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We made a mistake. This took place last year. Occupy the Courts is the only event on 20 Jan 2012. Sorry for this lapse.
Event: 20 January Occupy the Courts
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Inspired by our friends at Occupy Wall Street, and Dr. Cornel West, Move To Amend is planning bold action to mark the second anniversary of the infamous Citizens United v. FEC decision!
Occupy the Courts will be a one day occupation of Federal courthouses across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Friday January 20, 2012.
Move to Amend volunteers across the USA will lead the charge on the judiciary which created — and continues to expand — corporate personhood rights.
Americans across the country are on the march, and they are marching OUR way. They carry signs that say, “Corporations are NOT people! Money is NOT Speech!” And they are chanting those truths at the top of their lungs! The time has come to make these truths evident to the courts.
For notice of other upcoming local actions send a blank email to: 99percentaction-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Learn more:
http://movetoamend.org/occupythecourts
Event: #J15 15 Jan 1900 Worldwide Candlelight Vigil for Unity
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#J15 Worldwide Candlelight Vigil for Unity
Posted 2 days ago on Jan. 9, 2012, 4:43 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday
January 15th, 2012 @ 7:00pm in Each Time Zone Globally
Via J15global.com: On his birthday and in the spirit of Dr. King's vision for racial and economic equality, peace, and non-violence, we are holding candlelight vigils to unite our world in a global movement for systemic change.
Wherever we may be, whether in our homes, in city squares, online, Occupies, or at work, we lift a beautiful message high above the political dialogue. We light the dream of a more equitable world in our hearts. We can overcome!
Dr. King said “A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and say: ‘This is not just.' ”
Vigils are being organized around the world — from California to Cairo, New York to New Orleans, Germany to Nova Scotia. Pete Seeger, K'naan, Ramy Essam, Sol Guy, Joan Baez, Steve Earle and many more have committed their support.
We gather to empower a great and global dream, a dream we have all dreamt of for thousands of years. We will sing, because freedom songs are the soul of the movement.. Together, we will make the dream a reality.
Help turn this moment into a world-wide wave of light:
- Like our Facebook page and share with your friends.
- Follow @J15global on Twitter.
- Call a friend and make a plan to light a candle together.
- Organize a vigil on your block or in your town.
- Return to Facebook to post your ideas and see what others are planning.
Theophillis Goodyear: Conceptual Road Blocks to Common Sense
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Conceptual Road Blocks to Common Sense
Two major economic problems have been: 1. Unemployment, 2. the Housing Bubble and resulting financial crisis. But there were two ways of reducing the damage of both crises that no one seemed to think of because of conceptual road blocks to that way of thinking.
Some people have been collecting unemployment benefits for years. Meanwhile, employers can't afford to hire new employees. So money keeps getting paid out to people who remain idle through no fault of their own. If someone had thought of temporarily rewriting the rules so that people could volunteer to work for free while they were collecting their checks, then they could pool their labor and offer it to employers who desperately need it.
This would be a very difficult arrangement to organize. That's undeniable. First, it could easily put Temporary Employment Companies out of business, and that wouldn't be fair. So the system would have to be designed to protect those companies. Second, the unemployed would have to be allowed to pick their jobs according to what employers thought they were qualified to do. Third, there would have to be some way of making it worth their while: a certificate of service to their county for their future resume, perhaps extra money for gas if they had to drive a long way, etc. There would have to be some kind of incentive. Then it would be a matter of employers signing up for the program and giving employment agencies a list of what jobs were open. None of this would be easy, but it would mediate the cost to the economy of unemployment payments, and it would help employers get through tough times. To what degree it would help would depend on how many people participated. But it would help. The more who participated, the more it would help.
The housing bubble resulted in mass foreclosures. Because their mortgage payments went up, many people could no longer afford to keep making their payments. So they were evicted from their homes. Seas of unoccupied houses were the result. But many of them could have afforded a cheaper mortgage. If there had been a program that helped to match them up with other, cheaper foreclosed houses, everyone could have moved down a notch instead of putting everyone out on the street and leaving all those houses empty and mortgages unpaid. This probably would have been a much easier program to arrange than the above jobs program. But they both would be common sense ways to try and help mediate the effects of these two related crises. However, people are trained not to think that way, so no one thought of it.
I'm not saying that either of the above ideas would be easy to implement, only that they would have been a common sense approach to the twin problems. If we are ruling out common sense, then we have a problem.
We need to learn to see beyond these conceptual and ideological road blocks if we are to work together as citizens of nation that loves to call itself “United.” When crises occur, we need to look beyond narrow ways of thinking so that we can make the most efficient use of our resources.
Chuck Spinney: Situation All Fracked Up
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We Asked For Water, They Gave Us Gasoline
ROBERT HUNZIKER
Counterpunch, Weekend Edition 6-8 Jan 2012
According to worldwide energy industry participants, all of the low hanging fruit is gone. Finding new energy sources will henceforth be difficult and expensive… and very dangerous to your health. The unquenchable thirst for energy is unique to modern man, a little over 100 years old, and energy is unquestionably the heartbeat of modern civilization. We cannot exist without it, but where and how to find it is fast becoming the biggest challenge to the health of planet earth. Case in point: Fracking is the fastest growing segment of the energy industry, massively so in North America, but it may be the death knell of society well before global warming has the opportunity to really strut its stuff.
According to Texas Governor Rick Perry, when confronted on the campaign trail about fracking problems: “We have been using hydraulic fracturing in my home state for years and this is a fear tactic that the left is using and the environmental community is using that absolutely, excuse the pun, does not hold water.”
