Archive for December, 2007

Naomi Wolf gives credibility to the things that are usually relegated to the babbling crazies.

Found on Liberator Magazine: http://weblog.liberatormagazine.com/

From Jakada Imani and Ian Kim:

On Wednesday, December 19, President Bush signed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for green job training programs across the country!

The Green Jobs Act is part of the Energy Bill, a bundle of policies that is otherwise a mixed blessing. Conservatives stripped out some of the best parts of the package — like big boosts for solar and wind energy and an end to tax giveaways for oil companies.

Amidst these shortcomings, however, we have our share of great news. For the first time in history, we have a U.S. law that addresses both the climate crisis and the poverty crisis by investing in green-collar job training. The Green Jobs Act authorizes $125 million annually for greening the nation’s workforce, enough for training up to 35,000 people every year. Even more unprecedented, it allocates $25 million for “green pathways out of poverty” programs — like the Oakland Green Jobs Corps we’ve been championing here at home in the Bay Area.

This is just the beginning: the Green Jobs Act is a down payment on a larger vision. We must take on — and win — much bigger challenges to build a green economy that’s powerful enough to lift people out of poverty. This is why we’ve launched Green For All, a new national initiative led by Van Jones to secure at least one billion dollars to create green pathways out of poverty for 250,000 people in the United States.

And it’s why, beginning in 2008, the Ella Baker Center’s Green-Collar Jobs Campaign is taking on California. The nation’s most populous state is also the state with the biggest potential for creating groundbreaking environmental policy. We are excited to partner with the California Apollo Alliance and the California Labor Federation to set the “green jobs standard” for other states to follow.

Thank you for your endless support. With your involvement, we’re building the green-collar movement on the ground in Oakland, across the state of California, and nationally in Washington, D.C. We look forward to another amazing year!

Sincerely,

Jakada Imani and Ian Kim
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

On Wed. December 12th, Van Jones called together a “brain trust” of social and environmental justice activists, political theoreticians, and movement leaders for a war room session to shore up any holes in what is beginning to look like a full proof plan, his vision of an inclusive and trans formative green revolution.

Jones set the stage by pointing out that in the shadow of the Bali Climate Change Conference, predictions about the speed and impact of climate related shocks do to greenhouse gas are worsening by the day. According to Jones, the worst case scenarios posed by Al Gore’s now famous film are now best case scenarios. Indeed mainstream media outlets - the same ones that once took pains to mention the caveats of Bush administration scientists against jumping to conclusions on the issue - are now reporting that the polar ice pack is melting faster than IPCC computer models had previously predicted. While direct linkages are still highly scrutinized, few would argue that hurricanes like Katrina and the recent Southern California wild fires are not previews of what is to come as the planet heats up.

Ironically, this apocalyptic nightmare should be a progressive political boon. Conservatives have essentially spent the last decade or two putting their proverbial feet in their mouths on this issue; doling out tax breaks to coal, oil, and gas companies, thwarting emissions regulation, and waging wars for oil.

So, why then, hasn’t the left capitalized on this moment. The answer is multi-fold, but part of it may have to do with the gap between various sub-constituencies in the left, namely the huge cultural divide between “green” folks, and “brown” folks.

The stereotypical environmentalist is a white, relatively rich, and worries more about threatened species in remote regions than about the human beings living on the other side of the tracks in their own towns. Just as stereotypically, civil rights and social justice activists would think it a waste to spend time thinking about the forests and oceans as long as people are starving, disenfranchised, or violently oppressed. Interestingly however, an event like Katrina forces various progressive camps to defy these myopias by demonstrating that the warming of the earth threaten poor people, and people of color, more harshly more immediately than any other people group. The issues of environment and human rights are converging and the solutions for both must therefore be closely related.

Stage left: Enter Van Jones and the Green Jobs movement. “The left,” Jones asserted, “can and must move. It is in our interest, but we are not interested.” In the past, environmentalism has been averse to the agenda of labor and poverty activists and vice versa, but the current crisis clearly calls for collective solutions that may satisfy the aims of both.

Jones call to action is gaining adherents. In June, Congresswoman Hilda L. Solis of California and John Tierney of Massachusetts introduced the Green Jobs Act. The speaker of the house Pelosi later attached the act a larger energy independence legislation package.

