Category: Action

     In the face of HUGE profits made by Big Oil it is time to stop subsidizing them with taxpayer money NOW. The American people are suffering. The Big Oil firms and their extremely wealthy executives are not. With the deficits left over from the Bush/Cheney Administration still harming our nation, the easiest way to cut back wasteful government spending would be to stop subsidizing immensely profitable Big Oil Corporations.

     Americans are spending nearly $3 billion more on gasoline due to higher gasoline prices. And taxpayers are spending billions of dollars in tax subsidies to Big Oil. These subsidies will cost the U.S. government about $3 billion next year in lost revenue and nearly $20 billion over the next five years. The next dollars we spend should go to companies that provide genuinely clean and safe fuel. The costs are too high.

thinkprogress.org

    More below the fold

Have you ever worried that you might be fired if you gave any inclination that you might be straight?  You can be…with impunity…in any state which does not give equal employment protection based on sexual orientation.

It’s true that it rarely happens that someone would be fired for being straight, but it has happened.

To my knowledge, nobody has every been fired for being cisgender (i.e non-transgender).  But there is no reason, in most states, why it couldn’t happen.

The examples of people being fired for being transgender are too numerous to include.

That’s the thing about laws protecting gender-identity or sexual orientation.  They are for the protection of everybody, not just GLBT people.

Cross-posted many places including DailyKos.

On Thursday afternoon the AFL-CIO held a rally to protest the banking bailout and demand a peoples’ bailout. There was a call for not just regulating the banks that almost took this nation down but also doing an about face and forcing the bankers to bailout the people.

Do you think Wall Street should pay for the jobs they destroyed?

“People in New York and across the country who did nothing wrong and want to work have paid for the misdeeds of the big banks with their jobs, homes and retirement savings,” said Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president.

Do the elected officials of this nation think Wall Street should pay for the jobs they destroyed?

See a few photos and read some people’s stories below.  

25 April is a day of unified commemoration of the global effort to provide effective control of malaria around the world. This year’s World Malaria Day marks a critical moment in time. The international malaria community has less than a year to meet the 2010 targets of delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria, as called for by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.

Cross-posted at DailyKos and was at Progressive Blue.

PBS will be celebrating Earth Day with a special edition of American Experience called “Earth Days” that tracks the American ecological movement and also by showing “Food Inc” on April 21th.

On most PBS stations at 8 PM tonight “Nature” will show “The Thin Green Line” for a second time. It is an indictment of the human race, the fact that we are wiping out the frogs and amphibians and the we will also be sure to follow, has to be the most motivating hour of television I’ve ever seen.

I’ll update my original review below the fold but it would be wonderful if we can get others to watch the devastation so more people will take action. Perhaps you’ve already seen this “greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.” and you know that discussing the nature photography alone will get friends to watch. Whatever it takes, people need to get involved and tonight’s PBS line up can make a difference.

As many of you know, my husband, Dan, was a Vietnam vet who survived torture. Dan suffered from his injuries for over thirty years, until his fatal heart attack four and a half years ago. When he got back to the US, Dan had to have all of the toenails on both of his feet removed, to try to get rid of the bamboo infection from where they had inflicted pain to try to get him to tell them what they wanted to know. There was never enough food in the house to fill the hole left by the food deprivation he had suffered. He never got a full night’s sleep. He was till waking up screaming the week before he died.

Dan left me with a mission, to stop torture as the law, policy and practice of the United States, and to fight to have those responsible held legally accountable.

Hey everyone,

I had an idea the other day, and I’m going to put it together.  Basically, I’m creating a map of people all over the nation who are willing to donate something – their home, some food, some time, etc – to resistance to war, big business’ greed, and other injustices.  Google Maps makes this surprisingly easy, and although I’m not entirely sure how to do it, I’m sure I’ll figure it out as I go.

All I need now is names.  If you’re interested in being listed so that people can contact you if they need some help in your area, please email me at rossmlevin at gmail dot com.  What I need is:

Your name

What you’re willing to provide

Your contact info (email and phone are preferred, but whatever you want to put is OK)

Your zip code

I don’t want to get too specific, because we all know how snoopy the CIA is 😉

Seriously, though, if this comes together I think it could be a useful tool for activists all over the place.  Say you’re traveling to Philadelphia to help out the striking nurses at Temple University and you need a place to stay for a few days – you could check the map and see that, hey, rossl lives near Philadelphia.  Then you could call me up and see if it’s all right if you crash at my place for a few days while you’re helping these nurses.

In short, if this works out, it could potentially make organizing these things easier.  In a best case scenario, that would mean more action is taken.

Cross-posted at DailyKos.

At 11:30 yesterday morning on the corner of Greene St. and Washington Pl. I met Firefighter James M. Sorokac for the first time. I’d never met him before but being the keeper of “The Last Alarm” and a member of the of the FDNY ceremonial unit, his face was far too familiar to me.

In the shadow of the Asch Building he explained that the bell that is rang for the fallen dates back to a time when there was one bell at every NYC fire house. He told me the story of the four fives. When firehouses would communicate to each other across the city by ringing five times in a series of four the message that “a brother has fallen in the line of duty.”

Today that bell is rang once by a white gloved firefighter at funerals and memorial services.

Yesterday Firefighter James M. Sorokac rang that bell 146 times.  

Back in the early 1970s, there was a new genre of film, called Blaxploitation.  Remember it?  The movie would be set in the ghetto and all the characters would be hit men, drug dealers, pimps or narcs.  One may recall the films Foxy Brown and Blacula.  And who could forget Blackenstein?  Try as we might.

In the late 70s, there was a film called I spit on Your Grave, in the Rape and Revenge genre, trying to situate women’s rights the same way Blaxploitation did for African-American rights.  I Spit on your Grave is apparently being remade, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised about Ticked Off Trannies with Knives.

Synopsis of I Spit on your Grave 2010:

The story of a woman who is brutally attacked, raped, and left for dead in the wilderness.  She survives to hunt down her assailants and methodically, graphically takes her vengeance.  Based on the 1978 film.