We have two choices: to abandon hope and help ensure that the worst will happen; or to make use of the opportunities that exist and perhaps contribute to a better world. It is not a very difficult choice.
Noam Chomsky
First, 4 very fine reads I recommend to you, that arrived in my mailbox the same day… can be found on their Substack platform:
Robert Reich’s Oct 18th piece called "After Kamala Wins" [**robertreich.substack.com]
2. A thoughtful piece on the current state of affairs, by practical visionary Marianne Williamson, as part of her “Transform with Marianne Williamson” series, also on Oct 18th, called "Sinwar is Dead. Now What?" [MarianneWilliamson.substack.com]
3. Charles Eisenstein’s wise words in an article also published Oct. 18, called “Political Bypassing”, which also addresses “spiritual bypassing”.** [CharlesEisenstein.substack.com]
4. Michael Moore’s Oct. 18 piece in substack “Georgia, Jimmy (Carter), and the Confederacy of Dunces Ready to Steal This Election” [ Michael moor.substack.com]
NOTE: I personally do not publish my writings on Sustack but use this platform, BUTTONDOWN, largely because they are smaller and more personal in their help to people like me who often need help with online stuff.
*****
Very good news!
From Common Dream [commondreams.org]
June 4, 2024
On June 2nd, Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, former mayor of Mexico City, and member of the progressive Morena Party, became the first woman AND the first Jew to be elected president of Mexico. Furthermore, it was a landslide victory. The Morena party and its allies are close to winning a supermajority in the Mexican Congress. This would allow them to change the Mexican Constitution.
As Sheinbein told her cheering supporters,
“We imagine a plural, diverse, and democratic Mexico. Our duty is and always will be to look after each and every Mexican, without distinction.”
Bravo, Mexico!
Justice prevails
From NBC News,
October 3, 2024
The former Colorado county clerk who promoted 2020 election conspiracy theories was sentenced to 9 years behind bars for charges including official misconduct in connection with a security breach of Mesa County’s voting system. Tina Peters was convicted of four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August for using another person’s security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a prominent election denier and ally of former President Donald Trump, access to county election equipment.
As a local prosecutor explained, Peters was “a fox guarding the henhouse,” adding, “It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage.”
Did you hear about this from Ohio:
In a 2023 Ohio special election, Ohio voters rejected a ballot measure, dubbed Issue 1, that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution. The vote was a whopping a 57% to 43%, defeating the effort. The defeated ballot measure would have required 60% of voters to amend the Ohio Constitution. It was put forward by Republicans as a way to keep voters from adding an amendment to the state of Ohio’s constitution, which is what abortion rights advocates were preparing to do, to limit the ways Ohio could prohibit abortion up until a baby’s gestational age of viability.
Last November, Ohio voters put abortion protection in their state constitution!
readtangle.com
**NewU.S. Labor Dept. Rule Will Help Workers Earn $1.5 Billion More in Overtime.
**Slated to take effect July 1, the change to the federally mandated overtime policy will affect 4.3 million US workers.
TRUTHOUT [truthout.org]
By Tyler Walicek, June 10, 2024
“The U.S. Labor Department has unveiled a change to federally mandated overtime policy that promises to enact sweeping pay reform for salaried workers across domestic industries. With this newly announced increase, as of July 1, employers will be obligated to pay overtime to workers on salary who make under $43,888. Eventually, in a second phase in 2025, the minimum will increase so that the overtime mandate applies to workers making as much as $1,128 per week, or $58,656 per year.
… Because the July 1 increase is a marked leap up from the 2020 cap of $35,568 — kept egregiously low by the Labor Department under former President Donald Trump — it encompasses a significant subset of the United States workforce; by one estimate from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 4.3 million salaried employees are now poised to receive pay for exceeding normal work times — long hours during which they previously would have labored, effectively, for free.… U.S. employers have long utilized a simple sleight of hand in order to extract further surplus value from their workforces. “White-collar” exemptions have meant that certain employees, placed on salary instead of wages, can be worked a lot harder for a lot less.
