Ben Manski wrote: Hi everyone - I received the following email, thought, "this is important," and marked it for further action down the road. Then I received it a second time, looked at it again, and saw the name of the activist facing prison time (I have amended the subject header to include his name). I met Ted Glick almost 15 years ago, when the Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN) held its national meeting in Madison. I served with him on the IPPN Steering Committee. Ted and I collaborated with a handful of others in convening the first conference calls that formed United We March for Peace and Justice, later, United for Peace and Justice, the largest anti-war coalition in the country. I remember Ted's run for U.S. Senate in New Jersey, as a Green, in which he really pushed the envelope on key issues of political corruption and structural racism. I've had differences with Ted over strategy. But I've always known him as a warm, serious, and highly ethical political activist and person. For most of the past decade, Ted Glick has devoted himself to organizing the climate justice movement in response to global warming. Please take a few minutes to support Ted -- and to resist this heavy-handed suppression of non-violent civil disobedience -- by responding to the appeal below. - Ben Manski ~ ~ ~ ~ Dear Friends, Despite the Gulf disaster, no one from BP has been arrested and sent to jail. Despite safety violations at coal mines, no one from Massey Energy has been handcuffed. But today I write to inform you that one of America's best global warming activists is probably facing several months of jail. He's been convicted by a D.C. jury, and now he awaits sentencing on July 6th. Why? Because he peacefully dropped two banners on Capitol Hill that said: "GREEN JOBS NOW" and "GET TO WORK." I'm not joking. Ted Glick of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network was convicted by a jury May 13th of peacefully dropping the banners inside the U.S. Senate Hart Office Building last September. The DC U.S. Attorney's office clearly has decided to make an "example" of Ted because of his previous two -- count 'em, two -- convictions related to peaceful acts of climate civil disobedience. Can you believe it? You can see a three-minute video of Ted's September "crime" right here. He's the guy toward the end simply lowering the banners. Period. Now Ted is facing up to three years in jail. Based on the judge's comments last week, it really does appear that he will be incarcerated for at least a month or two. So here's what you can do: First, please write a respectful but firm snail-mail letter to Judge Frederick H. Weisberg telling him why you think Ted should not go to jail. The judge's address is below. Just type something up, print it and mail it off. Explain why only a suspended sentence is fair, especially given all the real injustices out there on global warming. There is reason to believe that that a large number of thoughtful, well-reasoned letters to the judge could bring leniency. Second, take an action right now that will help create a world where global warming is no longer such a threat and people like Ted won't have to drop banners and get arrested in the first place! Sign the "Windmills, Not Oil Spills" petition to stop new offshore drilling in America and promote clean energy alternatives instead. Thanks for your support, your activism, and your prayers as CCAN fights to keep a morally innocent staff member out of jail during this time of great global crisis. Sincerely, Mike Tidwell Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network --- Here's the judge's address: Judge Frederick H. Weisberg DC Superior Court 500 Indiana Ave., NW Washington, DC 20001 **Please keep in mind** The letters should be respectful. Suggested topics include: * If you personally know Ted and have shared experiences with him, tell the judge; * Describe the urgency of the climate issue and the need to pressure our government to take action on it; * Give your views on what would be a justice-based approach by the legal system toward nonviolent actions of the kind Ted took part in. Please let other people know about this campaign. And it would be helpful if you could send us a copy of your letter to Judge Weisberg, or if you could let us know that you have sent a letter. You can email Ted at ted@chesapeakeclimate.org <ted%40chesapeakeclimate.org>, or you could send by regular mail to Ted's attention at CCAN, P.O. Box 11138, Takoma Park, Md. 20912. Mike Tidwell Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network MTidwell@ChesapeakeClimate.org <MTidwell%40ChesapeakeClimate.org cell: 240-460-5838 www.ChesapeakeClimate.org
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Climate activist Ted Glick faces jail time; BP execs will not
Sunday, May 30th, 2010600 People at hearing in support of Wisc. Raw Milk Bill; farm org’s sharply divided on issue
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
I was there and it was awesome! As usual, because of a strong showing of consumers and small farmers supporting the direct sale of fresh raw milk legislation, the count estimate was way under. There were over 600 signed in to observe the hearing plus over 180 signed onto to speak for a total close to 800. They traveled and registered from all areas of the state to make this a broad grassroots coalition now in place.
