Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 03.19.06

[David Shove (shove001]

            P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R    03.19.06

1. Sami/Iraq         3.19 8:45am
2. Sensible vigil    3.19 12noon
3. IRV training      3.19 12noon
4. Shop unchained    3.19 12noon
5. Corp war machine  3.19 3pm
6. AI/Sami           3.19 3pm
7. KFAI Indian       3.19 4pm
8. Fox memorial      3.19 5:30pm
9. Sami/Iraq         3.19 7pm

10. Transit          3.20 7:30am/6:30pm
11. Real rights tour 3.20 6:30pm
12. Shocking/awful   3.20 6:30pm
13. mn911 truth      3.20 7pm
14. Lez minister/doc 3.20 8pm

15. Chris Floyd - Bush puts America on death row
16. Onion       - Poll:86%% Americans don't want to have a country anymore
17. Gregory Dicum - Meet Robert Bullard, father of environmental justice
18. Paul Palmer - What does zero waste really mean?
19. ed          - Intellectual property (poem)

--------1 of 19--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Sami/Iraq 3.19 8:45am

Sunday, 3/19, 8:45am, former Twin Cities resident and now Muslim
Peacemaker Sami Rasouli speaks on "Working to bridge divisions in Iraq"
following his 6 months there, Pilgrim Lutheran Church (Adult Forum), 1935
St. Claire Ave, St. Paul 651-699-6886.


--------2 of 19--------

From: skarx001 <skarx001 [at] umn.edu>
Subject: Sensible vigil 3.19 12noon

The sensible people for peace hold weekly peace vigils at the intersection
of Snelling and Summit in StPaul, Sunday between noon and 1pm. (This is
across from the Mac campus.) We provide signs protesting current gov.
foreign and domestic policy. We would appreciate others joining our
vigil/protest.


--------3 of 19--------

From: Darrell Gerber <darrellgerber [at] earthlink.net>
Subject: IRV training 3.19 12noon

IRV volunteer training
Sunday, March 19
12noon-2pm
Keewaydin Recreation Center 3000 53rd Street East Minneapolis, MN 55417
612-370-4956
For more information call Darrell Gerber at 612-824-7366


--------4 of 19--------

From: wamm <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: Shop unchained 3.19 12noon

Jump Out of the Big Box and Shop Unchained: Special Shopping Event at Wild
Rumpus. Sunday, March 19, 12noon-5pm. Wild Rumpus, 2720 W 43 St
Minneapolis.

Are you concerned that our economy has our backs up against the Wal-Mart.
Don't want to consume to devour? You are invited to exercise your dollar
power by supporting local, independent stores and services and WAMM. Wild
Rumpus sells good books for children in a visually-stimulating environment
with leisurely-reading areas, a variety of pet animals, lots of exciting
new books and favorite classics. Wild Rumpus also maintains a recycled
book program. 10% of all sales will be donated to WAMM with the exception
of books purchased with a teacher discount. FFI: Call WAMM at
612-827-5364.


--------5 of 19--------

From: Lydia Howell <lhowell [at] visi.com>
Subject: Corp war machine 3.19 3pm

Please join us for our monthly free IMPACT forum.
March 19 3-5pm
How Do We Stop the Corporate War Machine?"
Short flick and brainstorming session

May Day Bookstore, 301 Cedar Ave (Cedar-Riverside), Mpls

IMPACT (Ideas to Mobilize People Against Corporate Tyranny) is a
grassroots group of concerned citizens whose purpose is to raise awareness
about the impact of corporations on our society, promote sustainable
lifestyles and mobilize ourselves and our communities to take cooperative
action. We believe another world is possible, a world where peolple and
the earth are more valued than profits!/ Contact: Karen Redleaf:
651-644-1487


--------6 of 19--------

From: Gabe Ormsby <gabeo [at] bitstream.net>
Subject: AI/Sami 3.19 3pm

Join Group 37 for our regular meeting on Sunday, March 19th, from 3-5pm.

Our guest presenter this month will be Mr. Sami Rasouli. Mr. Rasouli is an
Iraqi-American and former owner of Sinbad restaurant in Minneapolis. Last
year, he returned to Iraq, which he left in the 1970s, to help his
relatives and friends during these troublesome times. In his time in Iraq,
he has befriended the Christian Peacemakers and formed a similar group,
Muslim Peacemakers. Mr.  Rasouli is back in the US for two months to see
his family and share what he has learned and seen about the situation in
Iraq today.

Mr. Rasouli's presentation is expected to last about an hour.

For the remainder of the meeting, we will hear updates from our sub-groups
about specific human rights cases and projects, share actions alerts, and
build the worldwide human rights movement.

All are welcome at the meeting, and refreshments will be provided.

Location: Center for Victims of Torture, 717 E. River Rd. SE, Minneapolis
(corner of E. River Rd. and Oak St.). Park on street or in the small lot
behind the center (the center is a house set back on a large lawn).

A map and directions are available on-line:
http://www.twincitiesamnesty.org/meetings.html.


