Category: Democracy

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Environment, language, Politics Tagged with , , , ,

As Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union speech last night, I found myself agreeing with upwards of 95 percent of it—something that NEVER happened under his predecessor. And it’s good to be reminded in very concrete terms of how much progress has been made on the economy, and in drawing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (one of the few bits of foreign policy that made it into the very domestically focused speech).

Of course, some of why I agreed with such a large percentage was because of what he chose to omit: government spying, drone attacking civilians, support for highly dubious massive energy projects, and other things that I find strongly objectionable. He did mention the disgrace that Guantanamo is still open.

And he left out other things that should have been in there. I’m still waiting for him to call for a Marshall Plan-style conversion to clean, renewable energy. I’ve been waiting for that for years. He talked briefly about energy independence and the success in switching much more to US-based power sources—but failed to put it in context of solving environmental problems as we change our energy sources.

But the real question is: How will he get it done? Despite his calls to the Republicans’ higher selves, and his pointing out repeatedly that he could have moved a lot farther if he’d gotten some cross-party cooperation, implementation is the problem. He needs to motivate his base to be heard in the halls of power, to be convincing their Senators and Representatives that it’s in their own self-interest to end the gridlock.

With less than three years left in his presidency, he still has time to claim a place in history as one of the great presidents. But he’d better get started with that.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , ,

To lose Pete Seeger so soon after Nelson Mandela–two great champions of justice and democracy! If you want to know the true definition of an American Patriot, it’s spelled P-e-t-e  S-e-e-g-e-r. Not only was he an extremely talented musician and a devoted rabble-rouser on a host of social, labor, and especially environmental causes–for which he suffered greatly in the 1950s and ’60s–and not only can he claim a major role in cleaning up the Hudson River and co-founding the amazing Clearwater sloop and organization and folk festival…he was one of the most humble people I’ve ever met.

I used to see Pete Seeger at the Clearwater Revival, wearing a volunteer shirt and picking up trash. I got to bang a few nails with him once as he was building the Woody Guthrie (one of I think three small boats he built along with the Clearwater and the Sojourner Truth). And I interviewed at least once, saw him perform dozens of times live and numerous more on TV–growing up as a public television kid in New York City, where once the blacklist was lifted, he was frequently found on Channel 13–and hung out with him at some People’s Music Network conferences. He helped start PMN, started Sing Out! magazine, the Newport Folk Festival, a bunch of environmental and peace organizations, and many other ventures for the public good.

His 1963 Carnegie Hall concert is one of the 10 albums I’d absolutely insist on having if I were stranded on a desert island with one CD holder. Among other things, it contains the best of his dozen or so recordings of Wimoweh, long before that other group made it a top-40 hit. I own many other of his records, but that one is a standout.

 

And Pete walked his talk. Though he could certainly have afforded much grander housing, he lived for the last many decades in a small cabin outside Beacon, New York, on his beloved Hudson River, heating with wood he chopped himself. Though he could have gotten all wrapped up in ego, he spent his entire life championing newer musicians. He helped bring Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton to the world’s attention, as well as later songwriters like Dar Williams and many others.

Pete was one of three amazing lifelong activists born in the spring of 1919 who I knew personally. Miriam Leader (not much known outside of her various home communities) passed about a year ago. And Frances Crowe continues her active work for peace, justice, and the environment. The world is richer because these three people with giant hearts walked its ground. Goodbye, Pete, and thanks for all you’ve done to make my life richer. You’re probably already starting to organize amongst the angels ;-).

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, language, Peace and War, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Progressives can be a gloomy lot. Too often, we focus on all the things wrong with society, all the problems we need to fix. I say “we,” because I’ve certainly done my share of that global kvetch.

But every once in a while, we actually win a major victory. I’ve been actively involved in a few of them, and I have to tell you, they feel great.

One of my favorite members of Congress, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla) knows the importance of celebrating our victories. He sent out an e-mail with the headline, “Hey, We Progressives Won Something.”

I opened the e-mail and discovered what we won: we didn’t go to war against Syria. And Syria destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile, under international supervision. The massive outcry of opposition certainly helped us get there.

Grayson gives us a lot to celebrate:

Let’s celebrate the war that never happened.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to hold sad and somber funerals for young Americans who would have lost their lives fighting in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to nurse and care for the wounded veterans who would have returned from the U.S.-Syrian war.

Let’s celebrate Congress NOT having to appropriate billions of tax dollars in emergency spending to support U.S. military operations in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to attend bitter marches protesting the U.S. war in Syria.

