Greater Ukiah Localization Project focuses on city repair at meeting
“To be surrounded by a million other people, but feel alone like a tree in the desert.” Michael Franti.
How well do you know your neighbors? Would you feel comfortable calling on them in times of need? Do you feel a strong personal connection to the neighborhood you live in? Would you like to improve those relationships with people and connection to place? If so, read on.
We live in an increasingly urbanized world. A greater percentage of people live in cities than ever in human history. One would think that because we live closer together our connections with our community would be stronger and more prolific. However, studies have shown that people feel increasingly isolated, despite our. Why is this so?
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Choose wisely in the organic food aisle
Not long ago, buying organic foods meant stopping at your local food co-op or a trek to the farmers’ market.
You can still get organic products there, of course, but increasingly, you can also find them at mainstream markets.
“Half of organic foods sold in the U.S. are now sold by chain groceries,” said Mark Kastel, co-founder and co-director of the Cornucopia Institute, in Cornucopia, Wis., a think tank and progressive farm-policy research group. “That shift has been happening the last few years.
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Recent rape in MB raises fears of another assault
Walking the short distance from her office to her car alone after dark didn’t bother Brandi Roberts before she learned a woman was sexually assaulted last month outside an office building near where she works.
“It used to be that we didn’t think about it,” Roberts said about herself and her female co-workers. “We’d leave after dark by ourselves. I’d go in and out, out to my car and back and not even think about it.”
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Veterans can use power in other ways
On Veterans Day of 2003, some months after President Bush proclaimed his war on Iraq as “Mission Accomplished,” I marched down Main and Court streets in Binghamton as a member of Veterans for Peace. The reaction to our group by the parade watchers was silence. At the reviewing stand the master of ceremonies had a comment for each passing group. For us, his remark was: “Veterans for Peace? Well aren’t we all for peace?” he asked in a jolly tone.
Not all veterans’ organizations are for peace. But after World War II and again after the Korean War, American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars put pressure on Congress. What resulted were two of the most important pieces of legislation to come out of the 20th century, the GI Bill of Rights and the Korean Bill. Millions of young Americans who could not afford college, or needed trade school assistance, got it under those bills. Veterans for Peace is proud of the work done by Legion and VFW to bring a measure of economic justice to returning vets.
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The Cash Cows of Personal Debt
The booming credit card business is one of the most profitable and destructive industries to ever emerge from the inventive capitalist mind. Citibank is raking in more money than Microsoft and Wal-Mart. Obscene profits are realized without lifting a finger to perform any physical work. In 2004 a single credit card company-the MBNA-realized 1.5 times the profits of fast food industry giant McDonald’s. Collecting on credit card debt is a very lucrative business.
With origins in South Dakota, the modern credit card industry began realizing obscene profits as a result of deregulation. The Supreme Court also played a pivotal role in expanding banking industry profits by lifting limits to the amount of additional fees credit card companies could charge their customers. The sky is the limit now. Industry deregulation has resulted in the systemic fleecing of consumers by practices that can only be described as willful and predatory in nature.
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2,600 apply for jobs at new wind turbine plant
About 2,600 people applied Saturday for hourly jobs at the Siemens Corp. wind turbine plant that will begin operating in Fort Madison next year. The company has announced the plant will employ about 250, which includes salaried workers.
“We didn’t really know what to expect,” said Pam Jackson, supervisor of the Iowa Workforce Development offices in Keokuk and Fort Madison. “We probably were expecting 3,000 to 4,000, but we’re not disappointed with the numbers. We got some good applicants.
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Hoe, hoe, hoe
It’s December. It’s cold, white at times - and the ground is hard, getting harder. So, of course, it’s time to work on that garden.
Or at least one particular garden, which isn’t in existence yet and probably won’t be without extensive planning, now.
Missouri Valley Resource Council - whose most recent project was working with city officials to add plastics to the city recycling program -recently decided to focus on one project for year 2007: establishing a community garden in Bismarck.
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Breaking Bread, Sharing Cultures
For Willard High, a fifth Sunday in the month is heart warming.
On those Sundays, the pastor of Shepherd’s Community Church in South Holland brings his flock together with the congregation from First Reformed Church for a combined service followed by a shared meal.
Shepherd’s Community Church has a primarily black congregation while First Reformed Church has predominantly white members.
The shared meals, High said, “break down inhibitions.
