Jan. 8, 2011
Vandy Savage – My 2 cents.

In order to add a green voice to plans for the future, I went to multiple Regional Growth Strategy (RGS) meetings where this long range Vancouver Regional Growth Strategy plan was presented, amended, and presented again. Nearly all of these were the dreaded “breakfast” meetings with tepid coffee and tea and coercive facilitators. No matter how we tried to steer the discussion, the underlying assumption to the plan in all of it iterations was one of GROWTH. When one of us suggested no growth, no new roads, more green spaces, and more rail/public transit, these ideas were passed by. I got so frustrated that I stopped going to the meetings.

In order to be heard, I think we would need many more than 10 green thinking people at these meetings. The ones I attended had lots of activists and concerned citizens that we know personally in attendance, trying to make a positive impact. We would need about 30 people per meeting to have a significant presence. But even with 30 people, as you know, my impression was that the facilitators were really there to get us to come to their conclusions, not to actually gather information. It was a total bullshit snow job by smarmy corporate consultants. Read the complete Post.

Posted on Nov 29, 2010

By Chris Hedges

On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better. Hope is not about chanting packaged campaign slogans or trusting in the better nature of the Democratic Party. Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

Hope does not mean we will halt the firing in Afghanistan of the next Hellfire missile, whose explosive blast sucks the oxygen out of the air and leaves the dead, including children, scattered like limp rag dolls on the ground. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators, or halt the pillaging of our economy as we print $600 billion in new money with the desperation of all collapsing states. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope.

Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. They become, in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. Read the complete Post.

Sunday, March 7, 2pm
The Unitarian Church of Vancouver
949 West 49th Ave, at Oak St., near 49th Ave Station on Canada Line

Suggested donation: $5-10 (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)

Featuring two speakers on the fight for climate justice after Copenhagen:
-Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s representative at the United Nations, lead spokesperson on climate change at the Copenhagen Summit
-Federico Fuentes, a participant in the revolutionary process in Venezuela and writer for Venezuelanalysis.com, Green Left Weekly and BoliviaRising.Blogspot.com.

The recent international summit on climate change hosted by the United Nations on Copenhagen ended in disappointment and recrimination. Greenpeace called it a “crime scene, with the guilty parties fleeing to the airport.” While Obama, Harper and other leaders of the rich countries stood accused, two heads of state in particular made connections with the tens of thousands of climate justice activists in the streets. Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, spoke for the world’s majority when they condemned global inequality and capitalism as the root causes of the climate crisis. Read the complete Post.

As some of you may know, the City of Vancouver has now given complete permission to create a community garden on the east wing of the land we call Crows’ Point (Near the Nanaimo Sky Train station). The community garden will be developed under the guidance of the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA).

The City will now install water access at the furthest east point of the land; they will also provide a large pile of soil and all the wood chips we can handle. The city has already cleared the east wing for garden plots.

In preparation for longer warmer days, we are encouraging anyone that wants to join us to meet at Crows’ Point at 10:30AM this coming Sunday, Feb. 7^th, 2010 to embark on two separate plant salvaging missions.

Read the complete Post.

Rex Weyler
http://rexweyler.com/2009/12/02/propaganda-scuttles-hope-in-copenhagen/

“There are many true things that are not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things, which although they are false it is expedient for the people to believe otherwise.”
- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 426 A.D.

Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.

As the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate summit limps toward indecision, the largest money-making corporations on the planet privately celebrate their ability to undermine science and hijack the international political process.

The US – the greatest historic source of greenhouse gases – set the tone of duplicity in Copenhagen by offering “provisional targets” (translation: fantasy targets) and “politically binding” agreements (translation: non-binding) and by replacing the 1990 greenhouse gas baseline with a 2005 baseline (to make the non-binding, fantasy “targets” sound more impressive.) China played along with this deception by offering to “cut emissions … relative to economic growth,” known as “carbon intensity reductions.” (Translation: no reduction at all). China’s actual emissions, and the world’s emissions, will continue to increase through the next decade. Read the complete Post.

By Viggo Mortensen
Dec. 11, 2009
The Huffington Post

Excerpt: “As Howard Zinn has often pointed out, history told from above — from the standpoint of generals and kings and presidents — encourages passivity, a sense of helplessness. In this version of history, “great men” make history, not ordinary people. But looked at from below, history has another lesson. Whenever change as happened, it has been through protest, dissent, struggle, social movements, ordinary people picketing, striking, boycotting, sitting down, sitting in.” Read the complete Post.