Let’s celebrate NOT having to rebuild Syria’s roads and bridges and schools, so that we can have a shot at rebuilding our own.

Let’s celebrate peace.

We won the battle, and the military-industrial complex lost the war.

We should be proud of our victories, because our victories matter. I know that politics sometimes can seem discouraging right now. Progressive often seem to lose, and lose frequently. But, you know what? Sometimes we win. And when we win, we save lives. We promote equality. We serve the cause of justice. We improve people’s lives.

(You can read Alan Grayson’s whole essay at this blog.)

Indeed, we do! Our actions–as individuals, and especially when we band together–actually do make a difference. Think how much poorer the world would be if the likes of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walensa, Wangari Maathai (the tree-planting woman of Kenya, who won a Nobel Prize for her work establishing a greenbelt in her country), Gandhi, Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, and Martin Luther King, Jr. had not walked it.

And you don’t need to be an activist. The world is richer for the presence of scientists like the brilliant energy strategist Amory Lovins, who is still very much alive–and Jonas Salk, Rachel Carson, and George Washington Carver, who are not…writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alice Walker, and even Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield (his The Success Principles is the one self-help book I regularly recommend)…and ordinary people whose names you won’t recognize, who turned their lives into blessings for the world. I’m going to honor one of those unknown heroes by name: my late mother, Gloria Yoshida, who was a civil rights volunteer in the 1960s. If a black person was told an apartment had already been rented, my 5’3″ white, Jewish mom was one of the people who would go and try to rent it afterwards. I remember her yelling at our own landlord, who towered over her, and looked pretty ashamed as she lit into him because “you just don’t want to rent to them because they’re black.”

That family history made it easier for me to take on a long list of causes over the past 40 years–even organizing the movement that saved a threatened mountain while all the “experts” said “this is terrible, but there’s nothing we can do.”

What are YOU doing to make the world better? Please share in the comments section, below.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

I revisited a post I’d written on election reform, back in 2007. In that post, I listed seven specific steps the United States could take to make its elections more representative and relevant.

But I left out a huge one—did I think back then, that it was so obvious it didn’t need to be listed?

Getting. Money. Out. Of. Politics.

That means not only repealing the wretched anti-democratic Citizens United decision, but much more. It means making politicians once again responsible to the people, and not to well-funded lobbyists. It probably means public funding of candidates, and limits on the dollars that can be spent. Ideally, it would mean an end to TV advertising of smear ads, and replacing them with a list of candidate websites (not just the largest parties but any party that achieves an agreed threshold of support) where people could learn the candidate’s positions on actual issues—in more depth than attack sound bites.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I hope Obama and the Democrats learn their lesson. when they refuse to comprise on things that should not be compromised on, when they stand up for their principles, they win.

What a great president he might have been (and perhaps still could be) if he had figured that out in 2009. There is a difference between conciliation and giving away the store, and every time he kowtowed, the other side saw him as weak, and took out their lances again to whittle things down even further.

Of course, it helped that progressives and liberals came out in force to tell him he was doing the right thing. One of the lessons Obama should have taken from the 2008 election campaign is that he can organize a large constituency that “has his back.” and we progressives can also organize to push him leftward when he dirfts like a rudderless boat in the face of pressure from the right.

We have to remember that Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation invention. The left wanted single-payer, which Obama refused to even discuss.

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , ,

Kansas State Representative Dennis Hedke is definitely in the running for Idiot Politician of the Year. This clown has introduced HR 2366, a bill that

would prevent public funds from being used “either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development.” The prohibition would extend to “any activity by any state governmental entity or municipality.”

The bill defines sustainable development thusly:

“sustainable development” means a mode of human development
in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the
environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but
also for generations to come, but not to include the idea, principle or
practice of conservation or conservationism.

In other words sustainable development—development that has the audacity to meet human needs now and into the future—would become ineligible for any government funding in Kansas. Forget about a school building designed to last 90 years, or even 25. Forget about economic incentive programs that use the green economy to create jobs in impoverished. How could sustainable development make an enemy?

Especially since the business case for sustainable development is so strong. All the research I’ve seen shows that sustainability pays huge dividends to companies, governments, and consumers.

If this ridiculous bill were to become law, presumably government money could only be used to build buildings or bridges that disintegrate in less than one human generation…that have zero energy efficiency features…that will lock their owners into a downward spiral of spending more and more money to feed an avoidable fossil-fuel “jones.” And how you can separate conservation from sustainability or sustainable development is beyond me.

One could even read the definition as preventing any contracts with companies like GE, Ford, General Motors, Walmart, even oil companies that have also invested in solar wind, or hydro.

