter (usually a mix of sidewalk and park protests alongside “bridge brigades”displaying banners and signs from highway overpasses.

We also have road maps, such as…

  • An amazing list of 346 nonviolent tactics, the first 198 compiled by Gene Sharp in the pre-Internet, pre-Covid era, and another 148 compiled by Michael Beer of Nonviolence International. Personal note: I’ve been a fan of this list for years and have cited it several times. Two weeks ago, I got to meet Michael, chat with him as we hiked our neighborhood mountain, and have dinner with several others as we hosted a gathering for a mutual friend who was in from California. He told me he could have expanded the list again with many more tactics, but he wasn’t able to keep up with them.
  • The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, especially Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011). This scholarly study compares the success of violent versus nonviolent struggles and provides evidence to explain why nonviolent ones have both a higher success record and, usually, more lasting effects. The above link takes you to the book’s page on Bookshop.org, where your purchase supports the independent bookstore of your choice, instead of the billionaire who continues to be one of T’s most prominent enablers in the second term. I believe in using our economic power to help accomplish our goals, so I avoid shopping at the world’s largest online store, just as I do most of my searching and much of my web browsing on Ecosia.org, a nonprofit which plants a tree for every search (and I think another tree for every tab opened on its browser).
  •  Chronicles of the current struggle, the history of resistance, and of people you may not have heard of but whose contributions matter. A few among dozens: Waging Nonviolence, Choose Democracy, Black Lives Matter, Rebecca Solnit, Heather Delaney Reese, Heather Cox Richardson, Jessica Craven, especially her Sunday Extra Extra good news roundup, the aforementioned Robert Hubbell (link is above), Black History Stories, A Mighty Girl (feminist history), Josh Helfgott (LGBT and political news), Moments from the Past (Black and general history)…
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, language, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Headlining it “Never think you are too powerless to make a difference!,” I shared a post on Facebook about an elementary school teacher in the then-broke Chicago school system finding a way to fund that system by forcing the city’s utilities to pay their fair share, as required but not enforced under existing law.

Someone commented that this victory could never have happened today, because “The courts are all shills for the other side. They would look at her hand written ledgers and say she made it all up.”

This was my response:

You’re such a pessimist! I’ve been part of enough successful “impossible” struggles that I named my TEDx talk “Impossible” is a Dare! [To watch that talk, click the link above and select “videos” and then “event videos”].

Yes, we lose a lot. But we win sometimes. And if we choose not to bother because we won’t win, we certainly lose. Right now, I’m active on two fronts. The immigration justice work is depressing, because as long as the current federal government is in power, we will always be sticking a finger in the dike to try to prevent a flood: it’s not enough but it’s something. Once in a while, we even win some small victory.  Occasionally, as in the Minneapolis resistance, we win a big one.

I’m a lot more optimistic about the safe energy work, even after hearing the State Senator in charge of the energy bill basically say yesterday that he was going ahead with trying to repeal our nuclear protections.

Why? Because even if we lose the fight to keep the repeal out of the bill (which is likely), we are a long way from done. Any nuclear plant trying to build in MA is going to be confronted in every public hearing, and even if they get their permits, there will be people in front of the construction sites holding big signs and maybe even filling the jails in civil disobedience. There might even be a movement to withhold that portion of the electric bill going to the project.

One of those victories that inspired the TEDx talk was starting the movement that led me to the work I’ve been doing for about 25 years. A developer announced a plan to build 40 McMansions all the way up the mountain right next to a much-loved state park. It wasn’t the plan itself in the newspaper article that moved me to take action, but the quotes from local environmentalists who should have known better, all issuing variations on “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.” When I saw those quotes, I knew I had to prove them wrong.

So I put out a call for the first meeting of Save the Mountain. I rode my bicycle around the neighborhood distributing fliers, announced it in local media, and spread it around to my friends.

From that first press release and flier, I maintained the mindset that we would win. I expected that 20 or 30 people would show up, maybe 5 would get seriously involved, and we’d make the developer’s life miserable for five years or so before our victory.

It was a pleasant shock when 70 people crammed themselves into our dining room, formed a core group of more than 30, assigned ourselves into committees—and won just over a year later. I attribute a lot of both our success and our rapid pace of victory to that success mindset. It was a game changer.

