Well, I've know for some time about this website and have decided to check it out. I've been lurking for a bit already and recognize that some of you are former/current DUers. I am also a DUer of 3 years and participate daily in GD but would prefer not to reveal my DU nick publicly here for reasons I'm sure you can all understand. I have had conversations with a couple of you, chlamor being one before he was TSed a couple weeks or so ago.

The reason I am here is because I have learned that DU can be a very chaotic place, though I personally have not sustained any significant damage there. Well, except that exchange with cali earlier today, which I feel I handled well enough, but I digress. And, here lately, it seems as if DU has been drifting more and more to the right of my own personal views. Progressives and progressive ideals seem to be under attack from certain quarters. Gay rights issues are under attack and the Obama praise is sickening, to name a couple of problems I see. Though I am not myself gay, I believe in equal rights for all, including marriage! I voted for Obama both in the primaries and in the general election. During the campaign I managed to manuever myself close enough to him at Reunion Arena in Dallas to deliver the following message:

"Senator Obama, I just want you to know that I trust you and your message of change. I am counting on you to advance progressive ideals including repealing DADT and advancing gay rights, as well as ending these immoral wars."

It was a quick exchange. I had managed to position myself in the midst of the Dallas City Council members, between the rostrum and the exit. I was at the rail and he was coming toward me when I was tapped on the shoulder. A young girl explained that she was there to get the story for her high school newspaper and asked if I minded she take my place on the rail in order to get a picture with the Senator. I, of course, obliged and was asked to snap the picture of them. That's when I gave him my message and as I was handing the young lady her camera, the Senator's response was:

"Thanks for having faith in me. I will try not to let you down."

Well, he has let me down. At that time, I was mesmerized and hypnotized and still naive enough about the ways of the political world (I woke up after 9/11) to fall for all the glamour and rhetoric. I keep telling myself to give it more time but I just can't ignore the fact that he's just the new boss, same as the old boss.

I have much more to say but it's getting late. Before I go I'd like to ask: how is PI different from DU? What are you guys all about? What are the issues you care most about?

Thanks for allowing me a few moments of your time. :)

What is this place about? You might take a look at this thread:

http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=102058&mesg_id=102058

It's a work in progress, as is this place.

Welcome.

Everyone (more or less) is welcome - with the understanding that this site is essentially anti-capitalist in nature. A warning: there be "Commies" here! The finer points tend to work out for themselves...

:hi:

!!!

Hey Scooch

Our idea is that things are fucked, and the only way to "unfuck" 'em, is to get to the root of the problem which is the system of exchange that not only dominates production worldwide but also dominates the lives of almost EVERY human being both in the most visceral sense that you are beholden to the rules of the system to survive but also politically, socially, and economically and ideologically. Its the Dictatorship of Capital.

And really, none of this is our "idea" that popped up in our head so much as the conclusion people arrive at, once the blinkers are removed. And as often as not, the blinkers get forcibly removed. Some DUers thinks the system is fine and just needs some fixin' up? They have that luxury..for now. Lets see how they feel after The End Of The World comes to their town.

Things change in a hurry.

Wandering around looking at the latest posts at the various boards this morning I noticed that they have something in common, there is something wrong with all of them.

One person says "OK, so what's your plan?" That always stops me in my tracks. What do they mean by "plan?" The implication is always that since "you don't have a plan" - and any plan you could come up with would then be nitpicked, or dismissed as unrealistic and impractical - we all should keep doing and thinking the same things.

Another muses endlessly and around in circles - "well I see what you are saying, and we could start a new party, but then how do we keep the new party from becoming corrupt like the old parties, and we would have to work out the platform blah blah" which all leads to "so I guess we need to consider just working to influence the existing party and politicians and not go off the deep end here into fantasy land."

Another says that they are not worried because they figure they have 30 years to convince people about "the truth" - that there were no planes on 911 and the media faked everything on behalf of the PTB.

