This Vermonter's Endorsement of Bernie for President

I write to ask you to support Bernie for President. I am a lifelong Vermonter and watcher of politics.I've supported Bernie since he spoke at my high school over twenty-five years ago. 

In the fall of 1988, during his first run for Congress, Bernie talked to a packed cafeteria of students from Burr and Burton Academy, in Manchester, Vermont. He gave excellent advice to the young. Mostly he tried to inspire us to get off our tails and get involved. He talked to us as equals who should take up our appointed task of repairing the world. In a booming voice, he challenged us to join the movement already afoot to make the world a better place. He sounded like the Prophet Amos with rolled-up sleeves, calling for 'justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." He challenged us to protect America's political system by renouncing apathy. He said Democracy was a precious historical advancement in human civilization over the rule of kings and queens. And there was a fight on because the system was being dismantled by the rich and powerful. Sound familiar? It should! As Dr. Cornell West says, "Bernie is a long-distance runner for justice."

Bernie is a disciplined, enduring contrarian against establishment party politics. Bernie rose up the political ladder, simply winning election after election fairly, owing little to the party power structures. This independent attitude helped him work with any useful allies in Congress, like with Senator John McCain to protect Veterans. Bernie knows real people will be helped if gov't work gets done and so he's a "getter-dun" kind of guy. My friend Claire Boughton is a Vermont homeowner facing an eminent domain land grab for a fracked gas pipeline that Bernie also opposes. About Bernie's time as Burlington's mayor, she said "He wasn't against people, he helped people do a lot of things, whatever would come up. I liked that he was natural-looking, didn't dress fancy, hair the way it is and he's not concerned. He wasn't doing what other people wanted him to do, he was doing what needed to be done." Amen to that.

As a lifelong Democratic voter, I think the Democratic Party will be healed by nominating Sanders because he will return the party to serving the general public again. Democrats can do better than being complacent losers who are Wall Street's second favorite party. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC) turned the Democratic Party into the Republicans Party Lite, a pro-fracking, pro-NAFTA & TPP nightmare trade deals party. No wonder Hilary can get millions giving quick speeches to Goldman Sachs because Wall Street knows the Clintons remade the Democratic Party to serve them. And this election season, the Democratic National Committeee (DNC) behaved like the Clinton's Downtown Abbey butlers, hiding the debates and giving up the chance to build up the party during the primary towards a 50 state strategy. 

Hilary Clinton's campaign symbol perfectly expresses the DLC's pro-corporate, rightward drift. The H, with the red arrow going to the right, reads as taking the party towards the right (Red=GOP, right=conservative). They spent a lot of time, thought and money on this symbol, and this is what they came up with: an right-wing headed, vaguely phallic red arrow in an H that's shaped like a squat elephant. It's a symbol with all the pushy ugliness of Picasso's Cubism but none of the Dreaminess. 

But "enough is enough" on criticizing the Clintons. Correctly remembering the Clinton's place in recent Democratic Party history is completely fair, but piling on just is not how Sanders has asked his supporters to roll. Sanders is demanding a more civilized political culture, something Obama deserves credit for too. Meanwhile, Trump is showing all the class and restraint of an ill-tempered monkey hurling his feces thru the cage bars. 

I agree completely with this subtle observation about Bernie's character, made by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who wrote in "The Case for Bernie Sanders"  that "Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks on his "grumpy demeanor". But Bernie is grumpy because he's thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who've had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time. I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don't believe there's anything else he really thinks about. There's no other endgame for him. He's not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha's Vineyard golf club. This election isn't a game to him; it's not the awesome repulsive dark joke that it is to me and many others. And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair. Not all of us can say that.  But that doesn't make us right, and him "unrealistic." More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost." 

Vermonters are crossing our fingers! Let's do this America. Keep your eyes on the prize and have some faith that we can still repair the world.

Obama Fracks His Climate Speech

President Obama is facing humanity's biggest problem with the right facts and language, and yet has polluted the whole thing by setting America on a development path that includes fracking for "natural gas."