But wait—it gets worse! There’s a nice little bit of reactionary censorship and thought-control in the legislation—just the sort of thing that right-wingers who claim to love freedom should oppose:

This prohibition on the use of public funds shall apply to: (1) Any activity
by any state governmental entity or municipality;
(2) the payment of membership dues to any association;
(3) employing or contracting for the service of any person or entity;
(4) the preparation, distribution or use of any kit, pamphlet, booklet,
publication, electronic communication, radio, television or video
presentation;
(5) any materials prepared or presented as part of a class, course,
curriculum or instructional material;
(6) any current, proposed or pending law, rule, regulation, code,
administrative action or order issued by any federal or international
agency; and
(7) any federal or private grant, program or initiative.

And yet this guy claims to be such a defender of liberty that the bill contains this explicit agenda:

to support, promote, advocate for, plan for, enforce, use, teach,
participate in or implement the ideas, principles or practices of planning,
conservation, conservationism, fiscal responsibility, free market
capitalism, limited government, federalism, national and state sovereignty,
individual freedom and liberty, individual responsibility or the protection
of personal property rights…

What kind of nutcase would write and submit such a law? How about one who happens to have a day job as a geophysicist whose clients include some 30 oil and gas companies (according to this article in TriplePundit). And one who has also introduced legislation to have school teachers argue against the evidence of climate change. Liberty, apparently, does not extend to those with whom Rep. Hedke disagrees.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Copywriting, Democracy, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , ,

“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.

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Apparently, a lot of people who voted for Romney would like to secede from the United States.

OK–let’s put aside for now the clear absurdity of this…the condemnation of the idea by Republican governors…the enormous difficulty of getting a majority of any state’s citizens to go along with it…the likelihood that this is based in crude racism…and the zero percent success rate of state secession movements in the United States.

Let’s just say they really do secede.

Most Southern states extract more money from the federal treasury than they pay in. And many people in the region work at US military installations or government offices. Everyone in the region relies on federal funding to maintain their transportation infrastructure, civil defense/disaster response And then of course there are those getting by with the help of federal assistance programs such as food stamps and Social Security (the ones Romney derided as “the 47 percent”).

In other words, if the secession movement succeeds, the secessionist states are going to take a huge economic hit. Bob Cesca, in one of the links cited above, says the federal government could simply starve them out and have them rejoin without military action. He’s probably right.

But here’s something perhaps more important that I don’t hear anyone saying:

If the Red states secede, Democrats will have a whopping majority in Congress and could actually get a much more humane, people-centered society in place–which the Red states would have to accept as reality when they come crawling back in a few years, IF the US will have them back.

Wouldn’t it be grand to have a country with a European style single-payer health plan…a solar-powered economy with jobs for all…a military designed to actually defend our shores instead of pursue imperialist wars in countries where we have no justification for our invasion (can you say Iraq?)…an education system that values science and knowledge, and prepares the next generation to play a leadership role in advancing society through technological progress…and so on?

So I say…let ’em Secede!

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By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

The amazing thing to me is that 18 to 24 months ago, it looked like if the Republicans put up a candidate who could breathe and talk, the White House would be theirs. We don’t know exactly what combination of factors created Obama’s near-sweep of battleground states and overwhelming Electoral College mandate yesterday. So that allows the luxury of putting forth a list, and people can make their own choices about which ones were significant.

Here’s my list:

