It’s called LOCALIZATION.
It’s called TAKING CONTROL of your life.
It’s the FUTURE.
Voters in Boulder passed two measures on Tuesday that would allow the city to lay plans to start a municipal utility and cut ties with Xcel Energy, its current, corporate power provider. Proponents say the move will give the city greater leeway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
via Colorado – Boulder Votes to Remove Power Company – NYTimes.com.
The other day I made a post about a church service I’d recently attended, remarking both on the power of the pastor’s preaching, its effect on his congregation, and on his responsibility to them. It was clear to me that he was energizing them to go out a face the world in a constructive frame of mind.
A friend of mine, a man I’ve known for almost 40 years, replied by indicating that he’d been lurking on a list of Unitarian ministers that was currently discussing Black Preaching: The Recovery Of A Powerful Tool by Henry H. Mitchell. This paragraph seems to have been particularly provocative:
As has been noted, worship among Whites and Blacks was similar during the Great Awakenings. It might now be asked why audible response or dialogue disappeared from mainline Protestant patterns of worship. One guess is that the preaching material soared beyond the intellectual reach of the congregation. This occurred, perhaps, because Protestant seminaries had engaged in a contest of one-upmanship with the graduate divisions of the liberal arts colleges, creating scholars instead of professionals skilled in reaching people. With such standard conditioning in the theological schools, the preacher might well be expected to be intellectual in concerns rather than interested in the day-to-day issues of ordinary people. It follows that in such a school-conditioned, abstract atmosphere, answering back would soon be considered by the preaching scholar as impolite and disruptive. This attitude would increase the inhibitions of an audience eager to please. Modern-day experiments in the middle-class church, in which dialogue takes place during and after the sermon, seem clearly to support this hypothesis. In the planning of the talk-back after the service, great care is taken to pitch the dialogue within the intellectual reach of the laity involved. It is encouraging to speculate that the middle-class model may now be drifting away from the graduate classroom and back to the pattern once shared by Blacks and Whites in the preaching event.
My friend then went to say: Continue reading
World famous French botanist, Partick Blanc, is known as the original creator of the vertical garden concept and has since travelled the world creating green urban master pieces without parallel. With his incredible modern approach and naturally green fingers, he takes on commissions with the attitude of “no wall is too big”. The beauty of his flowing and flowering work defies gravity and his incredible urban art form contributes to the built environment from New York to London, Cape Town to Paris, Hong Kong to Istanbul and beyond.
“In any city, all over the world, a naked wall can be turned into a Vertical Garden and thus be a valuable shelter for biodiversity. It’s also a way to add nature to the daily life of city inhabitants” said Patrick Blanc who started out as a scientific researcher in the 80’s until he made a trip to Malaysia and Thailand which inspired him to start his work in bringing plant life to corporate and urban spac
Shortly before 1 a.m. the crowd streamed into the center of Columbus Circle. There, surrounded by gushing fountains, musicians that included Arlo Guthrie, Tom Chapin and David Amram, joined Mr. Seeger on the base of the Christopher Columbus monument.
The crowd quieted. Guitars began strumming as Mr. Seeger began singing “We Shall Overcome,” a song that he introduced to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
via Pete Seeger Leads Protesters in New York, on Foot and in Song – NYTimes.com.
Let Occupy Wall Street become a permanent well of political discontent.
Occupy Wall Street HAS changed political discourse in America. It remains to be seen, however, what fruit will come from this change, if any.
That the OWSers have yet to come up with a set of concrete demands has often been noted. On this I side with those who do not see this as a problem. On the one hand, as many have noted, it’s not as though their central issue—massive income inequality—hasn’t been obvious for years, if not a decade or two, and it’s not as though it is difficult to come up with proposal after proposal that addresses the problem.
Everyone Must Eat
It is more important, at this point, simple to recognize the problem and to see it as deep and fundamental.
America, with all our problems, remains the world’s richest nation. That being the case, it is disgraceful that anyone should lack the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, education, and health care. Everyone, WITHOUT qualification, MUST have access to the means of living a decent life. Just how that is to be done, yes, that is a problem. But let us first state, and accept, the principle:
Everyone, WITHOUT qualification, MUST have access to the means of living a decent life.
It is not the OSW movement’s job to come up with proposals to achieve that end. That is a job for think tanks, Congressional staffers, lobbyists, and universities.
The Well of Our Discontent
Moreover, I rather like the existence of a somewhat amorphous well of ‘WE AREN’T GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE.’ Perhaps that should become a permanent feature of our political ecology. Continue reading
Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.
Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:
As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.
Things get moderated toward the end:
The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. …
On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.
Well, maybe.
People’s Music
But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement. Continue reading
From Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, to Town Square, USA, thousands upon thousands of people rely on public transportation to take them to jobs, shopping, to the doctor, and so forth. But bus lines are closing in cities across the nation and leaving people stranded in their homes, especially poor people and old people. It’s happening in Detroit, Longmont (Colorado), Washington D.C., and in my neighborhood in Jersey City, NJ.
Three neighborhood associations met at the Monumental Baptist Church last night to make plans on how to meet the crisis. While there is some reasonable hope that the abandoned routes will be taken-up by other providers, it is clear that this is a recurring problem that must be met by sustained action.
What’s happening in your neighborhood? Have any bus lines been closed in the last two or three years? Are bus lines being closed in the near future? What will happen to people stranded by these closures?
How is it that the so-called richest nation on the planet cannot figure out how to provide transportation for ALL of its citizens?
If you’ve got a story, put it in the comments.
Other stories below the fold. Continue reading
Where this is headed is to a shorter work week. And leaves more time for drumming and dancing, community gardens, and everyone teaching skills to kids and one another.
After surveying policies around the world, we found that there is one that clearly dominates in terms of impact and cost-effectiveness: work-sharing. The idea is simple. Currently, firms mostly respond to weak demand by laying off workers. Under a work-sharing program, firms are encouraged by government policy to spread a small amount of the pain across many workers.
In Germany, for example, which has used work-sharing aggressively in this downturn, a typical company might reduce the hours of 50 workers by 20% rather than laying off 10 workers. The government would then provide a tax credit to make up for most of the lost pay, with the employer kicking in some as well. In a typical arrangement, a worker might see his weekly hours go down by 20%, and his salary go down by about 4%.
via Work Sharing | Work-sharing could work for us – Los Angeles Times.
Truth and Traditions 