So why then does Van Jones think his agenda will be treated any differently than the Kyoto protocol or the Bali initiatives. The answer may be captured by an American political cliche: “It’s the economy stupid.” Jones’ political calculus, if it proves true, is a study of the inevitable as opposed to the alchemical. If we accept the idea that the world is running a fever and humans could be facing the most dangerous threat to their species in history. Then, governments and their citizens will be compelled do something to stave off extinction one way or another. Huge investments will have to be made in the technologies and processes that promise the most value in the survival effort. As Jones puts it, “America will need legions of ‘green collar’ workers to outfit the green revolution — creating solar panels, biofuels and wind farms.” His aim is to make these jobs a source of employment that can invigorate the languishing economies of the black and brown urban America.

Jones’ invitation only meeting was a chance for him to convene with the giants on whose shoulders his burgeoning movement stands. Many of the people in the room had been creating programs and initiatives around the concept of job creation and empowerment through the very act of stewarding a livable and healthy environment. The ideologies represented in the room spanned from the progressive to the radical and much of the discussion was devoted to how visions of a new and better society can be seeded within a movement with so much neo-liberal support.

I admit I had to fight off the temptation to be blindly swept up in the clear, artful logic of Van Jones’ analysis of our current historical moment. My resistance was not for the sake of critical distance itself, but at the behest of the presenter who asked his audience to be brutally honest.

One of my questions is how different the relationship between people and the planet be if this new wave of employment takes hold? Will we’ll still be trapped in the growth-is-good economic paradigm that presupposes the exploitation of people and the Earth, or are green jobs the first step toward a new consciousness about how human beings can sustain themselves in cooperation with nature and each other.

I once asked a wise man who happened to be a pioneering black farmer his thoughts on Hurricane Katrina. He pointed out a stinging irony. Most of the people stranded in the Super Dome without food and water were only a generation or two removed from lives of farming, and existences that were certainly more self-sustaining. As global food supplies are under increasing threat by agribusiness, peak oil, and global warming, I am increasingly convinced of the need to localize economies, increase and incentivize small and urban farms, and manifest communitarian interdependence in general. Havana was forced into such a strategy by the collapse of the Soviet Union during the special period. The underlying logic of urban cooperative is also at work in the Cuban approach to community health that empasizes neighborhood based health practices and preventative measures. If the seeds of such a shift are firmly entrenched in the Green For All movement, then sign me up.

Check out:
http://www.greenforall.org/
http://ellabakercenter.org/

“Millions of new jobs are among the many silver, if not indeed gold-plated linings on the cloud of climate change,” said Steiner, also UN under-secretary general. from the Bali Climate Change Conference Blog

Full article here >>

Up and come with it director, and Staple Crops founder, Tahir Hemphill assembled a crew of NYC’s dance culture innovators for this Deuce Gansta video. Hopefully we can get some of these folks out to the West sometime soon. Meanwhile, peep style. More info at the Staple Crops website which is worth a move if you haven’t hit it up yet..

If you haven’t heard this yet, you might as well get it over with here. This well funny stuff.

Couldn’t make this stuff up (or maybe its a subtle anti-drug campaign).

Taken from an email sent out by Kathy Dopp. Dopp is a “mathematician, expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in
exit poll discrepancy analysis.”
————————————————————–
On Friday, Dec. 14th the results of Ohio’s Secretary of State Jennifer
Brunner’s “Everest Voting System Review” were released:

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/everest.aspx
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/EVEREST/00-SecretarysEVERESTExecutiveReport.pdf

The Results of Ohio’s Source Code Analysis and Red Team (Penetration)
Testing Include:

Premier (Diebold Voting Systems):
* Failure To Effectively Protect Vote Integrity
* Failure to Effectively Protect Vote Privacy
* Failure to Protect Elections From Malicious Insiders
* Failure to Validate and Protect Software
* Failure to Follow Standard Software and Security Engineering Practices
* Failure to Provide Trustworthy Auditing

Hart Voting Systems:
* Failure To Effectively Protect Election Data Integrity
* Failure To Eliminate Or Document Unsafe Functionality
* Failure To Protect Election From “Malicious Insiders”
* Failure To Provide Trustworthy Auditing

ES&S Voting Systems:
* Failure to Protect Election Data and Software.
* Failure to Effectively Control Access to Election Operations
* Failure to Correctly Implement Security Mechanisms
* Failure to Follow Standard Software and Security Engineering Practices

Ohio’s SOS Brunner is recommending removing all voting machines from
the polls (even optical scan voting equipment) except for voting
machines required by federal statute to allow voters with disabilities
to vote privately and independently - and is recommending counting all
ballots with a high-speed central count system at county election
offices.