--------7 of 19--------

From: Chris Spotted Eagle <chris [at] spottedeagle.org>
Subject: KFAI Indian 3.19 4pm

KFAI's Indian Uprising for March 19, 2006

IT'S A LOBBYING SCANDAL, AMERICA, NOT AN 'INDIAN' ONE by Melanie Benjamin,
Minneapolis Star Tribune Opinion Exchange Section, Mar. 13, 2006.  Yet
some will try to shift the blame onto tribes instead of getting Congress
to enact meaningful campaign finance reform.  Most Americans were shocked
when the scandal involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff began to unfold.
Indian people weren't all that surprised.  A small group of businessmen
hatches a scheme to steal from Indian tribes, employing lies, deception,
and even bribing members of Congress. The cast of characters may have
changed, but there's nothing new or ingenious about the plot.
http://www.startribune.com/562/story/304641.html

WHEN A TREE FALLS IN THE PHILIPPINES by Barbara Goldoftas The Boston
Globe, March 7, 2006.  The recent coup attempt in the Philippines and the
mudslide that turned a village into a mass grave may seem unrelated. In
many respects they are, but in important ways the Philippines'
environmental woes are inextricably linked to the political turmoil that
persists there.  The ways that societies respond to environmental problems
reveal their strengths and their fault lines.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/07/opinion/edgold.php

CURRUPTION AMONGST OUR OWN.  E-mail (partial) by Richard Blunt to
Representative Frank Moe, Larry Howes and Senator Carrie Ruud, February
16, 2006.  Hello.  My name is Richard Blunt. I am an enrolled member of
the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe on the White Earth Reservation. I live over
on the Leech Lake Reservation.  I have been witness to too much corruption
taking place over here on this reservation.  The tribal government uses
its power to steal monies, materials, and whatever it needs to look out
for themselves and leave nothing for the rest of the members of the
community.  I am witness to many atrocities, one In particular that has
left a family homeless because of a land-grabbing scheme to acquire
lake-front property owned by this particular band member and her family.
They have succeeded at this particular moment to evict this family using
members of the tribal courts, tribal police, and an attorney who
represents the tribal government. Richard Blunt <thndr_brd [at] hotmail.com>.
See attached.

MOTHER EARTH.  Our planet, unfortunately, is suffering a severe beating
from us human beings, especially by advanced industrialized societies with
their material greed and lust for power.  Existence for us humans and
other beings are in real harms way if those selfish desires continue at
its present pace. There are warnings of unusual weather patterns and
catastrophes worldwide. It would be beneficial to all human kind that
indigenous people collectively voice their concern.  Let's create a
"Native Indigenous Movement" so all will understand that the world is a
living being, and as such, to respect and protect our environment.  It's a
matter of survival ­ cse.

SIERRA CLUB CANDIDATES FOR THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS 2006-09, comment on the
protection of the planet, environment and activism.  SC mission, "To
explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; to practice and
promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; to
educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the
natural and human environment..."  The Sierra Club's members are more than
750,000 of your friends and neighbors. Inspired by nature, we work
together to protect our communities and the planet. The Club is America's
oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental
organization. http://www.sierraclub.org/

* * * *
Indian Uprising is a one-half hour Public & Cultural Affairs radio program
for, by, and about Indigenous people & all their relations, broadcast each
Sunday at 4pm over KFAI 90.3 FM Minneapolis and 106.7 FM St. Paul.
Current programs are archived online after broadcast at www.kfai.org, for
two weeks.  Click Program Archives and scroll to Indian Uprising.


--------8 of 19--------

From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Fox memorial 3.19 5:30pm

Sunday, 3/19, 5:30pm, Memorial for Tom Fox, of the Christian Peacemaker
Teams, recently dead in Iraq, Peace United Church of Christ, 1111 N. 11th
St, Duluth. www.fnvw.org or Michele Naar-Obed at 728-0729.


--------9 of 19--------

From: David Kremer <kreme011 [at] tc.umn.edu>
Subject: Sami/Iraq 3.19 7pm

Sunday, March 19, at 7pm at Michael Servetus Unitarian Society, 6565
Oakley Dr. NE, Fridley.

Sami Rasouli, an Iraqi American, who has spent the last ten out of twelve
months working in Iraq with Muslim and Christian Peacemaker Teams, will
share his thoughts and experiences on Iraq. [directions:  From I694 and
Central Av. go north on Central three stoplights to Mississippi (about 1
mile), turn left (to the west) one block, turn right (to the north) on
Oakley Dr. one block.]

David Kremer  612-529-4136


--------10 of 19--------

From: Elizabeth Dickinson <eadickinson [at] mindspring.com>
From: "Transit for Livable Communities" <tlc [at] tlcminnesota.org>
Subject: Transit 3.20 7:30am/6:30pm

Transit for Livable Communities is sending you this invitation on behalf
of the Center for Transit Oriented Development.

Monday, March 20
  New Hoa Bien Restaurant
  1105 University Ave W.
  (NW corner of Lexington & University)
  Saint Paul, MN 55104

(Each session covers the same content)
Morning Session: 7:30 - 9:30 am
    - Check-In  7:30 - 7:45 am
    - Program   7:45am

Evening Session:  6:30 ­ 8:30 pm
    - Check-In  6:30 - 6:45pm
    - Program   6:45pm

Cost:  Free

Who Can Come: Anyone with an interest in Central Corridor and
Transit-Oriented Development

No RSVP Necessary - just show up and check-in at the door.

