the guy by the door …

Bob Bowes local member of BPT

I first saw Bread and Puppet Theater in the basement of the Washington Square Methodist Church in NYC. The Vietnam War was at it’s height. The performance was nearly silent, but it was the strongest anti-war statement I had encountered.  Sometimes they appear without warning. For ‘Mr. Bhutto’s Letter’¹ they performed at the Mass College of Art.

This week: All week; free art exhibit.

Monday January 25 free artist talk and reception 6-8PM

Evening Adult Shows “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” Jan . 28-31 Thurs.-Sun. 7 PM Advance tix²

Family Friendly “Dirt Cheap Money Circus” Matinees Jan 30-31, Sat. & Sun.  4PM  Advance Tix

All right! None of you made the Artist Reception. I know cuz I took attendance. My bad, not enough warning. You’re all plan your life types. So here are some pictures.

Artists Reception – Bread and Puppet Theater @ Cyclorama

Now that's a puppet! Massive and yet it moves!

¹ about the tragedy of the IMF as told by a disillusioned leader thereof

²This link has been broken and fixed more than once. Not a scintilla of a clue! This, hopefully will get you to the ‘shows’ page. Bread and Puppet shows are marked.

At about 2  PM EST, producer and occasional ‘on-air’ Sharif Adbel Kaddous tweeted that they have landed safely in Port au Prince. He posted this picture on Twitpic¹:

Sharif on the left and Amy squinting² in the middle. I’m guessing that Nicole Salazar ’07³ is holding the camera.

Nicole, while at Harvard, co-authored a Crimson article about the war in Iraq, “What Have We Won?“.

Tune in tomorrow and see Amy squinting in the Haitian sun.

¹For the benefit of Dr. Urs Gasser, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Twitpic does not claim copyright ownership from its submitters. DN! gives it’s content away. They will accept donations 🙂

²It never ceased to amaze me – the things that make women beautiful.

³For my non-Harvard readers this is the somewhat self-centered way the Crimson refers to Harvard Alums. A year with no further qualification means Harvard College a.k.a Bachelors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Without the resources of a major network, to get it’s own crews on scene in Port au Prince, Democracy Now! improvised. Emerging technology star Twitter was alive with tweets about Haiti. DN! invited journalist Kim Ives from the Brooklyn office of Haiti Liberté¹ to give on air commentary of the latest tweets from his contacts in Haiti. Democracy Now!, the little network that can, has done it, again. The dream of the internet bubble – Convergence.

Today is Sunday, Democracy Now! can’t call up the satellite companies and buy an extra block of time. All today the Democracy Now! blog has had posts from observers in Haiti:

“The Haitian People Have Mobilized, While Foreign Aid Efforts Continue to Stall”

“Bill Quigley: “Ten Things the U.S. Can and Should Do For Haiti”

“The Haitian People Have Mobilized, While Foreign Aid Efforts Continue to Stall”

What is NOT new, but a trademark of Democracy Now! since it’s inception is the historical background information including the involvement of the C.I.A. in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristede.

¹My fellow gringoes might want the english version.

The UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen was due to end Friday. But rising pressure from ‘the developing world’ i.e. the 130 nations of the G77¹ and the leak of a confidential memo to the UN Secretariat admitting that the carbon emission targets so far are too high,  raised the question of whether world leaders will stay on. The Guardian’s Copenhagen Twitter channel reflected confusion about what press conferences would occur when. First the rumor was that Obama would give a press conference, but then it turned out he was only addressing the Whitehouse press corps. Then he left due to weather in Washington. The EU delayed it’s press conference for another round of talks. The ‘deal’ wasn’t actually ‘sealed’ until the wee hours of Saturday  morning, well after Ban Ki-moon had declared a highly qualified victory.  It was agreed by the Conference of Parties to ‘take note of‘ the agreement brokered by Obama, between the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

As of 11:00 AM EST² on 12/19/09, The Uptake . Org is webcasting the press conference of the Climate Action Network on its Copenhagen 1 channel.

Obama:  Nothing legally binding. Kyoto was legally binding but everybody fell short anyway.

Friday night, close to midnight Copenhagen time, The Uptake.Org interviewed Naomi Klein and Bill MkGibben. Naomi pointed out that of the big five agreed on the 3+ degree nonbinding agreement – U.S. , China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – that they would have probably agreed to a stronger carbon reduction budget if the U.S. had put it on the table.

One Climate interviewed Amy Goodman, “This is another olympic failure.”

¹There were 77 developing nations when the group was formed. It now has 130.

²I suspect it’s running on a loop.

Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives

In my mind, a block of carbon-neutral developing nations could change the outcome of Copenhagen. At the moment, every country arrives at the negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible and never to make commitments unless someone else does first. This is the logic of a madhouse – a recipe for collective suicide.

The Maldives is a nation of about 360,000 people living on about 200 of 1197 islands in the Indian Ocean. The average island is about a kilometer¹ in diameter.  The highest elevation is 7’1″ above sea level. 80% of the islands are only 3′ above sea level.  If we cause the ocean to rise, this nation will disappear beneath the waves.

Amy will be reporting from Copenhagen for the duration. Today’s news looks distressing, but I can’t watch it myself. I have to prepare my case for the Cambridge Housing Authority. Please watch it for me. Tnx.

And an apology to the Islamic students of Harvard and the world, I totally spaced out about Ramadan and so I am late in conveying to you the good wishes of President Nasheed – for a blessed Eid.²

¹Just google^A it.

²I have great respect for Karl Marx, especially the portion of his work that is critique of capitalism, but it seems to me that portions of his work are not economics, but eschatology. In that light, the ‘opiate of the people’ remark loses a little steam. But Tom Friedman is just a dork. The strife in the Middle East is not about the ‘desert religions’. It is mostly about land and oil. The extent to which it is about religion, it is not because they all originated in a place where it’s too hot to think. It is because they are genetically related. It is a family feud. And it has gone on far too long.

^AI realize that google hasn’t yet achieved a place in the language comparable to kleenex, but I like to look ahead. Otherwise, I might know what is gaining on me.

A brief campaign statement to the Harvard Community and specifically denizens of FAS Arts who I propose to represent on the Executive Board of HUCTW.

The Late Larry Summers¹ had a model for the expansion of Harvard based on a significant shift in the political economy of the University. I once quite loudly suggested that he was planning to divest the Faculty of Arts and Sciences because it was a cost center and not a profit center. I was told by sympathetic, but more timid people to lower my voice and that what I had suggested was too nearly true to be funny.  Of course, the North Academic Complex is clear evidence that he had no intention of deprecating the Science portion of FAS. His top level idea was to favor the departments in any faculty that could increase the inflow of  ‘soft money’ i.e. research contracts. Watson of Double Helix fame, said that the Late Larry told him he favored medical research over basic biology because the former were ‘winners’ and the later ‘losers’. The plan was to convert endowment paper into buildings and use them to house income producing research.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of the recent history of capitalism, the question is, now that Larry is gone, has the plan really changed? Certainly it has been slowed. The first part of the question is, how much of the ‘fiscal austerity’ of the present is related to hopes of reviving the growth plan? The second part, and the one that affects FAS Arts most strongly is what’s going to happen to all those ‘losers’ in the Arts – where Arts is understood to mean The Humanities. The Late Larry’s approach to “The Two Cultures” problem was to divest one of them². What does the future hold? So while, the HUCTW members in the libraries are under the most serious threat, those in FAS Arts are not far behind.

At the very least, we need a much stronger effort towards job security. As citizens of the Commonwealth and the World, which presumably Harvard serves, we have a right to weigh in on Harvard’s future.

¹For those who for whatever reason have not followed the guy by the door for the past few years, I refer to the question, ‘Is there life after being the President of Harvard?’

²And to compound his error, he regarded economics as a ‘social science’ as opposed to the dismal excuse for a science that it is.

A brief campaign statement for the position of Union Representative in the Harvard College Library.

Just before the first snow of the year, a new University Task Force Report drifted down upon the Harvard campus. This one, sponsored by the University Provost Dr. Stephen Hyman is about the Libraries – all 73 of them which President Drew has called a  scandal.   The management of the Harvard Libraries needs to change to address the crisis ofcapitalism The Endowment and the challenge of the internets.  What are the proposed changes, who will be affected, and how?  The Task Force sought to deal in sweeping generalities. They have handed in their report leaving implementation details to The Implementation Group.

One of two serious problems with the report is the total neglect of any consideration of Green House Gas Emissions. A major revamp of the libraries, which of necessity will require redirection of substantial fixed as well as variable capital should include as a constraint, the reduction of GHG emission.  President Drew quoted Ban Ki-moon at Commencement, “Global Warming is the defining issue of the age.”  Was the Provost AWOL during that part?

The other serious problem is that Labor was unrepresented on the Task Force. Much of the work that ‘needs restructuring’ is performed by members of HUCTW.  They want to make the Libraries university wide, but did not hear from  the largest existing university wide organization in the picture. If you’ve really been paying attention, you will realize that these ‘two issues’ are intimately related. Unlike the ideological left, I do not believe that addressing Labor without explicit consideration of the time-scale of global warming is to have too much in common with capitalism.

