Saturday, November 14, 2009
Vancouver Anarchist On-Line archive
I was just sent this new anarchist archive of material relating to Vancouver history. See
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
What Is Your Energy Footprint?
While I do not think that individual action is the solution to the burgeoning environmental and social problems, we certainly ought to practice what we preach. I have always thought that if people in the developed world lived the counter-culture life style the problem would be minimal. Now I have some proof for my claim. The average Canadian uses the equivalent – if everyone in the world lived this same way – of 5.68 Earths worth of energy, agricultural land etc. Your typical 3 car garage, McMansion suburbanite uses 7.75 Earths. Turns out my score is 1.02 Earths.
My low score shows how untrue the right-wing claim is that living an enviro-friendly way requires us to live in poverty. I have everything I need and eat better and live better than people with twice my income. I have not cut out the necessities, but only the unnecessary – the excess. Much, if not most of people's excess is pretense anyway and has nothing to do with need. Few people, other than those with a lot of children or a vast extended family need a 4000 sq. foot house. People buy these barns because it makes them think they are important, instead of the suckers they really are. A near-new sweater from Value Village looks just as good and is just as warm as one bought new from an expensive boutique.
Take the test yourself at http://www.myfootprint.org/
Friday, November 6, 2009
Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights
While this initiative unfortunately failed, the process of bringing people together across issues to affirm the rights of people to decide their own quality of life over the rights of corporations was very impressive. Other initiatives like this will surely follow.
--------
Published on Thursday, November 5, 2009 by YES! Magazine
Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights
Thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.
by Mari Margil
Of all the candidates, bills, and proposals on ballots around the country yesterday, one of the most exciting is a proposition that didn't pass.
In Spokane, Washington, despite intense opposition from business interests, a coalition of residents succeeded in bringing an innovative "Community Bill of Rights" to the ballot. Proposition 4 would have amended the city's Home Rule Charter (akin to a local constitution) to recognize nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.
A coalition of the city's residents drafted the amendments after finding that they didn't have the legal authority to make decisions about their own neighborhoods; the amendments were debated and fine-tuned in town hall meetings.
Although the proposition failed to pass, it garnered approximately 25 percent of the vote--despite the fact that opponents of the proposal (developers, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Spokane Homebuilders) outspent supporters by more than four to one. In particular, they targeted the Sixth Amendment, which would have given residents the ability, for the very first time, to make legally binding, enforceable decisions about what development would be appropriate for their own neighborhood. If a developer sought to build a big-box store, for example, it would need to conform to the neighborhood's plans.
Nor is development the only issue in which resident would have gained a voice. The drafters and supporters of Proposition 4 sought to build a "healthy, sustainable, and democratic Spokane" by expanding and creating rights for neighborhoods, residents, workers, and the natural environment.
Legal Rights for Communities
Patty Norton, a longtime neighborhood advocate who lives in the Peaceful Valley neighborhood of Spokane, and her neighbors spent years fighting a proposed condominium development that would loom 200 feet high, casting a literal shadow over Peaceful Valley's historic homes.
Proposition 4 would ensure that "decisions about our neighborhoods are made by the people living there, not big developers," Patty said.
For years, she and her neighbors have participated in protests, spoke at City Council hearings, attended meetings, and educated their neighbors. But, as with other neighborhoods in Spokane who've come together to fight off Wal-Mart stores and other unwanted developments, the residents of Peaceful Valley found that they didn't seem to have the legal authority to make a decision about something that would have a significant impact on their neighborhood.
Then, in 2007, Patty and several of her neighbors went to a Democracy School in Spokane. Democracy Schools--run by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund--are weekend workshops in which communities examine why the structure of law often gives corporations more power to make decisions than the communities in which they seek to do business. Participants look at why our system of government seems to hamper our efforts to protect the places where we live, rather than to help us protect them.
Because the U.S. Constitution legalized slavery, abolitionists had to change existing law in order to end it. Democracy School students study this and other examples of people's movements fighting unjust laws, recognizing that sometimes legal changes are the only way to protect their communities and the environment.
