We include two articles, one from Naomi Klein covers the DNC’s refusal to treat climate change as a crisis and In These Times writes on Bernie’s new climate plan to create a public energy network. No More PNM’s.
After the Actions & Events, you will find two brief articles for your weekend reading, followed by a powerful poem sent to us by artist/activist and friend, Bobbe Besold. Read on.
Actions & Events
- A Retake Radio Doubleheader
- Retake on KSFR 101.1 FM, 8:30am-9am today with Erik Griego, NM Working Families Director (next week Nick Estes, Red Nation co-founder).
- Brave Space, KRTC 103.7 FM, 1260 AM. 9am-10am today with host Cecile Lipworth and guest Roxanne Barber, Co-Founder, Retake Our Democracy.
- EarthCare & Youth United for Climate Crisis Action planning for the September 20 General Strike. Today, 12:30-2:30pm at 1420 Cerrillos, Santa Fe.
- Community Solar Now, Today, Aug. 24, 1-4pm, Central Unser Library, 1260 Central Ave, NW, ABQ.
For more information on these and other events, click here.
Your Weekend Reading
Naomi Klein shames Democratic Party leadership or the sheepish version of leadership so typical at the national level.
In our second weekend reading feature, Bernie Sanders’ climate action plan is detailed, including a plan to create a national public energy network, eliminating the current dysfunctional private monopoly utility system dominated by the gas and oil industry.
Klein Tells DNC: Break Your Rules & Demonstrate You Know This is a Crisis
The bottom floor of your two-story house is engulfed in flames. Your children are screaming from their bedroom windows above. With an extension ladder in your hands, do you turn to your partner to discuss what action to take? Or do you act?
Well, our ground floor is engulfed and all of our children and grandchildren are screaming for us to take action and the Democratic Party won’t even break a small rule to devote one debate exclusively to climate change. That is not treating the climate crisis like an emergency. How much confidence can we have that the same party that won’t break a rule to allow a full discussion of this existential question, will suddenly spring into action in 2021 should they seize the Senate and White House?
In Klein’s moving letter to the DNC, she does more than insist that the DNC holds a presidential debate focused exclusively on the climate crisis. Her commentary touches on economic, racial and social justice and then pivots to capture how all of these forms of justice are both part of, but also superseded by climate justice. It is a powerful letter which unfortunately fell on deaf ears.
On Thursday the DNC Resolutions Committee voted 17-8 against permitting a climate crisis debate, with Biden spokesperson Symone Sanders urging the committee to reject the debate stating: “It would be dangerous territory in the middle of the Democratic primary to do so.”
You want dangerous territory, Symone? Check out our future. From Naomi Klein:
Here is why setting an emergency tone at this crossroads is so important. Imagine that the party does absolutely everything right between now and November 2020. It elects a beloved candidate to lead the party with a bold and positive platform; that candidate goes on to defeat Trump in the general election; other galvanizing candidates succeed in taking the Senate and keeping the House for your party. Even in that long-shot, best-case scenario, a new administration would come to power with the climate clock so close to midnight that it will need to have earned an overwhelming democratic mandate to leap into transformative action on day one.
The timeline we face is nonnegotiable. According to the fateful report issued by the International Panel on Climate Change last October, if humanity is to stand a fighting chance of keeping warming below catastrophic levels, global emissions need to be slashed in half in the decade that follows a new U.S. administration taking office. Not 10 years to agree on a plan or 10 years to get started on the plan. It will have 10 years to get the job done.
Click here to read Klein’s full open letter to the DNC.
Retake the Grid: Sanders Calls for Green New Deal to Include Public Takeover of the Grid
In These Times reported on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ just released plan for addressing climate change. The plan borrows heavily from the Democracy Collaborative’s Community Ownership of Power Administration and proposes to completely de-commodify the energy sector by 2035 and to do so based upon the Jemez Principles, a bottom’s up planning process developed by indigenous activists in 1996. After checking out In These Times, I highly recommend reviewing the Democracy Collaborative’s plan (link above).
The article describes how only this July, Con Edison of NY made the decision to turn off power in low-income communities of color during a horrible heat wave in order to ensure continued power to more affluent communities. We need to escape being governed by these profit and privilege-driven priorities. The article delineates other examples of corporate priorities that do not serve the public interest and also describes in broad strokes Sanders’ comprehensive plan for shifting to publicly managed energy. From In These Times:
The for-profit companies that reign over our energy system now have shown no meaningful sign of being willing to transform our energy system; they are much more interested in shareholder gains and business as usual. Together, for-profit utilities and fossil fuel companies have created powerful political-economic machines across the country to solidify the status quo of extraction and extortion. In contrast, democratic public ownership of our energy system could prioritize community benefit over profit, paving the way for a just and equitable energy system.
In These Times, August 2019
“We will end greed in our energy system,” says Sanders’ climate plan. “The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal will be publicly owned.”
Click here to read the full In These Times article.
Drew Dellinger – Hieroglyphic Stairway
“it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech”
– Drew Dellinger – Hieroglyphic Stairway
In solidarity,
Paul & Roxanne
Categories: Uncategorized
Former President, Jimmy Carter stated that Trump was an illegitimate president. We saw absolute innaction and denial on the well publicized Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook launched a campaign to give the appearance that Antisemitism was behind the questioning of Fakebook. Even now with republican support on the big tech our elected representatives have done nothing, even less than nothing.