The only opposition came from government regulators and big ag organizations like the Farm Bureau, veterinaries etc.
Consumers and small family farms uniting for healthy food,
socal justice and consumer rights is a new paradigm that big ag has not had to deal with, so it will be interesting to watch the spin they use to maintain control of food production. Family Farm Defenders and WI Farmers Union supported the rights of consumers and farmers to do business together without government regulation.
Please thank these two grassroots farm organizations if you get a chance. There is much more work to be done but this a good sign for local sustainable food.
Let’s keep moving forward sticking together.
Fred Depies
Chilton WI
“Sustainability” activity: a four-legged table with one leg missing?
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010Here’s some questions to take into the upcoming Roundtables and other meetings on sustainability. Some of these are posed by this story on Colorado Springs’ severe budget cutting. Budget cutting this severe would most likely impact new programs such as sustainability planning first, so these questions aren’t merely hypotheticals.
Suddenly, the people who have been invisible all this time–the working poor–are made visible by virtue of their diminishing tax payments. Why isn’t the money flowing in to the public coffers so quickly any more?
Something is clearly missing. Missing not only from tax revenue totals, but from the whole “sustainability” movement, I would boldly assert. And I wonder, am I the only one noticing what’s clearly missing?
If you go and review your Natural Step conditions for a sustainable society–and Natural Step is said to be the gold standard–you’ll find this system condition, #4:
“people are not subject to conditions that systemically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.”
Yet, with this deep recession steadily eroding the living standards of working class people everywhere, it’s clear that people most assuredly ARE being subject to conditions systematically undermining our capacity to meet our needs.
You don’t hear much mention of this deepening crash of living standards of working people in the torrent of good news about “sustainability”–locally, nationally or globally for that matter. The prospect for millions upon millions of Americans returning to some sort of right livelihood in which they would like to be engaged is steadily slipping away from millions of us, but the literature is silent on this.
I’d number those millions of us now marginalized to a clearly unsustainable mode of life in the neighborhood of 60 million. Maybe add ten million more to that, I don’t have exact numbers, just a sense of what’s going on. I call this group of us the OtherAmerica: working poor, people without health coverage, children, many youth under 25.
Doesn’t some discussion of what’s happening over here in the OtherAmerica belong in Rountables, seminars, webinars, lectures, and planning meetings on “sustainability?” Who will raise these questions?
This capitalist system no longer has a need for OtherAmerica, neither as producers-workers, nor as consumers. They’re trying to stage-manage this “recovery” with only 80% of the population needing to participate to make it credible. For us in the working poor, sustainability is further away than it was a decade ago, when the esoteric sustainability discussions began among the professional class in academia, in urban design firms, in select sub-committees in city and county governments, and in big non-profit NGO think tanks.
Neither neoliberal nor conservative politicians have any plan to restore to us any measure of dignity, but instead I believe we’re in for a long period of a kind of warehousing, like the Prawns in District 9, a systematic undermining of our capacity to meet our needs. I dread to learn what sort of fate they have planned for us, but I’m sure it will be dreadful.
Neither the Administration’s neoliberal friends-of-bankers, nor the overtly fascist Tea Partiers, have the welfare and well-being of working-class Americans (or workers anywhere) at heart. In fact, during deep recessions, working poor people become a big target market for overt fascists masquerading as right-wing “populists.” You already see an upwelling of this tendency in full effect in the USA, in Europe, and globally.
Yet in this kind of environment, we’re being told by the professional classes that we’re moving full speed ahead toward “sustainability.” A kind of American-exceptionalism Natural Step where only the first three conditions matter. Will the meeting of those conditions be accomplished by a Green Technocracy, guided and led by the leaders of the local plutocracy, whoever these may be in each locality? William Domhoff explained the methodology needed to get at who your local plutocracy may be, in his classic of sociology, Who Rules America?
One important point seems to have been missed, in this headlong rush into a technocratic sustainable geekdom filled with LEED buildings and renewable gadgets all smart-gridded together into a seamless wonderland: The corporations are still behaving as corporations. That is, they are working full-time to slow down or prevent any meaningful progress toward real “sustainability.” Yes, despite the fact that National Public Radio now gladly advertises Monsanto’s commitment to “sustainble agriculture,” in fact, Monsanto is still part of the problem, the crisis of sustainability, not part of the solution.