The report does not recognize that Libraries were invented basically to deal with shortcoming of the idea of private property. Libraries are the common relative to the political economic unit that pays for them. Harvard is chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and paid for in part, by way of opportunity cost, the citizens of Cambridge, Longwood, and Allston.

In fairness, I should mention that, given the current leadership of the union, had they been included in the Task Force, I would probably be complaining about their performance. This is why I am running for Union Representative in the Harvard College Library and Executive Board Member in the FAS Arts Region under the current districting plan. The proposed centralization of the Libraries makes it essential that we redistrict the union so that the Libraries are their own district. I am available for any new positions that may occur due to that.

1. Establish and implement a shared administrative infrastructure.

Administrative services that will be markedly strengthened by centralization include many information technology functions; most preservation functions; and certain significant technical services such as acquisitions and cataloging.

Translated into labor terms, (with the exception of IT¹), there will be less people doing these jobs at Harvard in the future. Add to this remarks like Nancy Cline’s, “were looking at buying catalog records from an outside vendor”.  This plan to outsource cataloging jobs will be more likely in a more centralized environment.
2. Rationalize and enhance our information technology systems.

The origin of the ‘irrational’ information infrastructure is glossed over. I submit that a big part of the problem has been management afraid of technology and insisting on hiring specialists to allow them to continue operating with minimum perturbation of their own jobs. Rather than using technology to extend their own capabilities, they hire someone to  translate old ideas into the new reality. Workers who make the effort on their own to know what’s happening in the wider world are punished or marginalized. In the college libraries, websites sprang up because interested employees thought it would help their organizations. Each one had its own look, but because the information was entered by the people closest to its origin, the were accurate. One of the early moves in centralization was to kill off these examples of Zittrain’s generative internet and impose a top down approach which requires extensive communication off the net to get the sites to be accurate.

3. Revamp the financial model for the Harvard libraries.

What’s remarkable here is there is no mention of  “Every Tub on It’s Own Bottom” which is second only to “Eating Your Children” to endowment fundamentalists. Is somebody going to be able to get the Widener’s, the Langdell’s and the Baker’s to agree on this? [The word tub appears  once and subtub once, but the whole phrase not at all.]

4. Rationalize our system for acquiring, accessing, and developing materials for a “single university” collection.

Another expression of centralization which if implemented as in the past means ‘out with the old employees in with the new’.

5. Collaborate more ambitiously with peer libraries and other institutions.

This recommendation has the potential to be good for a broad range of people including labor at Harvard and the other institutions. Whether good things find there way into reality depends on whether HUCTW can be vastly more effective than it has been in relating to labor at the other institutions. One question the Task Force report does not ask; Why does such cooperation not already exist? Have the libraries at other institutions been reluctant to work with the Harvard Libraries?

Among the principles to be kept in mind in implementing these recommendations, the Task Force has included:

¹This phrase, in and of itself, presupposes an industrial model of information infrastructure which I have strong doubts about.

… or if you are the kind of person who believes that decisions are made at meetings¹, you can believe that the Governor’s people ‘found’ a previously missing pot of money and that activism had nothing to do with it. And you can believe that the Speak Out shown below had no effect.

¹One of the reasons I liked the West Wing is that Aaron Sorkin put those words into Josh Lyman’s mouth. Another was the mention of Peak Oil. Dr. M. King Hubbert when he discovered it, was a denizen of that hotbed of radicalism, the Shell Oil Company. He later retired to another hotbed of radicalism, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

In response to $1 Million of budget cuts in programs for the homeless, Jim Stewart organized a Speak Out at the Massachusetts Statehouse. The gold dome caps a much larger building. It is easy get lost. Since the cuts were made by Governor Deval Patrick – while at the same time allocating $9 Million for a foot bridge for football fans – Stewart called the Speak Out in front of The Corner Office. Stewart, director of the First Church Shelter in Cambridge, has been there many times before – especially when Cantabrigian Bill Weld occupied the office.

The  ‘providers’ led off. Several spoke. I won’t show them all. Above, Paulette from Gateway Shelter in Somerville is in the center speaking. Immediately to the left is George Capinegro,  a former guest and former employee of First Church Shelter. To the right, Johanna and Joe, staff at First Church. The guy with the fisherman’s cap and glasses is Jim Stewart. There is a homeless person in the picture that I met at St. Francis House. You will never guess and I will never tell.

After the providers, Jim called on us, the homeless. I did not speak. I felt my colleagues were more eloquent. The Aviatrix did not speak. I suspect from past experience with her, she could not.

