SUMMER RECESS ‘09
Dear Green Sunday Fans,
A brief message to let you know that out Green Sunday organizers are taking a summer recess so there will be no Green Sunday programs in June, July and August. Our regular 2nd Sunday at 5pm schedule will resume in September.
The GPAC County Council meetings will continue through the summer on the 2nd Sundays of the month at 6:45 pm at the Niebyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland. Our next meeting will be on June 14th. We encourage anyone who is interested to attend our Council meetings.
Your Green Party County Council
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Wilson Riles on a Radical Alternative Currency System
for Oakland
Wilson Riles Jr
Sunday, May 10th
5:00 to 6:30 pm
“After almost a year of community work the Oakland Coalition for a City Identification Card (OCCIC), of which the Green Party has been an integral part, has proposed a complex, radical, alternative currency system for Oakland that has an excellent chance of being passed by the Oakland City Council.
Borrowing from the experience of hundreds of other US cities and international communities once passed by the Council this system could be transformative for Oakland and spark the creation of similar systems all over the Bay Area and nationally. The philosophical elements that under gird the proposal has Biblical, indigenous, and modern roots most intensive articulated in the writings of E. F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful). Thomas Jefferson lost his conflict with Alexander Hamilton over the economy’s structural issues this system raises up. All of this and the proposal is a mechanism that will promote ecological correction significantly. “
LOCATION: Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland.
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West
side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Served directly
by AC Transit routes 40, 64 & 17 with 6, 51 & 43 nearby.
Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs &
discussions sponsored by the Outreach Working Group of
the Green Party of Alameda County. They are usually held on
the 2nd Sunday of each month.
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Tom Athanasiou on “Global Justice or Climate Catastrophe”
Sunday, April 12th
5:00 to 6:30 pm
“In the face of global climate emergency, both theorizing and organizing must be accompanied by a deep commitment to truth telling. The mainline climate movement, alas, has concentrated almost exclusively on “inconvenient truths” of a scientific kind. I will briefly discuss a few of these, for they are essential. But essential as they are, it is long past time for inconvenient political truths to join them on the stage. And here there is plenty of inconvenience to go around. I will make two points. First, that the deep structure of the climate crisis — and the international climate policy impasse – has much to do with global economic polarization. And, second, that without a new and radically effective kind of global justice movement, we will fail to avert the impending catastrophe. Nor, despite all that we have learned, are we prepared. It’s time to think big.”
Tom is the director of EcoEquity and member of the Greenhouse Development Rights authors group. His interests focus on distributive justice within a context of global environmental emergency. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and reports, including The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World, Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming, and Divided Planet: the Ecology of Rich and Poor.
(See www.ecoequity.org for more information)
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LOCATION: Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland.
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West
side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Served directly
by AC Transit routes 40, 64 & 17 with 6, 51 & 43 nearby.
Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs &
discussions sponsored by the Outreach Working Group of
the Green Party of Alameda County. They are usually held on
the 2nd Sunday of each month.
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AC Transit in Trouble
Sunday, March 8th
5:00 to 6:30 pm
An Exploration: Can a change in the method of selecting AC Transit’s board bring about a more fiscally responsible agency that is sensitive to its riders and operators AND the environment?
Joyce Roy has been closely following AC Transit’s actions and writing about them for years. She does not own a car and is very active so rides a lot of buses. And she does not merely ride buses, she engages with riders and operators so knows their views.
After she got her nose under the tent, so to speak, as a member of AC Transit’s Accessibility Advisory Committee beginning in early 2007, her eyes were opened even wider and she tried to change things by running for the board. She lost the battle but won the war. She has begun referring to herself as a Whistle Blower and has started a ACTransitwatch. blog.
She is a semi-retired architect and has served as Director of Transportation on the League of Women Voters of the Bay Area board, and as the League’s representative on ACTIA’s Citizen’s Watchdog Committee. She was a founding member of a neighborhood YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) group, ULTRA (Urbanists for a Livable Temescal,
Rockridge Area) which advocates for more density along transit corridors like Telegraph and Broadway.
LOCATION: Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland.
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Served directly by AC Transit routes 40, 64 & 17 with 6, 51 & 43 nearby. Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs & discussions sponsored by the Outreach Working Group of
the Green Party of Alameda County. They are usually held on the 2nd Sunday of each month.
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Obama the Utopian?
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
5:00 to 6:30 pm
Many commentators have discussed the “pragmatism” of Obama, sometimes
with praise and other times with a critical edge. What many have
missed however is the “utopian” dimension of the Obama campaign this
fall. Berkeley Green Gabriel Hetland will be discussing the
utopianism of the Obama campaign. In particular, Gabriel will look at
how this utopian dimension functions in two contradictory ways: 1) as
a legitimation for the campaign’s instrumental politics (which have
been quite on display in the first several weeks of the Obama
administration) ; and 2) as a means of inspiring and bringing in a new
generation to politics, with possibilities that may spill beyond the
bounds of what the Obama campaign itself may consider acceptable.
Gabriel will also discuss how this relates to Alameda County Green
Party, and what potential this offers for radical politics in America.
LOCATION: Niebyl-Proctor Library
6501 Telegraph Ave. at 65th in North Oakland.
DIRECTIONS: One block north of Alcatraz on the West
side of Telegraph, wheelchair accessible. Served directly
by AC Transit routes 40, 64 & 17 with 6, 51 & 43 nearby.
Ashby BART is approximately 7 blocks away.
SPONSOR: Green Sundays are a series of free programs &
discussions sponsored by the Outreach Working Group of
the Green Party of Alameda County. They are usually held on
the 2nd Sunday of each month.
