At last our dying Mother Earth has taken center stage.

Thanks to Al Gore's global concert, the major media are finally filling with coverage of the climate crisis. It all comes with a dire dual realization: our economy will collapse, and we could all die, if something drastic is not done.

But what?

There are many piecemeal formulas out there. But there's also a holistic vision of a post-pollution civilization that is clear, absolute and all-encompassing.

It's a "Solartopia" built around a democratic, green-powered millennium. It is as simple as it is necessary:

Technologically, the vision rests on four pillars:

1. Total renunciation of all fossil and nuclear fuels. In a sustainable, survivable future, they are a 20th Century pox, neither green nor clean.

2. All-out conversion to renewable energy, led by the "Solartopian Trinity" of wind, solar and bio-fuels. Mother Earth gives us the natural power we need.

“America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
—John Quincy Adams

While it certainly was not his intent, Adams’ assertion serves to remind us of a truth revealed by vast oceans of tears, torrential rivers of blood, and formidable piles of human remains. Leaving murder, mayhem, and misery in its wake, America does “go abroad,” but not, as Adams noted, “in search of monsters to destroy.” What Adams failed to perceive, despite living in the midst of the Native American genocide and the abject evil of chattel slavery, is that America is the monster.

Yet like most monsters that exist outside the boundaries of imagination, the printed word, celluloid, or digital imagery, the United States and its denizens ostensibly appear rather harmless and mundane. In fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that a fair number of people still perceive us as downright heroic, cloaked as we are in our beguiling raiment of freedom and democracy.

On the 5th Anniversary of the Downing Street Meeting and the same day as a Dem Prez candidates debate in the evening on CNN, Youtube, and Google, July 23, 2007, Cindy Sheehan plans to lead a delegation to Congressman John Conyers' office in DC to demand impeachment. We will be willing to risk arrest. Let's bring a crowd!

This is part of a march that Cindy and others are making from Texas to New York. The march may make stops at the district offices of other House Judiciary Committee Members, such as Rick Boucher, Mel Watt, and Bobby Scott.

You can organize a meeting, protest, honk-a-thon, or sit-in at your Congress Member's office. One way to get organized is with this system. You can find events and create them here. And you can meet people in Facebook.

We need a nonviolent revolution to compel our Congress Members to revive our Constitution. Sitting in their offices and reading the Constitution out loud, if enough of us do it, may save our democracy.

I remember John Perkins.  He was a real jerk.  A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit.  

This was two decades ago.  The early 1980s. I wore sandals, uncombed hair down to my cheap collar and carried a busted ring-binder filled with honest calculations and sincere analysis.  It was Economic Hit Man Perkins vs. Economic Long-Hair Palast.  I didn't stand a chance.  The EHM was about to put a political bullet hole through me wider than a silver dollar.

CNN allowed the eight Democratic presidential campaigns to vote: Should CNN continue to place its preferred candidates together in the center of the stage in order to keep the candidates it ignores off camera at the edges, or should it follow the model PBS used last week and choose candidate positions on the stage by random drawing? Dodd, Gravel, and Kucinich were joined by Hillary Clinton in opting for the random drawing. Edwards and Obama were joined by Richardson and Biden in opting to stick Edwards, Clinton, and Obama in the middle. The vote was four to four. What to do? Appeal to the public? You're kidding, right? CNN cast the deciding vote itself and will stick with the podium positioning that suits its stance of choosing our elected officials for us.

The PBS debate at Howard University last week chose candidate positions on the stage by random drawing and sent a video of the random drawing to each campaign. It also gave the candidates equal time and respect, and asked them all about the same topics. Not exactly rocket science, but a pretty stunning breakthrough for a presidential campaign debate. You can watch it