Aside from Johanna who is a Divinity student at Harvard, I only recognized one other face from Harvard – David Dance from Phillips Brooks House. I have not had a chance to ask him how the student run UniLu Shelter will fare if the budget cuts stick. Next to him is Phil Wright from Pine Street Inn in Boston. I’ve met more Harvard ‘low wage workers’ since becoming homeless than I did during the Mass Hall Sit-In of 2001. There may well have been some that I haven’t met at this rally.

The high point of the morning was the prayer offered by Reverand Molly Baskette from First Congregational Church of Somerville. She was ably assisted by her exuberant three year old ecclesiastical assistant. The State Police Officer guarding the Governor rose to his feet and bowed his head.

We had heard that the Gov was in Worcester.  His Dudes were stationed by the door. They were going to ‘report back.’  But he popped out of the elevator and into his office. A homeless woman from the Anchor Program on Long Island¹ asked, “Can the Governor come out and talk to us.”

“He has important business.”

“He has bridge plans to look at.” Jim Stewart².

A woman on community service sabbatical from Sovereign Bank asked Deval’s Dudes, “How come you guys aren’t taking notes? How are you going to give a faithful report to the Governor?” The thinker in front of her is Reverand Tom Feagley from Bread of Life in Malden.

Deval’s Dudes under questioning. I moved in close to make them feel exposed. Deer in the Headlights Dude, had asked Jim Stewart if he could address the crowd.

“Are you going to tell them the cuts are restored?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t address them.”

Anyone with a conscience would have been moved by the experience. He would have come out and said, “You’re right. I was wrong. We won’t cut funds for the homeless.”  Sadly, that is yet to come.

I hope to have “action items” for you soon. Stay tuned.

¹This program is not readily Googlable. I’ll have to ask Jim Stewart. But at least I’ve ‘advanced’ the American language with a new adjective or am i falsely flattering myself.

²Referring, of course, to the $9 Million footbridge mentioned earlier. If you got it yourself, I apologize. If not, I’m glad I bludgeoned you.

In Summer of  ’68 I went to Paris. I had missed the Days of Rage, but I was in la place de la Bastille¹ [Eng] on July 14. The CNRS was out in force.  Lacrymogène was in the air.

Yesterday was not a Day of Rage at Harvard, but last night was a Night of Concern.

Healthcare, especially the Stupak Amendment

I’m with Harvard’s own Dr. Steffi Woolhandler [on Democracy Now! a day or two ago.] The current bill is worse than nothing. Call your Senator. [More in a bit.]

Global Warming

The Leadership Campaign in Harvard Yard

The Leadership Campaign is a Project of Massachusetts Power Shift. Their goals are:

• Nothing less than 100% clean electricity
• Nothing more than 350 ppm carbon dioxide.

This latter goal will certainly require a national policy stronger than the Cap and Trade that Mass Power Shift was espousing when they met at the Onetarian church across from Charles Sumner. Cap and Trade, as David Harvey points out, rewards past polluters. I will make the argument in capitalist terms with all the externality/internality jargon. More importantly it will be slooooow. It is basically a delaying tactic by the power industry, which has representatives within Mass Powershift. The Leadership Campaign must lead Powershift away from being a captive of Big Power. I will explain, but …
Gentle reader, I have lot to say more to say about both issues. Please come back, tomorrow. I need to spend some time dealing with my own homelessness.

¹My command of French barely gets beyond, “Il mio conto per favore.”^A I thought I would link the French Wikipages for those who are more able. For those who are tediously monolingual like me, I will link the English pages with [Eng].

^AYes, I do jest. Hearing Andrea Bocelli sing “Con te partirò” [Eng] is such an expansive experience that I wondered how much more was in the lyrics. The translations leave me with the vague notion that I know what the song is ‘about’. If you understand the lingo, you might try to explain it to me. But you may find me challenged in my knowledge of love, Love, lLove, or some such thing.ⁱ

ⁱi’m a bit of nominalist, remember?

To make meaning of our losses, we diminish the losses of others. This makes future losses more likely.  If you believe that war is a Law of Nature¹, our children’s future ceases to exist.

It was a week before the legal Veteran’s Day. It was, in fact, during the new abridged incarnation of a proud Cambridge tradition – The Count. The last hand count in 1995 took  four days to hand count the 19183  Proportional Representation ballots.  Since then, it is usually done the same day as the balloting. This time, because of the first truly significant write-in campaign in Cambridge history,  it took two days.

The Veteran’s gathering centered on World War II – “The Big One” as Dobie Gillis’ father used to say.  Other wars were mentioned but discussion kept coming back to WWII. It was the Best of Wars. It was the Worst of Wars.  It was the Morally Unquestionable War. They were the worst of monsters. We were the noblest of heroes. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki? Perhaps regrettable, but justifiable.  Really?

