Santa Monica’s Big Step for Sustainability

By Suzanne York, HowMany.org, February 2, 2012

This past January 24th the Santa Monica City Council unanimously approved a progressive sustainability bill of rights, building on the Santa Monica City Sustainability Plan first established back in 1994.

The resolution calls on the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish.”

Highlights from the resolution include:

the right to clean, affordable and accessible water from sustainable water sources for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes; the right to a sustainable energy future based on sustainable renewable energy sources; the right to a sustainable natural climate unaltered by fossil fuel emissions; the right to clean indoor and outdoor air, clean water and clean soil that pose a negligible health risk to the public; the City’s Sustainable City Plan declares that a healthy environment is integral to the City’s long-term economic and societal interests and that, accordingly, the City’s decision-making will be guided by the mandate to maximize environmental benefits and reduce or eliminate negative environmental

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Medical Breakthroughs... from the trash?

 

It’s amazing what folks are discovering these days.  Even in the discard pile.  

 

Not too long ago a man from San Jose, CA paid $1100 for the contents of an abandoned storage unit he’d only seen from the outside.  Moments after the sale, he found a Rubbermaid container inside filled with $500,000 worth of rare coins and gold bars.  

 

Then came the discovery by a team of international astronomers of the first circumbinary planet.  These are planets that orbit not one but two stars at the same time; kind of like Tatooine for you “Star Wars” fans.  Where did they find it?  According to one of the scientists who made the discovery, from a “rubbish bin” of junk data that other astronomers had determined was too bothersome to evaluate.

 

But my favorite are the discoveries being made all the time about the mental nature of health, thanks to a growing number of medical researchers who are beginning to take a closer look at evidence once cast aside as nothing more than anecdotal “trash.”  

 

What are they finding? 

 

Basically that what you believe about your body impacts everything from disease symptoms to appetite to brain chemicals and vision, all pointing to the long-suspected though still largely misunderstood notion that the mind and body are fundamentally connected.

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Occupy Oakland Takes Wrong Turn

After Occupy Oakland’s efforts to occupy the Kaiser Convention Center were met with police violence, a larger question about the group’s choice of targets was ignored: what part of our democracy entitles people identifying as “Occupy Oakland” to seize a public building for their own purposes? The Kaiser facility is hardly a “public space,” and unlike a bank, financial institution, or foreclosed home, it has nothing to do with the power of the 1%. Occupy Oakland did not spent months organizing broad public support for the group’s takeover of one of Oakland’s leading public assets; to the contrary, input on group decisions is limited to those with the time to attend Occupy meetings. For all of its claims to represent the true democratic spirit of the 99%, it seems that once Occupy Oakland decides to close down a public facility or seize a public asset, that’s all the democracy it needs.

Occupy Oakland’s belief that it was entitled to occupy the Kaiser building as a movement command center should force Occupy backers to think hard about what this entity has become.

A movement focused on economic inequality and the undemocratic abuses of the 1% now feels free to substitute the decisions of a very small group for the entire body politic of Oakland. Occupy Oakland did not care that ILWU leaders opposed the port shutdown in December because the group claimed it “spoke to workers” and concluded they supported a closure; in other words, Occupiers saw themselves as better representatives of ILWU members than their elected union leadership.

As for the Kaiser Convention Center that has remained vacant for six years, the obvious question is why is it vacant and what efforts have been made by community groups to either put it to good use or sell it for city funds. Shouldn’t the city’s elected leaders, with the input of community and labor groups, be the entity deciding a public facility’s future?

Occupy Oakland spokespeople defend their public targets by arguing that politicians are bought and paid for, union leaders do not represent members, and other rhetorical strategies designed to obscure a critical fact: there’s nothing “democratic” about a small group like Occupy seizing public facilities or closing them down.

It’s easy to shift attention from Occupy Oakland’s undemocratic processes – and, no, a consensus process by a very small, unrepresentative group in a major city is not how democracy is supposed to work – to Oakland’s excessive and even outrageously violent police response. Oakland Occupiers get the moral high ground when focusing on police abuse, yet speak little of who granted them the moral authority to speak for “the people” in dealing with publicly owned entities.

What Happened to the 1%?

When I heard that Occupy Oakland was prioritizing the seizure of public buildings, I wondered: what do these facilities have to do with the 1%? What happened to occupying banks and other institutions that, unlike the Kaiser Center, actually have a connection to economic inequality?

