(More public transportation, fewer cars. This should have been the focus rather than the Big Dig. - promoted by eli_beckerman)
The Urban Ring is a planned public transport service to encircle central Boston, connecting the existing subway line 'grid' so as to allow quicker routes around Boston's center. It is expected to move 40,000 passengers each day in phase I, to about 275,000 per day in phase III in 2025, speeding commutes and relieving central Boston's transit system congestion.
Because most business doesn't know now what to do with capital, interest rates are near historic lows, so it's a great time to raise building capital via municipal bond sales.
And it is a great time to hire transit system builders, amidst this seemingly endless recession, and to thus stimulate the greater Boston economy.
The land-owners of the to-be-connected new stops on the Urban Ring stand to gain tremendously in financial terms from the Ring's connecting these sites right to the existing subway and busway system, and it would thus be fair to partly fund Urban Ring construction by taxing the increase in land value created at and near these new stops with special taxation zones. This funding method is addressed at: http://www.vtpi.org/smith.pdf
(Interesting suggestion, though I'm not sure it's the right approach. - promoted by eli_beckerman)
I just stumbled over this group, just after stumbling over Blue Mass Group, where I recently posted on how Mass might raise revenues now.
I was surprised to discover little support among BMG respondents for raising Mass revenues now.
While I see Mass education, police and fire as in desperate straits, others at BMG saw a Mass state revenue returning to the historical 15% of state GDP
as healthy.
I'm curious - Here at Green Mass Group, what do we think about the existing level of taxation?
("We must move past indecision to action. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beyond Vietnam - promoted by eli_beckerman)
Ten years ago, this blogger had the honor of spending several weeks among the Oglala Lakota at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. At the time, the Tokala Oyate (or "Kit Fox Society," which serve as contemporary tribal warriors) had physically occupied a section of Badlands National Park that 'overlaps' the Pine Ridge Reservation. The occupation occurred after the National Park Service proved unable to prevent the looting of bones from Lakota graves on a landform called the Stronghold Table. Through much of modern history, the Lakota people have displayed a willingness to put themselves at risk and physically intervene in instances of social injustice.
This week was no exception.
On Monday, residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation learned through social media contacts that enormous trucks loaded with oil pipeline components related the Keystone Pipeline/Canadian Tar Sands Project were headed towards the reservation and set to pass through the Oglala Tribal lands. "We did not know where the equipment was going, but we knew that these trucks were too huge, too heavy, and too dangerous to pass our roads. We thought the equipment may be going to the Tarsands oil mine, or other oil mines in Canada," Lakota matriarch Debra White Plume said.
You have to sign in and thus provide your email address, and you may use all 3 votes to support the UMass project.
From John Gerber, Professor of Sustainable Food and Farming at UMass Amherst:
The UMass Permaculture Project was selected from among 1400 nominations as one of 15 finalists in the White House Campus Change Challenge. After a week of online voting we were leading the nation (until yesterday), when the University of Arkansas got a story in USA Today and picked up thousands of votes. We believe that with a last minute "push" we can retake the lead in the balloting.
If you are willing please vote for us here and ask a few friends to help us out.
Our students have done a terrific job trying to change the culture on campus to be more supportive of local food and farming. This would be quite a tribute to their hard work.
New York City appears to be going all out to win a world award for racism and bigotry. On February 24 the New York Post published a cartoon (1) depicting three men with long noses, long beards, turbans, and dishdashas assembling bombs in a locked upstairs tenement room. One of the men has a bomb strapped to his waist. He is looking out a window at an New York Police Department car in the street. The cartoon shows him speaking into the phone: "Hello, AP Press? . . . I'd like to register a complaint against the N.Y.P.D. for spying on us."
Vote in the Green-Rainbow Primary on "Super" Tuesday, March 6.
On March 6 you will have a chance to vote for peace, compassion, economic justice, women's rights and environmental sanity. All you have to do is go to the polls and take a Green-Rainbow ballot. This opportunity is open to any voter who is registered in the Green-Rainbow Party or is un-enrolled (independent).
By taking a Green-Rainbow ballot, you're saying no to politics as usual. You'll be joining the growing number of voters who refuse to endorse bailouts, sellouts, negative advertising, trashing the environment, troop surges, attacks on Social Security and Medicare, piling college debt on students, state-sponsored assassinations, and sending American jobs overseas with 'free trade' treaties.
(Where food goes, so goes the nation. - promoted by eli_beckerman)
On Monday January 30th, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) held a public meeting at Suffolk University, halfway between the State House and City Hall, to change the Boston zoning laws to allow for agriculture throughout the city, making it easier for local residents to grow and sell fresh, healthy, foods in Boston and the greater Boston Metropolitan Area. Nearly 300 people attended. Boston currently has about 150 community gardens serving 3000 gardeners, the highest per capita of any US city. Now the city is trying to figure out how to change zoning to increase urban agriculture beyond gardening and household use into businesses and economic development.