The speech was bittersweet for a climate activist like myself who foresees runaway Climate Change causing human extinction.  I loved hearing President Obama sound like author Bill McKibben as he recited weather facts such as 2012 being the hottest year on record. I was inspired to hear the President say "I refuse to condemn your generation to a planet that's beyond fixing" and that the US would "lead the planet in a coordinated assault on Climate Change." At long last, a U.S. president spoke sanely and intelligently about getting Humanity on track towards long-term survival!!!  Hurray, praise be to God, may it be so!

And yet...  I've spent the last year studying the rape scene that is fracking and so there was no joy in Mudville.  Obama got it mostly right on Climate, but includes the false solution of fracking as "a bridge fuel", just as environmentalists become aware that fracking is the largest emerging public health crisis on the planet.

  

Fracking is wrecking America's water supply right now!  Large chunks of America are being made uninhabitable right now! Fracking is the most unpatriotic, anti-American activity imaginable: blowing up America's ground floor and ruining our water forever! If Chesapeake Energy's corporate empty-heads had Taliban-style beards instead of Wall Street suits, the military would be drone-striking their headquarters in Oklahoma City. 

Fracking is the creation of vast regions of Ghost Towns, where the water makes you sick and doesn't grow good food. Someday a fracked map will overlay America and the only land of value will be where they didn't frack. Fracked land will be filled with poor and sick people. This is the making of an ugly American future, a version of Stephen King's story about "The Children of the Corn" mixed with a splash of industrial cruelty.  President Obama's long-term legacy may be green-lighting this ecological disaster.

With fracking, there is no "government regulation" that can make it safe. Government merely pretends to "regulate" to provide a fig-leaf of cover and legitimacy for the rape scene. But fracking can't be done safely ever, no matter what. Fracking wrecks the water supply, bottom-line, case-closed, period. So any talk of regulating the industry is a falsehood, a lie, a great pretending that government's power is greater than it is over the laws of geology, water and methane migration.  

According to the fracking industries own studies, as documented in the film Gasland, 5% of the fracking wells fail immediately and start polluting the water supply with chemicals, radon 226, toxic waste water, and so on.  And over time, all the wells will fail, ensuring that in 50-100 years, every well will be leaking toxicity into the water! This is what Chesapeake and Exxon are doing right now!  Creating millions of wells, across America, with one inch of concrete to stop the methane migration into the water. 

Having mixed concrete before, I know this is bad design that will not function to protect the water. Sure, concrete will make a sidewalk, but even that crumbles eventually. Stick concrete a mile into the Earth, amidst shifting rock, and expect it to hold FOREVER? The whole process is a lie, B.S., a pretend head fake at legitimacy while they ruin America's water.  Everybody involved with fracking should acknowledge and atone for their sins, walk away, become whistleblowers and help us save America's water while there is still time.

We need a NATIONAL BAN ON FRACKING right away.  Someday we'll get one, as inevitably as methane migrates into tap water.  People will eventually see how bad fracking is. In the meantime, so much more water and land will be ruined.  While there are many places where a safe, successful human future is being derailed, fracking is the perfect crime of insane industrialism. Fracking is a Wall Street financial instrument where junk bond billions are laundered by being spent on massive, self-absorbed, industrial projects. Chesapeake Energy borrowed $800 million to get started, another example of how alienated capital causes alienated decisions. They are wrecking America's water for five minutes worth of gas. It doesn't get any greedier, shortsighted and selfish than that.   

Albany, NY has become the front lines in the fight to protect America's water from fracking.  On June 17th 2013, Don'tFrackNY.org gathered over 4000 people at the Capitol Building in Albany. An impressive and sustained NY anti-fracking movement has arisen that's made it politically impossible for Governor Cuomo to sign off on fracking for New York state.

A former truck driver for the fracking industry gave the days most inspiring speech.  He said the industry gets rid of toxic wastewater by putting it in trucks labeled for pure water and then spraying on Pennsylvania's roads to keep the dust down. As a driver, he was personally breaking the law doing this and so he called the government to report this.  He was threatened and told not to call back. He said "So I became a whistleblower! They want me to shut up but I'm not going to!" 

