The Venus Project presents a bold, direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, technological unemployment, over-population and the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems. As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.

Designing the Future by Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project [PDF]

Venus Project FAQ

Activist Orientation Toolkit

This Thanksgiving, as an Ojibwe woman, I will grieve for what Europeans did to native peoples here. But I will also give thanks for life.

I will grieve because Europeans killed most of us quickly and directly at first and later resorted to more cunning means of forced assimilation, such as boarding schools and discriminatory land allotment. It is estimated that there were between 7 million and 10 million indigenous individuals inhabiting what is now America at the beginning of European contact in the early 15th century. By 1900, there were only about 230,000 of us left.

Some might wonder why a Native-American woman would give thanks on a holiday that highlights the beginning of the end for many tribes. I give thanks because that’s what we Ojibwe do. We express gratitude for the great gift of life given to us by the creator.

Traditional Ojibwe religion is deeply rooted in the understanding that life, ever moving, ever changing, is a tremendous gift. This understanding dates way back before the days when the Wampanoag Indians sat down with the Pilgrims for that now famous meal.

We also understand that there is no escaping life’s relentless nature. We are leaves on a tree, in various states of growth. At some time, we will turn color, fall from the tree, swirl colorfully around some kid’s feet and join the soil once again.

Read the rest here.

The journey home for Thanksgiving won’t be quite so far this year for many young adults. Instead of traveling across country or across town, many grown sons and daughters will be coming to dinner from their old bedroom down the hall, which now doubles as their recession-era refuge.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that 13% of parents with grown children say one of their adult sons or daughters has moved back home in the past year. Social scientists call them “boomerangers” — young adults who move in with parents after living away from home. This recession has produced a bumper crop.

Census Bureau data confirm that proportionately fewer young singles are living solo now than before the recession. Overall, the proportion of adults ages 18 to 29 who live alone declined from 7.9% in 2007 to 7.3% in 2009. Similar drops in the proportion of young people who live by themselves occurred during or immediately after the recessions of 1982 and 2001.

The current decline has been particularly steep among young women; the proportion who live by themselves fell by a full percentage point to 6.1%. Among young men, the share living on their own fell 0.2 percentage points to 8.4%, a statistically insignificant change.

Read the rest here.

I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving.

This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people.

Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing “Land of the Pilgrim’s pride” in “America the Beautiful.” Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing “Land of the Indian’s pride” instead.

[...]

I see, in the “First Thanksgiving” story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism.

Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused.

Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle.

Read the entire article here.

Fucking MARVELOUS. Western corporations fuck up the planet, western environmentalists march in an persuade, sometimes by economic might, governments that in order to fix it, the citizens of the fucked up places must give up their land. WHAT KIND OF FUCKED UP BULLSHIT REASONING IS THIS SHIT GODDAMMIT?!?!?!?!?!?!? I am so SICK of this everlasting insistence that Westerners know better and to hell with studying the local set up to see WHAT it is and WHY it has worked the way it has, no. We must import Western ideas wholesale and impose them on every damn place, completely ignoring the fuckery they bring into other people’s lives until said other people have suffered/hurt/died, in the case of Africa; according to PDF From Refuge to Refugee: The African Case MILLIONS of people; and god knows how many in Asia; and have had to raise holy hell before we back off!

Article based on the book:Conservation Refugees: When protecting nature means kicking people out:

“We are enemies of conservation,” declared Maasai leader Martin Saning’o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, Saning’o reminded his audience, “…we were the original conservationists.” The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: “Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems.” Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.

“We don’t want to be like you,” Saning’o told a room of shocked white faces. “We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us.”

An absolute must read.

Native social values then and now are centered on a view of humanity, the natural world, and the spiritual realm as a whole. . . . Native social values, based on an alternate calculation, have always been simply counterintuitive to a capitalist mind. The “kindness” of Native nations, sovereign then and sovereign today, not to mention their lands, rivers, minerals, timber, and other resources — for which they received virtually nothing — are the original source of United States “greatness.” Theft and exploitation of indigenous resources and labor, human-rights violations, and commodified African bodies, without which there would be no American ingenuity, created the big boost to U.S. world domination.

This Thanksgiving, I exhort Americans to honor their first president’s decree with petitions to the government of his and other founders’ creation “to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord.” Recognize our treaties, humanity, and agency in your ancestors’ survival. Absent that, we will continue to meet you, treaties in hand, in the courts of the land.

This June, in Ricci v. DeStefano, the Supreme Court held that the city of New Haven discriminated against white firefighters when it rejected the results of a promotion exam that eliminated almost all of the minority candidates. Frank Ricci and other white firefighters, as well as one Latino, claimed that the city intentionally discriminated against them on the basis of race, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, by rejecting the exam simply because too many of the highest scorers were white and thus denying them promotions.* New Haven’s defense was that it rejected the exam because using it would have violated another part of Title VII that prohibits tests that have a disparate impact on minorities—meaning any test that needlessly screens out a disproportionate number of minorities. During oral argument, Justice Souter worried that Ricci’s lawsuit put New Haven in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation”: liable for disparate-impact discrimination against blacks if it used the test and liable for intentional discrimination against whites if it didn’t use it.