Patty and other Spokane graduates of Democracy School began talking with one another about how they might address their concerns about the future of their neighborhoods, the health of the local economy, the heavily polluted Spokane River, and a host of other issues.
A Community Bill of Rights
In the spring of 2008, grassroots organizations, labor unions, neighborhood councils, and other groups across the city began meeting together as part of a coalition they called Envision Spokane. Over the spring and summer, they drafted a series of ideas for addressing the needs of residents, workers, neighborhoods, and the environment. These ideas formed a draft "Community Bill of Rights" for the city.
During the winter, Envision Spokane held a series of 12 Town Halls across the city to engage the community in a conversation about the proposed Bill of Rights.
Taking the community's feedback, the board of Envision Spokane revised the Bill of Rights and, in March of 2009, began to collect signatures. Despite opposition from the Spokane City Council and a concerted effort by business interests to block the Bill of Rights from reaching the ballot, Envision Spokane collected over 5,000 signatures from voters, successfully qualifying the Community Bill of Rights for the November ballot.
The Community Bill of Rights proposed nine amendments, written to address some very real needs in Spokane, to the city's Home Rule Charter. By recognizing broad rights instead of proposing specific legislation, the amendments were written to change the fundamental structure of Spokane's legal system so that it would prioritize the protection of the local environment, economy, neighborhoods and residents.
* First. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy. Recognizes the rights of residents to protect their local economy by denying permits to big-box and chain stores.
* Second. Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. Creates a fee-for-service program for the thousands of Spokane residents who lack health insurance and currently rely on the emergency room for health care.
* Third. Residents have the right to affordable housing. In response to the loss of thousands of units of affordable housing in Spokane over the past few years, the city would have been obliged, through incentives or other measures, to ensure that an adequate supply of affordable housing is available for those most in need.
* Fourth. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy. Requires the city and local utilities to make renewable energy accessible to residents.
* Fifth. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish. Under current law, nature has no legal standing--to prove environmental damage, a person has to prove that he or she has been harmed. The Fifth Amendment would have protected the Spokane River, one of the most polluted in the nation following years of mining and toxic dumping, would have been protected under the Bill of Rights.
* Sixth. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Patty Norton and her neighbors--and other residents of Spokane--would have been able to enforce their decisions about what's best for them. (The condominium complex hasn't been built yet, but it is approved. The Sixth Amendment would have done what years of protesting haven't been able to: allow the residents to say, "No.")
* Seventh. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage and to work as apprentices on certain construction projects. As skilled labor leaves Spokane, the Bill of Rights would have protected workers' right to competitive wages and created apprenticeship opportunities so that young people could learn a trade and stay in the city.
* Eighth. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace. Workers would have been free from interference by employers when seeking to form a labor union, as well as from having to attend "captive audience" meetings.
* Ninth. Residents, workers, neighborhoods, neighborhood councils, and the city of Spokane shall have the right to enforce the Community Bill of Rights. For the first time, residents would have the legal authority to enforce their own decisions.
While Spokane is the largest city to attempt these legal changes, and the first whose adoption would have meant a change to a city constitution, other communities have already succeeded in securing similar rights. Towns in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia have passed ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, prohibiting corporate mining and water extraction, and stripping corporations of constitutional protections and the right to contribute to political campaigns.
The board of directors of Envision Spokane recognizes that fundamental change doesn't come easily or quickly, and will be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to continue the work that they've started. Other communities are now reaching out to learn from Spokane about how they might do something similar.
Mari Margil wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Mari, the first associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), teaches Democracy Schools across the country. She also advised Ecuador's Constituent Assembly in its decision to recognize the "rights of nature" in the nation's new constitution.
--------
Published on Thursday, November 5, 2009 by YES! Magazine
Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights
Thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.
by Mari Margil
Of all the candidates, bills, and proposals on ballots around the country yesterday, one of the most exciting is a proposition that didn't pass.
In Spokane, Washington, despite intense opposition from business interests, a coalition of residents succeeded in bringing an innovative "Community Bill of Rights" to the ballot. Proposition 4 would have amended the city's Home Rule Charter (akin to a local constitution) to recognize nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.