Meet A Veteran for Peace: Tonight @ the Brattle Theater

David Fillingham of the Smedley Butler Brigade*

I met David Fillingham at the School of Government formerly known as John F. Kennedy. He was not invited when General Petreus was. Nor for that matter on any other day. He dropped in on Halloween. But he was invited to the Brattle Theater. You are too. Here’s your invite:

Friends,

I have been asked to do a Q&A for a showing of The Good Soldier at the
Brattle Theatre in Harvard Sq on Veterans Day Nov 11 Weds at 7:30 PM.
Go to www.thegoodsoldier.com for a trailer.

It is being billed as a national day of conversation,(20+ States) and
is being promoted by Bill Moyers on PBS. Please come if you are
available and interested.

—
Peace and Peach Pie,
David Fillingham

dfillingham at earthlink dot com

—————

I have to guard the library, but if you go, please tell David I sent you – that ‘saving face’ thing.

¹Danny Greenberger, a physicist of the General Relativity flavor at CCNY, believes that there aren’t really any Laws of Physics. He has two universes that illustrate the point. Iwill elaborate them at some point and add to it Sidney Coleman’s observation about progress in field theory. I am more serious about it than Sidney and simultaneously more tentative and more general about it than Danny. Then there is the question to what extent a Theory of Human Affairs can be said to be analogous to The Laws of Physics.  To appear.

*Smedley Butler, at the time of his death, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, wrote “War is a Racket”.  The Boston chapter of Veterans for Peace took his name.

Rumors abound, but most are untrue.

Election Commissioners evaluating "Auxiliary Ballots"

There has not been a significant write-in campaign in a very long time and there has not been one since the computer system was purchased to “streamline” the tabulation of the Proportional Representation voting system that Cambridge alone of all U.S. cities uses. Voters express a list of preferences for City Council and School Committee. The software has to keep track of the preference list for each voter and transfer votes to the second choice if the first choice is elected and so on. This used to all be done by hand. It was quite a social event lasting four or more days. The computer changed all that. Until now. The ‘late campaign manager’ who missed the nomination paper deadline for Marj Decker, has unknowingly forced a partial return to the hand count system. Except that in this case, the Election Commission has to look at all the “Auxiliary Ballots” including write-ins that have no ambiguity at all.

The Election Commission released unofficial results last night. Normally, when there are 50 or 100 Auxiliary Ballots the Unofficial Results give a pretty good idea of what’s going on. But with over 3590 Auxiliary Ballots that is no longer true. Quota, the number of votes required to elect a City Councilor will be something under 1606. It would be possible for two people to be electd on Auxiliary Ballots alone. But it didn’t happen.

The Election Commission released the computer printout of the count of all the machine readable ballots including tranfers and a determination of elected vs. defeated. Above it, in small print, they placed suitable disclaimers. But, many people didn’t read them. They read the big print in the table including the words “Elected” and “Defeated’ which even 18 hours later are still not meaningful. But since you have been suitably warned, I can let you look at what the Election Commission posted.

There are remarks made within the “Cordon Zone” that get overheard and misinterpreted. Most of the write-ins are for Marj Decker. A single scanner was reprogrammed to count for Decker, ballots with her name in write-in position one.

At 4:30 P, Executive Director Marsha Weinerman announced that the count would go into Wednesday, but with 1000 of 3590 auxiliary ballots counted and the kinks worked out of the system, she is optimist that it won’t go into Thursday.

The Peabody about an hour to go.

The polls are closed now. The ballot collecting machines are all at the Senior. So too are the “Auxiliary Ballot Boxes.”

Ballot and Aux ballot boxes; Senior Center Nov. 3, 2009

My ballot which had two write-ins was rejected by the machine. It went into the Aux Box. In1999, there were so few write-ins, the Election Commission counted them on the spot. They ran the PR computer program. The results were announced at 10:00 P. This time there are too many. The Election Commission is going to start counting at 9:00 AM. Nothing will be known tonight.

Goodnight!

12:58P Give me a few minutes.

1:04P I’m thinking.