That activist campaign used everything I knew after 20+ years in marketing. After we won, I started pondering what lessons from the activist world could make a difference on the business side, and that’s how I started sharing the message that social and environmental good are business success tools. Four of my ten books are specifically about that, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’m happy to send you a PDF at no charge if you subscribe to my newsletter and then reply to the welcome message requesting one.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, language, Mindset, Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , ,

This post started on Facebook, as a response to replies to this article by an Israeli expat living in the US who’s an expert on genocide, which I posted on April 22. There’s a spirited discussion going on at that post, which you can read by clicking on this sentence. Be sure to read the replies to the comments, and the replies to the replies—and to make sure that you’re viewing either “all comments” or “newest” and not “most relevant,” which will block some of the responses.

What follows is a response to Richard, who defends Zionism as providing a safe haven for Jews in a world that never had one before, a place where Jews can seek refuge from the pogroms of their particular generation—and to Robert, the person he was responding to, who posted that trauma often begets trauma, unless there is a deliberate effort to “alchemize” it into something positive, and who criticizes Zionism as “designed by colonialist and brutally implemented, and is now more ruthless than ever.” It’s posted there as a reply to Robert

This post is a substantial expansion of what I wrote—with considerable updating here but not in the original response, including several links to back up my claims:

Robert, Zionism had two impulses: One was protection against antisemitic violence, as Richard so eloquently describes in his response to you. The other was the one we progressives were hoodwinked into believing: that this was the chance to create a utopia, a place where women and men were equal, a place to recover a desert “land with no people for a people with no land”—(as I was told at the yeshivas [Jewish day schools] I attended as an elementary school student and again in the meetings of the Jewish Student Union at my secular city-wide high school), a semi-socialist endeavor based on cooperation.

It’s a bit hard to find, but the movie, “Israelism,” has an excellent analysis of how that idealism didn’t match the reality on the ground. Something I don’t remember if the movie addresses is the way the land itself was colonized. In my childhood, we were always sending money to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel. But just as we didn’t know about the Palestinians forced into exile, we also didn’t know that JNF was ripping out native species to plant non-native pine forests that have not been kind to the ecosystem—and of course, the Israeli government frequently bulldozes Palestinian olive trees in retaliation for perceived injuries, while Israel also often narrows the land of the local Palestnians so the settlers end up harvesting stolen oil.

The racist plans of Golda and Ben-Gurion [Perplexity.ai search for “statements against arabs from David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir made before 1967”, conducted April 24, 2026) were not in the open, and neither was the reality that, ahem, this was NOT “a land with no people.” It was a land whose people had largely been kicked out in 1948. So you had the yin and the yang, protection from evil and creation of good. But the creation of good was largely built on a lie and certainly doesn’t match the cruelty of today’s Israeli government agains tthe people their parents and grandparents threw off their land. Yes, Palestinians within the Green Line can vote and even have representation in the Knesset. But they have been actively discriminated against the whole time, just as Blacks in the US have been. Housing and job opportunities are not equal. Open racism is common.

Richard, I’ve been to Israel twice, in 1986 and again in 2014. Both times, Dina and I have sat and talked with Palestinians—and on the first trip, we interviewed several leaders of different organizations within the Israeli peace movement. We stayed part of the time with a Palestinian family in the Galilee, part of the time with my right-wing settler relatives, and even in an Arab-owned hotel in East Jerusalem. And we visited the ultrareligious Yiddish-speaking branch of my family that had fled to Israel to escape the Holocaust. On the first trip, we stayed in a traditional kibbutz, and on the second trip, a kibbutz for people in the Transcendental Meditation world. My right-wing Orthodox sister made Aliyah [moved to Israel] with her husband and three of their four grown children, who have all had kids born in Israel.

So I have sat down and broken bread with people on all sides of the spectrum—including a man who was ten years old in 1948 when the soldiers told his family they’d be back in their homes in two weeks. That was not a planned encounter; he was conducting a one-person Occupy movement at the one surviving building (the Orthodox church) in his childhood village WITHIN the Green Line, which the Israelis had bulldozed and turned into a national park that he now had to pay to enter.

That interview was conducted in Hebrew and translated for us by our host, a Dutch Holocaust refugee. He and his fellow refugee wife were two of the three Jews in a Druze village (the third was an elderly woman we didn’t get to meet, the last of her line, whose family managed to stay during the Babylonian Exile of 70 A.D. when the Jews were thrown out of present-day Israel). He also took us around to meet a bunch of his neighbors. And this couple were also the custodians of the actual carob tree that sustained Shimon Bar Yochai when he was hiding out from the Romans in a cave, 2000 years ago.

