Happy Earth Day, People & Planet!

Greetings from Dystopia! Wish none of us were here!  but rather, more like here:

Fifty years ago when we then-young Boomers, along with people of other age groups, created the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, I suspect many of us were hoping for a thriving and greener Planet by now.

Were you involved in the first Earth Day in 1970? If so, what did you do? What did it mean to you? What were you hoping for? What did you expect would happen by now?

We did have some major successes. We got then-President Richard Nixon, of all people, to get behind Sen. Edmund Muskie's (D - Maine) Clean Air Act and sign it into law, on Dec. 31, 1970, eight months after the first Earth Day. Even before then, Rachel Carson woke us up to the dangers of synthetic pesticides in 1963, with her paradigm-shifting book, Silent Spring. In Sept. 1970, essays by Charles A. Reich  appeared in The New Yorker, and later in 1970, the entire work was published as The Greening of America, which became a runaway bestseller.  We made major strides in promoting notions of sustainability and environmentalism, and in promoting practices of organic gardening, agriculture, food; vegetarianism; animal rights.

Then came the Reagan years, of deregulation, and of the plutocratic empire striking back. These two threads continue-- the addiction to money, and money uber alles; and the advocacy for life, community, and joy in being, which here in the physical world, is of necessity tied to the well being of Nature. When we destroy Nature, we destroy ourselves. That should be obvious, but obviously, it's not obvious to the money-addicted. The addicted want one thing only-- the thing to which they are addicted.

Anyway, if you participated in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, what were you doing? What were you hoping for, and what did you what to accomplish?

For those who are younger, when was the first Earth Day you remember? What did it mean to you?

Please feel free to email me your responses, by April 29, and I will make a compilation for a later blogpost, on May 1. That will be an appropriate day for such a posting! Let me know if I can post your name, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous. Send your email to BarbaraforAD101@protonmail.com, preferably with subject heading "Earth Day."

And yes, I am running for NYS Assembly District 101, on the Green Party line, of course, on a green platform. Read all about it here under my April 13 posting -- see column on the right.  To promote things green in NYS and on the planet, one thing you can do is support this campaign. To support it financially, checks to support the campaign can be made out to "Barbara for AD101" and mailed to:

Barbara for AD101
PO Box 34
Walker Valley, NY 12588

Thank you! And happy Earth Day!
Barbara Kidney,
Chair, Hudson Valley GP

Lesser of two evils?

So what should people who want Trump gone but cannot stand Biden do? First of all, no one should be shamed for letting their conscience dictate their vote or decision not to vote. ... Our system is dominated by corporate influence, big money, and the skewed rules of a default duopoly, and it actively fights to prevent third parties from receiving federal matching funds, joining debates, or gaining ballot access.

There is no mandatory voting in the U.S., roughly 40 percent of Americans do not belong to either major political party, and people have a right to register their dissatisfaction with the entire system by not voting. In an atmosphere where tens of millions of U.S. citizens choose not to vote, shaming the minuscule number of people who vote for the Green Party is a disgrace. There are hundreds of thousands of voters whose principled belief is that breaking the two-party stranglehold on U.S. democracy is the only path to meaningful systemic change. 

Votes for Jill Stein or Howie Hawkins are not being taken away from corporate Democrats. Those votes belong to the people who cast them and they have a right to vote however they choose, and the candidates they support have a right to run for office.

Full article: 

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/20/donald-trump-joe-biden-2020-presidential-election-voting/

GUEST: Mike Davis on Coronavirus and capitalism

Activist Radio has the following guest on this Thursday (5 - 6 pm):

GUEST: Mike Davis, Professor Emeritus at University of California at Riverside, a MacArthur Fellow, author of numerous books, and an editor of the New Left Review, talks about Coronavirus and capitalism. 

https://inthesetimes.com/article/22394/coronavirus-crisis-capitalism-covid-19-monster-mike-davis

The interview can be heard live on Vassar College Radio 91.3 FM, or streamed from https://classwars.org. It will also be aired this Sunday on WIOF 104.1 in Woodstock (4 - 5 pm), and from the Progressive Radio Network PRN.FM (5 - 6 pm). In addition, the interview will be available on the ClassWars.org website for the next ten weeks. Simply click on the date to hear it.

Thanks,

Fred
Activist Radio

The Green Party, the Real Alternative to Corporate Control

Lucy has once again yanked the football away from Charlie Brown. The Democratic Party leadership has yet again maneuvered to smother their own progressive wing and is already trying to lower the expectations of those who have been radicalized by the demands of a Green New Deal, improved and expanded Medicare-for-All and making the 1% and Wall Street pay their fair share.

We knew that was inevitable. That is why the Green Party sees political and financial independence from the parties of War and Wall Street as strategic necessities, no matter how much a particular candidate's platform might overlap with ours.

We have a tremendous fight ahead of us this year — even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. But we have new allies and friends joining us. Our job is to organize them to build the power necessary to break the duopoly by winning proportional representation, Ranked Choice Voting and fully-public campaign financing and continuing to elect Green candidates along the way.

By giving today you are fueling the growth of this party and bringing us one step closer to winning the world we all deserve.

Urge Rep. Delgado to cosponsor H.R. 2407

H.R. 2407 seeks to promote justice, equality and human rights for children globally by prohibiting any U.S. foreign aid dollars from contributing to "the military detention, interrogation, abuse, or ill-treatment of children in violation of international humanitarian law."

The bill sets a clear statement of policy declaring, “It is the policy of the United States to promote human rights for Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation and to declare Israel's system of military detention of Palestinian children as a practice that results in widespread and systematic human rights abuses amounting to gross violations of human rights inconsistent with international humanitarian law and the laws of the United States.”

• "They’re seized in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Every year Israel arrests almost 1,000 Palestinian youngsters, some of them not yet 13." - from an article by Netta Ahituv published in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

If you live in Representative Dalgado's district, please sign this petition urging him to become a cosponsor of H.R. 2407.

Fadhel Kaboub on a Green New Deal