Governor Perry’s bias and ill-founded statement is herein refuted by 12 personal testimonials in Texas included in the appendix to this article. Further, it is well understood by professionals who seriously follow the trails and tribulations of fracking that almost all cases where fracking has poisoned ground water are quickly settled, payoffs to the victims, by energy lawyers who arrange for the legal documents to be sealed. The implication herein is we do not know the whole story by a long shot, but knowing the whole story may be the only way to survive as a species. Why we don’t know all the facts should be one of the most important political questions of 2012.
Phi Beta Iota: Fracking poisons clean water. Tar sands are flushed with clean water. There is plenty of energy in the USA, the KEYSTONE/Tar Sands and fracking are scams–lies to the public–intended to feed refineries in the US for the EXPORT of processed fuels. The public desperately needs a government capable of combining intelligence with integrity. Fracking also causes earthquakes, as recently occurred in Ohio. Anyone who does not know all this is NOT qualified to run for President, Senator, or Representative. In our humble opinion.
Josh Kilbourn: Dollar Disappearing, US Sidelined on Syria / Iran
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For anyone wondering how the abandonment of the dollar reserve status would look like we have a Hollow Men reference: not with a bang, but a whimper… Or in this case a whole series of bilateral agreements that quietly seeks to remove the US currency as an intermediate. Such as these: “World's Second (China) And Third Largest (Japan) Economies To Bypass Dollar, Engage In Direct Currency Trade“, “China, Russia Drop Dollar In Bilateral Trade“, “China And Iran To Bypass Dollar, Plan Oil Barter System“, “India and Japan sign new $15bn currency swap agreement“, and now this: “Iran, Russia Replace Dollar With Rial, Ruble in Trade, Fars Says.” And ironically, the proposal to dump the greenback did not come from Iran. Per Bloomberg: “Iran and Russia replaced the U.S. dollar with their national currencies in bilateral trade, Iran’s state-run Fars news agency reported, citing Seyed Reza Sajjadi, the Iranian ambassador in Moscow. The proposal to switch to the ruble and the rial was raised by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Astana, Kazakhstan, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the ambassador said.” Is Iran gradually becoming the poster child of an energy rich country that just says no to the dollar: “Iran has replaced the dollar in its oil trade with India, China and Japan, Fars reported.” Next thing you know China, Russia and Japan will engage in bilateral trade agreements with the Eurozone in exchange for purchasing European or EFSF (which at last check are now forced to give 30% guaranatees) bonds, and bypassing dollars completely. But yes, aside from everyone else, virtually everyone (footnote 1) is still using the dollar as currency of global exchange.
Tom Atlee: A presidential candidate signs the Co-Intelligence Institute’s Politician’s Pledge
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Dear friends,
Robert Steele, a long-time colleague of mine and presidential hopeful with the Reform Party (see PS below), has just become the second politician to sign the Co-Intelligence Institute's Politician's Pledge http://bit.ly/SteelePledge. This pledge commits the politician to take seriously any properly convened and facilitated citizens deliberative council – to post its results on their website and either follow its recommendations or publicly say why they can't or won't.
This seemingly low-commitment pledge – which requires nothing from the politician except an authentic respect for a legitimate voice of We the People (as described in my post yesterday) – has been declined by a number of politicians. The only politician to sign it in the past was leading Hawaii Democratic state Senator Les Ihara http://1.usa.gov/LesIhara back in 2004.
Given that we are entering a major election year and the phraseS “the people” and “we the people” are being tossed around a lot, I invite you to consider asking the candidates seeking your support if they will sign the Politician's Pledge and, if they decline, asking them why not.
Imagine if a few dozen politicians in the U.S. elections – and elsewhere where elections are going on – why, imagine if a few hundred or a few thousand signed the Politician's Pledge…. Suddenly there would be a political “market” for citizen panels of all kinds – Citizens Juries, Consensus Conferences, Wisdom Councils…. And if a leading candidate made a big deal about their willingness to listen to the authentic, thoughtful voice of We the People and challenged their opponents to do the same, it just might become hard for other candidates to resist signing the Pledge.
And when 20% or 40% or 60% of the politicians signed the pledge – I mean, why not dream big!? – then suddenly the people would have a powerful voice to speak through, to make a difference, to get their collective wisdom pushed into political conversations and public policy. And suddenly the ball would be in our court. It would be up to us to convene the citizen panels that would tell the politicians what to do. And if we did they, the onus would be on them to do what we said. And if they didn't, I suspect there would be other politicians ready to say that they would.
And after a while, it would make little difference which party a candidate was from, because the standard by which they were all being judged was how well they honored and supported the informed, thoughtful, creative will of We the People.
Think about it.
C'mon. Dream with me. Below you'll find the pledge and the original “Listen to the People's Wisdom” campaign, for your consideration and enjoyment.
Coheartedly,
Tom
PS: Robert Steele's campaign http://bigbatusa.org (he's planning to hit a home run) is focusing on Electoral Reform, a Balanced Budget (don't presume you know what that means until you see the specifics), True Cost Economics (one of the highest leverage approaches to transforming the economic system), and a Coalition Cabinet (no matter what your politics are, you'll probably be boggled in both directions by the diverse people Steele is proposing for his cabinet). I have any number of concerns about a number of his proposals, but in a sense that's almost irrelevant. I mean, I've never seen a candidate I didn't have *some* real concerns about. And his platform is one of the most radical I've seen and he's determined to push these potent ideas into the political conversation. I had issues with him calling his campaign “We the People” because all the ideas in his platform are his and his advisors', rather than coming from citizen deliberative councils. But now that he's signed the Politician's “Listen to the People” Pledge, I feel he can make that claim. If he got enough support, he'd probably drum up a few CDCs just so he can play out his Pledge. He's a bit wild, I must admit, but he's extremely high integrity and very dedicated. Take a look and see what you think….
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