I love that President Obama is directing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon pollution. (A president even talking about "carbon pollution" is progress.) Here is another action Obama can do without Congress: direct the EPA and the Justice Department to start enforcing the Clean Water Act laws already on the books.  True, fracking got started when a sociopath you may remember named Dick Cheney pushed thru the 2005 Halliburton Exemption "Get out of Jail Free Card" to the Clean Water Act. But the Frackers are illegally dumping waste water down municipal sewer drains across the country right now.  President Obama, before bothering to make new EPA laws, have Attorney General Eric Holder talk to that truck driver and end the lawless, wild-west mentality of the fracking industry. Enforce the laws already on the books!

Fracking is America's next big contentious, not-going-anywhere issue. Fracked gas requires a spiderweb of pipeline to take the volatile, hard-to-store fuel to places where it can be used. In Vermont, a utility named VTGas is trying to build a 41 mile gas pipeline thru people's farms and gardens using immanent domaine. (Rule of thumb: "Immanent domaine" is a legalistic mumbo-jumbo term that in real life translates to poor people lose their land's value when bullied around by rich companies and their stable of lawyers.) A group called Rising Tide Vermont is opposing the pipeline, and challenging Vermont's rubber stamping of this massive, pro-carbon development.

Finally, the real kicker, fracked gas isn't even cleaner than oil once you factor in the methane released during production.  Fracked 'natural gas' releases more greenhouse gases overall once you count the methane that leaks out of the wells.  So fracking is a lose-lose proposition: ruin the water and the sky.

I'm grateful President Obama is getting serious about Climate Change. I dislike having to write this critical article when Obama just advance the ball so far in terms of talking sanely about Climate.  Challenging coal production ain't nothing when West Virginia will never vote for anti-coal politicians. And check out the amazing graphics the White House released to explain the problem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/climate-action-plan. I have faith Obama will come around to an anti-fracking position eventually.  But since fracking is ruining the water immediately, we don't have time to coyly please-both-sides of the issue like with the Keystone XL pipeline.

Obama's Climate speech was great progress and yet still feels a day late and a dollar short.  This opinion is reflected on many environmental blogs and websites. The inclusion of fracking divided the environmental community's response. This is too bad because the Climate Movement is the natural constituency to support action on Climate Change.

Try to see Gasland 2, premiering in July on HBO. Check out Don'tFrackNY.org, AmericansAgainstFracking.org and see the film "Dear Governor Cuomo." Join the movement against fracking and let's save America's water.

Info for 1st Anniversery of Occupy

Here's a list of links and information for the 1st Anniversary weekend of Occupy Wall Street.

Main event website and schedule are at  http://s17nyc.org/schedule/

There's some housing lined up. Factory space in Brookyln has been secured as temporary housing, folks can get location if they sign up to go at:  http://s17nyc.org/support/registration/ 

Good overall event summary is at these sites:

http://interoccupy.net/s17nyc/s17-everything-you-need-to-know-update-important-info-share-widely/

 http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/September_17th_NYC

Musical events are being organized by the Guitarmy.  Check out  http://www.guitarmy.org/   where you'll find a catchy updated 99% version of the miner classic "which side are you on?"

On Sunday morning Sept 16th, the Guitarmy brings it's music to the site of hydro-fracked gas entering the city. At 10 a.m. folks start gathering and at noon march from the Spectra Site to Foley Square to take part in the Occupy Anniversary Concert in Foley Square. Spectra Energy Pipeline Blast Zone is located at Gansvoort Street and West Street (the West Side highway), L/A train to 8th Avenue.

The Guitarmy is also organizing on Sunday S17 to do music pop-ups around the city, gathering to play music on 99 streetcorners around the city.  Info at http://99corners.tumblr.com/  A pre-game rehersal for this event will happpen on Saturday 15th 6pm, with song teach-in and rehearsal social justice songs together at Washington Square Park. 

In the spirit of participatory democracy,  the Guitarmy website asks "Want to be part of the opening and closing act, aka the occupy guitarmy?" Learn these songs: Which side are you on, This land is your land, Wall Street your kingdom must come down, and "Frack You" Cee Lo parody

occupy guitarmy press release for event at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jNAI7rI32YQNDXbXZgex_1K1OPqTftrLJErbWYV28oA/edit?pli=1

twitter tags to checkout are 

 #spectrashdown @owsguitarmy @owsmusicgroup

S17 has a Facebook page  https://www.facebook.com/events/407471409305638/

Resist the Fracking of NY's Water Supply and Your Future!

