News — jmblog

Friends led me on a hike up the north side of a local 9,000 foot high mountain last Sunday. We scrambled over downed trunks from an earlier forest fire. It was comforting to regularly encounter cairns on the way up. Dave was a few hundred feet ahead as we hiked down a trail in the darkening twilight. He turned on his headlight, and I complained, telling him to put it under a bushel. He came back up the trail in a rush, saying that he had encountered a moose. Someone said we should find trees to climb up to escape. We scrambled uphill away from the moose, and the moose peaceably ambled up the trail. After hiking with our headlamps for a while, we stopped to look up at the stars. Suddenly a bright meteor streaked across the sky. The Milky Way, Cygnus, and Cassiopeia stood out. Later we saw another meteor.

New "Autopsy" report says that Democrats need to focus on helping working people (white, black and brown) people and young people, Not on favors for Wall Street, hedge funds, big Pharma, health insurance companies, and huge corporations. The "Clinton-Obama crowd tilted the action away from the party’s core voter blocs—labor, people of color, and young people—in order to court suburban voters and maintain the party’s alliances with high finance and multinational corporations." "Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination." Also, the leadership refused to spend the money on state races and get out the vote efforts. Over 1,000 state legislature seats were lost under Obama. Instead Dems focused most of their money and time on the presidential races. Hillary was harmed by voter suppression, mysogyny, the antiquated electoral college bias, the media free coverage of Trump's outrages, and the corporate and right-wing funding of campaigns. But the Dem party needs to reform. Recently, the California Democratic Assembly speaker Rendon killed single-payer health care in California, ex-DNC honcho Gephardt has been blocking single-payer, DNC chair Perez has been ousting young progressives, and Pelosi has been saying that single-payer is not feasible. Obama and other Dem leaders had been buddying up with job offshorers like GE's head Immelt instead of keeping jobs in the US. Obama was trapped by the financial meltdown in 2008, but he appointed Goldman Sachs cronies to run the Treasury and bail out big banks. Sanders and Warren and Sanders keep up the good fight,but the leadership wants to keep itself leading the losing Democrats and getting power and money, rather than let in some new Democratic leaders with vision and enthusiasm. The Dem leadership doesn't want to be replaced by working people, minorities, or idealists. They would rather stay in power as leaders of the losing Democratic party even as they lose the presidency, the supreme court, and the Congress to corporate Republicans and oil companies. They would rather have the Republicans, oil companies, and large corporations in power than to lose their leadership of the Democratic party. It is normal behavior for entrenched political leaders. But it needs to be overturned. https://democraticautopsy.org/ https://democraticautopsy.org/wp-content/uploads/Autopsy-The-Democratic-Party-In-Crisis.pdf https://www.thenation.com/article/what-killed-the-democratic-party https://www.democracynow.org/2017/11/8/voters_reject_republican_candidates_as_new https://www.salon.com/2017/07/07/single-payer-falls-short-in-california-at-least-for-now-and-activists-are-angry

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112017/fracking-chemicals-safety-epa-health-risks-water-bush-cheney?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialHistory of

Five California cites have sued the oil, gas, and coal companies. 50% of the climate breakdown and 30 % of the sea level rise is due to these fossil fuel fools.

www.ucsusa.org/fa17-first-principles#.WgYZQFtSzct

www.ucsusa.org/fa17-ideas-in-action#.WgYZ6ltSzcs

KGNU radio interviewed Will Falk, who has sued on behalf of the Colorado River in order to protect it from pollution, and diversion for oil and gas fracking and industrial agriculture. The Colorado River is suing the state of Colorado in Federal court this month in Denver. This the KGNU interview with Will Falk that aired on 11-7-17 https://www.kgnu.org/apublicaffair/11/8/2017 . You need to skip to 25 minutes into the interview, as the first half hour is about something else. It's a whole hour, starting at 8:35, but the interview with Falk starts around 9:00. Here are 3 articles by Will Falk about the Colorado River and the rights of nature. https://catalystmagazine.net/rights-nature-movement https://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/09/why-does-the-colorado-river-need-to-sue-for-rights https://sandiegofreepress.org/2017/10/the-rights-of-nature-and-the-power-of-law Here is a link to the Boulder Rights of Nature group: http://boulderrightsofnature.org/resources/action-alerts