Sure enough, last week, just as New Haven prepared to promote a group consisting almost entirely of white fire captains and lieutenants based on the exam results, a black New Haven firefighter, Michael Briscoe, filed a disparate-impact lawsuit against the city. Like Frank Ricci, Briscoe is a sympathetic plaintiff. He received the highest score of any candidate on the oral portion of the lieutenant’s promotion exam. But he isn’t eligible for promotion because the city based 60 percent of each candidate’s score on the written exam. On this part of the test, Briscoe—like most black candidates for promotion—did comparatively badly.

It’s tempting to dismiss Briscoe as a sore loser. But if he’s right, New Haven is using an outdated promotion exam that screens out some of the most qualified candidates and locks in the effects of past discrimination. That’s precisely what Title VII’s disparate-impact prohibition is designed to prevent. And disparate-impact doctrine may be the most important part of civil rights law today, because although fewer and fewer employers openly discriminate on the basis of race, plenty still inadvertently perpetuate the effects of past discrimination by using flawed tests. [Read the rest here]

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the passage of the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act and related legislation. [...]

The repeal of Glass-Steagall removed the legal prohibition on combinations between commercial banks on the one hand, and investment banks and other financial services companies on the other. Glass-Steagall’s strict rules originated in the U.S. government’s response to the Depression and reflected the learned experience of the severe dangers to consumers and the overall financial system of permitting giant financial institutions to combine commercial banking with other financial operations.

[...]

What lessons should be learned from the 10-year debacle?

First, Glass-Steagall’s key insight was in the need to treat regulation from an industry structure point of view. Glass-Steagall’s authors did not set out to establish a regulatory system to oversee companies that combined commercial banking and investment banking. They simply banned the combination of these enterprises. Cleaning up the current mess, we need strategies that focus on industry structure — meaning, especially, that we must break up the big banks — as well as more traditional regulation.

Second, we need to return to Glass-Steagall’s more particular understanding: depository institutions backed by federal insurance protection cannot be involved in the risky, speculative betting of the investment banking world. (Notably, the Glass-Steagall problem is now worse than it was before the financial crisis, following JP Morgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, and Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch.) Moreover, we need not just to reinstate Glass-Steagall, but infuse its underlying principles throughout the financial regulatory scheme. Commercial banks should not be in the business of speculation. They have a job to do in providing credit to the real economy. They should do that. Their job is not to engage in betting on derivatives and other exotic financial instruments.

Third, giant financial institutions exercise too much political power, and for that reason alone must be broken up.

Fourth, we need broad reform in the area of money and politics. We need public financing of Congressional regulations, even stronger lobbyist reforms, and tight restrictions to close the revolving door through which individuals spin as they travel between positions in government and industry.

[Source: commondreams.org]

In October 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law.  This law makes it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity by expanding the scope of a 1968 law that applies to people attacked because of their race, religion or national origin. In support of this goal, it expands the authority of the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute such crimes instead of or in collaboration with local authorities.  The law also provides major increases in funding for the U.S. Department of Justice and local law enforcement to use in prosecuting these crimes – including special additional resources to go toward prosecution of youth for hate crimes.

The recent expansion of the federal hates crimes legislation has received extensive praise and celebration by mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations because it purports to “protect” LGBT people from attacks on the basis of their expressed and/or perceived identities for the first time ever on a federal level. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project does not see this as a victory. As an organization that centers racial and economic justice in our work and that understands mass imprisonment as a primary vector of violence in the lives of our constituents, we believe that hate crimes legislation is a counterproductive response to the violence faced by LGBT people.

Already, the U.S. incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world. One out of every thirty-two people in the U.S. live under criminal punishment system supervision. African-American people are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white people; Latin@ people are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white people.  LGBTS and queer people, transgender people, and poor people are also at greatly increased risk for interaction with the criminal justice system.  It is clear that this monstrous system of laws and enforcement specifically targets marginalized communities, particularly people of color.

What hate crimes laws do is expand and increase the power of the same unjust and corrupt criminal punishment system. Evidence demonstrates that hate crimes legislation, like other criminal punishment legislation, is used unequally and improperly against communities that are already marginalized in our society.  These laws increase the already staggering incarceration rates of people of color, poor people, queer people and transgender people based on a system that is inherently and deeply corrupt.

The evidence also shows that hate crime laws and other “get tough on crime” measures do not deter or prevent violence.  Increased incarceration does not deter others from committing violent acts motivated by hate, does not it rehabilitate those who have committed past acts of hate, and does not make anyone safer. As we see trans people profiled by police, disproportionately arrested and detained, caught in systems of poverty and detention, and facing extreme violence in prisons, jails and detention centers, we believe that this system itself is a main perpetrator of violence against our communities.

We are also dismayed by the joining of a law that is supposedly about “preventing” violence with the funding for continued extreme violence and colonialism abroad.  This particular bill was attached to a $680-billion measure for the Pentagon’s budget, which includes $130 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan protects no one, inside or outside of U.S. borders.

