Since 1983, Sharon Tennison has worked to develop ordinary citizens’ capacities to avert international crises, focusing on relations between the U.S. and Russia. Now, amid a rising crisis in relations between the U.S. and Russia, she has organized a delegation which assembled in Moscow yesterday for a two week visit. I joined the group yesterday, and happened to finish reading Sharon Tennison’s book, The Power of Impossible Ideas, when I landed in Moscow.
Over and above the greed and corruption of wealthy and powerful individuals, the leaked ‘Panama Papers’ revealed the need for a worldwide, standardised tax code, as part of a radical new global economic model. Not globalisation – which is ideologically based, designed by the ruling elite and set up to serve the interests of national and multi-national corporations and banks, but a new and just system designed to meet the needs of everyone, with sharing and social justice at its heart.
Failing institutions, nations or empires are often run by people whose capacities reflect the deteriorating material conditions. The greater the crisis, the more likely that morally crippled, mentally challenged or psychologically disturbed leadership may assert command. But when disastrous conditions are systemic and transcend borders, the weapons handled by the incompetents are the most lethal in recorded history and the area blanketed in propaganda and ignorance extends from municipality to province to nation, far more than a local population is under assault.
On September 11, 2001, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al, were either negligent about, or complicit in, the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of Americans. There is no third alternative. We require a thorough judicial proceeding to determine which it was. Fifteen years later we still need to know.
Which presidential campaign will promise to find the truth?
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On April 20th New York’s City Council overwhelming and unsurprisingly approved Mayor de Blasio’s controversial plan for the rezoning of the Brooklyn neighborhood East New York. The final tally was 45-1-0. Unsurprisingly since a month earlier the council had already approved de Blasio’s $41 billion housing plan that aims to create and preserve (a distinction that shouldn’t be glossed over) 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade.
Founded in 1986, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) is the international NGO that promotes BIG around the world. It held its last conference “Re-democratizing the Economy” at McGill’s Faculty of Law in 2014. A North American congress is being held in Winnipeg in May 2016 and its 16th congress in July in Seoul, South Korea.
Weaving through our never-ending obsession with U.S. politics is a skeletal finger tapping our shoulders, though we nervously whistle past it and avert our eyes. From the UN to NASA, scientists around the world are alarmed by the speed of our environment’s dissolution. Those paying attention have even increasingly been hearing the words “near term human extinction”, brought about by our heat engine civilization as it burns through the atmosphere on our small planet.
Liberty Quotient of the Subjugated
Self Power/CORPOCRACY POWER
One hundred years ago this week, Jesse Washington, an eighteen-year-old African American man, was burned at the stake in Waco, Texas.
On May 8, 1916 a 53-year-old white woman named Lucy Fryar was bludgeoned to death outside her home, seven miles south of the city. The chief and only suspect was Washington, an illiterate farm hand who worked for Lucy and her husband George.
A labor lawyer for the last 12 years, law was Chris Williams’ third career. He taught school in Chicago for a decade. For another decade he was a union organizer. Only then did he become a social justice lawyer specializing in advocating for and with low-wage workers. “Even though my route to law school was somewhat circuitous, I think my two prior careers help define who I am as a lawyer,” he says.
Beginnings