Transportation:
Free Parking at restaurant and additional parking along University Avenue
Bus route #16, #50
For personalized bus route information call Metro Transit's Trip Planner at:
612-373-3333 or go to: www.metrotransit.org   

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development
Invites you to a Community Involvement Discussion:

Learning a Common Language:
Creating a Vision for
Transit Oriented Development (TOD)

  Proposed Agenda
Central Corridor Transportation and Land Use Update
What is TOD?
National Models of TOD and Community Involvement
Panel Discussion on a possible Vision for Central Corridor
Audience Discussion

Confirmed Guests Include:
Mayor Chris Coleman
Commissioner Toni Carter
Councilmember Debbie Montgomery
Councilmember Jay Benanav

Sponsored By:
The McKnight Foundation, Center for Transit-Oriented Development, City of
Saint Paul, Minneapolis Department of Planning and Economic Development,
Urban Land Institute, Transit for Livable Communities, Center for
Neighborhoods, Corridor Housing Initiative and Hoa Bien Restaurant

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD)  is a national non-profit
that seeks to use transit investments to spur a new wave of development that
improves housing affordability and choice, revitalizes downtowns and urban
and suburban neighborhoods, and provides value capture and recapture for
individuals, communities and transportation agencies.

Reconnecting America / The Center For Transit-Oriented Development
436 14th Street, Suite 1005 - Oakland, CA 94612
Phone: 510.268.8602  - Fax: 510.268.8673

Email: info [at] reconnectingamerica.org
www.reconnectingamerica.org

{While we hear of LRT right down the middle of our best commercial roads,
how about LRT somewhere less destructive of small business (eg along
freeways, old train routes)? And how about PRT, cheaper and better in many
ways - will anyone speak up for it? -ed]


--------11 of 19--------

From: Brian Payne <brianpayneyvp [at] gmail.com>
Subject: Real rights tour 3.20 6:30pm

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is gearing up for the "Real
Rights Tour," culminating in a rally in front of McDonald's headquarters
in Chicago on April 1st (check out ww.ciw-online.org for more
information).  Several folks in the Twin Cities have started organizing
locally to support the CIW in this next stage of the campaign to end
sweatshops and slavery in the fields.  Local events include:

- March 20, 6:30-8pm, Workshop at the Waite House (2529 13th Ave. S, Mpls)
"Fast Food Profits, Farmworker Poverty and You".  The Coalition of
Immokalee Workers is a community-based worker organization made up
primarily of Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrants working in
low-wage jobs throughout the state of Florida. This popular education
workshop will discuss the work of the CIW to end sweatshops and slavery in
the fields of Florida, and and will challenge participants to explore the
links between the exploitation of farmworkers and consumers.  Following
the workshop, there will be a strategy meeting to discuss future
organizing in the Twin Cities.

- March 26-April 4, Student Labor Week of Action.  The Twin Cities CIW
Solidarity Committee will be organizing protests at local
McDonald's...events TBA.

- March 31-April 1st - A caravan will leave the Twin Cities to join
Florida farmworkers at the rally in front of McDonald's headquarters in
Chicago.

If you are interested in joining any of these activities, or in joining
the Twin Cities CIW Solidarity Committee to organize these and other
future events, contact Brian at 612-822-8460 or brianpayneyvp [at] gmail.com

Local contact: Brian Payne, brianpayneyvp [at] gmail.com


--------12 of 19--------

From: wamm <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: Shocking/awful 3.20 6:30pm

WAMM Free Third Monday Movie and Discussion: "Shocking and Awful"

Monday, March 20, 6:30pm. St. Joan of Arc Church, Hospitality Hall,
4537 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis. Parking is close, free and
easy.

An hour and a half report of the World Tribunal on Iraq which held
hearings in 20 cities worldwide with a Jury of Conscience from 10
countries with the objective to tell and disseminate the truth about the
War. Includes graphic scenes denied mainstream media outlets. FFI: Call
WAMM at 612-827-5364.


--------13 of 19--------

From: leslie reindl <alteravista [at] earthlink.net>
Subject: mn911 truth 3.20 7pm

Mon March 20, 7pm:  Meeting of 911 truth group.  Cahoots Coffee Bar, 1562
Selby Av StPaul (southeast corner, a few stores east of Snelling).  All
welcome.  651-633-4410.


--------14 of 19--------

From: Lydia Howell <lhowell [at] visi.com>
Subject: Lez minister/doc 3.20 8pm

The Rev. Anita C. Hill and Filmmaker Dawn Mikkelson Present
Premiere of /THIS obedience!

StPaul-Reformation Lutheran Church 100 North Oxford St. St. Paul, MN 55104

Monday March 20
Party begins at 8pm
Broadcast begins at 9am

FILM WEBSITE: www.thisobedience.com

On March 20, 2006 THIS obedience will have its US Broadcast Premiere on
Twin Cities Public Television, Channel 2. THIS obedience, winner of the
audience award for best documentary feature at the Central Standard Film
Festival in 2003, is distributed by American Public Television and will
broadcast on PBS stations across the country at various times throughout
the next two years. THIS obedience was condensed from 86-minutes to its
current length of 58-minutes for broadcast purposes.

THIS obedience is the story of a St. Paul church and was entirely created
by Minnesota residents and natives, from directing to the composition of
an original score. Word of the controversial film has sent shockwaves
through the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), the third
largest Christian denomination in the United States.

To celebrate the MINNESOTA PREMIERE, filmmaker Dawn Mikkelson and The Rev.
Anita C. Hill will be present! Come and join us for this significant
milestone!

*MINNESOTA BROADCAST DATES AND TIMES FOR /THIS OBEDIENCE:
US Broadcast Premiere: *March 20, 9pm (TPT2)
March 21, 3am (TPT 2)
March 21, 9pm (TPT17)

FILM SYNOPSIS

THIS obedience/ is one woman's battle with the third largest Christian
denomination in the United States, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America). Anita C. Hill is determined to become a pastor in spite of
the church's rules against "non-celibate" gays and lesbians in the clergy.