To me, if Zionsm is to remain viable, it MUST “alchemize” into something far more humane—something that would bring reality to the Koolaid we collectively swallowed as the utopian vision that didn’t exist was spooned out to us through a wall of lies, false promises, and exceptionalism. In its current form, not only is it attacking others, it also makes Jews LESS safe around the world. This is in part because conservative elements of the Jewish community insist on conflating antizionism with antisemitism—a conflation that I utterly resist and abhor. This division within the Jewish community is not new. It goes back at least as far as the founding of modern Israel in 1948.

But most Jews who get interviewed on national newscasts—politicians and college presidents, assorted right-wing pundits—claim that any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, and punish anti-Zionists (Palestinians especially, but also groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace). At the same time, the current US government has weaponized false claims of antisemitism to extort money from universities and attempt to control college curricula and suppress student activities—while, ironically, waving a banner of free expression.

These actions from the government and from right-leaning Jewish officials give the real enemies of Jews something to cling to and organize around, and creates a climate where hate crimes against Jews are somehow seen as forgivable because those who attack Jews just because they’re Jews can claim that Jews themselves have said that Jews must support the Israeli government’s vicious actions. We Jews are stereotyped as suppoters of an evil empire, and thus fair game for whatever mayhem comes our way. Thus, they claim they’re just opposing the racist and brutal incarnation of Zionism as conducted by the Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu has given advocates of peace and human rights real things to worry about (e.g., the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and looking the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinian civilians in the West Bank or within the Green Line)—never mind that a huge percentage of Jews both in Israel (which has had a massive peace movement for decades, though it had to rebuild after the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023) and in the Diaspora.

It’s important to note that many of these right-wing ideologues spouting this nonsense identify as so-called Christian Nationalists (not Christian at all, if you read Christ’s teachings, as I have). And many have a public history of antisemitism themselves. Here are some of the president’s anti-Jewish remarks and actions. And here are more of them (slight overlap) along with notes on antisemitism from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., FBI Director Kash Patel, and several other appointees.

I condemn the violence on all sides, including the violence of lies that demonize either people.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Entrepreneurship, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Mindset, Psychology, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Sixteen years after it was published, I’m reading Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin. I read his blog daily and have read several of his books. I also have a copy of an even earlier one, Purple Cow, on my to-read table.

His thesis is that workers should make themselves indispensable—not as prima donnas who nobody can work with, but as innovators who add far more value than they’re paid for because they take joy in it. And that managers should be eager to hire those folks and give them leeway and support to bring their A-game creativity, rather than crushing their souls in a rigid corporate culture.

One of Seth’s mantras has always been “ship your product.” Get it done, send it out into the world, and then tweak it. That’s what Apple and Microsoft both do (as we millions of unwilling beta testers can attest). That’s what Walt Whitman did, with his nine(!) different editions of Leaves of Grass, each time adding poems, changing the typeface, using a different author picture. And that’s what I’ve done with two series of marketing books, each of which started as a small self-published book, went to a major publisher, and then to a smaller publisher. So six of my ten books are actually series, with each new title more comprehensive, more up-to-date. I could easily write a fourth in each series, as a lot has changed since the most recent ones came out.

All well and good. BUT I take issue with Seth’s statement, “the only purpose of starting is to finish.”

I understand why he says this. He says many times in this book that real artists finish projects. His audience for that remark is the dreamers who doodle something amazing but never build it, never test it in the real world, never refine, iterate, or ship. To him, those folks are no better than the corporate cogs. But I do finish projects, when finishing the project makes sense. Thus, for me, starting a project is a way of exploring whether it’s worth completing.

As noted, I’ve written ten books. But I’ve probably written at least a dozen proposals or at least outlines for books I never wrote, not to mention dozens of unfinished blog posts, etc. I’m not a bad person because I didn’t finish those projects. In the 1990s, I wrote proposals like How to Find Your Next 10,000 Ideas and Sunshine on Your Shoulders (an ordinary person’s guide to renewable energy). The idea book was originally aimed at writers and called How to Find Your Next 10,000 Article Ideas.

Then I realized it would also be useful to clergy writing sermons, teachers doing lesson plans, and of course, inventors (among many others). I didn’t want to publish that one myself and I think I did send it around—with a sample chapter on finding ideas in classified ads, so maybe it’s just as well that I had no takers. The chapter would have been obsolete within a few years—and now, you could just ask an AI engine and get back hundreds of ideas per minute.

