Want to see who's written for our newsletter? Check out the new author index to Justice Rising: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Domination, here. Got a favorite author-activist? She might also be a contributor! Each link goes to a single-page pdf of the article, suitable for printing for tabling, events, or info packets. Members get a subscription.
Read more...As we build for 2013, we welcome your member support! Check out our 2012 report, and then please consider supporting the upcoming year's organizing by joining Alliance for Democracy. Members receive a subscription to our newsletter, Justice Rising, and the satisfaction of helping end corporate rule from the grassroots up.
If you can make a larger contribution, we'll thank you by sending you a dvd of one of the following Populist Dialogues programs. Select one dvd for a donation of $50, two for $100 or all three for $150. When you give online you'll be able to select the show you'd like. If you have questions, or want to learn more about sharing the show on your local community cable station, please contact us in the office--email or call 781-894-1179.
12-46: Escaping the Great Recession with Public Banking
Guest Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of The Web of Debt and founder of the Public Banking Institute, discusses the advantages of public banking in the United States and around the world. She reviews how money is created, how the Federal Reserve was created, various types of public banks and how their are structured, why some nations have escaped the Great Recession, how America could save its postal service, and how public banking institution could be used as a land bank to address the under-water property and foreclosure problems. First broadcast 11-11-12
12-44: Capitalism of the Olympic Games
Jules Boykoff, associate professor of political science at Pacific University, discusses the recent London Summer Olympics in terms of what he calls Celebration Capitalism. He also talks about the origins of the International Olympic Committee, costs for host cities (both economic and political), who sponsors and benefits from the games, the opposition which develops, media response to that opposition, and the militarization of public spaces including the concept of “Total Policing.” First broadcast 10-28-12
12-41: TransPacific Partnership and "Free Trade"
Guest Elizabeth Swager is Asst Director of Oregon Fair Trade Campaign. She talks about her role in the enactment of Portland Oregon's sweat-free procurement ordinance, designed to protect foreign factory workers. She goes on to review past "free-trade agreements" (NAFTA, Panama, Columbia and South Korea) and their effects on American jobs losses, tax havens and challenges to laws and regulations as a result of investor protection clauses. The TransPacific Partnership is then discussed as a "NAFTA on steroids." This agreement is being negotiated in super secrecy, except for a leaked chapter, which give us a look at how corporate-driven the TPP is. The show includes a petition calling for transparency in the TPP negotiations. First broadcast date: Oct. 7, 2012
Due out in October, the final issue of Justice Rising's series on "Money in Politics" will look at who runs US government. Is it the American people looking out for our common good or a corporate elite exerting control over public policy to benefit their private ends? Taking historic research by Gustavus Meyers, Thortstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills, this issue of Justice Rising will apply their analysis of "money power" to the twenty-first century. It will lay bare the disaster of a public policy driven by corporate allies in a time when the externalities of their market-driven rationales are causing extreme climate change as well as species and resource depletion-threatening life as we know it.
This important issue of Justice Rising will expose how the revolving door between corporate America and our government's top decision makers facilitates the monied elite's domination over Supreme Court decisions, our imperial foreign policy, and the daily workings of the regulatory system. It will also illuminate how our legislatures have been turned into training camps for corporate lobbyists.
In the tradition of Justice Rising, this issue will also promote the growing drive of the American people to exert democratic control over corporate power. From ending corporate personhood to creating a public service corps solidly loyal to the common good of the people, citizens are uniting to guarantee a future of liberty and justice for all.
A subscription to Justice Rising is free with Alliance for Democracy membership. For a free copy of this issue, email us in the Alliance office. Back issues of Justice Rising are available online, both as complete issues and individual articles.
This year's Netroots Nation, featured a panel discussion on energizing voters and activists to take on issues surrounding election funding, corporate power, and how to challenge the influence of big money on public interest-based governance. "After Citizens United: Combating Corporate Power in Elections" featured Jay Harris introducing the sponsoring groups, as well as John Nichols, Laura Flanders, Amanda Terkel and Leo Gerard. Netroots Nation organizers are posting panel discussion videos online; we'll keep an eye on the site and link to the video when it's available--from reports, it was a very popular and energizing discussion.
Netroots Nation also saw the launch of the United for the People web portal, a site with links to lots of groups working on issues surrounding corporate personhood, political bribery, democratic governance, and your political participation. The portal is a project of People for the American Way. Check out all the sites and get active!