In an act of "ecclesiastical disobedience" a small Midwestern congregation
ordains Anita. In the following months, Anita's life is turned upside down
as "good church folk" and the Lutheran hierarchy reject her ordination and
her congregation. Interwoven with Anita's personal reflections, her close
friend Emily Eastwood struggles with the church's power to reject her own
"call" to ministry. By defying church rules, the Reverend Anita C. Hill
emerges from relative anonymity to become a national icon in the fight for
spiritual equality.

Given unprecedented access to the Reverend Anita C. Hill and the ELCA's
2001 National Assembly, /THIS obedience/ reveals the emotional epicenter
of the debate over the ordination of gay clergy.


--------15 of 19--------

Bone Thugs: Bush Puts America on Death Row
by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 16 March 2006

Hardened cynics often accuse President George W. Bush of ruthlessly
exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 to advance his pre-set agenda of killing a
whole heap of foreigners. This is, of course, a calumnious slander against
the Dear Leader's noble ambitions. For as he clearly demonstrated last
week, Bush is also exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 to advance his pre-set
agenda to kill a whole heap of Americans as well.

In yet another of those momentous degradations of public morality that go
unremarked by the ever-vigilant watchdogs of the national media, Bush
slipped a measure into the revamped "Patriot (sic) Act" he signed last
week that will allow him to expedite the death penalty process across the
land, the Austin American-Statesman reports.

Prisoners just aren't being killed fast enough for ole George, you see.
They hang on for years and years, using all them lawyer tricks and court
procedures and what all, that DNA hocus-pocus and habeas corpus junk, or
even new testimony showing that they're innocent - as if that mattered.
No, you got to strap 'em down and shoot 'em up with that poison juice
lickety-split, churn those convict corpses out like so much prime pork
sausage - the way ole George did it when he was head honcho down in Texas.

This remarkably vindictive and bloodthirsty measure - which has absolutely
nothing to do with the "war on terrorism" or "homeland security," the
ostensible subjects of the Patriot Act - strips the judiciary of its
supervision over state-devised "fast track" procedures to speed up the
execution process. The history of the move actually goes back to that
remarkably vindictive and bloodthirsty precursor to the Bush Regime known
as the Reagan Administration. During that glorious "morning in America,"
it became all the rage to "cut the red tape" that kept prisoners alive
until the appeals process had run its course and determined there were no
egregious errors in their cases before the government killed them. The
tape-cutting crusade was led by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who
once ruled that even new proof of innocence was no bar to killing a
prisoner if state courts had earlier upheld his conviction, the Washington
Times reports. Urged on by Rehnquist - who was executed by God last year -
several states went the fast-track route, limiting the time that prisoners
have to file petitions and narrowing the range of factors that judges can
consider in death-row appeals.

Unfortunately, America's courts were not yet fully packed with hard-right
cadres, and even the vulturous Rehnquist couldn't keep them all in line.
Fast-track options in state after state were struck down by federal judges
- because the fast-trackers' overall death penalty systems were such a
shambles, riddled with literally fatal incompetence. One glaring example
could be found in - where else? - Texas, where Guv Dub was mowing them
down on his way to becoming the greatest mass killer in modern American
history, with 152 notches on his belt.

Bush had set up a veritable execution assembly line in his fiefdom, aided
by his trusty legal aide, Alberto Gonzales. Knowing just what the boss
wanted, Al would prepare dumbed-down capsules of death penalty cases,
stripping away pesky details like "ineffective counsel, conflict of
interest, mitigating evidence and even actual evidence of innocence," as
Alan Berlow reported in the Atlantic Monthly. Bush would "sometimes"
bother to look at the reports, sometimes not, Gonzales said. In his six
years as governor, Bush spared only one condemned prisoner from execution:
the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas. All the rest - including women,
juvenile offenders, even the mentally retarded - got the spike. Yet one in
every eight death row inmates have been exonerated since America resumed
the death penalty in 1976, the Washington Times reports - an astonishing
percentage of false imprisonment in capital cases. It is virtually
impossible that Bush did not kill some innocent people with his relentless
152-1 execution ratio.

In 1996, the courts put a crimp in Bush's carnival of death, ruling that
Texas failed to meet "minimum competency standards" for the fast-track
system. He had to make do with the old-fashioned appeals process, which
slowed but never stopped his killing spree: he averaged almost two
executions a month during the course of his term. But he never forgot - or
forgave - the judicial interference with his dominion over life and death.
How it must have rankled, to think that this judicial brake on wholesale
state-sponsored slaughter still existed in the Homeland, when he - the
great Commander, breaker of nations - could now order the "extra-judicial
killing" of anyone on earth whom he arbitrarily deemed a "terrorist" and
send mighty armies to grind tens of thousands of people into bloody mulch.
Who would dare put fetters on the god-like sway of the "unitary
executive"?

So now he has taken his revenge. The backdoor measure in the Patriot Act
decrees that responsibility for awarding fast-track death-penalty status
to the states will now be the sole prerogative of the U.S. Attorney
General - one Alberto Gonzales. Yes, the fawning minion whose perversions
of law on behalf of his boss have abetted murderous war, systematic
torture, mass corruption, assassination, abduction, rendition,
dictatorship - and the slipshod Texas death machinery - will now decide if
states are legally scrupulous enough to resume lickety-split executions.
You can hear those sausage grinders gearing up all over America.

God only knows what festering psychic wounds drive these spiritual
cripples and their obsession with death. But for them, power isn't real
unless it's written on the body of another human being - a prisoner,
guilty or not; an "enemy," real or imagined; or the multitude of
slaughtered innocents whose only crime was living in a land that the
cripples wanted to conquer.