… Unpaid overtime makes up part of the mountainous sum of large-scale theft committed by employer against employee in the U.S., to the tune of $50 billion per year. This form of normalized mass exploitation, in dollar value, far outweighs an entire year’s worth of better known types of larceny; in fact, wage theft exceeds the toll of robbery, burglary and motor vehicle theft combined.)
… The problem is that the pay grade salary cap is arbitrarily defined and artificially low — in part because it’s been punted back and forth in partisan squabbling since the Obama administration. Since the last 2019 update to the rule by the Trump-era Labor Department, which took effect on January 1, 2020, overtime protection has been afforded only to salaried workers making less than $35,568 a year. Before that, the cap was set at an absurd $23,660 per year, or $455 a week, by the first George W. Bush administration, all the way back in in 2004.
… By paying even a little over the cap, employers could place a worker on salary and, as long as the latter still qualified under the duties tests, demand overtime work up to 60 or 70 hours a week, for no extra pay. With the prospect of free labor dangling in front of them, plenty of employers were all too happy to oblige.”
*****
Regardless of what religion you follow, or none, I feel the following “sermon” by a Baptist minister-in-training who is a former teacher and current representative of Austin in Texas’s State house is a must-watch. He is speaking out again Christian
National.
I’ve mentioned this inspiring newsletter, The Marginalia, before but want to bring your attention to it again. Written and edited, illustrated and produced by one woman in Brooklyn - Maria Popova - it’s an act of love. It arrives in my email box every week plus a short newsletter midweek, and continues to be one of the most uplifting and enriching times I spend each week. Poetry, music, art, philosophy and much more. The newsletter is FREE.
*I’ve finally started making a monthly contribution.
*
sunday newsletter – The Marginalian
If you yearn for depth and delight without the distraction of a social media feed, try the Marginalian Sunday newsletter, free and ad-free since 2006 — the week’s most inspiring and nou…
An experiment that is paying off!
Inside the L.A.P.D.’s Experiment in Trust-Based Policing
February 25, 2021, Reasons to be Cheerful
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/lapd-community-safety-partnership-policing/
[Captain Emada] Tingirides, 50, is only the second Black female officer in Los Angeles to reach the position of Deputy Chief. Since September 1, 2020, she has been in charge of the Department’s new Community Safety Partnership Bureau (CSP).
“It’s about trust,” Tingirides says when asked to describe CSP. “The community has to hold law enforcement accountable, and law enforcement has to hold communities accountable. We ask the communities what they expect from us, and we take their goals seriously.”
CSP represents a major shift in L.A.’s notoriously hardline approach to policing. But there’s reason to believe it could stick — independent studies have shown that the CSP has increased trust in police, reduced violent crime and saved the city millions of dollars. Under the CSP concept, police officers are stationed in an area for at least five years. They become part of the community, attend neighborhood meetings, organize soccer tournaments, hand out “Donuts for Dads,” and “Muffins for Moms.” They work closely with gang intervention workers, social workers, non-profits and, most important, neighborhood residents. “I thought all cops were bad,” a nine-year old boy admits. But now, he says, he loves Community Officer Jeff Joyce, who started “Nicks Kids,” a soccer club for youths. “Our methods are unconventional, and we are adaptable,” Tingirides says. “Each neighborhood is different.”
And another successful program…
Sending Unarmed Responders Instead of Police: What We’ve Learned
July 25, 2024, The Marshall Project
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health...
…one proposal that has taken hold across the country, and continues to spread, is launching alternative first response units that send unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, to some emergencies. In Dayton, Ohio, trained mediators are dispatched to neighbor disputes and trespassing calls. In Los Angeles, outreach workers who have lived through homelessness, incarceration or addiction respond to 911 calls concerning people living on the street. In Anchorage, Alaska, trained clinicians and paramedics are showing up to mental health crises. Researchers have tracked over 100 alternative crisis response units operating across the U.S. Some distinguish between mobile crisis teams, which exclusively send clinicians to mental health emergencies, and community responder programs, which send civilians to a wider range of calls.