Reports came out about how big tech is selling software and technology to Border Patrol. There was a congressional hearing on the use of facial recognition software yet the Border Patrol was conspicuously absent. We did learn that the use of this software, by police departments, border patrol was adopted with no ethical or safety protocols in place. The FBI follows current Laws and regulation, and our Constitution, while these other entities do not. These big corporations use really sophisticated targeted marketing to sell this untried and ripe for abuse software, to local police departments. https://oversight.house.gov/legislation/hearings/facial-recognition-technology-part-ii-ensuring-transparency-in-government-use
I keep asking where is this apathy and inaction come from, and I keep coming back to media and social media. Global Warming is a Fact, yet Bolsnaro used a social media platform, with the help of these same republican operatives that undermined our election in 2016. As we watch in horror as the Amazon burns, the same thing is going on here. A local TV outlet last night reported on the Amazon fires, claiming it was like just some farmers clearing their land. They left out the coordinated attack on Indigenous people, the burning villages, mining and timber. https://theintercept.com/2019/08/23/gop-lobbyists-help-brazil-recruit-u-s-companies-to-exploit-the-amazon/
https://amazonwatch.org/
It is as if people are in thrall, and if we look at where people get their information the people who cannot afford Internet, or the people that turn on local news for their weather. People that read their local newspapers in New Mexico, some may appear to be factual, while others are clearly biased. On both sides there is one clear thread the marketing. The marketing on CNN, and MSNBC, and even the New York Times and Washington Post. The big corporate marketing is creating a kind of cognitive dissonance. The lead story is the Amazon is burning, but the native advertising, by big oil, is telling us the opposite.
The major TV news networks are telling as that we have to wait until the 2020 Election to fix this. Our politicians decided not to impeach, stay the course, the economy is doing fine, their friends and corporate CEO”s are making money. Our elected representatives voted for the massive military budget increase, the budget was one place they could have leveraged this administration. They want us to wait and see what other damage this administration might do what regulations they have rolled back and what laws they have undermined. Our reasonable expectation of safety we have had, believing there are regulations and Constitutional protections, is not what we might think it is.
I have been tracking the health industry, which is kind of serious business, it impacts people lives. Laws and regulations about marketing, are virtually non existent. New Mexico has one of the highest rates of suicide in the nation, bad heath outcomes and virtually no regulations on health related advertising. Health providers frequently put unmarked native advertising in local papers. No one has analyzed how this might impact Medicare For All or our local health outcomes The same with the adverting on local and national television. A lot of this deceptive marketing would have been illegal 20 or 30 years ago. Now it appears to be encouraged by the FTC. Our politicians take a lot of money from this industry, even locally. The provide a lot of cover for our broken healthcare industry, and corporate misbehavior.
Our local media peddled dumpf like a cheap suit, and it took quite a while for actual objective coverage of this administration. We can do all of the “educating” we want, 1619, and factual Indigenous history which was all suppressed by our education system. We can talk about alternatives, and sustainable practices. This too has been co opted by corporate marketers. Corporate media contorted these stories and turned them into feel good corporate marketing. The very same pattern is ongoing here in Santa Fe. The message is that we don’t have to worry about any of this, some nice corporation, foundation or whatever is working on it. It is a pernicious form of corporate propagandist, misinformation and outright lies.
Northern New Mexico, should have produced at least one person at the caliber of Occasio Cortez, yet where are they? The political system here would have sucked the life out of them, or they would have fled the state. Perhaps they are keeping their head down to avoid attack by the right wing. Maybe they were crushed by the ongoing alternate reality here. At least we know our local media would not have covered anyone “too controversial.” The ongoing and unrecognized corruption and denial would have broken their spirit long before now. I keep looking at our local candidates and no one is at the level of any of the “Squad.” Of course our local democratic party would not endorse anyone with that level of charisma or intelligence, they would have turned on them like chickens that peck one member of their flock to death.
Self described “activists” are still using Fakebook and Social media without thinking who could be scraping that data and for what purpose. A simple Internet search, pulls up a site that will use your photo for “free.” the random dupe can give some corporation more free data. The big tech companies have been doing this for years, so they can sell it back to racist police departments, and no one even thought to regulate that. Big players in the defense industry, like Google and Palantir, took the tech they tested overseas for military purposes and sold it here. it does not really have to work, they just need someone ignorant enough to buy it,and an embrace of corruption at a police department. https://www.facefirst.com/industry/law-enforcement-face-recognition/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6319701-6687-Informational-Materials-20190605-1.html
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-administration-revives-clause-that-kept-nazi-era-refugees-from-the-us/
They are still avoiding impeachment, apparently the kids in cages, the nazi references, the “trade war” and global environmental destruction are not enough. The media is still parsing his every word, as if he is a legitimate president. Our democrats still believe that the “Bernie Bros: were a thing. People are very careful locally to avoid exposing what has gone on here for years, who took corporate money to throw regular New Mexicans under the bus. The people in this state, with a high rate of poverty, the ones who don’t have 400 dollars to scrape together for an emergency. Some of these people voted for dumpf, they were so angry and powerless, the rest did not vote at all, the powerlessness had already broken their spirits, years ago.
The apathy is horrific!
A candidate like Occasio Cortez, from Northern New Mexico: YES. Please take a look at Las Vegas New Mexico born Teresa Legard de Fernandez, a candidate for CD3 —- Yale undergrad, Stanford Law degree, practices human rights and tribal law, works for functional city government and affordable housing, understands the urgency of the climate crisis and what is needed. Endorsed by the Taos Pueblo Council and other organizations. Teresaforall.com