Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 01.14.12 /2

[David Shove (shove001]

* P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R   01.14.12*

1. Palestine/Jews  1.14 10am
2. CUAPB             1.14 1:30pm
3. Northtown vigil   1.14 2pm
4. No stadium tax  1.14 2pm
5. Class war          1.14 3:30pm
6. Vs G8/NATO     1.14 4pm
7. Joe Callahan      1.14 7pm

8. Atheist radio      1.15 9am
9. Stillwater vigil     1.15 1pm
10. No stadium tax; ed opinion

11. Common Dreams - Report: massive movement needed to fix 'perverse
concentration of wealth'
12. John Jacobsen     - How to win a fight with the 1%
 13. Gary Corseri         - Heroes  (poem)
14. ed                        - Nice Bankers   (nonnet)

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From:WAMM
Palestine/Jews 1.14 10am

Film Screening: “Seeking Israeli/Palestinian Peace: Four Jewish Voices”
Saturday, January 14, 9:30 a.m. (Refreshments); 10:00 a.m. to Noon (Program
and Discussion)
Southdale Hennepin County Library, 7001 York Avenue South, Edina.

 "Seeking Israeli/Palestinian Peace: Four Jewish Voices" is a video of a
forum taken at Central Lutheran Church October 16, 2011 when there were
presentations from a panel of representatives from four distinct Jewish
groups:  Jordan Ash, Jewish Voice for Peace—Minnesota; Steve Lear, Jewish
Community Relations Council of Minnesota/Dakotas; Ron Garber, J Street
Minnesota; Sylvia Schwarz, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.
Sylvia Schwarz will be present to respond to the video and take questions.
Sponsored by: Middles East Peace Now (MEPN). FFI: Call Dixie Vella,
952-941-1341.


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From: Michelle Gross <mgresist [at] visi.com>
Subject: CUAPB 1.141:30pm

Meetings: Every Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at Walker Church, 3104 16th Avenue
South http://www.CUAPB.org <http://www.cuapb.org/>
Communities United Against Police Brutality
3100 16th Avenue S
Minneapolis, MN 55407
Hotline 612-874-STOP (7867)


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From: Vanka485 [at] aol.com
Subject: Northtown vigil 1.14 2pm

Peace vigil at Northtown (Old Hwy 10 & University Av), every Saturday 2-3pm


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From: Amber Garlan
No stadium tax 1.14 2pm

I will be standing in front of Mississippi Market this Saturday and Sunday
from 2:00 to 3:00 to gather signatures for the no stadium tax petition.
If you are a registered voter in Ramsey County and want to sign the
petition, come on over to the Mississippi Market on the corner of Dale &
Selby! See everybody there!
For social and economic justice!No corporate welfare,Peace,Amber


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From: AWE
Class war 1.14 3:30pm

Saturday, January 14, 3:30pm  TED Talks:
Richard Wilkinson on How economic inequality harms societies
Sumner Library, 611 Van White Memorial Boulevard, Minneapolis, MN


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From: Meredith Aby
Vs G8/NATO  1.14 4pm

Potluck & Politics:  Dinner Discussion on G8/NATO & Why We Should Protest
Them
Saturday, January 14th @ 4pm
May Day Books @ 301 Cedar Ave. S. (below Midwest Mountaineering)
Minneapolis, MN

The Anti-War Committee is organizing a bus to go to the protest of the
G8/NATO joint summit meeting in May.  We believe Martin Luther King Jr.
would support the protests that demand an end to these organizations’
agendas of poverty and war across the globe.  Honor MLK’s legacy and take
some time during MLK weekend to eat and discuss with others who the G8 and
NATO are and what their impact is across the globe.  We will have fun games
and food to share.  Organized by the Anti-War Committee.


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>From Meredith Aby
Joe Callahan  1.14 7pm

Support Joe Callahan: Fundraiser for Joe's Legal Defense
Saturday, January 14th, 7-10 p.m. @  622 8th Ave SE, Minneapolis

In July 2011, after 2 Salvadoran immigrants went to Canada to apply for
asylum, Twin Cities activist Joe Callahan was arrested, alone in his car,
at the Canadian border. He spent a month in Thunder Bay District Jail,
before being released on bail. At his trial (not yet scheduled), Joe will
face charges of "aiding and abetting an immigration without a visa,"
"providing false and misleading information," and "smuggling or human
trafficking." The prosecuting "Crown Attorney" is seeking a sentence of 3
to 4 years. Joe Callahan is no smuggler or criminal! He is a dedicated
activist from our own community, and we must support him in fighting these
charges.