The Oil Companies are starting to wreck America's water supply with Hydro-fracking for "Natural Gas".  So let's face this fact: we live in a dark time. Terrible things are happening, things that future generations will cuss us out for.  We live when the ecological world that supports human life is being taken away from us. One way to resist our immoral era is to bear witness and say clearly "We are not fooled. We see what's happening. This must be stopped."  This essay seeks to bear witness to the evils of Hydrofracking and to encourage New York state to stay fracking free.

Hydro-fracking is the nickname for hydraulic fracturing, a process invented by those Titans of Massive Industrialism at Halliburton.  In essence, they explode one of the Earth's bottom floors to release 'Natural Gas" and siphon it off with wells.  The process is fiercely complicated, and involves millions of gallons of fresh water and toxic chemicals pushed into the Earth at extremely high pressure.  Fracking is like a marriage between a PhD professor in Geology and Dick Cheney: advanced geological information combined with amoral cruel pragmatic self-interest.  In fact, Cheney helped pass the "Halliburton Loophole" that allows frackers exemptions from the Clean Water Act. 

CBS News reports that Gov. Cuomo is preparing to allow Fracking in south-west New York. Fracking has been on-hold in NY for four years, and perhaps with political pressure, luck and God's grace, fracking will continue to be kept out. But money talks and the Extreme Energy companies have a lot of ca$h to throw at politician$.  Money buys propaganda like CNN's relentless 'Natural Gas' ads. Yet some people aren't fooled. This weekend, there was a massive rally in Albany by a group called Don't Frack With NY, where environmental groups and college kids made commitments to resist NY's fracking with non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

Fracking's main problem is the wells leak.  The local ground water gets contaminated by the natural gas, the polluted water, and radioactivity.  The fracking industry claims to surround and seal the well with a solid concrete tube to protect leaking into the groundwater. Yes, let's fantasize...  imagine trying to pour concrete a mile down a hole where giant rocks are under intense pressure.  And then the concrete lasts FOREVER and protects the water for generations to come. That is delusion, a pretend design for a well, not a possible future.  Safe fracking is impossible.  

Even the oil companies admit to themselves they can't keep the wells from leaking.  In the new on-line film, The Sky Is Pink, activist/filmmaker Josh Fox shows the documents where companies admit that it's impossible to make permanent well casing to protect the water.  Fox made the film "Gasland"

which famously shows a man lighting his water on fire as it comes out of his tap.

Fracking is a sociopathic ruining of the Earth for short-term corporate profit.  It's only happening because of corporate/goverment collusion amidst a hurricane of money that buys politicians and a Nazi-like propaganda campaign that would make Gobbels jealous.  The GOP convention is tagged with the logo "America's Natural Gas" everywhere, from commercials to the front of Politico's pundits desk.  

  

Hydro-fracking is a very 21st century problem. Humanity has a lot of technical knowledge but not everyone is restrained by wisdom. Halliburton knows how to explode Mother Earth's bones and sniff the fumes, like half-bright boys playing with frogs and firecrackers. Somehow we humans must make these corporations behave in a way capatible with human survival.   

Hydro-fracking is so bad, so immoral that it deserves judgemental old-school Old Testament language to describe it: Evil, Abomination and Sin.  We cannot properly name the wickedness that's afoot with this project without all the fierce moralistic language of the past.  These words have become toxic through misuse in the cultural wars of late, but we need them to describe fracking.  Hydro-fracking is an Abomination, a grave Sin that anyone who encourages or takes part in will have to answer for when they meet their Maker.  Where's Elijah when you need him to talk about CNN's incessent "natural gas" ads?

Humanity is facing "the end of the world", or at least, the end of humanity, because the Corporations are more powerful than humans, they squish us like bugs, steal our water supplies, deny us a realistic response to the Climate Crisis. We are not, in any real way, planning for long-term human survival on this delicate Earth and that is stupid and wrong! We must organize like the Lilliputians and tie down Gulliver. We must save humanity and this Earth.  It's taken so much energy to get humanity here, we owe it to our honorable ancestors to not blow it now.    

Fracking will be the most environmentally contentious issue of coming decades.  Evidence of polluted water supplies will pile up. Then politicians who helped frack the water will be cast into the Lake of Getting Fired. If Gov. Cuomo fracks NY, he'll lose the political dynasty. 