  • The American public is smart enough to see that the reason why Barack Obama didn’t make as much progress as we all wanted—despite his own reluctance to make this much of a campaign issue—can be laid directly at the feet of a recalcitrant and hostile Republican Party that consistently refused to negotiate in good faith, and whose stated priority (as expressed by its own Senate leader Mitch McConnell) was  not to rescue the country but to deny Barack Obama a second term.
  • Trust in Mitt Romney is very low, because on most major issues, he’s had at least two and often more contradictory positions. He has developed a well-deserved reputation for saying what he thinks people want to hear at that moment, and conveying the impression that he has no core beliefs or principles—and because his attack ads and debate points were so blatantly based on outright lies.
  • Mitt Romney managed to alienate enough constituencies that he sabotaged his chances: women, people of color, students, people on Social Security (although, surprisingly, he apparently carried much of the elder vote in general), gays and lesbians, even veterans and dog lovers.
  • Mitt Romney’s amazing gifts for putting his foot in his mouth and for presenting himself as completely out of touch with ordinary people didn’t help him. Barack Obama’s progress on the economy despite lack of GOP cooperation helped him strongly—in the Upper Midwest, especially.
  • Citizens United and the infusion of enormous amounts of money by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS SuperPAC, Sheldon Adelson, and others may have actually created a backlash against the influence of money in politics (one that perhaps we can harness to create real and meaningful election reform). Even in Massachusetts, a state that was never in contention, we must have gotten somewhere between 30 to 50 calls and at least that many mailed fliers, to the point where we were totally sick of it. I can only imagine the barrage voters in battleground states were getting.
  • Despite massive reports of voter suppression and fraud (see for example https://www.thenation.com/blog/171079/whats-scope-voter-suppression-election, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/2012-elections-polling-places_n_2036228.html, and the truly despicable vote manipulation techniques highlighted at https://www.bradblog.com/?p=9706 (with video of a Pennsylvania touchscreen recording Barack Obama votes as Mitt Romney votes)—margins of victory were wide enough to prevent another election theft. However, this is a problem waiting to happen again, and a fix has been overdue since at least the aftermath of the 2000 election. I support electronic voting machines that use paper ballots, which can be scanned instantly for a preliminary tally, but then get safeguarded through proper chain-of-custody procedures and hand-counted over the next few days if there’s any question at all about the preliminary tabulation’s accuracy. Machines that do not keep a paper trail should be BANNED. end of story.
  • Polls can be wrong. Margins of victory were not even all that close in states like Pennsylvania and even Paul Ryan’s state of Wisconsin. Yes, Florida, Ohio, and Virgina, among others, were quite close—but overall, Barack Obama’s victory in the so-called swing states was generally decisive, with spreads in excess of five points.
  • Barack Obama was able to pull out his core constituencies to show up on voting day, even though these include groups that historically have had low voter turnouts: youth (pretty much written off by the pundits ahead of the election), people of color, women’s rights advocates, LGBT people and their supporters).
  • The US is getting more socially liberal: ballot initiatives supporting such causes as gay marriage and not just medical marijuana but even recreational marijuana passed.
  • The day of the ultra-right is drawing to a close. Even Missouri, which went for Romney, returned Claire McCaskill to the Senate, repelling a challenge by Todd “Legitimate Rape” Aiken. While the party has shifted so far to the right that I heard one commentator refer to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch as part of the party’s moderate wing, real moderates have nowhere to go in the Republican Party right now, so they vote Democrat. My personal belief is that if Mitt Romney had taken a consistent moderate platform—as he did when he was governor here in Massachusetts—throughout the primaries, he would have easily won the primary contest as all the other (extremist) candidates competed for the extremist vote, then gone on to win the presidency. I am glad he chose instead the “Etch-A-Sketch” approach. Trying to be first ultra-rightist then moderate was a failed strategy from the beginning, in an age of instant world-wide communication; it might have worked if there were still such a thing as private conversations from candidates to voters.
  • People saw this race as important enough not to risk anything on third-party candidates. The top six third-party candidates candidates together only got about 1.43 percent of the vote (fewer than 1.7 million votes out of a total of 116.8 million votes cast)—with just over a million of those going to Liberatrian Gary Johnson, bringing him 1 percent, and Green candidate Jill Stein (whose votes—including mine—I’m guessing were nearly entirely in non-swing states) got 0.3 percent, a whisker under 400,000.  votes. None of the others, not even comedienne Roseanne Barr, got even one-tenth of one percent. (all stats from https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results with “display all candidates” enabled)
  • Other than during the first debate, Barack Obama outmarketed Mitt Romney, by presenting a better and more believable picture of the next four years to average Americans, and by at least making some sideways attempts to take credit for some of the substantial list he actually accomplished in his first term—and inspiring, once again, a horde of volunteers to get involved. While he was effective in this only compared to Mitt Romney (remember the 47 percent?), Barack Obama’s modest effort outshone Mitt Romney’s pathetic self-aggrandizing.
  • With galvanizing speeches by Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton, the Democratic Convention gave Barack Obama a significant lift that he never really lost.

There are other factors too, but I’ll stop there.

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, language, Protests and Crackdowns, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

A Chinese writer posted a withering attack on Chinese corruption and environmental destruction, but disguised it as an attack on the US.

The ploy worked. Not only did it get past the censors, but it’s gone viral in China, gaining 44,000 retweets and 5400 comments.

We are a clever species. There’s always a way to communicate, no matter how hard the shoe of oppression squeezes down. I did some work on a WWII memoir written by a German civilian mom, and her focus was on the jokes ordinary Germans told to demonstrate their opposition to Hitler without getting killed or even in trouble (most of the time).

Wish some of MY articles would get 44,000 retweets! <wink>

 

Thanks to Daniel Lieberman, @damfino11, for passing the link.

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