For the sunshine book, I realized that even though I’d already been doing marketing copywriting for green businesses and nonprofits for more than a decade (and by now,  for more than four decades), I didn’t have the technical knowledge and there was no way to keep up because that world was evolving almost daily. It would have been obsolete before it even went to press. But I had to write the outline to figure that out. Starting and not finishing the proposal was the right choice,  because the proposal made it clear that I didn’t want to put in enough effort to become expert in a sector that was and still is changing constantly.

Around 2003, I started revising my 1995 book on having fun cheaply. I completely overhauled and rewrote a couple of chapters, mostly adding information about Internet resources for things like travel planning. Then it hit me that it had taken me eight years of hard work to sell through a small print run of 2000 copies. I did a lot of things right, had major press coverage from the Christian Science Monitor to Redbook, did tons of radio interviews—but this book had only a very small market, because frugalists don’t like to spend money on books. I asked myself why I was putting so much effort into a book I already knew would be a flop, and I stopped working on the rewrite.

Abandoning all of those incomplete projects were each smart business decisions.

In 2020, during the pandemic, I came up with a great idea for a book: Leveraging the Great Pivot: How the Post-Pandemic Era Could Be Different, and Better: Long-Term Post-COVID Opportunities for Racial Justice, Economic Advancement, and Environmental Healing. This would have been a huge, sweeping book that had the potential to alter society for the better—IF I could successfully leverage it and get it in front of major influencers.

Again, this wasn’t one I would publish myself. I wrote a strong proposal that included about 90 people I’d try to interview (some famous, some not); annotated competitive title analysis with sales ranks; a summary of the marketing strategy including a named charity partner I’d worked with before, and more. I had the proposal pretty close to finished but never completed it. I suspect that once the first COVID vaccines were announced, I realized that taking one to two years to write the book and the publisher then taking at least another year to publish meant that the book  would be written for a world that no longer existed by the time it came out. And I wasn’t ambitious enough to rush it into production, especially because I recognized that rushing would mean a book of lower quality, that I’d be less proud of, and would be less effective in fostering the creation of that new world.

Instead, I suggested to one of my book shepherding clients that she put her full-length book project on hold until working at offices was a thing again, and instead spend three months to write and publish an ebook on thriving during the crisis. This was quite different from the book I’d have written and was not going to create any moment to completely reinvent the world—but helping her through it satisfied my need to make some difference in that crazy time.

Side question: How might Seth write it differently in today’s AI age? While we’ve evolved from the days where many people had no goal other than to be a replaceable but steadily employed cog in a factory, how do we re-evolve when machines can do almost everything we do, and do it much faster and less expensively (but, so far, not as well). He is a futurist who’s been aware of AI for a long time, and who both uses AI extensively and has a lot of criticisms of it—so maybe it wouldn’t be any different. But maybe it would be completely different.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Innovation, localism/locavore, Mindset, Networking, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

One of the strongest local economy advocates I know is Michael Schuman, who publishes the Main Street Journal. Today, he took on the US president’s attempts to strongarm voters and rig the election. And then he noted that David Plouffe, a key advisor in Obama’s successful “out of nowhere”run for the presidency in 2008, has said that demographically, he can’t win.

Schuman says the way to defeat Plouffee’s defeatism is to get half a million Democrats to move to states where T narrowly squeaked by in 2024. North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana all went GOP by less than 150,000 votes. These states are contiguous with each other—so, if that shift happened, we’d have an entire new liberal REGION bordering progressive Minnesota on the east and with only a thin strip of the Idaho Panhandle separating it from progressive Washington to the northwest. And it’s worth remembering that as recently as 1979, George McGovern—probably still the most progressive major-party presidential candidate in my lifetime—was the more conservative senator from South Dakota.

I agree that Plouffe is wrong. And so are all those pundits who keep howling at us that the Dems need to move way to the right.

But I’m not convinced that Michael Schuman’s solution is the way to get there. First, it’s going to be very hard to find those half million people willing to start their lives over for a hope of shifting their new state blue. Second, it’s going to be even harder to coordinate that effort so that just enough people land in the right districts in each of the swingable states. Third, there’s no guarantee it will work. Republicans would get wind of it and work much harder to get their base out or to recruit new residents of their own.