Chris Floyd/This is an expanded version of the column appearing in the
NYTimes

[But will the DC Dems do anything about it? Is there any outrage that will
make them act? Is there any time they will defend us and the Constitution?
So what are they worth?  So will we look elsewhere? -ed]


--------16 of 19--------

New Poll Finds 86 Percent Of Americans Don't Want To Have A Country Anymore
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46227
March 13, 2006 | Issue 42-11

WASHINGTON, DC - A Gallup/Harris Interactive poll released Monday
indicates that nearly nine out of 10 Americans are "tired of having a
country."

Chicago commuters, 87 percent of whom just don't care anymore.

Among the 86 percent of poll respondents who were in favor of
discontinuing the nation, the most frequently cited reasons were a lack of
significant results from the current democratic process (36 percent),
dissatisfaction with customer service (28 percent), and exhaustion (22
percent).

"I don't want to get bogged down in the country anymore," Wilmington, DE
accountant Karie Ashworth said. "I'm not up in arms or anything, I'm just
saying it'd be a lot easier for everyone if we just gave it up."

Of those who were against maintaining an American nation, 77 percent said
they believe that having a country is "counter to the best interests of
Americans." Twelve percent said "the time and effort citizens spend on the
country could be better spent elsewhere," and 8 percent said they just
didn't care.

Roughly 3 percent said we ceased to have a country years ago, and
explained that they had been stockpiling weapons to protect their
independent compounds.

According to study organizer David Griffith, poll respondents were
surprisingly uniform in their opinion that the nation is too much of a
hassle.

"I already belong to a health club, a church, and the Kiwanis Club,"
Tammy Golden of Los Angeles wrote. "I'm a member of the Von's Grocery
Super Savers, which gets me a discount on certain groceries. These are all
well-managed organizations with real benefits. None of them send me a
confusing bill once a year and make me work it out myself, then throw me
in jail if I get it wrong."

Olympia, WA student Helen Berg expressed frustration with the country's
voting process.

"I was gonna vote, but it rained," Berg wrote. "It wasn't for the
president anyway, so what difference does it make? The president is the
only one that matters, and you don't even get to vote for him."

Most citizens said they did not wish to abandon such American traditions
as parades, fireworks, and national holidays.

"I'm for saluting flags and pledging allegiance to them, but nothing
beyond that," Tampa, FL mechanic and former Marine Doug Pauls said. "I
like singing the anthem before the game, but I can't keep up with the news
every day. I have three kids."

Pauls added: "I love America, but what's that got to do with having a
country?"

Some critics, including the leadership of both parties, have attacked the
methodology of the poll, saying that questions like "Do you want a country
anymore?" are poorly worded. Casey Mark, a fellow at the Brookings
Institute, characterized the question as leading.

Said Mark: "What you must consider is that respondents often don't have
the time or energy to devote to answering five questions about their
country, which they consider themselves to be remotely involved with, at
best."

Griffith pointed to Cheyenne, WY banker Jeff Wheldon's response.

"I think we've come far enough as a nation that we don't need to have one
anymore," Wheldon wrote. "It's not like we're Somalia, where the warlords
run everything, or Russia, where it's all organized crime.  We've had over
200 years of being Americans. I don't think we still need the United
States of America to show us how to do it."


--------17 of 19--------

JUSTICE IN TIME
Meet Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice
By Gregory Dicum**
From: Grist, Mar. 14, 2006

Robert Bullard says he was "drafted" into environmental justice while
working as an environmental sociologist in Houston in the late 1970s. His
work there on the siting of garbage dumps in black neighborhoods
identified systematic patterns of injustice. The book that Bullard
eventually wrote about that work, 1990's Dumping in Dixie, is widely
regarded as the first to fully articulate the concept of environmental
justice.

Since then, Bullard, who is as much activist as academic, has been one of
the leading voices of environmental-justice advocacy. He was one of the
planners of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership
Summit in 1991, at which the organizing principles of modern environmental
justice were formulated. Bullard later helped the Clinton administration
write the watershed executive order that required all federal agencies to
consider environmental justice in their programs.

Under the Bush administration, progress made during the 1990s is under
attack, with even the U.S. EPA working to dismantle that provision. As he
has for 25 years, Bullard stands at the forefront of efforts to maintain
environmental-justice gains, and to make mainstream environmentalists
aware of the issues at stake.

Currently on sabbatical from his position as director of the Environmental
Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, Bullard has just
published his 12th book. The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights
and the Politics of Pollution brings together more than 20 contributors
for a survey of the movement's past and future.

Grist caught up with Bullard as he took a break from working on a Ford
Foundation-funded study of how government actions have endangered the
health and welfare of African Americans over the past seven decades. Most
recently, this work has turned Bullard's attention to the area devastated
by Hurricane Katrina, which he describes as the latest urban environmental
sacrifice zone.

Q: How did you first become involved in environmental justice?

A: I was a young sociology professor just two years out of graduate
school. My wife asked me to collect data for a lawsuit she had filed. A
company had decided to put a landfill in the middle of a predominantly
black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood -- a neighborhood where 85
percent of the people owned their homes. Of course, the state gave them a
permit, but the people said "no."

I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in
black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the
population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were
located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the
city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant
that these were decisions made by individuals in government.

That's how I got dragged into this.

Q: And you got hooked.

A: I got hooked. I started connecting the dots in terms of housing,
residential patterns, patterns of land use, where highways go, where
transportation routes go, and how economic-development decisions are made.
It was very clear that people who were making decisions -- county
commissioners or industrial boards or city councils -- were not the same
people who were "hosting" these facilities in their communities.

Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making
decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including
Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table.

Q: Just before Hurricane Katrina, you were getting ready to look at
natural disasters as part of a study of how government actions endanger
the health of African Americans in the South. How does Katrina fit the
historical pattern?

A: Katrina was not isolated. It was not an aberration, and it was not
incompetence on the part of FEMA and Michael Brown and the Bush
administration. This has been going on for a long time under Republicans
and Democrats, and the central theme that drives all of this is race and
class.

Q: You've done a lot of work with schools. Why is that of particular
concern?

A: Poor children in urban areas are poisoned in their homes. And when they
go to school, they get another dose. And when they go outside and play,
they get another dose. It's a slow-motion disaster: the most vulnerable
population in our society is children, and the most vulnerable children
are children of color. If we protect the most vulnerable in our society --
these children -- we protect everybody.

Q: Can you give a sense of the scale of the problem surrounding these
schools?

A: Moton Elementary School, in New Orleans, is built on top of a landfill,
causing lots of problems with the water in the school. The playgrounds in
Norco, La., in Cancer Alley, are across from a huge Shell refinery. You
stay there 15 minutes and you can't breathe. And in South Camden, N.J.,
there are schools and playgrounds on the waterfront where you have all
this industry, all this nasty stuff. Almost two-thirds of the children in
that neighborhood have asthma. In West Harlem, the North River Water
Treatment Plant covers eight blocks near a school. On the south side of
Chicago, it's the same kind of thing.

From coast to coast, you see this happening. It's not just the landfill,
it's not just the incinerator, it's not just the garbage dump, it's not
just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump
all that stuff in these neighborhoods -- it's all that combined. Even if
each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that
take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral.
Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral.

Q: Let's look at a specific case in which you're an expert witness: In
Dickson County, Tenn., a county that is just over 4 percent black, a
landfill was sited in the middle of a poor black community several decades
ago. The dump was later a candidate for Superfund status, yet black
families contend that authorities told them their water was OK to drink,
even as they were telling white families not to drink it. In 2003, one
family whose land borders the dump began a lawsuit against the county and
the company that allegedly dumped the industrial waste. What does it take
for a community to stand up against such comprehensive injustice?

A: In every struggle, somebody has to step forward, just like Rosa Parks
or Martin Luther King Jr. In this case, it's the Holt family: they have
drawn a line in the dirt and said "no."

Every time I go there, I'm amazed at their spirits. These are fighters,
from strong stock: this is a community of black people who owned land
dating back over 100 years. They are resilient. But at the same time,
they're sick. Harry Holt is the patriarch in the family right now, and he
has cancer. His daughter, Sheila Holt-Orsted, has cancer. His son has an
immune deficiency.

That's how these lawsuits play out: it's a waiting game. The people with
the money can wait the longest, and the people who are sick generally
can't, because at some point, sick people die. And they know that. That is
the cruelty and the horrific nature of environmental racism.

Q: What keeps you going?

A: People who fight. People like the Holt family. People who do not let
the garbage trucks and the landfills and the petrochemical plants roll
over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years.

And in the last 10 years, we've been winning: lawsuits are being won,
reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have
been put on notice that they can't do this anymore, anywhere.

Q: It's no longer overt policy to practice environmental racism in this
country, yet it keeps happening. Where is the locus of the problem now?

A: Now it's institutional racism. You don't have a lot of individuals out
there wearing sheets and hoods. Instead you see it as the policies get
played out. On their face, policies may appear to be race-neutral. They
say, "We're going to look at unemployment, poverty rates, and educational
level," but the poorest areas oftentimes correspond to racialized places.
Without even talking about race, you can almost predict where these
locally unwanted land uses, or LULUs, will go.

Q: In your 2003 book Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal
World, you took a look at what sustainability means from an
environmental-justice perspective. Is there such a thing as sustainability
without justice?

A: No, there's not. This whole question of environment, economics, and
equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt
with as an afterthought, that stool won't stand. The equity components
have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity
can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of
poor people and race are raised.

Q: In your latest book, you wrote, "Building a multiethnic, multiracial,
multi-issue, anti-racist movement is not easy." That seems like a huge
understatement. Has anything like that ever been done?

A: No. What we're up against is really trying to disentangle and unpack a
lot of baggage, from slavery to colonialism to neo- colonialism to
imperialism, and all those -isms that have really served as wedges.

For example, before we had the First National People of Color
Environmental Leadership Summit, there was very little interaction and
understanding and collaboration among African Americans and Latino
Americans and Native Americans and Asian and Pacific Islander Americans on
anything. We had the civil-rights movement, but the modern civil-rights
movement was not necessarily your model multiethnic, multiracial movement.

There was friction and lots of confrontations and animosities in terms of
who's going to lead and the extent to which paternalism and racism and
sexism could be eliminated. The environmental-justice movement took on the
huge task of breaking down mistrust and stereotypes and the internalized
racisms that we're all victims of. You have some dynamics that are really
very complex. But we've made a lot of progress: we've worked out the
relationships for partnering and respecting leadership styles.

Q: There are a couple of cases in your latest book of people involved in
local struggles who went on to hold elected office. How representative is
that of environmental justice as a leadership incubator?

A: In at least a quarter of cases, the leaders that emerge to work on
local environmental-justice issues get involved in electoral politics.
They get elected to school boards, city councils, and run for state
representative. And 35 percent of them are women.