Mayor Menino, the newly appointed chair of the food policy task force for the US Conference of Mayors, opened the meeting and the keynote address was given by Will Allen, Founder and CEO of Growing Power Inc. (http://www.growingpower.org), non-profit based in Milwaukee, WI which also does work in Chicago, Detroit, Ghana, and around the world. Growing Power addresses social justice and food access issues through building local agriculture and farm-based businesses and Mr. Allen won the 2008 McArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant for his work on urban farming and sustainable food production. Growing Power has grown an underutilized 2-acre lot into a farm that produces enough produce, eggs, honey, fish and other meats to feed more than 10,000 local residents and employs more than 100 people on 20 farms, 13 farmstands, and a year round CSA.
(Keep hootin', hollerin' and howlin', Scott! - promoted by eli_beckerman)
ASKING OUR TOWNS TO AFFIRM THAT LOCAL ENERGY POLICIES WILL SHAPE THE GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS: THESE POLICIES SHOULD INCLUDE SEEKING MEANINGFUL MEASURABLE ACTIONS TO DEVELOP ALTERNATIVE ENERGIES OF CONSERVATION, SOLAR, AND WIND, FOCUSING ON COMMUNITY OWNERSHIP.
Following the issuance of the Lenox Wind Energy Research Panel's final report, the Board of Selectmen held a public hearing on February 27 and then voted 4-0 on February 29 not to pursue the project as it was outlined in a feasibility study it had received from Weston Solutions.
Lenox will continue to develop solar projects and conservation programs. I will continue to argue that wind energy development should not be taken off the table, even while acknowledging that the feasibility study for wind energy that was prepared by Weston Solutions was not thorough enough for any actionable proposal to be voted upon.
I submitted the following statement to the Lenox Board of Selectment on February 28, 2012. It includes a call to affirm the town's commitment to reducing carbon emissions through a town meeting vote and by incorporating such an affirmation into the charge of an Energy Committee.
("I hope we shall crush... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." --Thomas Jefferson - promoted by eli_beckerman)
The Green-Rainbow Party offers the example in Massachusett politics of not accepting corporate financial influence. As I noted ten days ago, Beacon Hill's Joint Committee on the Judiciary is holding a public hearing tomorrow, for which I submitted the following testimony today, in support of an effort to amend the US Constitution.
Great to see some progressive media giving Jill some attention. I'm pretty disappointed that Democracy NOW! has ignored her strengthening campaign.
Stein made the case for her Green New Deal and the 25 million jobs it would create for the same price tag as the first Federal bailout of about $700 billion.
We are on the ballot in: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia
...
Next major priorities include: New Mexico and Nevada
...
We are currently petitioning in: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai'i, Iowa, Indiana, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia
(We the People indeed - promoted by eli_beckerman)
The Citizens United decision worsened an already terrible situation of big-money influence in democracy. I support amending the US constitution to remedy the situation.
Such amendments require proactive purposeful resolve by individual state representatives, whose legislative bodies must ultimately ratify what Congress passes.
Please join me in preparing testimony in support of a piece of legislation currently on Beacon Hill for a public hearing later this month. Read on for details...
When elected to Beacon Hill I will lead in that resolve by example, advocacy, and action.
Green Mass Group is an online forum for Green thought and collective action in Massachusetts. It is a community forum for justice, sustainability, democracy and health in the Commonwealth and beyond.
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Quotes
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty--power is ever stealing from the many to the few... The hand entrusted with power becomes... the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
--Abolitionist Wendell Phillips, 1852
"Last year Evergreen, a Massachusetts company, agreed to establish their first-ever United States based manufacturing facility here in Massachusetts. They did so, or are doing so, at Devens. They have now agreed and chosen to triple their size at Devens. Their next phase of expansion, right here in Massachusetts, a signature company in a signature sector, and we congratulate all of the folks at Evergreen and look forward to continuing to work with you...
We made a personal commitment to Evergreen for the sake of Evergreen, but also because we wanted to show that there are ways in which state government, in working together with private industry and with the utility companies, could begin to create a different kind of environment, a different kind of business climate here, to grow that sector, and it is happening. It's happening. Evergreen is one of the most prominent examples, but there are a whole host of examples."
--Governor Deval Patrick, April 7, 2008, boasting about state investment in Evergreen.
and Now...
"Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, completing a stunning reversal of fortune for a high-flying alternative-energy company that once seemed to herald a new era for the Massachusetts economy... At its peak, Evergreen employed roughly 900 people locally and attracted more than $50 million in state support, as its stock price soared above $100 a share.
Yesterday, Evergreen's stock closed at 18 cents. The company shuttered its manufacturing plant in Devens earlier this year and now has only 85 employees left. Massachusetts is one of its top creditors, owed $1.5 million in rent."
--Erin Ailworth, Boston Globe, August 16, 2011