Finally, here's some good good words by blogger April Lukes-Streich, an activist working in the banking industry in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She writes for ethecofem on gender, class issues, and local politics. In the excerpt below, the emphasis is ours.
The third session was After Citizens United: Combating Corporate Power in Elections. Like many of the panels I attended, money was a central focus of the discussion. The solution offered by the panelists here was, perhaps surprisingly, a constitutional amendment ending corporate personhood. Many people think that such an amendment would never pass, as it’s been quite some time since we’ve amended the Constitution; on the other hand, the support is behind the spirit of the amendment. It was mentioned that we often perceive the fact that there are so many grassroots, progressive non-profits that are working toward the same thing as an indication of factions within the progressive movement; this is not necessarily true. On the contrary, these groups are fighting for the same end goal and are mobilizing their communities. As is another frequent theme of Netroots this year, starting small and coming together to effect real, nationwide change is key to progressive victory. Simple measures work best, as Laura Flanders of GritTV noted: contact local media, local candidates who they are accepting donations from, be present at as many open forums and townhall meetings as you can manage. We can make a difference if we’re willing to be persistent.
"Populist Dialogues" most recent show features guest Judy Barnes of Oregonians for Renewable Energy Policy (OREP) who explains how feed-in-tariffs have created big increases in production of renewable energy and in good paying jobs in Germany, Gainesville FL, and elsewhere. Judy answers frequently asked questions on this means of financing renewable solar energy which OREP is spearheading in Oregon. Read their brochure here.
The series' next show focuses on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, campaign finance, and Portland's radical history. Featured are Gerry Pollet of Heart of America NW speaking on Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country and the focus of needed environmental clear-up due to long-term contamination of the surrounding area and eco-systems; Steve Cowan, director of PriceLess,the Movie on the problem of money and lobbyists in our political system and the role of public election financing; and Michael Munk, author of Portland Red Guide, a history of people and places in Portland's radical history.
No cable? Not in Portland? Watch the show from the AfD-Portland website. Or get "Populist Dialogues" on your local cable access station—contact David Delk for further information.
Long-time AfD member Stan Robinson and other staffers at WZBC-FM's "Truth and Justice Radio" were honored by the the Community Church of Boston with its Sacco and Vanzetti Social Justice award on May 15.
In recognizing the show Community Church praised the Truth and Justice team for "bringing honest reporting and stories to the greater-Boston area for over a decade. Honesty and transparency in media are values too often hidden from the public. The staff of Truth and Justice Radio speak truth to power every Sunday morning."
Along with Stan, regular contributors to the show include Steve Cornie and Martin Voelker, along with Salma Abu Ayyash, who has continued reporting of "This Week in Palestine" since the passing of journalist Sherif Fam last year. The church's service/award presentation featured show clips, food, and music, including a performance by singer-songwriter-activist Tom Neilson (you can listen to his Citizens United song here).
"Truth and Justice Radio" airs from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Sundays. If you're outside the ZBC broadcast area (which is, sadly, not very large!) you can listen online or hear last week's show here.
"Being the media" is extremely important. Whether TV, print or radio, we don't get coverage in the major corporate media, so we need to do it ourselves. We need to present the analysis and the framing of the issues of the day so that people can understand issues from a populist, anti-corporate progressive perspective. That is why we created the Alliance for Democracy - Populist Dialogues. Now we need to share them with the rest of the nation and that is where you come in. You can "be the media" by helping to put our programing on your local public access TV station. It's easy!
Populist Dialogues – media for the populist future!
Bring it to your community. All Populist Dialogues episodes are available for any public access station nationwide to broadcast. And it is easy both for you and for them to do it.
What you need to do:
First, go to the Portland AfD Chapter website at www.afd-pdx.org and view the list of programs. You can view all the programs recorded to date. New shows will added at the rate of one a week.
Now, contact your local public access TV station and find out, by speaking with the programming manager how they schedule shows. Most stations have open time spots which they need to fill and will be interested to know that this is available. Learn from them if they are interested in just one or another episode, or topic, or maybe running Populist Dialogue Program with one show each week. How this works will be different for each station.
You can direct them to our web page so they can take a look. Direct them to the show you like for viewing and let them know there is a need for this type of programing to be on the air. Let them know that it is easy to use PegMedia to download the shows for broadcast and it does not cost them a penny.
Many stations have never heard of PegMedia. Let them know that this is a way for them to download content for their station at minimal or no cost to them and that you and others in the community are interested in watching "Alliance for Democracy – Populist Dialogues."