4:10P I had to go to a cosmology seminar to regain my composure – watching galaxy clusters collide. It’s peaceful in some ways. They mostly pass through each other, but the gas gets striped out of them. Black holes are very violent. They eat matter spiralling in to them and spit x-rays and radio waves out. Fortunately none of them are in our immediate neighborhood – the solar system. There’s a really big one at the center of the Milky Way, but it won’t eat us anytime soon. We have angular momentum. Nothing dissipates angular momentum in a serious way except gravitational radiation.¹

I don’t know if I can fully explain my title before the polls close. For now, let just indicate my choices for City Council:

1. Philip Fenstermacher

I will write myself in. No candidate has put forward a platform that seems to me truly progressive in terms of the cacophony of crises we face. I drew papers to get on the ballot, but got sick and had to go to the hospital. I was somewhat victimized by the false rumors about how a sticker campaign works, but if I had been serious I would have checked with the Election Commission. I have no campaign manager and no money. My platform most likely would have caused Glenn Koocher to brand me as unelectable – at best 🙂 I don’t think Cambridge has ever elected a homeless person. It would be an honor to be the first. It is unlikely. I will get at least one vote and surely less than 50 which, by the rules of proportional representation, means I personally will not pass to the second round as a candidate. If by some miracle, I make it into later rounds, I will be cut from the bottom. If you want a protest gesture that won’t cost you anything, sticker me in.

2. Lawrence Adkins

An eloquent plain speaking African-American man from Riverside. If elected, I think he would probably revive the spirit of Saundra Graham. But he won’t be. He got 15% of quota on the first round in ’97. He’ll survive into the second round. My vote will transfer to him. But he doesn’t have much money and his ’97 performance was far behind the incumbents. It’s doubtful he’ll be seated. So.

3. Minka van Beuzkom

A woman from Central Square who has been active in the area especially in the areas of public health and environment. I don’t know if she ever followed on her threat to bring some of the rats that are infesting parts of Cambridge into the Sullivan Chamber, but I like the spirit. She pulled of a Toomey with her nomination papers. She gathered a full 100 signatures over 4th of July weekend – the sign of an dedicated organized core of support. The bad news is that she has 1/3 the money of Davis and Decker. The good news is she has almost as much money as Seidel. She has a good chance – not a sure thing.

4. Marj Decker has been the most stridently antiwar counselor, but she hasn’t solved the problem that has plagued the peace movement for as long as there has been one. How do you answer these two questions at the same time.

I. Who really benefits from war?
II. What did my daughter die for?

Nobody else has. I have ideas, but …

Marj is good on the potpourri of progressive issues. I do wish though that she wouldn’t talk to me as if she didn’t put her pants on one leg at a time.

Anyway, despite the gaff with her election papers, she’s an incumbant with a strong base and more money than anybody else! The only real question mark is, will people not want to write her in? I’m not counting her out. Despite any rumors to the contrary, a sticker candidate is treated the same as any other. You can vote them at any preference. If you like Marj to any degree, sticker her in!

5:48P It’s getting late so I must get sketchy. Besides if my vote hasn’t stuck by this point, I can’t find someone to give it to who both needs it and has a chance of being elected. Anyway.

5. Silvia Glick

6. Tom Stohlman

7. Kathy Podgers

———

¹You may occasionally come across the phrase ‘gravity waves’. This is the name that physicists of the last century assigned to waves propagating on the surface of water. Gravity provides the restoring force.

I was in Roxbury visiting Project HipHop. Deputy Director D’Mon Bills took me to coffee at nearby Haley House. I kind of deserted my host to get a snap of Boston Mayor Menino. Unfortunately, the lovely Dottie Wells, his steadfast publicist, had her back to me. She claimed she remembered me from the Firefighters rally outside the State of the City at the Strand. She’s a publicist.

That’s all very nice, but I didn’t see them at the Rally and March for Jobs and A Real Economic Recovery.

Whereas:

Michael Flaherty @ Rally for Jobs Oct. 1, 2009

and the guy who’s always with the people:

Chuck Turner at rally for jobs Oct. 1, 2009

Coming soon. Breaking news first.

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

-An alleged¹ Ancient Chinese Proverb cited by Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture 2007.

We need to go far, quickly.

–Al Gore Nobel Peace Prize Lecture 2007.

We need to go farther, quicker than anybody thought.

-The guy by the door 2009 in response to 350.

A day of action, which will last for three days, begins tomorrow. Here in Cambridge, MIT students will gather in the Killian Court² with laptops form the 350 symbol. 12:00 Noon – 12:20 PM.

Students of the Amigos School 100 Putnam Ave. will be taking pledges from adults to walk, bike or take public transportation. The goal is a total of 350 miles.

¹I don’t know Al’s source for this Ancient Chinese Proverb. I will pose the question to Harvard’s own Di Yin Lu. If she tells me there is such an ACP, I’ll believe her. I am already indebted to her for making me aware of the Public Knowledge Project. I try to follow the Enclosure Movement on the Internet and responses to it, but I did not hear of PKP from the Berkman Center.

²Killian Court is in the shadow of the Great Dome on the River side of the Infinite Corridor.