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Environment: Majora Carter
Growing up in the South Bronx, says Majora Carter, “it didn’t occur to me that what I had here was an environment.” Her neighborhood was surrounded by waste treatment plants, garbage dumps and power stations, and she glimpsed nature only when visiting the blueberry patch in her aunt’s backyard in New Jersey. Since then, Carter, 40, has been making up for lost time. An artist and urban planner, she created Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX), an organization dedicated to the idea, says Carter, that “poor communities of color are just as deserving of clean air, clean water and open space as wealthier ones.”
For Carter, that has meant rallying residents to oppose even more dumping and waste treatment, while bringing nature to urban neighborhoods. Carter helped design the “green roof” above her headquarters and has started a “green collar” job-training program for South Bronx residents to install similar roof gardens, consisting of a thin layer of soil and dense vegetation, on other buildings. Green roofs generate oxygen and insulate buildings, which cuts energy use. They also absorb rainwater, reducing the amount of runoff that city sewage plants must process. Carter recently obtained a grant to design a factory that would transform recycled materials into new products, and create some 300 to 500 local jobs.
Jose Padilla’s Ordeal
Jose Padilla, a US citizen, has been tortured by his own government for the better part of three-and-one-half years, suffering years of systematic sensory deprivation documented in his attorneys’ filings and supported by photos of the prisoner published this week by the New York Times.
In that time, Padilla, who has been judged by professionals as mentally ill as a consequence of his brutal treatment, has been denied his Constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial and was permitted no legal representation for twenty-one months. The Bush Administration’s excuse for this betrayal of our legal system was that Padilla was a dangerous Al Qaeda agent, a big fish caught in the Administration’s successful pursuit of its much ballyhooed war on terror. In the words of then-US Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, Padilla was “a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” Those lurid claims were abandoned when the government, faced with a belated US Supreme Court censure, finally charged Padilla with vague and lesser crimes carrying a maximum fifteen-year sentence.
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‘a recorded life’
Over the past 20 years, a small band of corporations — fewer than 10 — has been sweeping through the country, changing the face of all things media.
Much like railroad companies swept through the Old West doing anything they could to swallow up land, these behemoths have been buying up every available media outlet, forcing the public to endure the same tired rhetoric and faux-news stories about celebrity babies and runaway brides, all the while ignoring real stories about politicians and the so-called War on Terror.
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Fault Lines
It was just a few months ago that CBS announced it would add a real-world wrinkle to this season’s “Survivor” by dividing the show’s “tribes” into competing racial groups — blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos.
How has that been going, anyway? I’ve spent most of what spare time I have these days watching fantasy offerings such as NBC’s “Heroes,” a story about regular people who gain superhuman powers and attempt to save the world. Truth be told, it’s probably reading books such as William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub’s profoundly sobering There Goes the Neighborhood that drives me to such otherworldly fare. Their careful and convincing summary of research carried out in Chicago during the mid-1990s paints a picture of social intolerance and bad faith that makes wasting away on a desert island sound like a pretty reasonable alternative to scraping out a living in today’s contentious American cities and suburbs.
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Suburbia: Running on Empty?
There is a species of fatuous thinking these days in America which states, in so many words, that suburbia is fine and dandy because so many people like it. Variations on this theme range from the idea that suburbia is the highest expression of free markets, to the notion that it is the natural outcome of our democracy, to the belief that God has ordained it. This has been the reasoning of some public intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks, Joel Kotkin, of the New America Foundation, and the preposterous Peter Huber of Forbes Magazine and the Manhattan Institute. Now Robert Bruegmann, professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago, weighs in from academia with essentially the same argument floated on barges of statistical analysis.
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Gringos turn tide crossing border - Boomer retirees invading Mexico
(written in October)
The visitor crossing from Tijuana to San Diego these days is immediately slapped in the face by a huge billboard screaming, “Stop the Border Invasion!” Sponsored by Grassfire.com, the same truculent slogan reportedly insults the public at other border crossings in Arizona and Texas.
The Minutemen, once caricatured in the press as gun-toting clowns, are now haughty celebrities of grassroots conservatism, dominating AM hate radio as well as the even more hysterical ether of the right-wing blogosphere. In the heartland as well as in border states, Republican candidates vie desperately for their endorsement. With the electorate alienated by the dual catastrophes of Baghdad and New Orleans, the Brown Peril has suddenly become the Republican deus ex machina for retaining control of Congress in next month’s elections.