What they need to do:
1. Go to the PegMedia web site at www.pegmedia.org.
2. Establish a free account by clicking on: Create New Account
3. After establishing the new account, log in.
4. Now click on: Shows From Selected States
5. Select "Oregon"
6. Click on: Alliance for Democracy – Populist Dialogues
7. Now read the brief description of the series and scroll down to view list of currently available shows.
The station or program manager will find instructions on how to download the shows on the right hand link: Downloading Show Episodes.
Note that there is no cost to the downloader as we, the Portland Chapter of the Alliance for Democracy, pays the cost.
What do we have so far? See the Populist Dialogues page for the short list and more details!
"Bard Insurgent" Tom Neilson has written a song about the humanity of corporations, aptly titled "Corporations are Human." Here's some choice lines:
People have faces and socks in a drawer. Corporations are faceless, here and offshore.
If you think corporations bought free speech before, now that they're human they'll buy even more
When a corporation has a colonoscopy, then I'll believe they're human like me.
Alliance for Democracy of Portland, Oregon, USA, would like to publicly express solidarity with Julian Assange, the investigative journalist and internet publisher of WikiLeaks website, which he founded in 2006. Since then, Assange has won numerous awards including a Media Award for excellence in human rights journalism in 2009 from Amnesty International (New Media) for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. The legitimacy of his status as a journalist has been recognized by the Center for Investigative Journalism.
In a world where most sources of news are owned and controlled by governments and large corporations, which use said organs of public media to aggrandize themselves and suppress news unfavorable to their own bottom line, we support international freedom of the press and those pressmen, presswomen, and publishers who operate without the constraints of corporate control.
In December 2010, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank La Rue, said Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases."
We refute Assange’s condemnation by many governments, including the United States—in a remarkable stance against our own First Amendment—for his exposure of embarrassing, slanderous verbiage by public officials in many countries, and the publication of videos showing United States forces engaging in criminal acts of shooting journalists and civilians
In a continuing conspiracy to obstruct the freedom of the press and the free speech rights of Mr. Assange guaranteed in the First Amendment, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal have all stopped processing contributions to WikiLeaks. Major corporations in the business of money handling should not cut the flow of money to a publication in order to control its content, on behalf of the US government.
This is a civil liberties issue. We support Julian Assange’s right to publish truthful news on a free access internet source such as WikiLeaks. We decry his persecution and hounding by the Swedish government on trumped-up charges of alleged sexual offenses.
Whether or not the Swedish accusations have merit, Mr. Assange has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. It is quite remarkable that he was held in Britain without bail as if charged with a capital crime, although in fact merely wanted for questioning. This is indicative that the Swedish matter is being exaggerated as intimidation or retaliation for Wikileaks' unwelcome revelations.
We support the right of Julian Assange to publish WikiLeaks on the basis of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. That amendment is copied below least we forget the text of the amendment, These are rights explicitly retained by the American people when the Constitution of the United States was adopted.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Grim but good. Chris Hedges and Michael Moore discuss "the avalanche that's come down the mountain." Thanks to friends at Concord (MA) Climate Action Network for forwarding.
Update: Download or listen to the archived show here--scroll down, and it's at the top of the list.
Riki Ott will be on Pacifica Radio tomorrow (Tuesday) from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, on "Ecologic," hosted by David Occhiuto. The discussion will start off with geologist Chris Landau, then move to Riki and a discussion of the BP oil disaster and Move To Amend. Journalist Heather Rogers will also be on the show. You can listen in on WBAI's website, and find out more details on the broadcast here.
AfD member Mary Francis is a key organizer for the Voices of Oklahoma radio project, which hopes to start up a community, not-for-profit FM station serving McClain, Garvin and southern Cleveland counties. After submitting their application to the FCC in 2007, Voices of Oklahoma recently learned it was approved, pending a 30 day period for competitors to appeal. But their attorney says their application is a strong one, and they're looking forward to receiving a construction permit, picking call letters, and getting on the air.
Voices of Oklahoma hopes to be working with the Prometheus Radio Project as their second full-power radio station "barnraising." The group also hopes to file applications for community radio stations in the towns of Cordell and Wynnewood.