A coalition of the city's residents drafted the amendments after finding that they didn't have the legal authority to make decisions about their own neighborhoods; the amendments were debated and fine-tuned in town hall meetings.
Although the proposition failed to pass, it garnered approximately 25 percent of the vote--despite the fact that opponents of the proposal (developers, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the Spokane Homebuilders) outspent supporters by more than four to one. In particular, they targeted the Sixth Amendment, which would have given residents the ability, for the very first time, to make legally binding, enforceable decisions about what development would be appropriate for their own neighborhood. If a developer sought to build a big-box store, for example, it would need to conform to the neighborhood's plans.
Nor is development the only issue in which resident would have gained a voice. The drafters and supporters of Proposition 4 sought to build a "healthy, sustainable, and democratic Spokane" by expanding and creating rights for neighborhoods, residents, workers, and the natural environment.
Legal Rights for Communities
Patty Norton, a longtime neighborhood advocate who lives in the Peaceful Valley neighborhood of Spokane, and her neighbors spent years fighting a proposed condominium development that would loom 200 feet high, casting a literal shadow over Peaceful Valley's historic homes.
Proposition 4 would ensure that "decisions about our neighborhoods are made by the people living there, not big developers," Patty said.
For years, she and her neighbors have participated in protests, spoke at City Council hearings, attended meetings, and educated their neighbors. But, as with other neighborhoods in Spokane who've come together to fight off Wal-Mart stores and other unwanted developments, the residents of Peaceful Valley found that they didn't seem to have the legal authority to make a decision about something that would have a significant impact on their neighborhood.
Then, in 2007, Patty and several of her neighbors went to a Democracy School in Spokane. Democracy Schools--run by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund--are weekend workshops in which communities examine why the structure of law often gives corporations more power to make decisions than the communities in which they seek to do business. Participants look at why our system of government seems to hamper our efforts to protect the places where we live, rather than to help us protect them.
Because the U.S. Constitution legalized slavery, abolitionists had to change existing law in order to end it. Democracy School students study this and other examples of people's movements fighting unjust laws, recognizing that sometimes legal changes are the only way to protect their communities and the environment.
Patty and other Spokane graduates of Democracy School began talking with one another about how they might address their concerns about the future of their neighborhoods, the health of the local economy, the heavily polluted Spokane River, and a host of other issues.
A Community Bill of Rights
In the spring of 2008, grassroots organizations, labor unions, neighborhood councils, and other groups across the city began meeting together as part of a coalition they called Envision Spokane. Over the spring and summer, they drafted a series of ideas for addressing the needs of residents, workers, neighborhoods, and the environment. These ideas formed a draft "Community Bill of Rights" for the city.
During the winter, Envision Spokane held a series of 12 Town Halls across the city to engage the community in a conversation about the proposed Bill of Rights.
Taking the community's feedback, the board of Envision Spokane revised the Bill of Rights and, in March of 2009, began to collect signatures. Despite opposition from the Spokane City Council and a concerted effort by business interests to block the Bill of Rights from reaching the ballot, Envision Spokane collected over 5,000 signatures from voters, successfully qualifying the Community Bill of Rights for the November ballot.
The Community Bill of Rights proposed nine amendments, written to address some very real needs in Spokane, to the city's Home Rule Charter. By recognizing broad rights instead of proposing specific legislation, the amendments were written to change the fundamental structure of Spokane's legal system so that it would prioritize the protection of the local environment, economy, neighborhoods and residents.
* First. Residents have the right to a locally-based economy. Recognizes the rights of residents to protect their local economy by denying permits to big-box and chain stores.
* Second. Residents have the right to affordable preventive health care. Creates a fee-for-service program for the thousands of Spokane residents who lack health insurance and currently rely on the emergency room for health care.
* Third. Residents have the right to affordable housing. In response to the loss of thousands of units of affordable housing in Spokane over the past few years, the city would have been obliged, through incentives or other measures, to ensure that an adequate supply of affordable housing is available for those most in need.
* Fourth. Residents have the right to affordable and renewable energy. Requires the city and local utilities to make renewable energy accessible to residents.