In other cases, they become the go-to people when it comes to, "What about
jobs? What about this facility? Will it be a good thing or is this just a
sell job?" Whether they be retired school teachers or retired mail
carriers or little old grandmothers who have lots of time to devote to
these issues, this is the training ground for leaders.

Q: Marshall Ganz has pointed out that many of the mainstream, national
environmental groups are D.C.-based lobbying organizations that don't have
the really engaged grassroots constituencies you're describing. How do you
see these two different kinds of groups working together?

A: The environmental-justice movement was never about creating little
black Greenpeaces or little brown Environmental Defenses or little red
Audubon Societies. These organizations have their expertise and when we
can work together and maximize our strengths, that's when we win.

There's division of labor that can work to the advantage of this whole
movement. When the mainstream national environmental groups pair up with
environmental-justice groups that have the ability to mobilize large
numbers of constituents -- to get people marching and filling up those
courtrooms and city council meetings -- that's when you can talk about an
environmental movement.

A great example of how it should be done is happening right now in
Louisiana. The Natural Resources Defense Council is partnering with the
Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Louisiana
Environmental Action Network to work on testing and issues of
environmental justice after Katrina. NRDC brings a lot of expertise, but
is respecting those organizations based in New Orleans and Cancer Alley.
They're really showing how a national group and local groups can form a
relationship that is principled.

Q: So you're hopeful?

A: On our side we have lots of committed troops on the ground and a
growing movement of young people. Because of the way race operates in this
society, there are some people -- poor white people, for example -- who
have been given blinders; they're blinded by racism and have voted against
their own best interests. When we take the blinders off and allow every
single American to rise and reach his or her potential without these
artificial barriers, then we could really become a great country.

What environmental-justice issues might we be surprisingly close to
breaking through on?

Globally we've got a long way to go, but the fact is we don't have a lot
of time -- I think that reality will force collaboration. An awareness
that what we do in the developed world doesn't just impact us is now
pretty much a given. But we have to move that to another level of action
and policy: the framework that environmental justice has laid out can
resonate across a lot of developing countries.

In the end, I think we'll be able to get our message out because it's
based on principles and it's based on truth and justice.

** Gregory Dicum is the author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from
the Air. He writes a biweekly column for SFGate, the online edition of the
San Francisco Chronicle, and has written for the New York Times Magazine,
Harper's, Mother Jones, and others.

Copyright 2006. Grist Magazine, Inc.


--------18 of 19--------

From: Getting to Zero Waste, Mar. 3, 2006
WHAT DOES ZERO WASTE REALLY MEAN?
By Paul Palmer paulp [at] sonic.net

[Paul Palmer is the author of Getting to Zero Waste (Sebastopol,
Calif.: Purple Sky Press, 2004; ISBN 0-976057-0-7).

A verse in a well-known blues runs: Everybody wants to go to heaven
but nobody wants to die.

In a similar way, (almost) everyone wants to get rid of garbage but
(almost) nobody wants to adopt zero waste thinking.

Zero Waste is an idea that is spreading from one city to another,
from one county to another and is being adopted by environmental
groups, individuals and even countries.

But what is it? In one sense, it really isn't that difficult. Zero
Waste means that there isn't any waste. No garbage! No throwing
anything away in a pit in the ground! No burning things just to "get
rid of them". Everything is reused. On this level, the concept could
hardly be simpler.

Unfortunately garbage has been with us for so long that most people
have internalized it as a social behavior. Too many people have
convinced themselves that the creation of garbage is an innate
activity, even a social right! No matter that there is nothing to back
up this defeatist idea except that we are used to it. So the first job
of a zerowaster is not just to define the concept academically but to
instill comfort in the idea that the creation of garbage has become
unacceptable, unnecessary and no longer has to be tolerated.

A short while ago, cigarette smoking was considered to be a personal
right. When people began to organize against polluted air, a powerful
industry fought like a tiger to continue their socially destructive
sales. People who had grown up with smoking shouted that they had a
right to pollute everyone's air and no one could stop them. But social
expectations changed. The rights were turned on their head to where no
one has the right to pollute. The "right" to create and throw away
garbage is another delusion that can and will be changed. Wait and
see!

Moving to a deeper level, zero waste is a way to organize society so
that every article or commodity that is used, by industry, commerce or
personal consumer, is designed for reuse after its first use. And then
for reuse after that.

I would like to tell you that this is a simple change from today's
practices but I can't. There are lots of implications in that brief
description.

Today, there is essentially no design for reuse at all. To incorporate
this new overriding design principle will take a lot of engineering
and technical changes.

Unlike recycling, zero waste is not an end-of-pipe strategy. It means
abandoning the idea that articles are used and discarded and then,
surprise! we suddenly need to find a way to reuse the materials that
are in them. With the adoption of zero waste principles, this will
never happen, because the reuse practices were designed in right from
the start. So it is clear that zero waste has very little in common
with recycling. In fact, if zero waste thinking is implemented,
recycling will essentially disappear. Recycling of materials will
persist only when no higher form of reuse can be found, and then only
temporarily until a higher form of reuse is found.

Are you confused by this? Are you thinking that design for reuse is
the same as design for recycling? Not at all! In most cases, recycling
is the lowest form of reuse you can find. This is because the most
important thing to reuse is not the materials of which an item is made
but the function that it serves. The first goal of any redesign is to
make the entire article, or the largest piece of it, reusable in its
highest form. Breaking a complex article into its bare materials is
hardly better than discarding it into a dump. True, it temporarily
keeps the materials out of a dump. But by degrading the complex
article into mere materials, you practically guarantee that those same
materials will soon find their way into another dump. And in many,
many cases, they won't even stop to pass go -- "recycled" materials
often move directly into dumps. End-of-pipe methods are hugely
inefficient.