Some involved with Occupy Oakland have focused on stopping foreclosures and occupying foreclosed houses. Yet their efforts are now eclipsed by high-profile marches and protests whose public targets appear almost random.

After President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech, pundits came out in droves to note the impact of Occupy on his comments about income inequality and what is happening to the middle-class. Nobody doubts Occupy’s central role in shifting the national debate.

That’s what makes Occupy Oakland’s focus on public facilities rather than the 1% so sad. Instead of using the momentum created by the massive November 2 general strike to build a broader coalition against banks and the financial industry, Occupy Oakland shifted its target to public facilities and the city’s police and elected officials.

What Happened to Organizing?

Social movements are built through grassroots organizing. Is Occupy Oakland organizing to broaden its base, or operating as a group that is defined by those who show up at a particular meeting?

Organizing involves more than posting a flyer or sending an email announcing a meeting. Yet Occupy Oakland seems satisfied to operate as a small group that calls mass protests, missing the critical intermediary step of reaching out to neighborhood groups, churches and labor unions to achieve broad support for their actions.

One risk of organizing is that the people organized may have different opinions on strategy, tactics, and targets. A broader cross-section of Oakland residents might question targeting the Kaiser Center instead of empty, foreclosed homes where low-income people could live.

Occupy Oakland has dissipated much of the positive spirit that emerged from the November 2 general strike. It either gets back on track, or becomes yet another sectarian group disconnected from the 99% they claim to represent.

This post originally appeared at Beyond Chron.

The Mirkarimi Distraction

As the debate over San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi continues, one impact is beyond dispute: the controversy is eclipsing far more critical issues affecting San Francisco. In the past two weeks I have attended two press events involving Mayor Lee in which every media question ignored the issue at hand and instead focused on Mirkarimi. The January 12 event included a broad cross section of affordable housing advocates, builders, developers and others who were coming together to promote a vital San Francisco Housing Trust Fund; the media ignored everything Mayor Lee and other speakers said about this important issue and instead swarmed the mayor to ask about Mirkarimi. San Francisco faces challenges on job creation, the end of Redevelopment, the city budget, and a number of pending development projects. Yet the talk of the town remains Ross Mirkarimi.

In my experience in San Francisco going back to 1979, the media spends the first month after a mayor has been sworn in focusing on the plans and personnel of the new administration. Not this time. Ross Mirkarimi’s domestic violence charges have dominated the news cycle from the time they first emerged, and this is likely to be the case until the matter is resolved.

I bet Mirkarimi has gotten more media coverage in his month as sheriff than predecessor Mike Hennessey got in 32 years. The Sheriff has rarely had a high profile in San Francisco. San Francisco is a City and County, so its sheriff does not have the power over non-city areas that has brought the office greater attention in Los Angeles County or Maricopa County, Arizona (home of the racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio).

Richard Hongisto made national headlines when he temporarily refused to evict International Hotel tenants, and went to jail for contempt. And his interim replacement Gene Brown got attention through a series of prisoner escapes that coincided with Hennessy’s 1979 campaign.

But this is the first time the Sheriff has eclipsed the Mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and even the Governor for over a month as a topic of public discussion.

Lee Can’t Match Mirkarimi

Mayor Ed Lee’s nose to the grindstone approach is popular with voters, who prefer a mayor focused entirely on getting things done. But the Mayor’s efforts to create affordable and workforce housing, expand small business loans, revitalize Ocean Avenue, and similar actions he has taken in January cannot match the gossip quotient of domestic violence charges against the city’s Sheriff.

Are people talking nonstop about Mirkarimi because of the constant media coverage, or because they are genuinely interested in a story that concerns far less people than those affected by the above issues and others?

I heard a reporter ask the mayor at a January 24th press event whether, like the electrical outage at Candlestick in December, the Mirkarimi charges were making San Francisco a “national embarrassment.” What possible basis could there be for such a question, other than to justify media focus on a story with so few new facts that even the smallest new detail becomes a front-page article.

It would be one thing if San Francisco had elected Mirkarimi with such charges pending. But that is not what happened here.

What the media might have reported if not for the Mirkarimi distraction is that Mayor Lee brings multiple Supervisors to most press events, a clear break from past mayors. And each event is geared to building support for future actions, functioning as organizing opportunities rather than the standard ribbon cutting.

Mayor Lee is not going to get in public yelling matches, or create gossip through his personal life. It appears that a media that privately complained about Gavin Newsom’s distractions prefer this type of coverage after all.