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Catastrophic Failure - Foundations, Nonprofits, and the Continuing Crisis in New Orleans
Fifteen months after New Orleans became an international symbol of governmental neglect and racism, the city remains in crisis. Students are still without books, healthcare is less available to poor people than ever, public housing is still closed, and infrastructure is still in desperate need of repair. In an open letter to funders and national nonprofits released yesterday, a diverse array of New Orleanians declared, “From the perspective of the poorest and least powerful, it appears that the work of national allies on our behalf has either not happened, or if it has happened it has been a failure.”
In conversations this week with scores of New Orleans residents, including organizers, advocates, health care providers, educators, artists and media makers, I heard countless stories of diverted funding and unmet needs. While many stressed that they have had important positive experiences with national allies, few have received anything close to the funding, resources, or staff they need for their work, and in fact most are working unsustainable hours while living in a still-devastated city.
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Taking a stand against rape
Most people think violence against women is a women’s issue, and why wouldn’t they? Females ages 12 to 24 are at the greatest risk for experiencing rape or sexual assault, according to U.S. Department of Justice, and almost all perpetrators are men.
The point is not to attack men but to understand that the society we live in makes people believe that rape is a women’s issue and women need to deal with it alone.
Our society responds to the threat of sexual assault by telling our daughters not to walk alone at night, to always have mace and to take self-defense classes. This is a reactionary response that may bring the number of completed rapes down, but not the number of attempts. To work more effectively toward ending rape, we must educate men and chip away at the rape culture we live in.
What is a rape culture? It is a culture in which rape and sexual violence are dominant, and in which violence against women is sanctioned by prevalent attitudes, practices and beliefs. In a rape culture, the media and society excuse, normalize and support sexual assault. I see it when I open magazines in which women are constantly objectified to sell products. I see it on men’s T-shirts, which objectify women. I see it when I hear about the “Janet Jackson scandal,” though I clearly remember it was Justin Timberlake that ripped Janet’s clothing off, which was sexual assault even though it was deemed “Janet’s scandal.”
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Peak Oil Update - December 2006: Production Forecasts and EIA Oil Production Numbers
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A generation is all they need
By the time my four-year-old son is swathed in the soft flesh of old age, he will likely find it unremarkable that he and almost everyone he knows will be permanently implanted with a microchip. Automatically tracking his location in real time, it will connect him with databases monitoring and recording his smallest behavioural traits.
Most people anticipate such a prospect with a sense of horrified disbelief, dismissing it as a science-fiction fantasy. The technology, however, already exists. For years humane societies have implanted all the pets that leave their premises with a small identifying microchip. As well, millions of consumer goods are now traced with tiny radio frequency identification chips that allow satellites to reveal their exact location.
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The Byrne Report - Urban Operations
Did you know that the U.S. Northern Command just tightened its control over Northern California? “NORTHCOM” is the combatant command created by the Bush administration to control armies on the move inside the so-called North American battle space, which includes Mexico and Canada. The self-described job of NORTHCOM is to repel invaders, eliminate drug dealers and “terrorists,” and control civil disturbances. To spot these nuisances, NORTHCOM runs an intelligence “fusion center” at its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. It correlates electronic data collected from military and commercial sources with duly recorded suspicions forwarded by local law enforcement agencies and neighborhood watch groups.
On Nov. 19, NORTHCOM’s 9th Reconnaissance Wing announced the deployment of the Global Hawk at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County. On that day, the Air Force’s newest unmanned spy plane flew its first official combat command mission over the continental United States. Beale will soon host a dozen of these $132 million war-fighting machines, which can fly at 65,000 feet for 34 hours while leisurely photographing Americans and uploading their pixels to the fusion center at Colorado Springs. Privacy? Fuhgeddaboutit.
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US roots in Iraq too deep to pull
The ISG report stands out among the present flurry of re-evaluations as the sole evaluation of the war by a group not beholden to the president; as the only report containing an unadorned negative evaluation of the current situation (vividly captured in the oft-quoted phrase “dire and deteriorating”); and as the only public document with unremitting criticism of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war.
It is this very negativity that brings into focus the severely constrained nature of the debate now underway in Washington - most importantly, the fact that US withdrawal from Iraq (immediate or otherwise) is simply not going to be part of the discussion.
Posted by stan in News