Green is good for business. Not greenwash, GREEN. By working with nature rather than despoiling nature, Ray Anderson has led his company to high levels of success and profitability.
Ray Anderson died this week, of cancer. And the cancer is not incidental to this story. Ray was a friend and an inspiration. A lot of people talk about the environment. Ray did something. A lot of people say that we have to choose between a livable environment and a prosperous economy. Ray showed them that they were wrong, and he did it in an industry which is one of the most toxic around. Though it is impossible to know with absolute certainty precisely what causes a cancer, Ray spent much of his early career in the old-fashioned carpet industry … one which used (and still uses) bioactive, petroleum-based chemicals to manufacture the carpets. There’s a very good chance that long-term exposure to those chemicals caused the cancer that killed Ray.
January 20, 2021 we will know if you believed Black Lives Matter. Did it or didn’t it?
It’s not too late between now and November 2, 2020. Will you ask your friends and relatives if they voted? If they haven’t encourage them to vote a straight blue ticket during this election.
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post 10/19/2014 02:37 am ET Updated Dec 18, 2014
Ebola’s the open secret no one wanted to know about. This is anything but a new story. The Hot Zone caused a stir early in the ‘90s’; Virus Hunter toward the end. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is a chronic problem with the media. Headlines moved on to the next crisis de jour. Our program chose to look beyond those headlines. What we found is eerily prescient — virologists (people who study viruses) imploring us, begging us, to pay attention*.
What America, and therefore the world, got instead was the result of virulent Republican loathing of our government (except when subsidizing or protecting big business). Public funds plummeted while private funding was living down to its promise. In this cut-government-at-any-cost world, we’re now paying a deadly price for the stunning cuts. One example suffices: The 2013 Republican orchestrated “sequestration” required an National Institutes of Health across-the-board $1.55 billion cut in every area of medical research.
*We could easily have titled this piece “We Were Warned, and Warned, and Warned…” In 1997 we broadcast a program with Dr. C.J. Peters, then Chief of Special Pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control (and author of Virus Hunter).
Paula Gordon and Bill Russell: Conversations from People on the Leading Edge
Don’t sit back and wait for the Supreme Court to fix things, Mr. Dean warns. It is by far the most secretive of the branches of government, and the most dangerous.
John Dean, John Dean: A Very Different Country, The Paula Gordon Show, recorded September 17, 2007. in Atlanta, Georgia, US.
Paula Gordon and Bill Russell: Conversations with People from the Leading Edge
Republicans have broken America’s government by gaming the system, says John Dean of “Watergate” fame, and author of Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. He says his hopes for a reversal rest with the American people — we hate being suckered.
“People know when they’re getting screwed. When there’s a breakdown in fairness, people get it.”
He’s deeply concerned that authoritarian Republican leaders and followers are intent on a radical transformation of the United States.
“What’s interesting is Conservatives once were such sticklers for the rules,” says this former Goldwater Republican. “They prided themselves on their adherence to playing by the game’s proper procedures. That’s not true anymore, from the way they run government to being intellectually dishonest and making arguments that are fallacious — arguments for the nation going to war, for torture, for illegal wiretapping — very radical rulings.”
Before he wrote Broken Government, he revealed the strong authoritarian streak among leaders and followers of America’s extreme political and religious right wing in Conservatives Without Conscience. The second book in his unintended trilogy, he called Worse than Watergate.
“It was actually a misnomer. It should have been Much Worse Than Watergate. Nobody was tortured during Watergate. Nobody was killed under the so-called Watergate abuses. Millions of people weren’t subject to electronic surveillance under Watergate. It was just minor if you compare the two.”
And the good news?
“Give the public solid information — the things they don’t know about — and they’ll make the right decisions.”
Kurtis Robinson, representing the Spokane NAACP, spoke at SCAR’s last general meeting via video. Listen to his well reasoned arguments on why Spokane does not need a new jail. (SCAR Spokane Community Against Racism)
Email government officials and council members to reallocate egregious police budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial injustice via this crowd-sourced tool.