The key tenets are that they can be the first response to an emergency situation and that they arrive without armed officers. There have been no known major injuries of any community responder on the job. Eventually, a large portion of current police work could be handed off to alternative responders. A 2020 review of 911 calls ... estimates that up to 68% of calls “could be handled without sending an armed officer,” according to a report by the Center for American Progress and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.
From Peers Inspiration List [peerservice.org]
October 20th
Latin America has two models for eradicating violent crime. One is rooted in dignity and forgiveness.
April 29, 2024, Christian Science Monitor
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0429...
Latin America is the world’s most dangerous region due to cartel and gang violence. It has 9% of the global population but one-third of the world’s homicides. Kidnapping and extortion are on the rise. The trend is driving a turn toward increasingly militarized solutions. El Salvador, for example, has incarcerated some 75,000 people – nearly 2% of its population – in recent years on suspicion of being involved in gangs.
In Colombia, by contrast, exchanging the threat of arrest for dialogue is a key part of the government’s painstaking strategy of negotiating peace simultaneously with some 20 armed factions to end 60 years of conflict. That process, known as Paz Total (“total peace”) and launched less than two years ago by President Gustavo Petro, has been marked by reversals and unintended effects. But a key distinction lies in its emphasis on both empathy and the rule of law. The strategy’s first example of “restorative incarceration,” launched earlier this month, shows how.
In exchange for admitting guilt for violent acts and seeking forgiveness from victims and the families, 48 military and former guerrilla leaders are now serving “sentences” by planting trees and helping heal the communities they once dominated through fear. “We’re going to sow life to try to make amends and build peace,” [said] Henry Torres, a former army general. As Colombia’s new attorney general put it, “our mission will be ... a mission for the dignity and well-being of our people.”
Peace requires patience, said Juan Manuel Santos, a former president who negotiated a 2016 peace accord with Colombia’s main guerrilla faction that still serves as a template for Mr. Petro’s broader peace plan. “You need to convince, to persuade, to change people’s sentiments, to teach them how to forgive, how to reconcile,” he told The Harvard Gazette.
Note: A prison in Brazil with low recidivism rates uses a humane approach, where there are no armed guards and inmates have the keys to their own cells. Explore more positive stories like this about repairing criminal justice.
A blessing for our some of the U.S. national parks
As reported in the **1440 Daily Digest
**Aug 27, 2024
The National Park Foundation received a $100M grant.
The first US national park, Yellowstone, was established in 1872. Since then, the system has expanded to over 430 areas covering national parks, memorials, rivers, trails, and more. In all, the National Park Service manages more than 85 million acres of protected lands, which span across every state in the US and are frequented by over 320 million visitors annually.
The grant—from an endowment created by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly—will fund several priorities, including conservation efforts in Florida and grants to facilitate more visits from young people.
Toward a better future…
From Michael Moore’s Letter to a Future Voter [MichaelMoore@substack.com]Oct. 20th
In a number of countries around the world, they have decided that people under the age of 18 should have the right to vote, so they have lowered the legal voting age now to 16 years old. Why? Because they realized that many of the laws you will have to start following as an adult at 18 were made by the politicians elected in the last election when those 18-year-olds were 16. So they said, “You, at the age of 16, must have a say in the laws that you’re going to follow when you turn 18. Thus, you should be voters at 16.”
Here are a few of the countries where the voting age is 16 years old:
Brazil • Austria • Scotland • Wales • Belgium • Germany • Argentina • Greece • Nicaragua • Ecuador • Malta • Cuba
And there are already a number of cities in the United States that have lowered the voting age for local elections to 16, including:
Silver Spring, MD • Berkeley, CA • Takoma Park, MD • Brattleboro, VT • Oakland, CA • Hyattsville, MD • Newark, NJ
Learn more about the efforts to lower the voting age to 16 years old. Join with others to make this happen: Vote16USA.org + FairVote
I read this anecdote in a Substack piece from Soren/wisdom2.0:
A woman once came to Gandhi with her child, concerned about her child's habit of eating too much sugar. Knowing how much her child respected Gandhi, she asked him, “Could you please tell my daughter to stop eating sugar?”