If we can step back a ways and get some perspective - say we were living 100 years from now and could come back and read the posts, almost all of the posts (and the things people are saying offline are the same) I think these things would be obvious:

You would never know that there is a crisis by what people are saying.

You would never know that they were anything more than disconnected observers of events.

You would have no sense that they care much about what is happening.

(a slant rhyme)

Only, its NOT sophistry since the case they make and the arguments and protestations that accompany it are so asinine, so transparently desperate -- desperate to justify the status quo, not desperate for relief or change -- that calling it "sophistry" would be only serve to unduely flatter their kissass-ery.

For them there is no crisis other than in the most detached sense, and they only care about what is happening with the same detachment.

Being a kissass pays, until it doesn't.

I see this site as a place for those who are resistant to the status quo. I worked on the Obama campaign too, and there are others here who did. I guess it was a last ditch effort for "change" and we all know how that's turning out. Increased war, bailouts for the banking, pharmaceutical, and health care companies (who are pretty high on the Fortune 500 and really don't need the "help"), the list goes on and on.

"Issues" are a distraction. Those are the talking points the status quo throws out there to keep labor disorganized. Abortion, gun rights, gay marriage - they'll pump up whatever they can in the mainstream media to divert attention from economics. So we discuss economics here. Well, I don't because it makes my head hurt, but there is an excellent thread on capital if you're so inclined.

Since there don't seem to be too many people actively resisting (and if you do on other websites you're booted pretty quick), this is where we're building it. Welcome aboard.

Check this out from this morning...

Most political arguments don't really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they're argued. They're about human preferences -- for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact. On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we're on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I'm always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.

That's why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly, taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That's why, from the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the correct course for our health-care system: a single-payer model like the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to digest. That's undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.

Instead, we're fighting hard over a much less exalted set of reforms that represent a substantial shift, but not a tectonic one. You could -- and I do -- despise the insurance industry and Big Pharma for blocking progress, but they're part of the game. Doubtless we should change the rules, so they represent a far less dominant part of it. But if that happens, it, too, will undoubtedly occur piece by piece, not all at once.

Moving by increments: it frustrates the hell out of many of us, and sometimes it's truly disastrous. (I just watched Bill Moyers' amazing recent broadcast of the LBJ tapes in the run-up to the full-scale escalation of the Vietnam War, where the president and his advisors just kept moving the numbers up a twitch at a time until we were neck deep in the Big Muddy.) Usually, however, incrementalism, whatever you think of it, lends a kind of stability to the conduct of our affairs -- often it has a way of setting the stage for the next move.

We may have to wait years for the next round of health-care reform and, in the meantime, doubtless many people will suffer, but here's the one thing we know: what we don't do now doesn't foreclose future progress. In fact, it may make it more likely -- if, after all, people grow comfortable with the idea of a "public option," then the next time around the insurance industry won't be able to make actual, honest-to-God public medicine seem so scary.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/144400/why_copenhagen_may_be_a_disaster?page=entire

About Bill McKibben
Click here for the downloadable press kit

An American environmentalist and writer, Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign. This October 24, 350.org is organizing the 350 International Day of Climate Action, with thousands of events planned at iconic places around the world. Bill frequently writes about global warming, alternative energy, and the risks associated with human genetic engineering. Beginning in the summer of 2006, he led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history. McKibben is active in the Methodist Church, and his writing sometimes has a spiritual bent.

Bill grew up in suburban Lexington, Massachusetts. He was president of the Harvard Crimson newspaper in college. Immediately after college he joined the New Yorker magazine as a staff writer, and wrote much of the "Talk of the Town" column from 1982 to early 1987. He quit the magazine when its longtime editor William Shawn was forced out of his job, and soon moved to the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

His next book, The Age of Missing Information, was published in 1992. It is an account of an experiment: McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable tv on the Fairfax, Virginia system (at the time among the nation's largest) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools, and was reissued in a new edition in 2006.