“Corporations” are not just some kind of hard-working communities of dedicated people fulfilling a mission statement to the benefit of society. They’re a legal creation of the state, aimed at maintaining the power status of their largest shareholder-owners, the wealthiest members of society, affectionately known to Marxists as “the ruling class.” A class understanding of corporations and their peculiar power over us is missing from the sustainability literature.
Threats/Obstacles to Sustainability
As people settle in to the rountables, planning meetings, seminars, and sub-committee meetings, I would urge folks to keep these questions in mind:
Has the mortgage crisis really been solved? How could that be, when Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, quasi-public corporations, now carry the vast majority of mortgages as assets on their balance sheets as banks are bailing on holding them?
How much further will house prices continue to fall, in the face of steady, ongoing erosion of the employment base in this nation? If house prices do continue falling, perhaps as much as 30-40% as the editors of The Automatic Earth blog have suggested, how can we possibly avert an even deeper mortgage crisis?
What is to be done about the steady erosion of real wages–actual purchasing power–of increasingly large segments of the working class who remain employed? Won’t this erode the tax base for all levels of government, whether township, village, city, county, state or federal?
In our local food groups, why is the expression “cheap food isn’t good; good food isn’t cheap” still in use? What does this even say to working poor families whose spending habits have to be “cheap” out of necessity? What can be done to make fresh, healthy, organic food affordable to working poor people?
Why are things being done FOR the working poor–food pantry distributions and the like–rather than BY the working poor, on their own behalf? Why is there so little mutual aid, self-help, co-operative self-organization by the workers for the workers?
Are the neoliberal governors of troubled states such as Wisconsin’s Gov. Doyle really being honest about the depth of the budget crises that still lie ahead? If the bulk of the state budget crises are still on the future segment of the timeline, what will this do to the remainder of the economy? Until now, state employees and to some extent, municipal and county employees, could be counted on as stably employed citizens who could drive a consumer economy, since production stopped being “our thing” in the USA. What will happen to these top-tier workers and their way of life?
“Green jobs” are expected to replace only about 25% of the massive losses in employment since 12/07. What about the rest?
What impact will the peak of global oil production have upon a struggling economy barely able to stave off even worse losses in employment? Why have sustainability groups completely stopped talking about the question of peak oil?
Are we supposed to believe that the problem has gone away, that the predictions were all wrong of peak oil production having already occurred 2005-2006 (Laherre, Simmons, Pickens, Heinberg); to occur in 2010 (Petrobras); to occur in 2012 (Colin Campbell’s original estimate) or even, to occur in 2030 as the ever-optimistic IEA says?
Why is climate change denial politically incorrect, while peak oil denial is the new coolness?
And, finally, when is this problem going to be addressed in the sustainability movement: Tens of millions of us in the USA being “subject to conditions that systemically undermine our capacity to meet their needs.”
At the upcoming meeting, don’t put any your laptop or any heavy objects on that end of the table with the missing leg ,the 4th system condition. And be aware: the building where the meeting is being held is a four-pillar edifice, one pillar missing.
Bobby G.
Central Wisc. USA
Colorado Springs cuts city services deeply. Very deeply.
Friday, February 5th, 2010Colorado Springs’ deep budget cuts are a harbinger of what’s to come for many, many cities in the USA. Reading this article will give you some idea what may develop in a medium sized city near you before too many months go by.
Need continues to rise in our area’s food pantries
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010The story is from the Stevens Point, WI Journal, at this link.
Mary Ann Krems wins today’s award for talking accurately about reality, instead of sugar-coating things:
“Mary Ann Krems of Portage County Hunger and Poverty Prevention Partnership said the economy is to blame for the increases, but it’s hard to tell what the future holds.”I think a lot depends, because the jobs are still going down the tubes,” she said. “We’re expecting and anticipating an increase.”
While this increase in need at food pantries is coming during a time of supposed “job-less recovery” (an Orwellian doublespeak term if ever there was one), all the while, there is a “perfect financial storm” still coming.
Welcome to the perfect financial storm (click)
I’d say the food pantry business is in for some, as they say, “robust growth” in the next 24 to 60 months, wouldn’t you? Story is below my initials, in case the link doesn’t work.
b.g.
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Food requests continue to increase at Portage County food pantries.
Data from the Portage County Hunger and Poverty Prevention Partnership show the number of people unable to afford an adequate amount of food is continuing to rise in many pantries.
Operation Bootstrap, an emergency pantry, saw the largest increase between October and December, when it provided food for 259,749 meals in Portage County, and filled almost 700 requests for emergency assistance, said director Roseann DeBot. Last year during that time, she said, it provided food for 252,722 meals.
Operation Bootstrap received a check for $30,000 from an anonymous donor at the Community Foundation of Central Wisconsin on Jan. 21, which will help address an increased demand for emergency services in Portage County, she said.
“This will help us really across the board continue all the good projects we have going and meet the increased demand,” said. “We’re going to be able to continue with … granting people money for prescriptions and dental, which are two of the biggest needs in the community.”
The money also will go toward fresh food, milk and other products that Operation Bootstrap provides to people in crisis.
St. Vincent de Paul in Plover also saw an increase in demand. It periodically provided food to 1,673 households between April and June. Between July and September, that rose to 1,748, and to 1,876 during the fourth quarter.
The Salvation Army is seeing the same trends, though the numbers dropped slightly because it was under construction for several months in 2009.
Bob Quam of The Salvation Army said in general, more people are coming in for meals. The center served 4,809 meals during the third quarter and 4,574 during the fourth.
“Right now our pantry is in pretty good shape. We can always use (donations), and I always know other food pantries that aren’t in as good a shape,” Quam said.
Mary Ann Krems of Portage County Hunger and Poverty Prevention Partnership said the economy is to blame for the increases, but it’s hard to tell what the future holds.
“I think a lot depends, because the jobs are still going down the tubes,” she said. “We’re expecting and anticipating an increase.”
Do you believe Friday’s economic “good news?”
Monday, February 1st, 2010Friday’s economic news was abuzz with the announcement that Gross Domestic Product grew by 5.7% in the previous quarter of 2009. Now, have the economic wizards in Washington/Wall Street figured out how to keep the economy growing with only 80% of the population participating in it–I’m subtracting the 20% of us who live in what I call the “OtherAmerica.” Can they actually keep it limping along as each week, another 400,000+ workers are added to unemployment rolls? Can you run an eight-cylinder economy on just six cylinders this way? For how long?
Is my outlook too negative? Why don’t I publish more “good news?”
The answer is, I’m trying to accurately reflect the reality that I see facing the 20% of US population now living in the “OtherAmerica.” Who are these? It’s the people now permanently unemployed. The people living on part-time incomes who really can’t afford to live on part-time incomes. The 40 million (or whatever the real number is) who are living without health insurance. Or enough health insurance–just one major accident or illness away from full bankruptcy. The people living at or below the federal poverty line. That’s our “OtherAmerica.”
And for us, the economic news is unrelentingly bad. Day after day, week after week, month after month. There is no recovery out here in OtherAmerica, sorry to report.
I don’t believe the good news on the GDP.
B.G.
“Move to Amend” responds to Supreme Court ruling on corps.
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Ben Manski has started this website Move to Amend which attempts to start the petitioning for an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting corporations being treated as persons–whether for purposes of buying elections, or any other purposes where you don’t want people and corporations confused.
Anyway, the “corporation” is just a business organization that serves the interests of members of the ruling class(es) isn’t it? Why do we have a hard time saying it’s time to rein in the power of the “ruling classes?”
Americans are so afraid of class struggle, or any hint of class struggle, aren’t we?
bg
Obama’s Yemeni Odyssey Targets China
Monday, January 11th, 2010This linked story well worth reading if you want to help others around you sort out why the US is so interested in Yemen now. Hint: it has nothing to do with the "junk-in-the-trunk" bomber on a Christmas Day flight. Of note is that this link appeared in a larger context on The Oil Drum, "China's global quest for oil." RT @TheOilDrum Drumbeat: January 9, 2010: China’s global quest for oil When the going gets tough, China goes shopping for ener... http://bit.ly/8nzJxr Peak Oil: It gets complicated now. Bobby G Middle Wisconsin
How America went from a nation of producers to consumers. Part I: Post-war
Friday, November 20th, 2009“What has happened is that, in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer; and all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. The way it is.
“We used to be a producer–very inflexible at that–and now we are consumers and finding it difficult to understand: Natural resources and minerals will change your world.” –Gil Scott-Heron, “B Movie,” ca. 1981.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56ipWM3DWe4&feature=related
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How did we get from being a nation that produced things, that made things, to being a nation of consumers, hugely indebted to China, who saw our economy start to crumble in fall, 2008 when the overdebtedness finally caught up to us? Will our heyday of easy consumption ever return? Will we ever become once again a nation of producers?
World War II seems to be the main inflection point in this process. With the end of World War II and the stimulative effect it had on the industrial producer economy, came the threat of a return to the depression. Returning veterans were not immediately able to find work. All those “Rosie the Riveter” women who had helped build the warmaking machinery had to return to the home, capital decided, in order to avoid unemployment-induced disruption. A series of severe labor conflicts broke out as the US economy struggled to get onto a peacetime footing.
It was during the labor conflicts from 1946-1949 that the US labor movement was mostly derailed onto the tracks of supporting industrial capital instead of confrontation with capital. The left-wing union leaders who ascended to leadership in the 1930s were gradually red-baited and hounded out of positions of leadership, in favor of a leadership more amenable to a “pork-chop” style of unionism (seeking more pork chops rather than more workplace power). The great Allis-Chalmers strike of the late 1940s here in Wisconsin was a microcosm of this process. When it was over, the left-wing leaders were out of power.
In the late 1970s, I worked with a group of workers in a big electric motor plant in Minneapolis, under union contract with I.U.E., who could remember many of these fratricidal struggles in labor, particularly between the left-wing United Electrical Workers (UE), which moved outside the AFL-CIO, and the International Union of Electrical workers, which took the path of labor peace with management, under a much more right-wing leadership.
This process of co-optation of labor leadership in some ways paved the way toward the consumer society that finance capital envisioned for the USA. With labor peace assured, workers could feel confident in going out and buying houses, buying automobiles, and buying all the stuff to fill up the houses. The massive movement to the suburbs on the part of mostly white, better-paid workers and professionals began in the early 1950s and has only begun to come to a halt with the mortgage crisis of late 2008.
My own family was a case study in this process of moving from producerism to consumerism. My dad returned from his tour of duty in the Navy and found that the textile mills of Rhode Island, where he and his brother had worked in the pre-war days, were beginning the process of shutting down to move to the deep south of the USA, almost universally non-union factories that paid far lower wages and rode the workers much harder than in the union north.
This was the first of what I believe were three major phases of what labor came to call the “run-away shop” or that we now call “outsourcing.” Phase I was the move to the deep south. Phase II was the maquiladora movement to the region just inside the Mexican border. Phase III was when finance capital discovered an even cheaper labor force in China and southeast Asia generally. I believe that Phase III is probably the final phase of the search for ever-cheaper labor, the phase that ends with the process of de-globalization, the crumbling of the global economy itself.
The Baby Boomers were born and grew up in that period between the wars–from 1946 to the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The world of rampant consumerism was their world. The period of unrest of the late 1960s marked the turning of a segment of this young cohort of people against the very consumerism they had grown up with. It also marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the USA as a producer nation.
We moved from the woolen mill towns of Rhode Island down to the Jersey Shore, where commuting 45 miles a day to north Jersey was the preferred lifestyle. I remember my dad explaining how we bought things “on time” and he worked something called “time-and-a-half” (overtime pay) at Western Electric to pay for all the stuff bought “on time.” We were supposedly living the high life as the USA approached peak producer status. Along with a whole generation of other people across the nation doing exactly the same thing.
Next: Part II, The 1960s convergence of three rivers of social change.
Sources:
Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, United Electrical Workers, self-published, 1955.
Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Prager, 1975.
Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, 2nd edition, South End Press, 1998
Reality check
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 “…The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is
that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put
out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem.
Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These
days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them
push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for
human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words,
it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose
to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too
difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with
little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution. It’s
astonishing that all the smart people around the president don’t get
this…”
by Chris Case, over in Japan