Gandhi listened and then replied, “Please come back in two weeks.”
The woman and her child returned two weeks later. This time, Gandhi simply told the child, “Please do not eat sugar.” Grateful, the mother thanked him, but she couldn’t help asking, “Why did we need to wait two weeks for you to say that?”Gandhi’s response: “Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”
The lesson, of course, is that we teach more through our behavior than through our words.
A reminder of the good (positive) steps being taken on behalf of our planet.
From NPR [npr.org]
October 15, 2024
The Biden administration is establishing a new national marine sanctuary off the Central California coast that will protect over 4,500 square miles of ocean. The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will be the first to be managed by Indigenous people. It will be overseen in collaboration with local tribes and Indigenous groups that will provide guidance to the federal government. This initiative reflects the Biden administration's commitment to involving tribes
in decisions regarding the lands and waters that were historically taken from them. in decisions regarding the lands and waters that were historically taken from them.
Positive change is happening! Here’s one example
from Peers Inspiration List [peerservice.org]
October 11, 2024
One farmer abandons factory farming
**“**Leah Garcés considered Craig Watts her enemy. As CEO and president of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has devoted her life to protecting animals. When she met Watts in the spring of 2014 at his poultry farm in North Carolina, he was one those factory farmers she deeply despised. Watts had raised over 720,000 chickens in 22 years for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the US. He took out a $200,000 bank loan to build four giant chicken houses. Squeezed by Perdue’s profit margins, Watts struggled to pay the bills.
Garcés realized that Watts was not her enemy, but an ally: Chicken farmers like him wanted to end chicken farming as much as she did. Yet because of his hefty loans, Watts saw no way out. Together, they released footage from the horrors of chicken farming, in the New York Times. Watts has now become one of the poster farmers for the Transfarmation Project, which Garcés founded as an offshoot of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals in 2019. Ultimately, Garcés’s vision is not just “helping a few dozen farmers transition to a healthier and more sustainable model, it is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming.” The Transfarmation Project connects farmers with consultants and is producing resources and pilots to model successful transitions. In the same warehouse where Watts once had to kill chickens and where he and Garcés filmed the whistleblower video, Watts is now harvesting mushrooms.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this outrageous piece of news. So I’ll laugh.
From The Hightower Lowdown, now published on Substack [JimHightower@substack.com]
October 15, 2024
As school kids learn in civics class, our government is made up of three separate branches. Your church is not one of them. Unless you live in Oklahoma.
There, a fanatical Christian Nationalist named Ryan Walters is the appointed State Superintendent of Schools. But he’s confused on the concept of “instruction,” viewing it not as teaching, but as a commandment to implement his own personal theology.
In June, he pompously instructed all public schools to put the Christian Bible in every classroom and to use them for teaching every subject. He’s also demanding millions of dollars from taxpayers to buy Bibles.
But not just any Bible. This month, Walters went from kooky to corrupt, issuing bid requirements that effectively narrowed the state’s purchase to one particular edition of Christianity’s Holy Word – the “God Bless the USA Bible.” It’s a MAGA-approved compilation promoting the dogma that America is meant to be governed by Christians. Marketed by right-wing country musician Lee Greenwood, the volume is being hawked in commercials by presidential flimflammer Donald Trump, who is avidly supported by Walters.
Oh, coincidentally, it turns out that Trump gets a cut of every one of Greenwood’s sales. So, a chunk Oklahoma’s big Bible purchase would be pocketed by The Donald, enriching the most unholy president in history with manna from above.
The stench of this scam was even too much for Oklahoma’s aggressively partisan GOP leaders, who’ve now rewritten Walters’ purchase order to eliminate the Trump bid-rigging bias. Still, regular citizens are asking why the hell their state is trying to indoctrinate schoolkids, putting one religion above all others. To follow this Bible Story, connect with the nonprofit news group, Oklahoma Watch: OklahomaWatch.org.
A bit of recent U.S. social history worth knowing about and sharing:
Excerpted from Robert Reich, writing on Substack
October 7th
“Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.
The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.
It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.
The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich saw an opportunity to build the Republican Party around similar lies and conspiracy theories. Gingrich’s efforts attracted the first group of modern crackpot candidates into the GOP.
Starting in 2016, Trump attracted another group, even wackier than the previous one.
It’s become a doom loop. As both the demand and the supply of these lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and racism have grown, the Republican Party’s base has ventured farther from reality. Meanwhile, sane Republicans have left, reasonable people have drifted away, and normal Republican officials have been purged or voted out.
If Trump loses the 2024 election, the Republican Party won’t change, because its base is filled with this poison. So it will continue to attract more crackpot candidates loaded with even more venom; it will nominate them, and some of them will win.
…The only way forward is with an entirely new Republican Party that rejects and detoxifies the old one and puts an end to this doom loop.”
A piece of very good news
Reported by Jim Hightower in a 2-minute message sent out (both audio and text) on August 10th
“The demise of local newspapers [in the U.S.] has been a very depressing story in the last few years, with several thousand of them gobbled up by Wall Street profiteers. Those money powers loot the publications’ assets, then callously shut down each community’s paper, or reduces them to empty news shells. So that’s that – local print journalism is passé, right?
Wrong! High-spirited, community-minded subscribers in places like Glen Rose (Texas), Hamburg (Iowa), Portland (Maine), and International Falls (Minnesota) are humming an upbeat tune of regeneration that could be titled “Not Dead Yet!” In Maine, for example, five of the state’s six daily papers and 17 weeklies were sinking under the ownership of an investment group. But all were recently bought by the National Trust for Local News, a non-profit started two years ago. The Trust is turning each publication over to local non-profit owners and helping them find ways to become sustainable.
Another new effort, called Cherry Road Media, has bought 77 rural papers in 17 states, most from the predatory Gannett conglomerate that wanted to dump them. Cherry Road’s business plan is simple, old-time genius – return editorial decision-making to local people and journalists who know the town, be an active presence and participant in community affairs, make the locals responsible for sustaining their town’s paper – and most important, reinvest profits in real local journalism that advances democracy.
In both of these new initiatives, the foremost mission is to serve the common good of the communities, not to pad the wealth of a few distant financiers. To learn more about these models (and how you might implement something similar in your
town), contact the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues: RuralJournalism.org.”
Would I be “blowing my own horn” if I tell you about an interview that was recently conducted with me for a podcast that is both visual and auditory.
Perhaps you’ll find the time to listen to (if not watch) me share a large part of what I believe and why, as well as my personal roots that led me to a life of seeking consciousness and being an agent of positive social change.
*******
Finally, I think you might like to read about one male doctor’s courageous ongoing 50-year stand on abortion:
ABORTION DOCTOR
by Jia Tolentino
Reprinted from an interview in the Sept 29, 2024 issue of New Yorker
*[Excerpted & highlighted by Suzanne]
*Warren Hern is a physician whose career in reproductive medicine began before Roe v. Wade and continues today, after Roe’s fall. Hern, who is 86, founded the Boulder Abortion Clinic, and is one of the most high-profile abortion doctors in the country. For a long time, he has been one of the very few physicians who openly perform abortion in the second and third trimester. At the time of the 2013 documentary “After Tiller,” which followed Hern and other abortion providers, there were only four such physicians; one has since died and the other two are retired.
…Late abortion is wildly misrepresented by politicians and misunderstood by the public; it is rare, but the need for it has increased as state bans make it harder for pregnant people to seek care.