Subsequent books include Hope, Human and Wild, about Curitiba, Brazil and Kerala, India, which he cites as examples of people living more lightly on the earth; The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation, which is about the Book of Job and the environment; Maybe One, about human population; Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, about a year spent training for endurance events at an elite level; Enough, about what he sees as the existential dangers of genetic engineering; Wandering Home, about a long solo hiking trip from his current home in the mountains east of Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont back to his longtime neighborhood of the Adirondacks.

In March 2007 McKibben published Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It addresses what the author sees as shortcomings of the growth economy and envisions a transition to more local-scale enterprise.

In late summer 2006, Bill helped lead a five-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming that some newspaper accounts called the largest demonstration to date in America about climate change. Beginning in January 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation's history. A guide to help people initiate environmental activism in their community coming out of the Step It Up 2007 experience entitled Fight Global Warming Now was published in October 2007 and a second day of action on climate change was held the following November 3.

March 2008 saw the publication of The Bill McKibben Reader, a collection of 44 essays written for various publications over the past 25 years.

Bill is a frequent contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board member and contributor to Grist Magazine.

Bill has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He has honorary degrees from Green Mountain College, Unity College, Lebanon Valley College and Sterling College.

Bill currently resides with his wife, writer Sue Halpern, and his daughter, Sophie, who was born in 1993, in Ripton, Vermont. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

Local products support local economies. Buying products from local growers, farmers and food artisans keeps money in the community, supporting the local economy.

For a hundred years we've been steadily extending the supply lines of our economy, becoming ever more globalized. But some have begun to question that trend, and even to form the foundations of a newer, more local economy. The main reasons are two-fold: our ever-growing globe-spanning economy is increasingly vulnerable to the ecological disruption it is causing, with global warming the prime example; and despite record affluence Americans report ever-growing feelings of disconnection and loss of community, trends that can only be reversed if we manage to rebuild local institutions that draw people together.

To wit, the farmer's market: energy-efficient local food, and the average shopper has ten times as many conversations as a supermarket shopper. No wonder they're the fastest-growing part of our food economy. Now we need to get going on other sectors too.

Tips for Launching a Local Business Alliance

The following forms provide tips for independent booksellers interested in initiating a local business alliance, but they can be adapted by any local business owner interested in uniting the other local businesses in a community and forming an alliance to local merchants and service providers.

Tips for Launching a Local Business Alliance [PDF]
Tips for Promoting Localism in Your Bookstore [PDF]

http://www.billmckibben.com/pdfs/introduce-residents.pdf
http://www.billmckibben.com/pdfs/tips-local-bookstore.pdf

"It's anarchy in here, ANARCHY I tell ya!"

"Now children I want you all to get back in your seats this minute!"

distilled liberal horseshit of almost unimaginable purity. Stability is the watch word, just as it is in business. Though in this case it is stability in the comfortable lives of these middle class eunuchs, any and all is tolerable if not permissible as long as their boat isn't rocked.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ELzxsAuMnuI/Sk5UF5vExfI/AAAAAAAABAs/6w4oPuqlxdg/s400/224-047~The-Three-Stooges-Posters.jpg

Just tryin' to help the common man fight off the vice grip of the robber barons...

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ZP1S6Myct3U/Sc2vqkwOnKI/AAAAAAAAA4U/vcMIwy58JDk/3stooges%5B2%5D.jpg

since I doubt his mumbling would be intelligible, whatwith his lips glued to the bosses butt and all

(sorry, I guess its bad jokes day..but on the plus side its still more entertaining than Jay Leno)

:) j/k

This guy is an important somebody!!

Are you trying to alienate potential friends and allies?

so I mean, I kinda HAVE to take them before February ;)

Things are so chaotic and disorganized that I can never find it.

He told me he'd put it back where it belonged...

:blush:

I told you and told you and told you - don't let the Kid play with that anarchy. He'll poke his eye out, if he doesn't burn the whole place down.

we really oughta be more clear on these things..

Oops?

Also, since I am on a pun kick..an archy? Which archy? Malarky?