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Hi all,
Gabe will be speaking and facilitating a discussion about “Obama the
Utopian” at this Sunday’s (Feb 8th) Green Sunday. He thought this
article by Ted Glick was relevant and that you might like to read it
before hand.
Third Party Organizing Under Obama
Feb 02, 2009 By Ted Glick
Ted Glick’s ZSpace Page / ZSpace
“As a politician, Mr. Daschle often struck a populist note, but his
financial disclosure report shows that in the last two years, he received
$2.1 million from a law firm, Alston & Bird; $2 million in consulting fees
from a private equity firm run by a major Democratic fundraiser, Leo
Hindery Jr. . . and at least $220,000 for speeches to health care,
pharmaceutical and insurance companies. He also received nearly $100,000
from health-related companies affected by federal regulation.”
-N.Y. Times, Feb. 1, 2009, page 1 story, “Daschle Knew of Tax Issues
As Of Last June”
The nomination of Tom Daschle for both White House “health czar” and
Secretary of Health and Human Services is in trouble. It’s in trouble
because information has come out that Daschle, former Democratic Party
leader in the U.S. Senate, didn’t pay until very recently $128,000 in back
taxes owed for “the use of a car and driver provided by a private equity
firm,” the same one which gave him $2 million in consulting fees.
Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is quoted as saying, “The
president is comfortable with Senator Daschle’s variety of experiences
and backgrounds. It’s why he believes he’s best suited to the efforts to
reform our health care system.”
Is this really the best President Obama can do when it comes to change we
can believe in as far as our seriously-flawed health care system?
It has been like a breath of fresh air to have Obama in the White House.
I don’t miss at all reading in the newspaper each morning about the
latest Bush/Cheney outrage. Some mornings over the last two weeks there
has been truly good White House news to read about: an end to torture,
pro-labor initiatives, support for renewable energy, a reversal of Bush’s
anti-choice family planning policies internationally.
But the Daschle fiasco, coupled with other problematic Cabinet
appointments, particularly Robert Gates, James L. Jones, Timothy Geithner
and Lawrence Summers, underlines the importance of continuing efforts to
build a consistently progressive political alternative- a “third party”-in
this country.
The last eight years for those efforts have not been easy. Under the
neo-conservative Republicans, the predominant sentiment among
progressive- minded people, both activists and the broad swath of voters,
has been that it is essential that we get the Republicans out of office.
And since the winner-take- all, corporate dominated U.S. electoral system,
and the corporate mass media which reports on it, are structured to make
third parties seem like little more than “spoilers” (spoilers of a rotten
system), it has been a hard, upstream row for groups like the Green Party
and the Labor Party, the two surviving, national, progressive third party
organizations.
At a local level the Green Party has been able to maintain and strengthen
its presence in many, a large majority, of states. It has been electing a
slowly growing number of people to local offices like city council while
maintaining an activist presence on issues. The vast majority of those
local electoral victories, however, have been by Green Party members
running on a non-partisan ballot line. Very few of the currently 250 or
so elected Greens won office by running on a Green Party ballot line.
On a national level, in both 2004 and 2008, the progressive third party
movement was divided between those who supported non-Green Party member
Ralph Nader’s independent campaigns and those who supported the
candidates chosen by the GP’s internal democratic processes, David Cobb
and Cynthia McKinney. In both Presidential election years, Nader got a
small percentage of the 2.8 million votes he had gotten in 2000 -460,000
(2004) and 730,000 votes (2008)-and Cobb and McKinney got between 120,000
(Cobb) and 160,000 (McKinney).
It seems to me that if we are ever going to open up the U.S. electoral
system to the participation of those who rightly feel very excluded, if
we are to ever have a genuine multi-party democracy instead of a
two-party duopoly, there are a number of things which must be done by
those who support this objective, those who are currently active in
groups like the Greens or the Labor Party, as well as those working in or
close to the Democratic Party who clearly understand its serious
limitations:
-We need to keep building our independent electoral/activist efforts,
organizing on issues and running candidates on local and, where it’s
strategic, state levels.
-We need to be people who can be counted on to support the struggles of
communities of color, labor, young people, women, environmentalists and
other progressive- oriented constituencies around the issues they are most
affected by. We need to be reliable allies. We don’t have the money and
access to corporate media that the Dems and Reps do, but over time we can
compensate for that with solid personal and political connections at a
grassroots level.
-Along these lines, there is a need to firmly reject sectarian, narrow
and divisive approaches toward third party organizing which would isolate
us from our natural allies. There are some individual members of the
Green Party, for example, who attack as sellouts other Greens who are
working with Democrats, as well as non-Green independents and maybe some
Republicans, on issues. They have no appreciation of the need to be known
not just for having good ideas about what needs to be done to bring about
genuine change but for demonstrating in practice an ability to organize
effectively through alliance-building.
-Finally, there is a continuing need for the development of arenas for
discussion and relationship- building among those who have similar
programmatic ideas about what needs to be done but have differences over
the political tactics to achieve them-i.e., between progressive
Democrats, progressive third partyites and those who see themselves as
primarily issue-oriented activists. It may well be the case that such
discussions could develop into something more substantial as far as
regularized communication and coordination. And perhaps, as we get the
mixed bag of results– some positive, some negative, some somewhere in
between–that we can realistically expect from Obama and the Democrats,
we’ll figure out how to advance toward an effective, consistently
progressive, activist and electoral, national political vehicle we can
all be part of.
Ted Glick is a former coordinator and continuing leader of the
Independent Progressive Politics Network. His primary work for the last
four years has been as a climate activist. More information can be found
at http://www.tedglick .com.
From: Z Net – The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommuni cations.org/ zspace/commentar ies/3762