* Fifth. The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish. Under current law, nature has no legal standing--to prove environmental damage, a person has to prove that he or she has been harmed. The Fifth Amendment would have protected the Spokane River, one of the most polluted in the nation following years of mining and toxic dumping, would have been protected under the Bill of Rights.
* Sixth. Residents have the right to determine the future of their neighborhoods. Patty Norton and her neighbors--and other residents of Spokane--would have been able to enforce their decisions about what's best for them. (The condominium complex hasn't been built yet, but it is approved. The Sixth Amendment would have done what years of protesting haven't been able to: allow the residents to say, "No.")
* Seventh. Workers have the right to be paid the prevailing wage and to work as apprentices on certain construction projects. As skilled labor leaves Spokane, the Bill of Rights would have protected workers' right to competitive wages and created apprenticeship opportunities so that young people could learn a trade and stay in the city.
* Eighth. Workers have the right to employer neutrality when unionizing, and the right to constitutional protections within the workplace. Workers would have been free from interference by employers when seeking to form a labor union, as well as from having to attend "captive audience" meetings.
* Ninth. Residents, workers, neighborhoods, neighborhood councils, and the city of Spokane shall have the right to enforce the Community Bill of Rights. For the first time, residents would have the legal authority to enforce their own decisions.
While Spokane is the largest city to attempt these legal changes, and the first whose adoption would have meant a change to a city constitution, other communities have already succeeded in securing similar rights. Towns in Maine, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia have passed ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, prohibiting corporate mining and water extraction, and stripping corporations of constitutional protections and the right to contribute to political campaigns.
The board of directors of Envision Spokane recognizes that fundamental change doesn't come easily or quickly, and will be meeting in the next few weeks to discuss how to continue the work that they've started. Other communities are now reaching out to learn from Spokane about how they might do something similar.
Mari Margil wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Mari, the first associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), teaches Democracy Schools across the country. She also advised Ecuador's Constituent Assembly in its decision to recognize the "rights of nature" in the nation's new constitution.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
The Winter Olympics - Passivity When There Should Be Outrage
The Olympic torch has passed hand to hand up Vancouver Island. Crowds gather by the thousands and cheer the spectacle. Nothing wrong with this display, in principle, if the Olympics was a voluntary effort. But we, the citizen, are stuck with a bill for an estimated $6 billion. (How bout a tee shirt saying "$6 billion and all I get is this lousy torch?) Meanwhile people lie in the streets for lack of housing and the Children's Festival was canceled, since the govt would not come up with the measly $40,000 due to cut-backs. $6 billion in corporate welfare to the mass media, construction and real estate industries, cut-backs on the real needs. Critics such as ORN and NO2010 are condemned by this same media with all the deceitfulness, pompousness and arrogance that the propaganda machine can churn out. And the masses – or at least a high percentage of them, rejoice. Where is their outrage about being doubly robbed by the government and the corporations it whores for?
At the same time people this spectacle runs on,are lining up by the thousands to get their swine flu shots. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent by the government on this corporate-made vaccine. Swine flu is the direct result of corporate "factory farming". The corporations create the problem, and the corporations make money off correcting it. The people in those line-ups ought to be jumping up and down with anger that their lives have been threatened by a corporate-greed produced virus.
Taking an airplane flight is a totalitarian nightmare of humiliation and degradation worthy of Orwell's 1984. Terrorism is the result of US meddling in the Middle East. The obvious solution to terrorism on aircraft is to eliminate its cause, that is cease the meddling. But people seem to put up with this – even though less are flying – and there does not seem to be any ground swell of anger directed at the true cause of terrorism and the resulting degrading procedures at the airport.
Are today's problems so overwhelming that people have just decided to swallow the Kool Aid? Is the ability to make changes now so limited that people have given up?
Before sinking into despair, I would like to point out that today's passivity is different from that which existed during my childhood in the 1950's. Back then people believed in the system and gladly accepted what was done to them in the name of progress, democracy and free enterprize. They might go along today, but they go along sullenly. The crowds cheer the Olympic torch, but I suspect many do in the spirit of an editorial in our local paper which said, yes, we are paying a fortune for it, the govt is cutting back on essential services, but it is there and we might as well have good time with it. Essentially,"we are getting screwed anyway, we may as well enjoy it."