Voices of Oklahoma's web magazine, www.voicesofok.org, features updates on station development, plus the kind of community-focus news the station hopes to be covering. Congratulations, Mary and all the people at Voices of Oklahoma!
by Jan Edwards
April 25, 2010 marked the 10th Anniversary of the passing of the historic Point Arena Resolution on Corporate Personhood. In recognition, the Point Arena City Council proclaimed April 25th to be "Democracy Day" and voted to co-sponsor a celebration on Friday, April 23rd at the Arena Theater. There was a community potluck in the theater followed by a free showing of This Land is Your Land, a documentary about the effect of corporate power on the lives of average citizens with a special focus on corporate personhood. The movie was partially filmed in Point Arena and has several clips of the town and local folks commenting on corporate power. The audience cheered every time a familiar face or a clip showing the town flashed on the screen. Turnout was terrific and the evening was a lot of fun.
On Saturday, there was a forum at the Coast Community Library with a deeper discussion on the implications of the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC and of a proposed Amendment that will legally correct the Constitutional problem. Led by William Meyers with community activist and former Arcata City Councilman Dave Meserve working for the Campaign to Legalize Democracy, Dan Hamburg, director of Voice of the Environment and others including Jim Tarbell, Jan Edwards and many of the committee members who wrote the original resolution 10 years earlier.
In 2000, Point Arena became the first municipality to pass a resolution
rejecting the concept that corporations should be allowed to claim rights originally intended for human persons in the U.S. Constitution. The resolution was written and promoted by the Redwood Coast Chapter of the Alliance for Democracy. This action inspired Berkeley, Arcata, and then other cities and towns to pass resolutions of their own. Eventually, towns began to pass binding ordinances. In 2006, Humboldt County passed Measure T which revoked corporate rights in the county. Measure T was later overturned, but many small municipalities are currently using these ordinances to protect water, prevent toxic sludge dumping, prohibit factory hog farms and promote local democracy. Just this week Berkeley restated their opposition to corporate constitutional rights by passing a new resolution in reaction to the recent Supreme Court ruling that strengthened corporate rights.
In 1886, the Supreme Court recognized corporations as "persons" under the 14th Amendment, which had been passed to give equal protection and due process to people newly freed from slavery. Since that time, corporations have been handed almost all the rights of "natural (human) persons" including the First Amendment freedoms. In January of this year, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission banning as unconstitutional Congress's restrictions on corporate campaign spending in elections. The trail of law supporting this ruling stems directly from the concept that corporations are persons with rights in the constitution.
Websites for more information:
www.CaliforniaDemocracy.org (Click on Corporate Personhood for Point Arena Resolution and history of corporate personhood)
www.MovetoAmend.org (To read about the amendment and its sponsors.)
www.thislandthemovie.com (For information on the documentary This Land is Your Land.) To order a DVD of the movie, send $24.99 to: Lori Cheatle, Hard Working Movies, 10 Jay Street, Ste 902, Brooklyn, NY 11201, office: 1-646-383-5971. www.hardworkingmovies.com
ProsperityAgenda.us reports action gets results with PBS--the ombudsman says Frontline has been at fault in not including single payer in their coverage of health care reform. Hat tip to Floridians for Health Care.
Thanks to all of you who responded to our call to action when Frontline reported on the new health law and how it became law and excluded single payer. The ombudsman wrote:
. . . our office was deluged with almost a thousand critical e-mails from people who said they were upset and angry that an hour-long look back at how the White House ultimately hammered out a historic agreement on health care, aptly titled 'Obama's Deal,' failed to deal with the single-payer system advocated by many of those who were not part of the deal. Many of these e-mails appeared to have been generated in response to a handful of websites that criticized the program for what they saw as failures to deal fairly or adequately with this single-payer option and with one of its major proponents, Dr. Margaret Flowers.
A public opinion poll by CBS News and the New York Times in February 2009 reported 59 percent of respondents said the government should provide health insurance, and a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concluded that the same percentage of doctors "supported legislation to establish national health insurance." A bill introduced years earlier in a House committee by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) supporting the single-payer plan through an expansion of Medicare had 87 co-sponsors as of February 2010 (more than any other universal health-care bill) and lots of labor union support.
So, while the hard-nosed journalistic decision may be to focus on the real options and debate, it seems to me that to ignore something that was out there and popular with millions of people and thousands of health-care professionals but not really on the table, was a mistake. Although obviously tight on time, the producers should have found 30 seconds to take this into account because many Americans support it yet the deal makers never mention it nor is the politics of discarding it addressed.
What is also puzzling to me is that this is the second time that producers of major Frontline programs on health care have decided not even to mention the single-payer system with respect to would-be reform. The other program was a March 31, 2009, broadcast of 'Sick Around America' which provoked a substantial amount of controversy and that I also wrote about at the time.