At this party, we will have drinks, finger food, and *live music* by String
Bean, Chick Pea, Garbanzo and Refried. The brief program will include an
auction, but feel free to drop by any time. In addition to helping with the
considerable legal expenses for his defense, the Joe Callahan Support
Committee is also working to raise funds to help supporters attend his
trial. Bring your contributions to the party, or mail them to: Joe Callahan
Support Committee, 2919 Polk St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418.
supportJoe.wordpress.com <http://supportjoe.wordpress.com/>.  Endorsed by
the Anti-War Committee.


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From:AWE
Atheist radio 1.15 9am

Sunday, January 15, 9:00am-10:00am  “Atheists Talk” Radio
AM 950 KTNF in the Twin Cities or stream live at http://www.am950ktnf.com.
Guest:  Shawn Otto, “Skeptically Speaking.”
Contact us during the show with questions or comments at (952) 946-6205 or
radio [at] mnatheists.org.


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From: scot b <earthmannow [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Stillwater vigil 1.15 1pm

A weekly Vigil for Peace Every Sunday, at the Stillwater bridge from 1- 2
p.m.  Come after Church or after brunch ! All are invited to join in song
and witness to the human desire for peace in our world. Signs need to be
positive.  Sponsored by the St. Croix Valley Peacemakers.

If you have a United Nations flag or a United States flag please bring it.
Be sure to dress for the weather . For more information go to
<http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/>
http://www.stcroixvalleypeacemakers.com/
For more information you could call 651 275 0247 or 651 999 - 9560


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No stadium tax

Representatives of the No Stadium Tax Coalition (nostadiumtax.info)
have launched a full-scale petition drive to enact a charter amendment that
would prohibit the use in Ramsey County of public funds for a professional
sports stadium without a referendum.  The Ramsey County Home Rule Charter
gives citizens the right to amend the charter through petition, and this is
the first time that this right has been exercised in the County.

     To become involved go to the website: nostadiumtax.info
     or contact ady [at] adywickstrom.com or call her at 651-233-3161

     To sign the petition check out the signing locations:
      http://adywickstrom.com/NSTC/SigningEvents.asp

[ED OPINION: It is amazing and disgusting that a rich blood-sucker can
spend a few hours or days starting a process to stick his thieving hands in
all our pockets, and then dozens or hundreds of us have to spend dozens or
hundreds of hours stopping him.The 1% spends a few million dollars to buy
toadies and media and legislators, and then the 99% has to work its ass off
so things don't get even more unequal and criminal.

  He can do it because he has tons of money, and we don't.

 So why do we ALLOW anyone to get that kind of money? If we don't stop it
by making it ILLEGAL and publicly despicable, we're just asking to have our
pockets picked constantly by bold thieves.

 To hell with capitalism. To hell with the capitalist line that we must
allow a few exploiters to grab billions to 1. make our economy work, and
2. allow those exploiters to "realize their true selves."  To hell with
their "true selves." Screw capitalism! Screw captialists! Back to hell!
Back! Back! Now!

And once they're down there, pave it over so they never get out!]


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Report: Massive Movement Needed to Fix 'Perverse Concentration of Wealth'
-CommonDreams staff
Published on Friday, January 13, 2012 by CommonDreams.org

Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality is far from reality.

Census Bureau figures show the U.S. on track to be a majority minority
nation by 2042. But if the trends of the last 30 years continue, according
to a new report, the economic racial divide is set to increase.

The non-partisan group United for a Fair Economy's (UFE) ninth annual MLK
Day report, State of the Dream 2012: The Emerging Majority finds that
racial economic divide will remain "disastrously large and will threaten
the stability of the entire economy."

While the numbers of people of color in the nation surge, this fact alone
is not enough to change the economic reality. From the report:

In the age of mass media and Citizens United, money buys influence, and the
national income and wealth will remain over-whelmingly in the hands of
Whites – a small group of Whites at that.

"The early 1980s marked a turning point in U.S. politics. Reagan sparked a
'me-first' ideological revolution in Washington, D.C. and beyond," says
Brian Miller, Executive Director of UFE and a co-author of the report. "The
policies since have done little for economic progress for people of color,
which should raise great concern as these demographic shifts occur. Without
a sea-change in public policy, racial inequality will devastate our economy
as people of color become the population majority."

"Income and wealth inequality lend to a host of other social inequalities
that keep people of color locked into cycles of hardship and poverty," says
Wanjiku Mwangi director of UFE’s Racial Wealth Divide program. "If we do
not change course, our economy will not be able to provide for the swelling
numbers of Blacks and Latinos out of work, in poverty and in prison."