This post originally appeared at Beyond Chron

Looking for Hope in Afghanistan

By Suzanne York, HowMany.org, January 26, 2012

(Photo credit: dvidshub.net/r/lipgrz)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most of the news we get about Afghanistan is negative and depressing. This is especially true where womens’ rights and reproductive health are concerned. But if we look hard, there are signs of hope.

First, some cold hard facts. The population of Afghanistan today is 31 million people, and it is expected to more than double by 2050 to 76 million. Forty-four percent of the current population is under age of 15. Afghan women have one of the lowest ages of female life expectancy, at approximately forty-eight years. It is an extremely poor country, where one-third of Afghans live in absolute poverty and a further 37% just above the poverty line, and the government is highly dependent on foreign-assistance.

Despite some positive laws, Afghanistan still ranks as the world’s sixth-worst country for women’s equality in the U.N. Development Program’s annual Gender Inequality Index.

It’s hard to even know where to start in such a war-torn and impoverished nation. A good place to begin is family planning. In the words of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, family planning is a solution to “many of the global problems that confront us, from climate change to poverty to civil wars”. It is also a good investment of U.S. foreign-assistance.

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KQED Call-In Yields Insights Into Pain

 

According to Dr. Sean Mackey, understanding the link between mind and body can make a world of difference, particularly when it comes to dealing with pain.  He should know.  After all, he’s the head of Stanford University’s Division of Pain Management and spends a lot of time researching and thinking about these kinds of things.

 

Not too long ago I got so immersed in what this guy was discovering that I ended up writing a post about it for this web site.  And then, just the other day, I found myself talking to him on the phone.

 

Well, not exactly.  Truth be told, he was the guest on KQED’s “Forum” program and I just happened to call in with a question.  For those who didn’t catch the show, I thought I’d share a transcript of my question and his response.  

 

ME:  Hi there.  Just a couple of points that were brought up earlier – obviously this idea that pain could very well be in one’s head and also the idea that pain is genetic.  And the comments reminded me of something that Dr. Herb Benson, in one of the studies that he did recently, that pointed out that actually that one’s thought – specifically meditation and, related to that, prayer – could actually impact the makeup of one’s genes.  And I’d just like to get the guest’s comments on this idea that thought impacts your genes and, by association, pain.

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The Source & Potential of Consciousness

 

As I was poking around the Internet, I ran across a mind-blowing video featuring physician-turned-mind-body-guru, Deepak Chopra, producer of the recently released meditation video game, Leela.  I gotta tell you, this guy has a real knack for taking extraordinarily complex ideas and reducing them to clever little nuggets of wisdom.

 

“Consciousness cannot be perceived, but without it there is no perception,” he said.  “It cannot be cognized, but without it there is no thought.”

 

Speaking of consciousness, there seems to be an increasing number of folks who feel that consciousness – as imperceptible as it may be – is actually at the root of everything we experience.  Not just what we think but what we see, what we feel, even our health.  Still, as the narrator of the aforementioned video puts it, “We know neither the source of its existence nor the limitation of its potential, but it could be the most important exploration of our time.”

 

Over the years, my own exploration of this topic has yielded some pretty interesting observations.

 

First, I’ve figured out that consciousness has to reside somewhere outside my brain.  Think about it: have you ever found yourself saying to someone, “That’s exactly what I was thinking”?  How could this be possible if the source of what they were thinking was somehow locked inside their head?  

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The Romney Tax Loophole

After refusing for weeks to release his taxes, Mitt Romney now says he’ll do so — by tax day, April 15. But the real news is what Romney has now admitted about his taxes.

It’s not how much Romney earns. Everyone knows he’s comfortably in the top one-tenth of one percent.

It’s how much he pays of it in taxes. Romney says he pays a tax rate of “about 15 percent.”

That’s lower than the tax rate most of America’s middle class face and far lower than the 35 percent top rate after the Bush tax cut. (To put this in perspective, recall that the top income tax rate under Dwight Eisenhower was 91 percent.)

Newt Gingrich immediately pounced on Mitt’s admission as evidence that Newt’s proposed flat 15 percent tax is ideal, and wants to call it the “Romney tax.” Newt’s flat tax is a fraud. It would dramatically lower the taxes of most of the top 1 percenters and increase the taxes of most of the rest of us.

The real smoking gun is how Romney manages to pay only 15 percent on what’s been his money-gusher of compensation from Bain Capital. Romney hasn’t released his tax returns yet, but the most obvious answer is he treats his Bain income as capital gains — subject to the current capital gains rate of only 15 percent.

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