American policing tactics are rooted in white supremacy, fear, and violence. Spokane is not exempt from this, even though our mayor, police chief, county commissioners, and sheriff refuse to admit the true nature of the problem. Support substantive change now. Learn About the Platform and sign up in support
Paula Gordon and Bill Russell From the Leading Edge
Our Deadly Cocktail (excerpts)
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post, 04/18/2012 03:48 pm ET Updated Jun 18, 2012
America’s role in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman tragedy goes down as smoothly as any toxic cocktail: one part guns, one part race, one part stress, stir and duck. We’ve let ourselves become inured to guns, blind to how radically America’s changing racial composition is threatening a very old caste system, and ignorant of what is now knowable about stress. And for garnish? A deaf ear to “lead us not into temptation.”
The gun industry and their consorts among the host of extremists from our political and religious right-wing fringes have shouted down a long overdue, totally legitimate exploration of what place guns have in a society aspiring to be civil, never mind civilized. We’ve demurred when they’ve (mis)quoted the Constitution and mostly resign ourselves to sighs as a highly politicized Supreme Court majority shamelessly redefines the essence of the American Constitution.
So how do we “make sense” of Trayvon’s demise and all the factors indictable in that cruel endgame? What is the sense of America’s appetite for fear and for its purveyors, for atavistic fundamentalisms, for right-wing gun-lust, and for the irrefutably racist elements found across the nation?
We, at least, find a starting point in the actions and words of two very different men who, ironically, share a name.
First, think of George Zimmerman as an Everyman among the countless people, women as well as men, seduced by America’s gun-toting, right-wing agenda. No gun, different story. No “Stand Your Ground,” different story.
Then listen again to what Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, so presciently told us decades ago: “He’s only a pawn in their game.” Full article
When You Pray Move Your Feet. Congressman John Lewis 1940 – 2020
From John Lewis, The Spirit of History, an interview recorded June 5, 1998, in Atlanta, Georgia, US with Paula Gordon and Bill Russell, Interviews and Conversations with People Leading from the Edge:
Young John Lewis was one of the original members of the Nashville Student Movement and the first president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.) He was arrested dozens of times in nonviolent demonstrations across the South, was on the first Freedom Ride, a leader of the 1963 March on Washington and he led the bloody Selma march which sealed passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His recently published autobiography, Walking with the Wind, is a memoir of the Civil Rights Movement.
Mr. Lewis believes The Movement showed that violence is not able to stop nonviolence. Thousands of simple, ordinary people were the key. They didn’t have resources. They followed the wisdom of an old African proverb which says, “When you pray, move your feet.” In marches and sit-ins and stand-ins, protesters prayed with their feet. In so doing, they saved America’s soul.
Congressman Lewis continues to believe in nonviolence. He continues to believe the Spirit of History calls people, as it called him. When that Spirit calls, he says, you have to follow. And you’d better be prepared. No one, he insists, can sit on the sidelines.
Paula Gordon, Huffington Post 11/02/2014 04:17 am ET Updated Jan 01, 2015
The conflict between people and corporations is not inevitable. Actually, it’s stupid. This conflict is the result of overreach by (some) large corporations and the Republican Party.
This conflict is now so threatening because of the power given to corporations by a series of misguided Supreme Court decisions. Those decisions have bestowed on corporations and the rich the power to use their massive and concentrated wealth to undermine our Constitution, pervert our laws and enfeeble our people. That is a genuine, lethal threat to our collective well-being. And, a mortal threat to the American experiment.
Robert Monks: Corpocracy
In his 2007 book, Corpocracy, Bob Monks presents a clear and strong case for making corporations accountable and responsible. The Supreme Court’s 2010 “Citizens United” decision unleashed an unprecedented flood of corporate money on the American political system.