Camera crew at Harvard Sq T

Multiple camera crews were are in Harvard Square shooting for “The Town”. It is directed by and stars ben Affleck. I was told Ben was around, but I did not recognize him.¹ I think it more likely that what I saw was second unit stuff.

The script is a screen adaptation of a novel by Chuck Hogan, “Prince of Thieves.”

¹In addition to seeing him in the Littauer Center [North Yard edition] when he spoke in support of the Living Wage Campaign, I passed about a foot from him when he was shooting “Gone Baby Gone” in Uphams Corner^A in 2006. I didn’t stop to talk, I had to catch the bus.

^AThanks to bloggers and commentors at Universal Hub for straightening out the confusion of the New York Times. Cantaloni’s is not in South Boston. It is in Uphams Corner, Dorchester. As for the spelling of the bar’s name, there is no sign. It’s called whatever a particular long time resident tells you it is.

Asian Youth Rally for 350 in Bangkok!

Cairo Cyclist Club calls for 350 in front of the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

The Cambridge churches have been ahead of the City government for some time now. I caught the 350 bell ringing last year. Now:

First Church Welcomed Bill at 11:00 AM [Mp3 of the sermon]

And Memorial Church is ahead of official¹ Harvard:

Memorial Church Welcomed at Bill 2:00 PM

Bill McKibben in the Memorial Church pulpit.

¹My way of saying ‘administration’ without being too pejorative. And the Late Larry wanted to move it out of the Yard.

²Oh My God! I thought Memorial Church was some flavor of Protestant. You know. Martin Luther, ‘priesthood of all believers’ and like that. But this, which Reverand Peter refers to as “10 feet above contradiction”, brings to mind time honored phrases like “papist idolatry.” Well at least they had the Onetarian guy from First Parish with his guitar. The First Church [UCC] guy was there too, but he don’t sing. There was another UCC guy from the Mass conference, but he didn’t sing either. Despite the recent schism between the Firsts, they got along amicably. This abrupt climate change thing must be big.

Columbus discovered America – tcwmits¹

Discovered America? How can you discover something that’s already in use? See that BMW over there? Let’s discover it.                                   —-Dick Gregory

What if “Columbus Day” was given the more accurate name “Celebrate Genocide Day”?
—-The Professor who dares to ask what if²

PWDAWI, makes several citations to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Democracy Now! today [after headlines] {large raster BitTorrent download} is an interview with Canadian Cree singer/songwriter Buffy St-Marie. Included is a performance of ‘Universal Soldier’. In Buffy’s view, for a Native American to ‘make it’ requires a lucky accident. She spends her money on education from the Native American point of view.

¹The Common White Man In The Street.

²I don’t know where she teaches. I would say definitely not Harvard, but that would be snarky. I’ll just say definitely not in Harvard economics or government. Jack Womack has been emeritized by Harvard history, but there are still some folks around who question.
That said, I still reserve the right to question whether Harvard’s pair of world historical jacks question enough.

I have failed you.

-Richard Clarke 2001
-the guy by the door 2009

I forget to warn you that HONKFEST was coming. What is Honkfest¹? It is the Festival of Activist Street Bands. such as the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band:

SLSAPS in the Labor March Oct. 1, 2009

Devoted followers of tgbtd will remember them from The State of the Union Rally in Davis Square.

Also in the line up is the Bread and Puppet Circus Band. They are an alternate incarnation of a group that I first experienced in college at the height of the Vietnam war – the Bread and Puppet Theater. They used to publish and propagate The Cheap Art Manifesto. I will have to ask them why it’s not on their own website.

Update: Open Media Boston has the after-action photo/video report.

¹Someone suggested to me that Honkfest is a conference at Harvard to which neither Professor Gates nor Officer Crowley were invited. Not so, in the current instance at least.

Barack Obama {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

The Norwegian Nobel  Committee¹ has announced the 2009 prize winner US President Barack Obama.

“We would like to enhance, to support what he is trying to do.”

Naomi Klein {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

British-Pakistani historian, journalist and activist Tariq Ali was also interviewed on DN! [They tried to reach journalist Jeremy Scahill³, but had technical difficulties.] In his talk at Harvard, Tariq expressed his doubt that US military activity in Pakistan is in the US long term interest. In today’s interview he points out, among other things, that the war in Iraq-Afghanistan goes on apace with an increase in troops in Afghanistan. Tariq pointed out some of the questionable awards in the past.