Fourth, and most importantly, a new culture doesn’t easily impose itself on an already established culture. I am a New York City native living in a rural area, on a working dairy farm in Massachusetts. My neighbors have 600 cows. New YorkCity values and lifestyles won’t work here. You want to build quality relationships with your neighbors, and that doesn’t happen by storming in, taking over, and stomping on the opinions and values of your neighbors. I seasoned for 17 years in a small college town and learned to be “bicultural” before I made the big move to the farm. If the existing communities feel disrespected, there will be no progress.

Here’s what I suggest instead: The Dems could finally figure out how to talk about real issues that working people care about without negating the social equity and environmental justice pieces. They need a lot more candidates like AOC, Bernie, and Mamdani, who’ve shown that we can move mountains if we organize where people are, and we don’t need to sacrifice the justice agenda to do it.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I sent a shortened version that fit in their contact forms with a copy to my own delegation, but here’s the entire letter. If it inspires you to write your own letter, Jeffries has a separate contact form for non-constituents.

 

Dear Leader Schumer and Leader Jeffries:

Please encourage your caucuses to terminate ICE funding and abolish the agency. The US managed without ICE until 2003. Democrats should be demanding to abolish it entirely—and there is wide public support for this: G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, a data-driven Substack, says it could be as high as 70%. It is the only course that can be morally and politically justified right now.

As a strong Democrat, former member of my local Democratic Committee, advisor to several successful local candidates since the 1980s, business owner since 1981, and immigration justice activist since 2019, may I humbly suggest that THIS is the moment to take a strong stand. ICE has broken so many laws about due process, use of deadly force, profiling, overstepping its legal requirement NOT to do local police work, and much more. It must be held accountable NOW.

  • Public sentiment following Renee Good’s murder is strongly against this rogue agency.
  • The memo just leaked that ICE unilaterally tells agents they don’t need a judicial warrant to break down the door of someone’s home will add to the people’s fury.
  • Even before the murder, millions of people have watched ICE’s brutal violence unleashed against ordinary people with no criminal record on video, and thousands have seen it live on the ground. Just as nightly news coverage of the horror shifted public support away from the Vietnam war, revulsion against ICE has shifted the territory on immigration.
  • We’ve all been affected by this barbarism. Homeowners have lost their landscaping crews, restaurant patrons can’t get decent service because so many cooks and servers have either been taken or are too afraid to come in, businesses are shutting down because they can’t get workers. It would be difficult to find a US resident who is more than two degrees of separation from one of those abducted.
  • US citizens and members of registered Native tribes who have more of a claim on our land than we do have been taken, as have immigrants here legally. Often, they’ve told their captors they have proof, but the agents are far more interested in making quota and having the chance to behave viciously than they are about justice or fairness or legality. And refuse to look at the documents. Sometimes it has taken weeks for the system to release. To name just two among many high-visibility cases, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil were detained for MONTHS. In Abrego Garcia’s case, the government quickly acknowledged that his arrest, detention, and deportation to a hellhole prison in a country the government was expressly prohibited from returning him to was a mistake. Khalil was here legally until the government unilaterally revoked it with no notice and no appeal process AS THEY WERE ARRESTING HIM. He was obviously punished for his publicly stated and First Amendment-protected political opinions.

THIS IS THE TIME FOR DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLD. In the early days of Trump 2, I kept hearing, “where are the Democrats? Why aren’t they shutting this atrocity down?” ICE is out of control and has ignored its mandated obligations around due process in favor of unchecked violence against the people. “Taco Trump” backs down whenever he faces a real challenge. We’ve seen that many times and saw that again in today’s news of his capitulation on retaliatory tariffs against the eight countries that came to Greenland’s defense. We Dems need to step up and loudly and consistently say to the American people (and vote accordingly):

  • The administration is stealing your healthcare money to fund an illegal and morally reprehensible—and totally unnecessary war—against the immigrants and descendants of immigrants and Native people as well as those who have flooded the streets to protect the first group’s rights who make this country great.
  • Biden, Obama, and Clinton controlled illegal entry without resorting to this disgusting violence and intimidation.
  • It’s becoming more and more clear that Trump sees ICE as his private army that he can use to attack opponents and suppress dissent. We’ve even seen elected officials and faith leaders handcuffed and/or detained, even in cases where they attempted to exercise their right of oversight at ICE and CBP facilities.