If hope for a better life can be re-introduced to the mass of ordinary people, perhaps this sullenness can be turned into positive action, like it has at other times in our history.
Monday, November 2, 2009
B.C. Counter-culture
Geocities is no more, so I have moved my BC Counter-culture Web site site to a new location. For anyone interested in this (hopefully) ever-expanding file of articles, links and photos see:
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Vatican Response To Genocide Inquiry
Memorial Service for Murdered Residential School Children Evokes Literal Storm, and a Response, at the Vatican - Support for International Inquiry Grows
The first public memorial service ever held in Rome for the victims of Catholic Indian Residential Schools, that occurred outside the Vatican on October 11, has evoked literal storms of change in the Roman Catholic church.
Less than a day after the service, a rare tornado struck the centre of Rome and the Vatican. Two days later, senior Vatican officials stated privately that they would meet with Rev. Kevin Annett and The Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) from Canada to discuss their demand that the remains of children who died under the care of the Catholic church be surrendered for a proper burial.
Until the October 11 ceremony, the Vatican had refused to respond to the FRD and its letters to the Pope. One church insider recently informed Rev. Annett that the Curia's willingness to meet with him and the FRD represents "a major admission that genocide went on ... the Pope's back is to the wall on this one."
Besides a return of the remains of residential school children, the FRD has called for the Catholic church to surrender the guilty, revoke genocidal papal bulls such as the Inter Caetera of 1493, and appear before an international war crimes tribunal.
Held across from St. Peter's Square following the Pope's weekly Sunday service, the October 11 ceremony was officiated by Rev. Annett, who was commissioned by families of the dead and aboriginal elders in Vancouver to hold the service.
Rev. Annett said prayers for the dead and scattered on the pavement in front of the Vatican water and soil from the site of a mass grave at a Catholic Indian Residential school in Canada.
The service proceeded undisturbed, despite the presence of numerous police and Vatican security forces nearby.
Rev. Annett also conducted a symbolic exorcism during the service, aimed at what he termed the "spirit of anti-Christ and worldliness" that rules the Vatican.
Rev. Annett splashed sacred water from the land near a residential school on the pavement in front of the Vatican three times as he spoke, and then scattered soil from a mass grave at the same school to the winds, saying,
"We lay these elements of the murdered Indian children to rest, here where their murder was planned, so that their spirits may always be a witness against the Lie that poses as the church of Christ."
The Italian media extensively reported the event and Annett's lectures on genocide in Canada that occurred across Italy.
In response to Annett's trip, several Italian municipal governments have indicated their willingness to sponsor Rev. Annett to return to Italy, and to endorse the FRD's annual Aboriginal Holocaust Memorial Day on April 15, 2010.
Rev. Annett conducted the service as part of a month long speaking tour he conducted in Europe. He spoke to communities in Italy, England and Ireland, including survivors of crimes in Catholic schools and orphanages in Ireland, and screened his award-winning documentary film on genocide in Canadian residential schools, UNREPENTANT.
In the coming months, similar ceremonies will be conducted by Rev. Annett and residential school survivors at Roman Catholic, Anglican and United churches across Canada. Annett and FRD members plan to return to Europe during late March and April, 2010.
Note: The soil used in this memorial service was obtained with the blessing and permission of some of the aboriginal families whose relatives lie in the mass grave in question. In the words of one of the elders who authorized this event, Chief Louis Daniels of the Anishinabe Nation,
"Kevin Annett has the permission of my clan and nation to conduct any kind of service or public event needed to bring the truth and the children home." (July 8, 2009)
A Public Liturgy of Remembrance and Exorcism
performed outside the Vatican
Sunday, October 11, 2009
You tube link to event:
performed outside the Vatican
Sunday, October 11, 2009
You tube link to event:
Weather link: Tornado in Rome
http://www.theromanforum.com/?p=5464
http://www.huliq.com/8684/87606/freak-tornado-struck-rome-yesterday
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