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In Search of The Living Buddha

Shovels ground into the four-foot high mound of mud in the road. Several cars were piled either on top or in front of the lump, freshly formed by a sudden landslide following a rainstorm. This was only a minor obstacle in our two-day journey through Sichuan Province to Da Ze Temple ("Temple of the Great Rule"), a small monastery in a remote region bordering Tibet. Our group consisted of over 20 people, mostly educated young or middle-aged professionals from Shanghai and Sichuan, all devout followers of a Living Buddha, or Huo Fo, whom they called "master."

They represented a growing contingent of people in Chinese society who have both the resources and the will to pursue something beyond material existence. Overwhelmed or disappointed with the influx of material wealth, people who came of age in the Reform Era are moving away from the drive toward wealth and toward another type of success, in which the profit margin is serenity and the chief asset is contained not in a bank but in a spiritual vision.

Seeds of Power

Settled amid rows of urban housing and apartment buildings on a busy thoroughfare of Milwaukee's north side is the Growing Power Community Food Center. What at first glance appears to be a modest roadside produce market and aging greenhouse - the last of its kind, standing in an area that was once the thriving agricultural center of the city known as Greenhouse Alley - is a pioneer meeting place and educational facility, committed not only to growing food but also to growing communities.

Nine years ago, Will Allen, a local farmer and co-director of Growing Power, Inc., tapped into a movement that was emerging from beneath the shadows of waxy apple towers and pallid wilted greens of mega-markets across the nation. However, the vision of providing a community-based education center was never a part of his original plan. "I bought this place for my own selfish reasons, to sell my farm produce," he explains. His main desire was to expose his family to the pride and integrity he associated with farming, as he had experienced it first-hand as a child growing up in rural Maryland.

Legacies of Resistance: A History of Community Based Organizations in the U.S.

It happens somewhere in America almost every day. On Chicago's South Side, dozens of elderly folks gather outside the power company's gates before dawn to block utility trucks from going to shut off poor people's electricity and are arrested. In Los Angeles, African-American, Latino, and Korean bus riders, all wearing yellow t-shirts and chanting, march one week against poor public transportation, and the next against the war in Iraq.

Despite the supposed lack of class conflict in the United States, hardly a day passes without angry crowds of ordinary people confronting the elites whose decisions affect their lives. In organizing terminology, these groups are frequently called community-based organizations, or CBO's. From national networks like ACORN and the Industrial Areas Foundation to locally based groups like Direct Action for Rights and Equality in Providence or the Bus Riders' Union in Los Angeles, these groups share a particular set of organizing methods first developed in the 1930s.

Warren County, Ohio: most successful voter registration drive in American political history, or stuffing the ballot box

Warren County, a traditional Republican stronghold northeast of Cincinnati, came to national attention on election night. While the nation awaited returns from Ohio, the state that would decide the election, county officials locked down the administrative building and prohibited all independent observers from watching the vote count.

An analyst who has all the vote data for 2000 and 2004 by precinct in several Ohio counties did a detailed analysis by precinct of the huge increase in Bush votes and margin in Warren county. This county first did a lockdown to count the votes, then apparently did another lockdown to recount the votes later- resulting in an even bigger Bush margin and very unusual new patterns.

Several very unusual patterns were evident in the history and the vote totals by precinct. The analyst concludes:

Doing What Comes Naturally

Food and its distribution have been the spark for more riots, revolutions, and political movements than anything else you can name. Still, in a rich country such as ours, food can ebb and flow as a political issue. The mid-1970s, however, was a time when food was in the forefront of many people's political work. Rainbow Grocery Cooperative started as part of an ambitious food system in 1975 that sought to incorporate collective stores, producers, and distributors into one big counter-cultural network that would destroy corporate agribusiness by providing healthier, less processed, cheaper food alternatives.

While almost all of the food collectives that made up that network have collapsed over the last 30 years, Rainbow has survived, becoming the largest natural foods store in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has gone from an all-volunteer staff to a 200-person worker cooperative, still dealing with the ongoing issues of how to best support its community - and who their community actually is.