These talking points are what is resonating. We’re hearing them from a few individual members of Congress, but from the leadership, we’ve heard far too much about trying to get along and pass some lame bill that barely impacts ICE or Trump. Don’t make the mistake of 2016 when our candidate tried to defend the status quo while the people were crying so loudly for change that they elected a racist, clueless monster because HE was calling for change while she was calling for more of the same.

The working class of the US is in pain right now. We need to tie those economic struggles to Trump’s policies on deportation and a bunch of other things. We need to be loud, strong, and consistent. We need to be making these points in the news media every day—including on Fox. And we can start by supporting the people’s demand to abolish ICE once and for all.

Sincerely,

Shel Horowitz

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, media-general, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , ,

If you cringe when protestors describe the federal government as fascist, consider what happened today in Minneapolis, where a US citizen mom of a six-year-old was gunned down in cold blood by an ICE agent after she tried to escape when an agent ordered her (using the other f-word, according to some accounts) to get out of her car.

AP has about a dozen (somewhat repetitive) news stories about this. If you can stomach it, the BBC has the actual murder starting with an agent attempting to yank her car door open and continuing as she backs the car away and then is shot point-blank by a different agent.

Judging by this quote in the AP reports by Kristi Noem, “He’s been in situations like this before, and he certainly has been out there and followed his training today,” the feds know exactly who this terrorist murderer is. I hope Minnesota and/or Minneapolis law enforcement brings him to justice immediately.

I am APPALLED at everything the feds did in this totally avoidable and unacceptable assassination and the vile cover-up lies that they’ve been telling ever since—but I AM grateful for the mass public and local/state government outrage and their demand the ICE get the F out of the state. This is at least the fifth killing by immigration agents since T’s inauguration last year.

What has this great country of ours become?Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Gratitude, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Innovation, language, Marketing Trends/News, Media Ethics, media-general, Mindset, People Helping People, poverty, propaganda, Psychology, Publishing, Science, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

“We have built the safest civilisation in human history while convincing ourselves that we live in the most dangerous. Billions of people experienced measurable improvements in health, safety, and material conditions in 2025. That progress didn’t make the news. But it happened anyway, one vaccine, one school meal, one kilowatt-hour at a time.”
—Angus Hervey, Fix the News

From Fix the News, one of several good-news publications I receive—and one that skews toward science-based progress. This one does start with a depressing summary of the news we’ve all heard—but then moves into a long series of victories that most of us didn’t even now about. It pauses to excoriate mass media for amplifying the negative and superficial (e.g., celebrities) while ignoring unsexy but vital stories such as the amazing ocean treaties and the actual elimination of rampant fatal diseases, country by country. And then it finishes with another long list of victories for humanity and the other creatures we share this amazing planet with.

You won’t be sorry to spend ten minutes with this. https://fixthenews.com/p/the-telemetry?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4861955&post_id=182468358&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=sl4r&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, General Commentary, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, poverty, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

A very merry and soulful Christmas to all who celebrate it today. May you be inspired not only by Christ’s holiness but by His words and deeds in the Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan parable about welcoming and finding good in those from other cultures—even despised ethnic groups, His challenge not to kill a sinner unless you yourself are without sin, and his anti-greed action in the temple. May He inspire you to be a nonviolent warrior for social and economic justice, as He was. Have a blessed day.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post by Nina Amir

Promoting a cause or growing a movement often benefits from an atypical approach to activism. Instead of [editor’s note, as both a writer and activist: I would add “or in addition to”] marching, protesting, boycotting, or even building community with hashtags or forums, write and publish a book related to your cause. Allow your written words to create positive and meaningful change.

Most activists like to “do something,” such as participating in a march, joining a protest, writing letters, or fundraising for a cause. However, if you’re leading a movement—or want to further one —a book can provide a powerful boost to your other efforts.

Not convinced? Here are five powerful ways a book can support your cause.

 

  1. A book will attract new members to your movement.

When you launch your book and begin promoting it, you attract people to your movement who previously knew nothing about it. This is especially true if you share about the book on social media sites or with online ads.

With a book, you can shift your messaging from “join my movement” to “find out more about my cause here.” Plus, if you produce an ebook (rather than a printed book), you can give it away using free promotions. This tactic encourages people to download a digital book while it’s free, which can place your ebook on your publishing platform’s Top 100 (bestseller) list. That makes it more likely to be found by those interested in your movement. (You can run an evergreen free book campaign as well.)