…People have the idea that a woman just decides she doesn’t want to be pregnant. She wants to get a new dress, or she wants to go to prom next week, so she decides to end the pregnancy. But women take this decision very seriously. Obviously, the operation is highly stigmatized. Many women, right after Trump was elected, thought that abortion was illegal and were afraid to even make the phone call, much less come in. And now abortion is functionally illegal in about twenty states, and we have situations where women come in, have their abortion, and are afraid to go to their own doctor or any doctor in their home state for a follow-up exam, which they need to have—because they’re afraid to be arrested and sent to jail. That is not a complete fantasy; there are threats to that effect.
…In terms of popular speculation about late abortion, there was the partial-birth-abortion meme, which was set up in the nineties when an anti-abortion group took some fragmentary information from a presentation at one of [the National Abortion Federation] meetings and turned it into a weapon. People believed that this was a way that late abortions were being done. And there were a few people doing a few of these procedures, but it was never the principal way things were done. It has been a very damaging bit of psychological warfare.
…I am not an abortion-dispensing machine. I’m a physician, and there are things I will do and things I will not. I will do a late abortion for someone who has a serious fetal abnormality or a twelve-year-old kid who’s been raped, but I would not do it without that indication.
…I know of many cases where women have a catastrophic diagnosis, they want to continue the pregnancy, they want to have their baby, and they want to comfort it until it dies. That’s a legitimate moral choice for people, but it is cruel and stupid to impose it on other people who don’t want to do that.
…The procedure that I developed in the seventies [involving multi-day dilation and evacuation] for late abortion was safer for the women than [the previously common methods of] saline abortion or hysterotomy, but it transferred the stress of the experience to the doctors and nurses. But we were putting abortion in the context of health care for women, which, in a way, goes in conflict with our entire evolutionary experience over millions of years. We have this ingrained, wired desire to support small, helpless creatures. That is one of the reasons late abortion is difficult, and why it is very useful for the anti-abortion people. And the most dangerous thing about the anti-abortion stuff is not necessarily the beliefs but the exploitation of those beliefs for political power.
…what we need is a constitutional amendment that says you cannot interfere with a woman’s access to health care, including reproductive health care.
*[Re the doctrine of “fetal personhood”, which says a human life begins at the fertilization of an egg]
…*Who knows when the fertilization occurs? Is it when the sperm enters the ovum? Is it when it forms a blastocyst? When it attaches to the wall of the uterus? What if it’s in the fallopian tube—an ectopic pregnancy, which can be a fatal problem [and cannot result in a child]? There’s a thing called a hydatidiform mole—it results from a fertilized egg, but it’s a tumor that looks like a bunch of white grapes. Is it a person?
…These politicians are in a realm they should get the hell out of, because it does not make any sense. This idea of fetal personhood means that birth is no longer a legal event, that birth doesn’t have any meaning. But it’s not about logic or reason, it’s about politics. Women have a new role in society and they’re able to compete with men for jobs and money and power, and a lot of the men don’t like that.
…First of all, I’m in favor of anything that helps people have more access to fertility control that’s safe and that is easy for them and within their means. For most people, remote treatment with telemedicine and mifepristone works. For most people, it’s safe. I have some issues with it, but that’s partly because I’ve done tens of thousands of surgical first-trimester abortions without a single major complication. I know when the patient is safe, and I know when her abortion is over and her uterus is empty…
My issue with medication abortion is—is there a follow-up exam? Do you know if the uterus is empty or not? Who’s going to take care of them if there’s a complication? Because of political oppression, people are afraid to take care of the patient. There was a young woman in Las Vegas who had a medication abortion. She started bleeding, she went to the emergency room, she did the right thing. They told her she was going to be O.K. and sent her away. She went back to a different emergency room, and they said, “O.K., we’re going to transfer you to another facility,” and she died before she got there.
I think that the medications themselves are quite safe. My issues have a lot to do with the way they’re used, and a lot of that is because of the repression from the political system.
Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts.
Wishing you well in these perilous times.
With Love, Suzanne