Please write Governor Cuomo and tell him to keep NY un-fracked. Encourage your legislators to pass laws like Vermont's which outlaw hydrofracking.  Join the struggle to save Mother Earth from this cruel, blind system that is taking us towards extinction.  Join the effort to help humanity win a livable future. 

Let's Converge on Burlington, Occupy the Pipeline!

Please come to Burlington the weekend of July 29-31 for the biggest environmental protest Vermont has seen in years.  Activists are planning to "Converge on the Conference!"   On Sunday 2 p.m, we'll wear all black and make a human oil spill to symbolically say NO! to a Tar Sands Pipeline going thru New England. This weekend is a great opportunity to meet-up and say to the governors "we'll un-elect you unless you act on the Climate Crisis! And that means, no pipeline."

The Conference of New England Governors and Canadian Premiers meets at the Hilton Hotel above the waterfront in Burlington. Among the topics to be discussed is the Tar Sands pipeline that would run through most of these territories.  

Now, why bother the Governors, tastefully meeting behind close doors to promote economic growth and bureocratic interbreeding? Because it's become a very successful organizing tactic to OCCUPY outside the doors of the rich and powerful as they gamble away our future. Occupying is irritating to the Elite. It is rude to occupy their doorsteps with scruffy sleeping bags and sincere concern for our dying planet. It shines light upon the on-the-downlow business-as-usual destroying of Mother Earth.

For example, we need LIGHT upon the Trailbreaker pipeline.  The Titans of Big Oil want to fix-up a 1950's pipeline that runs from the Tar Sands of Alberta to the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, thru Montreal, through 30 miles of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom and onward to Maine. (Good idea, boys. While yer at it, fix up an old Model T to keep an eye out for leaks!) 

Citizen's groups are stepping up to say "No Way!" 350Vermont.org has been leading VT's disobedience to Corporate Craziness.  Check out this photo pile of recent action touring the proposed pipeline route: http://world.350.org/vermont/take-a-virtual-tour-of-pipeline-corridor-in-northeast-kingdom/  People are organizing regionally at http://www.tarsandsfreene.org/   Schedule for Convergence at http://www.btvconvergence.net/wordpress/ 

For fun, check out this lovely, in-french video from some Quebeckies coming down to be in Solidarite: http://youtu.be/YDB9YOiyClM

After the Human Oil Spill at 2pm, the Occupy New England Regional Gathering will happen at 4 p.m. In the evening,  the U.U. Church is hosting a dinner and a teach-in about many issues related to the Conference.  Bread and Puppet Theater performs Monday at 11:30 near the Hilton.

Be there or Be pipelined.

Encouraging travel details for Occupy National Gathering

A friend on-site says the Occupy National Gathering is off to good start, "peaceful chill scene at encampment in Quaker Church parking lot, 500-700 folks, need more bodies, come on down, people!"  There's a full schedule of teach-ins by day on Independence Mall. Later in week, folks may try camping in front of some local banks. Philly cops reputed to be generally cool, but yesterday cop dickishness at intersection leads to 30 arrests. Dem mayor denying water access to encampment from fire hydrants, maybe trying to protect Occupiers from Philly's water supply. But by and large, it's a safe campout in the limelight. People should come down and be in support. Bring a tent if you've got one, a sleeping pad perhaps, or book a hotel room.  Yeah, let's travel to camp in a parking lot in Philly during a record breaking heatwave. Why? Because Occupy stands for cool things, like direct democracy and saving our planet from hydrofrackers. Because if we don't stop climate change is going to get 10 times this hot. Because Novelty in a dreary political time is good. 

more info:

http://www.occupynationalgathering.com/#

the Quaker Church camping is two blocks off Independence Mall at 4th and Arch Street at http://www.archstreetfriends.org/  

good articles:

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2321/399/Occupy_National_Gathering_Update.html

workshop times:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/occupy-philadelphia/schedule-and-announcements-for-monday-july-2/245456635557211

Is this it? Humanity, come on!  We can do better than this.  We can morph into an enlightened species, complete with healthy food/fuel and fun, and hey, why not?  We can manifest ECOTOPIA.