In a recent diary by Cassiodorus, one point of his in particular struck me:
Thus the comparison between the Great Depression and the current Great Recession falls flat, because the popular upheavals of the 1930s are only in evidence today among the least helpful segments of the population. This of course is a major reason why we can expect no FDR-like President to save us from the...economic collapse...
...During the 1930s...intellectual figures such as John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Kenneth Burke, and Richard Wright were actual socialists and not just mere liberals offering occasional plugs for John Kerry.
Another prominent socialist, albeit a bit later than the Depression, was Albert Einstein. He was an all around brilliant man, someone whom I admire greatly. And he wisely said this, although today it would probably be considered way too radical for anyone respectable to utter:
There are many people who lament the end of the '60s and complain about today's self-absorbed, materialistic youth. Now, I'm a teenager, and I can tell you that there's a grain of truth (maybe a boulder...) to those complaints, but there's also a vibrant political culture among those of us whippersnappers who do care.
Well, we all know Dylan, Lennon, and Young. But what about Francis, Folds, and Morello? If you take a look at the music scene today, it's apparent that there are a lot of young people who care. There's currently a lot of music in the same spirit, if not the same style, as the classics of protest music.
We fight, even against insurmountable odds, because sometimes we win.
As I get ready to head to Copenhagen this Saturday for the international climate negotiations, I'm thrilled to see the success of The Leadership Campaign and their efforts to have Massachusetts use 100% clean electricity by 2020.
On Monday, Representative William Brownsberger will file their bill, An Act to Re-power Massachusetts, in the Massachusetts House, calling on Gov. Deval Patrick to create a task force to formulate a plan to get Massachusetts to100% clean electricity by 2020.
Today, on November 30, one week before the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen open, and on the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protest in Seattle in 1999, major demonstrations, teach-ins and civil disobedience are taking actions place in cities around the North America. Reports are now starting to come in from all over...
This week's edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.
Here's the latest news on the healthcare front: Republicans and their allies are pressuring Democratic healthcare reformers at townhall meetings around the country. Addie Stan has a blockbuster piece in AlterNet that exposes the network of corporate funders and lobbyists behind the mobs.
The Progressive's Ruth Conniff explains the mobs' marching orders, as spelled out in a memo by Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the Tea Party Patriots, an anti-reform group with ties to former Republican Rep. Dick Armey's pressure group Freedom Works. MacGuffie instructs town hall protesters to shout at lawmakers and attempt to throw them off their game as they try to make the case for health care reform. So much for reasoned discussion.
As I reported in In These Times, the teabaggers are trying to scapegoat organized labor as the instigators of confrontations at town hall meetings. On August 6, a scuffle broke out in front of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. This video clip shows the last 10 seconds of a scuffle in which a man in an SEIU t-shirt lies prostrate on the ground. A 38-year-old conservative activist claims to have been severely beaten, but the video shows him apparently uninjured, darting around to different cops and trying to convince them that he was attacked. The man's lawyer claims that he saw his client get punched in the face and kicked in the head by SEIU members.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County police told me that the police hadn't reviewed the video because nobody had submitted it to them, despite a call to the public to turn over evidence for the investigation. The fact that the videographer hasn't turned over the video kind of makes you wonder if the teabaggers really take the "evidence" as seriously as they claim.
How's this for irony? According to Talking Points Memo, the activist was asking for money to pay his hospital bills because he's uninsured.
Finally, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that Kansas Now is calling upon AG Eric Holder to restore the Federal Marshall security detail of prominent late-term abortion provider Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and colleague of the late Dr. George Tiller. Carhart was placed under protection after Tiller was shot. But the feds didn't even wait for the trial of Tiller's alleged assassin to wrap before pulling Carhart's detail. Now he's on his own, just as the alleged killer's links to a broader coalition of violent anti-choicers are coming to light.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.
For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little...which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we're getting into a proper context.
The goal of today's conversation is to give you a bit more of an "insider look" at today's news; and to do that we'll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we'll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we'll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we'll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.
Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.
Thursday, June 25, 2009, has been designated Torture Accountability Action Day by a large coalition of human rights groups planning rallies and marches in major U.S. cities, including a rally in Washington, D.C.'s John Marshall Park at 11 a.m. followed by a noon march to the Justice Department where some participants will risk arrest in nonviolent protest if a special prosecutor for torture is not appointed.
http://accountability4torture.com
Events are planned in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco, CA; Pasadena, CA; Thousand Oaks, CA; Boston, MA; Salt Lake City, UT; Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; Las Vegas, NV; Honolulu, HI; Tampa, FL; Philadelphia, PA; and Anchorage, AK, with details available online:
http://tortureaccountability.w...
We've been lobbying the Department of Justice all these months without realizing that the key to justice lay in the Department of the Interior, and specifically in the National Park Service, which has told activist Steve Lane he will be prosecuted if he attempts to demonstrate waterboarding at Thursday's anti-torture rally in Washington, D.C. The permit for the rally reads "Waterboarding exhibit will not be allowed for safety reasons."
The firm has announced an Open House to be held this Thursday, August 14th from 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm to celebrate the opening of Schubert Flint's new Irvine office.
If you are able to get over to Irvine this Thursday evening, I've prepared a flyer that you can download, print out and take with you to distribute to the Open House attendees: Schubert Flint Protest Flyer Download (PDF)
I just got word that Teamsters in Laredo, Texas, and San Diego, California, are going to protest the DOT's illegal pilot project to allow Mexican trucks beyond the current 25-mile border safety zone tomorrow.
I will update with times and places as the details become available.
We welcome all bloggers, vloggers, photographers, and supporters. Help us send a message to the Bush administration that we have a Congress for a reason.