—-

News articles (taken from the Daily Voting News) on the subject include:

OH: Study: Voting Systems Vulnerable
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/everest.aspx

OH: Brunner declares Ohio’s voting systems vulnerable
http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2007/12/14/vote.html

OH: Brunner: Ohio’s vote vulnerable
http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2007/12/brunner_ohios_vote_vulnerable.html

OH: Report finds voting equipment flaws
http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20071214/FREE/71214014/1008&Profile=1008

OH: Ohio’s electronic voting system vulnerable, report says
http://www.ohio.com/news/break_news/12505391.html

OH: Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920

OH: Official: Ohio Vote Machines Vulnerable
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/12/14/ap4442329.html

OH: Statement of Premier Election Solutions in Response to Today’s
Release of the Ohio EVEREST Voting System Review
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/news_press_release,242777.shtml

OH: ‘Critical Security Failures’ Leads Ohio Sec. Of State To Recommend
Ban of DRE (Touch-Screen) Voting Machines
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5443

OH: Cuyahoga County - Secretary of State wants new voting system in
Cleveland
http://www.ohio.com/news/ap?articleID=284686&c=y

—-

Please take a few minutes to call your US Representative and Senator
to support Rep. Rush Holt and Senator Bill Nelson’s election reform
bills that would assist states to pay for replacing their flawed
high-cost DRE voting systems with paper ballot voting systems that are
less costly, more reliable, and fully auditable, and provide funding
for conducting manual counts (audits) of paper ballots to verify the
accuracy of machine counts.

http://senate.gov and http://www.house.gov

Kathy Dopp can be reached at:

“P.O. Box 680192
Park City, UT 84068
phone 435-658-4657

http://electionmathematics.org
http://electionarchive.org”

What’s Really Good is fully impressed by Whats Going On
After you view this montage of beautiful pictures of some New Orleans’ folks set to the ever timely Marvin Gaye anthem, Whats Goin On, you are invited to write a letter the White House. I wrote:

Dear White House,

History will judge weather we have squandered our wealth and energy by devoting half a trillion dollars to the restructuring of the Middle East meanwhile failing to make basic repairs to the levees of New Orleans and subsequently failing to evacuate the refugees stranded by their failure.

Now, you have a chance for some redemption by setting the right national priorities. Rebuild New Orleans with sufficient affordable housing. Subsidize educators, health workers. Oversee the rebuilding of homes instead of the redevelopment of a city made vulnerable to real estate speculation by disaster.

Do not associate yourself with the ruin of one of the treasures of our country, nay our civilization.

Brandon

Check out: http://www.whatsgoinon.org/

The Junction at The Black New World Social Aid & Pleasure Club is quickly becoming an Oakland sure shot. Every first Friday Rebel B’nai Front and Kev Choice rock live music for a very live Oakland crowd into the very early morning. For the adventurous or the die-hard music lovers, a quick disco nap and your vintage fedora tilted to the side will help you blend in to this late night taste making session.

I made it out last Friday for my second dose and caught a preview of Kev Choice’s new “hip-hop sonata for rap, piano, drums, bass, and percussion.” Like Robert Glasper, Kev and his band discredit the proverbial binary that pits hip-hop against tradition. We’ve gotten used to hip-hop artists who dabble with jazz samples and using Beethoven riffs for dramatic effect, but this new breed of artists has the chops to absorb hip-hop into a growing vision of Black music.

This description sounds academic if not somewhat overblown, but Kev’s music is anything but. The band’s musicianship does not define them. They can get dirty. Instead they show off by moving deliberately and skillfully through their set. At one time rising into a sort of Earth, Wind, and Fire epic riffiness only to settle back down to allow Kev to outline the song with a piano solo. Then sometimes-as in the case of the Hip-hop Sonata-rolling seamlessly from one song into the next. The comparison to the roots would not be completely outlandish. But where the roots have many more years of raw hip-hop and mcing skills in their sound, Kev’s unique potential is in his combo rapper/song writer steez. The Black New World is a perfect venue in which to catch this show. The BNW itself is a passage connecting the African-American ancestry of those who made the Lower Bottoms (West Oakland) a vibrant mid-century Black community with contemporary, Black visionaries of arts and culture. Its complex enough to contain a seriously attractive and stylish young crowd without wavering toward a run of the mill bar experience for a moment. Kev Choice exploits this potential to the fullest, by creating an intimate conversation with the audience that talks about the struggle to maintain your focus and your integrity in a world that offers few such refuges.