¹Note that the ‘Nobel Prizes’ are awarded in memory of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel and presented by the King of Sweden. My favorite anomaly is the inclusion of the Bank of Sweden Prize, not funded from the Nobel estate, with the Nobel prizes. This does not make Amartya Sen^A the spawn of satan, but it tarnishes his halo a bit. Robert Merton and Myron Sholes who won “for a new method to determine the value of derivatives” [mortgage backed securities anyone?] , on the other hand, clearly are the spawn of satan. We don’t need to make a fuss about the Late Larry Summers’^B hero Milton Friedman, but one has to wonder how someone who gets people fired for wanting to regulate underbacked highly liquid securities can be regarded as a monetarist.

²Naomi, offered her critique of Milton Friedman and his disciple Donald Rumsfeld, in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Basically, Friedman who favored ‘non-interventionist government’ nonetheless thought that the only way to get there is by engineering ‘shock and awe’.

³Jeremy is the chronicler of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”

^ASen has a quality that the Late^B Larry Summers will never be accused of. He is disarmingly charming.

^BFor those who have, for whatever reason, not been following tgbtd, is there life after Harvard?

Democracy Now! traces it’s heritage to the Pacifica Foundaation which is an alternative to mainstream radio. In 2001 it morphed into a radio and TV broadcast. With the rise of streaming video DN! added it to its portfolio of distribution modes. Very recently, DN! has added the BitTorrent file sharing protocol to it’s portfolio. Because of the higher efrfective bandwidth of BitTorrent, the DN! torrent has a raster that is comparable to broadcast television. The stream that tracks the live broadcast at 8:00 AM Eastern and repeats shortly thereafter is much smaller. But you do have to wait for them to put the torrent together usually by 11:00 AM. Also, if the main site goes down, as happened recently, most of the clients/servers in the BitTorrent swarm stay online so that the protocol can still work. And the torrents live on a separate server so you can get the torrent here.

Next, DN! and Twitter.

I don’t remember which social network thing alerted me to this, but the open tab in my browser is:

October 1st is the one-year anniversary of the Wall Street bail out.  The government gave hundred$ of billion$ of dollar$ to save the bank$ and in$urance companies, but where are the jobs?

Thursday, October 1, 2009

4:00 PM Kickoff at the State House

4:30 PM March through Downtown and the Financial District

4:41.39871 Rally at Verizon

5:30 PM Rally at the Hyatt (One Avenue de Lafayette)

Sponsors: (list in formation); Mass AFL-CIO; Greater Boston Labor Council; Mass. Jobs with Justice; IBEW Local 2222; IBEW Local 2313; IBEW Local 2321; IBEW Local 2322; IBEW Local 2323; IBEW Local 2324; IBEW Local 2325; CWA Local 1400; CWA District One; AFA-CWA Council 27; Teamsters Local 122; Operating Engineers Local 877; Utility Workers Local 369; UE Northeast Region; UFCW Local 1445; SEIU Local 509; SEIU Local 1199; Laborers Local 22; HERE Local 26; AFT-Massachusetts; Roofers Local 33; Plumbers Local 12; Sprinkler Fitters Local 550; Painters District Council 35; Boston Carmen’s Union; Professional Fire Fighters of Mass; Elevator Constructors Local 4; SEIU/NAGE 5000; APWU of Mass, Pipefitters Local 537; Mass. Teachers Association; MOSES; Boston Teachers Union, SEIU Local 615, IBEW Local 103; Teamsters Local 25; Mass ACORN; Community Labor United; North Shore Labor Council; Merrimack Valley CLC; Norfolk County Labor Council; Plymouth-Bristol Labor Council; Central MA AFL-CIO; Hampshire-Franklin CLC; Greater Southeastern Mass. CLC; Pioneer Valley CLC; Chelsea Collaborative; Irish Immigration Center; Mass Alliance Against Predatory Lending; Boston DSA; Mass Interfaith Cmte for Worker Justice; Lynn Health Task Force; Nat. Jobs for All Coalition; Nat. Lawyers’ Guild; AFSC; Mass Transgender Political Coalition; Centro Presente; Mass COSH; IWW; Union of Minority Neighborhoods; Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries; South East Asian Women’s Resource Group; City Life/Vida Urbana; Jewish Labor Committee; GALLAN; SEIU Local 888; WILD; Brazilian Immigrant Center; UAW MA State CAP Council; AEEF-CWA Local 1300, UFE, BWA, CPA, Metrowest Immigrant Center, La Commindad, UAW State CAP, Boston Building Trades, Mass Building Trades, APWU 100

… and they’re not gonna take it anymore.¹

Logo of Mad As Hell Doctors

They’re mad at the insurance companies, the Congress, and Obama. Rightfully so. They are by no means alone.

Much more, but now I must blog today’s rally for economic justice.

¹Sound familiar? I don’t know who was the first to say it, but it became a fixture of American popular culture with the movie “A Thousand Clowns”.