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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

Book cover

I constantly remind the students in my African American history classes that if you are poor and white in America, especially if you are rural or southern, the only difference is that you are not black. We have long known that poor whites and blacks live very similar lives, and the socioeconomic indicators we use to measure well-being–level of education, family life, employment, home ownership, involvement in the criminal justice system–are also remarkably similar.

We Are Mourning …But We Are Marching and Organizing for Democracy & the Earth

Trump with a big head
In the midst of a terrible national illness, we organize and march for the known and solid cures.     For democracy and our natural planet.     We have clear direction on both issues.     This weekend's massive, powerful women's and other marches rocking the nation have dwarfed the turnout for Friday's illegitimate inauguration.   With them we must demand—-and WIN—-a voting system that actually reflects the will of the people, and an energy supply that comes in harmony with our Mother Earth.     For democracy: we must have universal automatic voter registration, transparent voter registration rolls, a four-day national holiday for voting, elimination of all electronic voting machines, universal hand-counted paper ballots, automatic recounts at no charge to the candidates, an end to the Electoral College, a halt to gerrymandering and a ban on corporate money in our political campaigns.   It's a towering agenda.  But without it, we have no structural power.  It's the essential key to the one thing that can ultimately reverse a disease like this Trump presidency—-real electoral democracy.  

Trump's Inauguration Disrupted

People dressed in red, white and blue with RESIST spelled out on each shirt yelliing

The resistance started January 20. Six citizen activists with Democracy Spring, AllofUs, and Americans Take Action disrupted Trump while he took the oath of office, standing on their chairs and revealing a single word spread across their clothing: R-E-S-I-S-T. 

https://www.facebook.com/democracyspring/videos/618592765007396/

Six Things We Should Do Better As Everything Gets Worse

Here I am in occupied DC. The White House looks like a Green Zone. There was a time when you could walk up to it. Caravans of police cars and black SUVs zoom by with sirens blaring and everyone else forced aside. Do people look outraged? No, they grin and admire. We need more democratic perspectives. Here are six.
 

1. Get active around policy not personality. And try to nudge newly active or re-activated people in that direction. To take one example of thousands, we should be cheering more loudly for the commutation of Chelsea Manning's sentence. And we should have raised a lot more hell than we did over the idea of locking her up to begin with -- and Obama's pronouncing her guilty before his subordinates tried her -- and over all the other whistleblowers still in cages or facing persecution. More support for not bombing Syria in 2013, and more condemnation for arming proxies instead. More -- hell, any -- support for Trump deescalating hostility with Russia, and more opposition to his proposals to "kill their families" and "steal their oil."

Tomorrow is Today

The icon’s day has come and gone, and — oh, the irony — eight people were fatally shot in Chicago on his weekend. Another eight were shot during a Martin Luther King rally and celebration in Miami. 

God knows how many more died this past weekend: around the country, around the world.

An enormous wrong called human violence continues to roll across Planet Earth, but we bring less understanding to it than we had 50 years ago, when King spoke at Riverside Church in New York City and stood courageously against the war in Vietnam. 

Inauguration day events in Columbus

Columbus Rally and Walkout on Trump’s Inauguration

Friday, January 20, 11:30am-1:30pm, OSU Oval
Join us on the OSU Oval at 11:30am on Inauguration Day, Friday, January 20, to stand strong against Donald Trump’s racist, sexist, anti-immigrant agenda.
Students and non-students alike are welcome! Donald Trump and the Republican Party are preparing to unleash a storm of attacks on women, immigrants, the Muslim community, LGBTQ people, workers, and the environment. We must stand together in solidarity against Trump’s attempts to divide us! A huge national student strike will send a clear message to Trump, the billionaire class, and the Republican Party, that we reject their agenda of bigotry, hate, and division; that we reject their corporate policies to gut our social services and education. Hosted by Socialist Students Columbus. 
Facebook Event 

Samantha Power Can See Russia from Her Padded Cell

At the Atlantic Council -- a "think" tank funded by such bastions of democracy as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, not to mention that center of peaceful nonviolence NATO -- Samantha Power announced on Tuesday that Russia is a menacing danger to the United States of America and to the rule of law in the world, which statement in fact constituted a menacing danger to the U.S. and to the rule of law in the world.

Power cited the "Russian government’s aggressive and destabilizing actions."

"For years, we have seen Russia take one aggressive and destabilizing action after another. We saw it in March 2014, not long after mass peaceful protests in Ukraine brought to power a government that favored closer ties with Europe, when Russia dispatched its soldiers to the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. The 'little green men,' as they came to be called, for Russia denied any ties to any of them, rammed through a referendum at the barrel of a gun, which Mr. Putin then used to justify his sham attempted annexation of Crimea."

Picking our healthcare battles: Single-payer implementation over Obamacare preservation

Single Payer health cate logo

On January 4th, the Senate voted to begin debate on a budget resolution which is widely seen as the first step on the road to repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The 51-48 vote was unsurprisingly along party lines with the exception of Rand Paul, who voted in the minority with the Democrats. Congressional Republicans are yet to offer any proposals for replacing Obamacare, and any eventual replacement would most likely involve scaling back Medicaid and further privatizing America’s healthcare.

We The People 2.0 film showing

We the people 2.0 film logo and info

Wednesday, January 18, 7pm, Studio 35, 3055 Indianola Ave.

https://www.facebook.com/events/568288650040663/

We the People 2.0, the movie, is a visual essay about the loss of democracy in the United States. The film utilizes both original footage as well as found footage to describe a profound change in thinking at the grassroots level.

The story unfolds through the eyes of rural people who have faced decades of toxic dumping, drilling and mining in their communities. We learn with them that the reason why, in spite of all their efforts, they “get what they don’t want, again and again,” is because they are, by law, truly powerless in spite of propaganda that says they live in the “best democracy in the world.” These people come to understand that the reason they can’t stop the destruction is that the U.S. has become an oligarchy, run by the corporate few who ignore the rights and will of the people.

This movement is building as you read this, not just in this country but around the world; this film shows how and where it all began.

Free; donations will be accepted.

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