 

  1. A book helps you promote your cause on a wider scale and to global audiences.

If you make your book available in markets across the world, global audiences discover it. As a result, your cause may move across oceans and continents.

Many book distribution services, including Ingram Spark and Amazon, offer global distribution. If your book is available in other countries, it only takes a few people sharing it in those markets to give your movement huge global visibility and an influx of international members.

 

  1. A book explains your cause and the steps required to achieve change.

It can become tedious to continually repeat your cause’s “pitch” to get people interested and involved. Additionally, you might find it boring to constantly tell others exactly how you feel they can make a difference in the world.

If you aren’t excited and passionate each time you share about your cause, your audience may feel your lack of excitement. And that low energy decreases the likelihood that they will join your movement.

You can explain all the details of your cause in the pages of a book…once. And you can provide readers with all the steps or ways to join your movement, including specific actions that result in change…once. You don’t have to continually repeat yourself. Simply, hand them a free copy of your physical or printed book. (Be sure to bring copies with you wherever you go.)

 

  1. A book can generate discussion about your cause.

People who join social media groups or forums enjoy discussions about topics they are passionate about. Your book can provide them with fodder for such conversations.

Readers love book groups. And those interested in a particular subject often join book clubs to discuss books on those topics.

You can create your book with this in mind. Include a chapter or appendix that encourages readers to form groups to discuss the book and implement the steps for creating change.

 

  1. A book becomes a unique, unforgettable “business card.”

There’s a common saying: “A book is the best business card” or “Your book is your business card.” Indeed, someone is more likely to remember you by your book than a business card that gets lost in their wallet or on their desk. Even digital business cards can be difficult to track.

Consider publishing a paperback version of your book. Then, offer a copy to anyone you meet who seems interested in your cause or knows someone who would want to learn more about your movement. People are less likely to lose the book, forget you, or forget to pass it along.

You can also get quite creative with a book. For example, you can leave copies for people to find at bus stations, on subway seats, or at the local coffee shop. You never know who might pick it up, read it, and join your movement. Or, better yet, someone influential might find it, read it, and share it in a way that goes viral.

 

What if you aren’t a writer?

As you probably realize by now, a book can prove quite supportive as you promote your cause. But maybe you don’t consider yourself a writer. Maybe you don’t believe you can write and publish a change-inspiring book.

Or you may want to devote your time to what you do best—activism. That’s okay.

You don’t need to be a writer to write and publish a book. Here’s why:

  • You can write a “messy” first draft to get your ideas on paper and then hire a great editor to polish your work into a publishable manuscript.
  • You can hire a ghostwriter to write the entire manuscript for you.

I don’t suggest using AI to write the book for you—at least if you want it to help support your cause. However, you could use AI to help you research the book or put your thoughts into a cohesive outline. If you decide to use AI to write the manuscript, rewrite, edit, and revise to make it “yours” or be sure it sounds like you. Of course, an editor or professional writer can help you create a final draft that is publishable—and doesn’t sound like AI wrote it.

Possibly, the idea of writing a full-length book feels daunting to you. In fact, your book doesn’t have to be long. You can write a short book—5,000 to 20,000 words long—and get your point across well and support your cause.

As for publishing, there are lots of experts who can hand-hold you through the process or teach you how to do it yourself. It’s not that hard. But beware of companies that charge a lot to help you self-publish, since most are vanity presses in disguise.

Don’t be put off by the writing and publishing process, especially if you believe a book could support your activism by providing a powerful educational and promotional tool. Instead, write a book that can change the world.

Do you believe a book could help you support your cause? Tell me in a comment below.

 

Nina Amir, the Inspiration to Creation Coach, is an 19X Amazon bestselling hybrid author. She supports writers on the journey to successful authorship as an Author Coach, nonfiction developmental editor, Transformational Coach, and Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC®)—the only one working with writers.

Nina’s most recent book, Change the World One Book at a Time: Make a Positive and Meaningful Difference with Your Words, will be published in January 2026 by Books that Save Lives. (Preorder it now and receive two bonuses!) Previously, she wrote three traditionally published books for aspiring authors—How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and Creative Visualization for Writers. Additionally, she has self-published a host of books and ebooks, including the Write Nonfiction NOW! series of guides. She has had 19 books on the Amazon Top 100 List and as many as six books on the Authorship bestseller list at the same time.

Find out more at https://ninaamir.com or https://writenonfictionnow.comFacebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail