If you are like me, and you struggle to find full throated enthusiasm for any of the Democratic candidates, I want to encourage you vote and to vote for Barack Obama.
In my most cynical moments I fear that there is little difference between Obama and Clinton and that neither will be a progressive President.
I've been saying to people that I like Obama best during his speaches, which have inspired and moved me. I often distrust my positive emotional responses to political candidates, but the presidency is, in fact, a symbolic position. In my book, Obama is the candidate who most clearly stands for meaningful political change and national cohesion based democratic and progressive values. We need the President to stand for these things. The devil will most certainly be in the details. Once Obama is in office, it will be up to us to hold him accountable for what he says he stands for and to make sure those details are not forgotten in excitement over the first Black president or in the resumption of business as usual in Washington.
If you are on the fence about Obama or about voting at all, read this email from Fred Berman to the Progressive Democrats of Somerville email list. It helped me.
Maybe Obama isn't Kucinich, but then Kucinich couldn't be elected.
Obama is willing to meet the challenge of building the tax base by increasing the amount of Social Security taxes paid by higher income earners; Clinton isn't.
Obama was unwilling to support the Congressional resolution labeling Iran a threat; Clinton did.
Neither Obama or Clinton are proposing single payer, but Obama's proposal will move us to single payer more directly, because instead of providing coverage through the commercial insurers (as Clinton proposes to do), Obama proposes the creation of a public insurance alternative.
If you think the soapbox isn't important, look what George Bush has accomplished at the bully pulpit.
If you think that people around the world will see no difference between Goerge Bush and Barack Obama at the helm, will think that a change in leadership is just four years of more of the same.... you're wrong. Electing Obama will be the clearest message that the American voting public can send to the world that we've woken up and we're ready to change course.
If you were fooled by Ralph Nader into believing that Gore and Bush were just two sides of the same Demopublican coin, you must by now have seen the error of that thinking, or you are wearing blinders.
If you think that Gore would have invaded Iraq, would have opened Guantanamo, would have supported extraordinary rendition, would have pushed drilling in Anwar, would have fought stronger fuel economy standards, would have sliced funding for housing subsidies, would have cut back funding for substance abuse treatment, would have linked commitment to abstinence to foreign aid and AIDS treatment, would have supported the intrusion of religion in the public arena..... you're wrong.
And if, after listening to the campaign rhetoric, you think that McCain/Huck/Romney would be no worse than Clinton/Obama then you haven't been paying attention...
Voting DOES make a difference, even if the election doesn't bring corporate power to a grinding halt.
It's NOT worth sitting out the election if you can't get everything you want in a candidate. Life isn't about perfection or nothing. It's about playing the hand you've been dealt, and moving on from there.
The future of war and peace, climate change, health coverage, the right to choose, water and air quality, affordable housing, worker health and safety, an unfettered Internet, human rights, public education, and the Supreme Court are all at stake.
Chances are you're not doing anything so important that you can't spare 15 minutes to go to the poles, even if Buddha isn't on the ballot.
Today The Kid turns 5, and we're having a party. We have a number of activities planned for the kids that will be occurring at different stations in the space where we're celebrating. One of the stations will be for music and dancing. When I asked him what music, he quickly replied: Matt Ward, Pete Seeger and the Beatles. I've got all of Matt Ward's recordings on my iPod, and Pete Seeger's Children's Concert and 1963 Carnegie Hall concert have long been on the iPod as favorites on car rides, but most of our Beatles are on LPs and CDs around the house. We're not bringing LPs, of course, but The Kid insisted we collect all of our Beatles CDs for the party: Let It Be, Let It Be ... Naked, The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Revolver and Help! And then The Kid said, "will you post Eleanor Rigby on your blog? The one from Yellow Submarine..."
This is from Beth Kanter:
Here's the deal. We need to be in the top four charities that get the most unique donors in order to win the $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation. Right now we're number 5, only trailing by 28 donors.
Essentially, I am asking YOU for $10 (USD) to help children in Cambodia. Donate here before the contest ends 1/31 at 3:00 PM EST.
[Video removed because code was messing my blog.]
To learn more check out the rest of Beth's posts from this campaign.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson has approved MS Governor Haley Barbour's plan to divert $600 of Federal Community Development Block Grant funds from low-income housing recovery to a Port Expansion Plan in Gulfport.
In his letter to Gov. Haley Barbour, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said that although he's concerned about using the housing money for the port project, congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds "allows me little discretion."
"I'm sure that you share my concern that there may still be significant unmet needs for affordable housing, and I strongly encourage you to prioritize Gulf Coast housing as you move forward," Jackson wrote....
The plan has drawn harsh criticism from several groups working on recovery efforts in the region who say housing is too scarce not to devote all possible resources to it.
Kimberly Miller, a policy analyst for Oxfam America, said the state's long-term recovery committees that work with displaced families have 15,000 cases on their waiting lists, and a similar number of people are in temporary housing.
The state's plan "doesn't make any financial sense when you look at the number of people who haven't gotten back into homes," Miller said.
Two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast, less than a fourth of the 10,833 public rebuilding projects are completed.
Many haven't even broken ground.
And local officials are finding it harder to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie spent much of Tuesday in a meeting with FEMA accountants arguing over whether the federal government will help pay overtime costs incurred by his fire and police departments in the days and weeks after the storm.
"They are wanting to deobligate about half of that," he said.
In regular language, Skellie explained FEMA is hedging on paying the city's costs of more than $350,000 because the agency's contract accountants are not satisfied with the time sheets kept by first responders immediately after Katrina hit.
"We were just trying to survive. I mean, my God," Skellie said. "It's these people who worked around the clock pulling bodies out. ... They don't want to pay for any of that because a person's name doesn't appear on a time sheet."...
Since the storm, about $1.3 billion has been paid out to cover the costs of rebuilding to local governments, school systems and eligible nonprofits.
But as Mississippi approaches its third hurricane season since Katrina, many of the projects have not made it out of the planning stages. In all, 22 percent of Mississippi's 10,833 public projects have been completed.
Together, Haley Barbour, HUD and FEMA are making sure that thousands of Mississippi hurricane survivors remain homeless, many of whom have no option but to live in poisonous, carcinogenic FEMA trailers.
House Democrats accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday of covering up the long-term health hazards - possibly including cancer - linked to formaldehyde in hurricane trailers.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a committee hearing Tuesday it is "unacceptable" FEMA did not begin testing formaldehyde levels in travel trailers and mobile homes until last month.
"Even more troubling is the recent discovery that FEMA directed the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to not investigate, or communicate, the health effects associated with prolonged exposure to formaldehyde," said Thompson, of Mississippi's 2nd District.
More than 43,000 trailers and mobile homes still are on the Gulf Coast housing victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some have been occupied for more than two years.
The House Committee on Science and Technology this week released e-mails from Christopher DeRosa, a CDC scientist analyzing test results on unoccupied trailers in 2006. The e-mails said FEMA repeatedly requested "we specify safe levels of exposure."
"We should be very cautious about the use of the word 'safe' in reference to formaldehyde," De Rosa wrote. "Since it is a carcinogen, it is a matter of science policy that there is no 'safe' level of exposure."
In case you want some further reading:
- Haley Barbour Wants to Divert Even More CDBG Katrina Funds from Low-Income Housing
- The KatrinaRitaVille Express Tour
- Why Protecting Watersheds Is About Community and Culture
By the way, do you know Clarence? This post is partly for him. Check out his podcast, The Truth and Poplitics.
Dollars & Sense co-editor Amy Gluckman appeared on Your Call, a show on radio station KALW. Appearing with Amy was Lawrence Pintak of Arab Media and Society and Glenn Ford from Black Agenda Report. Amy discussed what is being left out of economic news coverage and was great (as were Pintak, discussing the fall of the Gaza blockade and Ford discussing how race was being covered in the SC primary). This is a shameless promotion. I am on the Dollars & Sense Editorial Collective. If you like the way Amy is able to discuss complex economic issues in plain English and from a progressive perspective, you can get can much more of that, from a diverse range of economists, activists and investigative journalists and others, by subscribing to the magazine.
Yesterday, I mentioned on Twitter that I gave a presentation at work about using an internal blog for sharing news and announcements.
Before I knew it, non-profit tech consultant Beth Kanter was interviewing me via IM about the presentation and the launch of the internal blog. I gave Beth my slides from my presentation and she put the whole thing together as a blog post called "Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: The ROI Approach." If you are interested in the subject of using technology for social change, you should check out the rest of Beth's blog.
The Constitution was
A noble piece of paper
With free society
Struggled but it died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner—unemployed
And I'm hopin' that it rains
Been a hopin' for some rain
But it just don't look like rain
I've seen the robins
Perched in barren treetops
They're watchin' last-ditch racists marching across the floor
Just like peace signs that melted in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow
[This post is the the third in a series (1, 2).]
Like Marshall Kirkpatrick, I want it all.
I want my data to be free, I want to be in control of it and I want to have control over my privacy as well. Is that too much to ask? The watchdog group Privacy International released their annual report today about privacy around the world and put the US in the lowest category - "endemic surveillance societies." Can we figure out how we can minimize surveillance while balancing privacy and the incredible opportunities that come from making at least some of our data open?
In the background of Marshall's overview of contemporary privacy issues are discussions of our "post-privacy era." Chris Messina, who has been involved in developing standards and technologies for handling personal data on the internet, writes:
My somewhat pessimistic view is that privacy is an illusion, and that more and more historic vestiges of so-called privacy are slipping through our fingers with the advent of increasingly ubiquitous and promiscuous technologies, the results of which are not all necessarily bad (take a look at just how captivating the Facebook Newsfeed is!)
Still ... there needs to be a robust dialogue about what it means to live in a post-privacy era, and what demands we must place on those companies, governments and institutions that store data about us, about the habits to which we’re prone and about the friends we keep...
I think there needs to be a broader, eyes-wide-open look at who has what data about whom and what they’re doing about — and perhaps more importantly — how the people about whom the data is being collected can get in on the game and get access to this data in the same way you’re guaranteed access and the ability to dispute your credit report. The same thing should be true for web services, the government and anyone else who’s been monitoring you, even if you’ve been sharing that information with them willingly.
The history of the US government's surveillance of its own citizens says to me that privacy has actually always been an illusion. Old FBI files show the government maintaining decades worth of minutia on people's affiliations and associations. For example, in close to 1000 pages of FBI documents that I have on the Greater NY Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the early 1960s (when my father was the Executive Director), for practically every person mentioned there are lists of political meetings they were known to have attended and organizations they had been members of, often dating back to the 1940s.
While we're on the subject of civil rights and Dr. King's vision of an inclusive society, I thought I'd share this sweet video (via The Bilerico Project)
The SCLC campaign in Chicago was a failure but still revealed a great deal about racism in the North. There is much of interest here on Dr. King, the local Civil Rights Movement in Chicago, the climate in the US in the mid-60s and more. This is a playlist, with five videos, approx. 30 mins total.
The SNCC Freedom Singers perform in Turkey, Fall 2007
Charles Neblett
Director Rutha Harris
Bettie Mae Fikes
Seku Neblett
My new tumblelog has arrived at http://minorjive.net (feed).
A while ago I decided to set up another WordPress blog as a tumblelog, to keep clippings of web content that I come across on the web. I didn't like the limited functionality of the popular hosted Tumblr service, so I thought it would be better to have my own setup. I really like the T1 WordPress theme, designed for tumbleloging, and the QuickPost plugin, which allows you to post on the fly, as you surf. But each WordPress installation is work to maintain, and I was having trouble finding time to fully customize my setup. The straw that broke the camel's back was when QuickPost stopped working right. I never got around to diagnosing the problem and I therefore simply stopped posting the the tumblelog. The site devolved into an archive of my twitter posts, which publish to the tumblelog automatically each night.
In the meantime, Tumblr added some of the features I wanted (namely an audio content type and (sort of) tagging), and I started to think that less might be more, especially when less includes less site maintenance work for me. I'm still waiting for tagging to be fully functional, and I'd like to see commenting. But the main thing is that I find myself using and enjoying my Tumblr site.
So again the link:
The tumblelog subscription and site links in the sidebar now point to my Tumblr site. After I recycle the content from the old site that I want to keep, I will retire it from the internet.
(If you're unclear on the tumblelog concept, try the classic explanation by kottke or the more recent one by Brian Oberkirch.)
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