"As a nation, we honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, but we
tolerate the perpetuation of racial inequality that he dedicated his life
to fighting," says co-author Tim Sullivan. "The growing share of the
non-White population presents an opportunity for Blacks and Latinos to
build political power. In this era of extraordinary economic inequality,
the fate of the vast majority of the White population is more connected
with the economic interests of Blacks and Latinos than with the ruling
political elite."

>From the report's key findings:

Disparities in income perpetuate poverty in communities of color and will
continue to do so unless change is made.
Increasing wealth inequality entrenches the racial economic divide.
Education is one of the most important tools we have for increasing social
mobility, yet dramatic disparities in education perpetuate inequality.
The mass incarceration of people of color is historically unprecedented.

Democracy Now! also remarked this morning on the mass incarceration:

Today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether
in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in
1850. And more African-American men are disenfranchised now because of
felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.

In order to abolish this inequality, the group contends, a massive movement
is necessary:

Eliminating racial inequality will require a powerful and sustained
political movement, aligned not just along the lines of race, but also by
economic interests. The renewed national debate about who benefits from the
economic system, who doesn’t, and why–a debate inspired in large part by
Occupy Wall Street–presents an opportunity to build such a movement. The
perverse concentration of wealth and power in the U.S. is central to both
Occupy Wall Street and efforts to close the racial economic divide.


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How to Win a Fight with the 1%
by John Jacobsen
/ January 10th, 2012

Since its explosion onto the political scene in September, Occupy Wall
Street has taken our nation by storm; it has led stirring marches, an
attempted general strike, occupations of banks and abandoned buildings,
disruptions of political speeches and press events, and a massive West
Coast shut down of major port terminals.

The actions, moreover, have already achieved limited successes — besides
having created space for Americans to come together outside of the
established political system, they have rightly been credited with having
stopped fee increases amongst the largest banks in the country, as well as
having widely validated the American public’s fury over increasing
inequality, generating massive media exposure.

Despite its impressive influence, however, the only real material victory
of Occupy so far — its having stopped increased bank fees — was entirely
incidental, and was in no way a conscious objective of the Occupy Movement.

The Occupy Movement therefore remains increasingly susceptible to losing
its momentum if it does not achieve some tangible gains. We can be certain
that if people do not see real results from the Occupy Movement soon, they
will move on to something which seems to offer them more; and with our two
political parties gearing up for election season, we should take this
threat all the more seriously.

Concretely, what this is going to mean for Occupy supporters is to
re-orient their organizing from mass, symbolic actions — such as
“mic-checking politicians” and waving signs at CEO’s — to more targeted
campaigns designed to win real, immediate gains for ourselves.

In order to do this, Occupiers are going to have to learn three important
organizing guidelines for their campaigns, exemplified by a growing
community organization out of Seattle, Washington: the Seattle Solidarity
Network (or “SeaSol”).

They will have to make sure their fights are relevant, winnable, and
importantly, make sure they hurt.

Make sure the fight is relevant

For social movements to not only sustain themselves, but also to grow, it’s
important for them to be relevant to other people’s daily lives. They must
offer something that will, at least eventually, markedly improve their
quality of life.

The Seattle Solidarity Network has seen a good amount of growth in its
relatively short life span because it focuses on solutions to a problem
most people face: naked exploitation. Has your boss stolen your wages? Is
your landlord refusing to make needed repairs to your home? Have you been
discriminated against?

People — mostly working class people — identify with these problems. These
problems are things we and our loved ones face daily; that makes campaigns
around these issues relevant to our day to day lives, not just because it
affects us and our loved ones, but because we intimately understand them.

In order to attract more people to join Occupy, organizers will have to
make the case that the issues they are taking on are of great importance to
others.

Make sure the fight is winnable

People need to believe they have a chance of winning something. There is no
point in turning out to protest after protest, after all, if at the end of
the day you don’t feel like progress is going to be made. Organizers need
to achieve concrete victories in order to show people that it’s worth
fighting on their side.

A brief visit to SeaSol’s website reveals that all of the fights it has
taken on — over stolen wages or deposits, for example — have been rather
small conflicts. That’s because SeaSol recognizes that to effectively
address a problem, you must have the resources and capacity to hurt your
target more than it will cost them to give into your demand.

Or, to put it even more simply: to win, you have to have leverage.

SeaSol shows this relationship — between the amount of leverage they have,
and the amount it would cost a target to give in to the demands — in its
“winnability graph.”