We continue to work in solidarity with many organizations and individuals to support people in prison, to reduce incarceration, to end the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, and to create systems of accountability that do not rely on prisons or policing and that meaningfully improve the health and safety of our communities–especially redistribution of wealth, health care, and housing.  A few of the many other organizations doing radical and transformative work to increase the health and safety of our communities include:

• The Audre Lorde Project
• FIERCE
• Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
• Queers for Economic Justice
• Right Rides
• TGI Justice Project
• and The Transformative Justice Law Project of Illinois

For these reasons, we believe that a law that links our community’s experiences of violence and death to a demand for increased criminal punishment, as well as further funding for imperialist war, is a strategic mistake of significant proportion.

ACORN is suing the U.S. government over a law passed recently by Congress that bars the controversial community group from receiving federal money.

In a complaint filed this morning in U.S. District Court in New York, ACORN charges that the law is unconstitutional, because it’s a bill of attainder — that is, it targets a specific individual or group for punishment.

The complaint, brought on behalf of ACORN by the Center for Constitutional Rights, also mounts a broader push-back against ACORN’s conservative critics. According to a draft version examined by TPMmuckraker, it claims that the law to defund ACORN was passed thanks to “a public relations campaign orchestrated by political forces” that are hostile to its work registering low-income voters. And it charges that ACORN “earned the animosity of political forces who are dedicated to the proposition that the fewer poor people who vote the better.”

Complaint for Injunctive and Declaratory Relief [PDF]
Bill of Attainder Fact Sheet [PDF]
ACORN v. USA Exhibits [PDF]
ACORN v. USA Memo of Law [PDF]

From the Guardian (UK):

It is very hard for the average person in the street to come to a sensible conclusion on peak oil. It’s a subject that prompts a passionate polarisation of views. The peak oilists sometimes sound like those extraordinary Christians with sandwich boards proclaiming that the end of the world is nigh. In contrast, the the international economic establishment – including the International Energy Agency (IEA) – has one very clear purpose in mind at all times: don’t panic. Their mission seems to be focused on keeping jittery markets calm.

Faced with these options the majority of people shrug their shoulders in confusion and ignore the trickle of whistleblowers, industry insiders and careful analysts who have been warning of the imminent decline in oil for over a decade now.

Read the rest here.

NY Governor David Paterson will address the State Legislature today to urge it to approve a round of state health and education cuts to close a $3.2 billion deficit. But Senate Finance Committee Chairman Carl Kruger came up with his own plan over the weekend, which calls for refinancing tobacco settlement bonds and extending hours for video slot machine parlors instead of many of the governor’s controversial cuts. The governor’s office said Kruger’s plan avoided the necessary proposals to deal with the state’s fiscal crisis. The legislature is scheduled to enter an extraordinary session tomorrow to consider the governor’s cuts and some other issues, including gay marriage.

Democrats say the House measure — paid for through new fees and taxes, along with cuts in Medicare — would extend coverage to 36 million people now without insurance while creating a government health insurance program. It would end insurance company practices like not covering pre-existing conditions or dropping people when they become ill. [Source: Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House]

The passage of the bill came at the expense of reproductive rights, with restrictions on abortion “barring any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies from covering abortions” by a vote of 290-194 (see NYT: Abortion Was Heart of Wrangling; see also Reproductive Rights Prof Blog). Follow the links below to see how members of the House voted on the bill and the controversial Stupak/abortion restrictions amendment. Next up: passage of the bill in the Senate (the chamber of congress that has the greatest and most special kind of prima donnas and attention whores (read: Jackass Lieberman) who will undoubtedly find a number of ways to play politics with human rights, i.e., since health care is a human right). The culmination of this epic melodrama/circus show is expected to happen before the end of the year when President Obama hopes to sign the bill into law. This is so much fun that I can hardly wait until we get to immigration reform.

In other news, the U6 has unemployment figures at 17.5%, as mentioned here last month.

Affordable Healthcare for America Act Headlines

Roll Call on Affordable Health Care for America Act

Roll Call on Stupak/Abortion Restrictions Amendment

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House

Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling

Gay Benefits in Health Bill (editorial comment: this NYT headline is so dumb — I didn’t know the “benefits” had a sexuality)

One whiz, Anthony W. Crowell, the mayor’s counselor, went beyond legalisms. He trivialized the two plebiscites in the 1990s that established a two-term limit for major-office holders.

To underline how unimportant the mayor considered them, Mr. Crowell noted that the 586,890 people who formed the majority in a 1996 referendum represented a trifling 17 percent of all registered voters in the city. Others in the Bloomberg administration invoke a different standard. Term limits, they say, had support at the polls from only 1 of every 15 city residents.

O.K., then what is one to make of the 557,059 votes that Mr. Bloomberg received on Tuesday to win his coveted third term? They amount to a mere 13 percent of registered voters. The 1-in-15 standard for all residents also applies.

Might I add that the narrow 5% margin of victory cost $200 per vote for the well-known, incumbent figure with all kinds of institutional privileges and connections.

Read the rest here