Economic Power

Hooray for Jesse Jackson!

I can't tell you how thrilled I am that someone with some stature has finally said it out loud in the press that the election irregularities in Ohio and Florida are unacceptable and need to be investigated.  That the mainstream media continues to pooh-pooh the idea is frustrating beyond belief.  I have never much followed Jesse Jackson, but he is my new hero!

  I have hope again!   I'm going to send a check to your CICJ Election Protection fund to help the cause.  We can't give up!  It's too blatantly obvious that they toyed with those machines to get the outcome to contradict the exit polls.  I won't believe George Bush is my president until it's proven to me with hard, cold, TRANSPARENT polling evidence.  We need to eliminate the paperless voting machines in all future elections.  Is anyone working on that?

Politicize the CIA? You've got to be kidding!

No alien penetration, or treachery of double agents, has ever done nearly as much damage to the CIA as the infighting consequent upon the arrival of each new director, charged by his White House master with cleaning house and settling accounts with the bad guys installed by the previous White House incumbent.

            Bush's new director, former Republican Florida Rep. Porter Goss, and his team of enforcers are on a rampage through the corridors of CIA headquarters at Langley. Goss was once an undercover CIA officer, so there's probably a personal edge to his mission of revenge, as he strikes back at the dolts who nixed his expense accounts or poured scorn on his heroic endeavors in the field.

            But Goss's most pressing task is to exact retribution for the stories emanating from the CIA in the months before the election suggesting that the agency's measured assessments of the supposed WMD presence in Iraq were perverted by the war faction headed by (Vice) President Cheney.

Requiem for two hogs

The Free Press regrets to announce that the grand old hog, Iggy Fitrakis, and his mischevious stepbrother, Winston Mogg-Way, both passed away in October at the age of 13. Both elderly men lived four years longer than most pet pot-bellied pigs and were the equivalent of 90-year-olds in swine years.

Free Press Editor Bob Fitrakis adopted Iggy as a young porker, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Bob immediately immersed Iggy in the world of social justice activism and politics as he volunteered the little guy in a “Kiss a Pig” contest for charity. During the Fitrakis for Congress campaign in 1992, Iggy sported a “Fight Back with Fitrakis!” T-shirt on a campaign commercial and his photo appeared in In These Times.

A frank discussion with Franken

The more politically savvy will know Al Franken from his radio show on Air America, while the Saturday Night Live fans may remember him from his hilarious self-help character Stuart Smalley and his behind the scenes award-winning writing. Both contact points are real touchstones which reveal his wicked satirical genius. Franken is at once mischievous and intelligent.

To illustrate the point, he recently pulled a prank that received the attention of John Ashcroft. Franken sent a note to 27 senior Bush administration officials on the letterhead of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. The mailing list included the U.S. Attorney General himself. The letter asked each to “share a moment when you were tempted to have sex but were able to overcome your urges.” The stories would allegedly be used in a book about public school abstinence programs called “Savin’ It!” No doubt the dour Ashcroft was less than pleased.

Drug War Briefs: Voters nationwide embrace marijuana law reform proposals

Voters nationwide approved numerous ballot proposals liberalizing marijuana laws, including a statewide measure in Montana legalizing the use of medicinal cannabis for medical purposes, and a citywide proposal in Oakland mandating police to make the prosecution of pot offenses the city’s “lowest law enforcement priority.”

While this year’s election was not a clean sweep for marijuana law reform initiatives, voters backed the majority of proposals put before them, particularly on the municipal level.

In Oakland, California, 64 percent of voters approved Measure Z, which directs the Oakland Police Department to make the “investigation, citation, and arrest for private adult cannabis offenses the lowest law enforcement priority, effective immediately upon passage of this ordinance.” Measure Z also mandates the city of Oakland “to tax and regulate the sale of cannabis for adult use, so as to keep it off the streets and away from children and to raise revenue for the city, as soon as possible under state law.”

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