Recycling has been an amazingly successful social innovation. Over the
past thirty years, it has raised the public consciousness and made
dumping much less acceptable. But now it is time to move past that
into taking true responsibility for everything that we create.

Why is function more important than the mere materials of which used
articles are composed? Here are some examples. Consider the glass and
plastic bottles that we are so often urged to recycle. Their function
is to contain. Their materials are just glass or plastic. How much of
the value of the bottle lies in the material of which they are made?
Maybe five percent, or even less. All of the value is found in the
proprietary shape, in the unique profile, in the recognizable
identity, in the seal which allows them to be closed and poured from
-- in short, in the fact that they can be used to contain a beverage.
When a glass bottle is broken, it loses all of that value. In order to
then recover some small residual value from the broken glass, it has
to be transported a long distance and then melted and reformed into a
new bottle at great expense in fuel. Then it has to be refilled with
some product and trucked back to the original customer. What a waste!
How much better it would be to simply refill the original, unbroken
bottle. It is already in the hands of a bottle user who just emptied
it. No transportation and no remelting. This is what reusing function
can accomplish but recycling discards.

As for the crushed plastic bottles, they are of so little value that
in most cases, their "recycling" is just a pretense to make them more
attractive to the public. In fact, they are most often taken directly
to a dump.

In the case of the bottle, responsibility does cost the user
something. He needs to wash out his bottle, keep it intact and
ultimately bring it to a refilling station in order to refill it. When
the garbage industry markets its pretense of recycling by telling the
homeowner that there is no need to wash or clean, no need to separate
plastic from glass, they are blowing smoke. They are selling
irresponsibility and trying to take advantage of laziness. But the
result is that the planet fills up with polluting garbage and destroys
our earth's patrimony, both silica (for glass) and petroleum (for
transportation and heat). As we approach the end of the Age of Oil, we
must simultaneously end the Age of Garbage.

Another example is found in the way that computers are mismanaged by
the garbage industry. These immensely complicated instruments, which
were wrung from simple materials by the application of high
engineering skills, years of expensive research and the prodigal
exploitation of human labor in multibillion dollar fabrication plants
are insulted by the garbage industry which brightly claims them to
consist of nothing but some steel, some plastic, some glass and bits
of gold and copper. They actually have developed ways to crush, smash,
shred and smelt these machines back into the lowest forms of raw
materials. What a waste!

Even without the benefit of design for repeated reuse, there is a
smaller industry which finds that it can refurbish and reuse many of
these computers. They call themselves the Computer Refurbisher
Industry and every week they collectively provide thousands of used
computers to schools, training classes and people who could not
otherwise afford a computer. But imagine how much more they could
accomplish if those same computers were actually carefully designed
for long life and perpetual reuse of all possible parts and features.
Designing willy-nilly for maximum profit, assuming that a dump will
always be there to welcome anything anyone wants to throw into it, is
a primitive, irresponsible way to run a civilized manufacturing
industry.

There is one industry that illustrates these principles so
beautifully, it is essential to take a look at it. Imagine an industry
that spends a great deal of money and human labor to produce a product
that uses no materials whatsoever but can nevertheless be designed for
reuse. Can you guess what it is?

The industry I have in mind is the one that produces software. From
the zero waste point of view this is no different from the automotive
industry, but the issues are clearer. Every programmer knows that he
is simply wasting effort if he designs software to be used once and
never again. There is a tremendous push in the software industry to
design software in reusable modules called objects and other names. So
if the product has no materials to speak of, where does the recycling
come in? Recycling theory may look at only the dribbles of paper or
plastic that the software is recorded on. But the real cost of
software is in the human labor. The huge investment in materials
represented by software are all of those materials used by all those
programmers as they buy homes, eat food, drive cars, read books and
newspapers etc. In an exactly parallel way, the real investment in a
bottle, which is summed up in the concept of function, is the
resources used up by the laborers and engineers who created the
bottle. This is the only reason there is such a wide gap between the
value of the bare plastic or glass materials and the completed bottle.
The same is true of computers, cars and every other product we
produce.

Recycling has been reinterpreted by the garbage industry to be merely
an add-on to the collection and disposal of garbage. California law,
especially in AB 939 passed in 1989 has obligingly mandated what is
called diversion, as the desired form of reuse. This means, first make
garbage but then divert a small portion of it into recycling. It is
the garbage industry which owns most of the beat and heat recyclers,
and which picks up the most profitable materials at the curb. They
have also instituted a way to fund recycling departments and efforts
that is insidious, namely by surcharges on dumping. This gives
recyclers a stake in continued dumping, undercutting their ideological
commitment to getting rid of dumps.

Zero Waste, on the other hand, suffers from no such contradictions. It
stands for the end of all garbage as we know it and for the end of
that harmful anachronism which is the garbage industry. It requires no
direct subsidies since the reuse of all manufactured articles will be
paid for at the time of first sale. The major indirect subsidy which
it requires is the same one that all modern technical industries
require, namely university based scientific research to develop ways
for manufacturers to design for reuse.

Zero Waste closes the responsibility gap by demanding that our society
stop pretending that unwanted articles and goods can be ignored,
thrown away and discarded into dumps. Down that road lies all
pollution. In taking responsibility, we are also taking back our one,
precious planet. There can be no alternative.


--------19 of 19--------

 Intellectual
 property, what's that,
 huh huh huh? drawls Bush.


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