This graph, while only a vague representation of real life — where we
obviously cannot quantify “units of pressure” — nonetheless forces us to
really look at what our resources are, and what we might be able to achieve
with them.

What if instead of using our time at Occupy to make unwinnable demands —
things we are simply not yet strong enough to gain — we focused on winning
a series of smaller fights? What if instead of trying to get “corporate
money out of politics,” we instead tried to stop foreclosures in our
cities, home by home?

With the level of participation in the Occupy movement as it stands,
demands such as this are demonstrably more winnable — and consequently,
help build a larger and more empowered movement.

Make sure it hurts

Once you’ve decided on a demand that people will find relevant — a demand
you feel confident you and other occupiers in your city can win, you’ll
want to begin fighting for it with all the resources at your disposal.

SeaSol normally approaches a fight with a few principles in mind.

First, they know that the name of the game here is pressure. Essentially,
how are we going to make life very, very hard for our target until they
give in?

There are a nearly infinite number of tactics you can use to put pressure
on a target — it just takes some creativity. You can, for example, hurt
them economically with pickets, boycotts, or blockades. You can target
their social connections, and embarrass them in front of neighbors, fellow
church goers or business partners with flyers, letters, protests, or
sit-ins. You can even target other businesses which are financially tied to
your target to put secondary pressure on them.

While there are no hard and fast rules for planning which tactics fit any
given situation, the general rule of thumb is that you normally want your
tactics to be sustainable (meaning you could, theoretically, continue them
for a very long time), you want them to hurt your target more than they
hurt you, and you want your tactics to escalate.

A SeaSol organizer put the concept of escalation this way: “it isn’t the
memory of what we did to the boss yesterday that makes them want to give
in, but the fear of what we’ll do to them tomorrow.”

As a campaign progresses, you want to give the target the impression that
things are getting increasingly worse for them — that you are constantly
escalating your fight. So while yesterday you may have simply been putting
up flyers around their business, tomorrow you may be picketing their shop
or disrupting a fancy dinner party.

Next Steps:This election season, as is custom, the presidential campaign
will dominate most news coverage — pushing needed publicity for Occupy off
the front page. Some organizers and participants in your local Occupy
groups will leave to organize for Obama, and nearly every union and
non-profit which up to now has been somewhat supportive of you will be
going into full fledge “get out the vote” mode, attempting to co-opt your
movement for the Democrats.

The only effective countermeasure against this will be to draw in new
layers of support from people not yet involved.

In order to do that, you will need to start taking on fights which help and
empower them.

And, of course, whatever the campaigns local Occupy groups plan to take on
next, it will be important to remember these few tips: make sure the fight
is relevant, winnable, and hurts.

John Jacobsen is a labor activist currently living in Seattle, Washington.
He works as a welder’s apprentice with the Boilermakers Local 104, and is
an organizer with the Seattle Solidarity Network. He has written and spoken
on labor and anti-war topics to audiences from Seattle to Portland to
London.


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Heroes by Gary Corseri
/ January 9th, 2012

Do not call them “heroes”
if they have done your killing for you.
Say that they have done your bidding;
say they were your “soldiers.”

Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.
Refrain from saying “professionals,”
and the usual nonsense about “surgical strikes.”
They were never doctors and nurses
in starched, white linens.

The best heroes are dead ones—
mortified and mortared.
They neither complain nor contradict.
They don’t re-live “friendly fire” incidents,
the sonofabitch sargeant-sadist,
nor the rapist in their midst.
They don’t see again
the faces of traumatized children.
Their bones stretch to attention under the sod.

The man and woman who will kill and injure
because some fool tells them to
are just little spin-off fools.
No act born of ignorance is heroic.
Heroes are sensible, not imbeciles.
Heroes dispel myths; they neither create
nor perpetuate them.

The fully manifested hero,
aware of his power and dignity,
is more than human, is humane.

Heroes don’t talk about heroes.
They need no confetti showered in their faces.
They question; they learn; they challenge; they act
according to their own honed principles:
What is truth? for example;
what is honor?

Gary Corseri's work has appeared at Dissident Voice, Common Dreams,
CounterPunch, the New York Times, Village Voice and hundreds of other
venues. His dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and he has performed
his work at the Carter Presidential Library and Museum. His books include
novels and poetry collections. He can be reached at:
gary_corseri [at] comcast.net..


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NICE BANKERS

When bunnies
can't pay, their hutches are
foreclosed. Then the nice bankers put on
neighborhood Bar-B-Ques,
just for them.

[nonnet 3 6 9 6 3]

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Shove Jove