AfD secretary Dr. Peter Mott had this letter to the editor published on Thursday, April 22, by the Rochester, NY, Democrat and Chronicle.
To the Editor:
There are two increasingly serious threats to our democracy. First, the threat of corporate domination. Consider: Who chooses our representatives in Washington, the people or the corporations? Who chooses our health care system, the people or the insurance corporations? Second, the decreasing ability of our society to truly listen to one another. The extreme right-wing in our country is becoming so well financed and organized that it can shut down civil discourse on almost any issue by creating factions based on fear, racism and hate. We need to quickly recognize and speak out strongly against both. To let them fester is to continue to weaken our country.
Peter D. Mott
... you may have noticed some missing context for Dr. Margaret Flowers's interview. As Healthcare-NOW has it:
"Obama's Deal"...exposed some of the sordid deals struck by congressional lawmakers and the White House with the health insurance industry and Big Pharma...While Frontline extensively interviewed Dr. Margaret Flowers of PNHP, they neglected to broadcast the very reason that she and others risked arrest: to get a single-payer advocate to testify in the Senate Finance Committee hearings on health care. Frontline, rather, depicted these advocates as President Obama's "liberal base" leaving out any discussion about why nurses, doctors, and every-day Americans would risk being arrested by Federal police.
Healthcare-NOW alerts us to an upcoming episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline on "Obama's Deal"--a look at the high-stakes backroom and boardroom negotiating that went on between the health care industry and their friends in Congress and the White House as lobbyists and legislators put the health care bill together. A preview is below:
We hope that the show ask why the health care needs of the American people had to take second place to the profits of insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit service providers, and why the sensible alternative--single payer health care--was excluded from the debate from the beginning. Frontline's track record on the debate is mixed--a year ago they aired "Sick Around America," which earned brickbats from activists and media reviewers alike for its kid-glove treatment of industry spokespeople.
The show airs on television and cable starting on Tuesday, April 13. Check Frontline's website for local listings.
Here's the lowdown on manufactured demand for bottled water and the environmental cost of this overpriced pseudo-necessity.
Pass this YouTube link on to friends and let's get this video viral! And let's make the commitment to give up bottled water and reinvest in good local public water systems at home and overseas. See the video for more ideas for families, schools, and communities.
The Boston/Cambridge Alliance "Dispatch" is out, and you can request a copy from editor Dave Lewit at dlewit@igc.org. Among the highlights: Using the Mondragon coop model to develop employee-owned businesses in Cleveland, "personal corporatehood," the repeal of Instant Runoff Voting in Burlington, VT, and building durable prosperity and democracy... in Europe.
Locally, Dave reports on groundwork for Boston participation in June's US Social Forum, following a meeting of mostly young people of color who are organizing around racism, militarism, climate, economy and education. People in the area who want to connect with the groups involved or learn more about attending with others from the area can visit Mass Global Action.
Finally, the Dispatch will now be published bi-monthly--with double the material, though, so having an extra month to read it will be a good thing! The revised schedule comes about because, as Dave writes, he "will soon be editor of a Common Good website--that's the tentative name of an institute or movement to bring together splintered, specialized movements of the left--health care, labor, women, immigration, globalization, localization, peak oil, climate change, and so on--springing from a shared philosophy. Theologian John Cobb, who reads the Dispatch, sensed in it the kind of thinking that underlies Process Theology--systemic thinking that is concerned with suffering (hell) and beauty (heaven), diversity and change, striving and realizing, community and reintegration. He and theologian-pastor Ignacio Castuera, both of the Claremont CA university community, asked Dave to join them to start the movement, with folks who are potential writers or steering committee members, or can help with technical services. " Interested? Email Dave at dlewit@igc.org.
An international outlook on defending water was the topic of Sunday's "Paradigms" radio show, on WBKM-FM in Burlington, Vermont. Host Baruch Zeichner spoke with Emily Posner, of AfD's Defending Water in Maine, Anil Naidoo of the Blue Planet Project in Canada,
Hemantha Withanage of Sri Lanka, Executive Director and Senior Environmental Scientist for the Centre for Environmental Justice, and Marcela Olivera, of Bolivia, who is Latin American Coordinator for Food and Water Watch and is part of the group putting on the 3ra Feria Internacional del Agua/3rd International Water Conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
You can listen to extended interviews with Emily and Hemantha here, and listen to past shows on a variety of topics at the Paradigms website.
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