ASKING THE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

This painting, of the Earth renewed, was sent to me this morning by a woman in Arkansas who just saw our space video, Arsenal of Hypocrisy, on Free Speech TV. They keep running it from time to time and I always hear from some folks who saw it. The video, made in 2003, still holds up well and has turned out to be the greatest educational tool we ever came up with.

I am in a bit of a surly mood this morning. The signs of corporate domination are all around us. I just read an email by Ted Glick who is on his 19th day of fasting around the climate change issue. He told the story about a Congressman who said we have "41 years" to deal with global warming so not to worry......Ted ran right up to the guys office in Washington and asked to see him...."he's not here" Ted was told so he said he would just sit and wait for him.....eventually the guy showed up and they had a "spirited" discussion.....but in the end the politician wants to make sure we give sufficient "incentives" to the corporations to cover their costs in making changes......once again the rich come out on top of the heap.

And then there was the Senate hearing on Health Care the other day in Washington where Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) chaired the meeting with a panel of more than a dozen insurance company executives testifying and no one giving the single-payer position. For the first 6 1/2 minutes of the hearing eight people (some of whom were doctors) stood up and spoke out loudly from the audience in favor of single-payer and they were hauled off by the cops. Good on them.

One of my sisters called yesterday, I have five of them, and she told me a funny story about how she had just called the White House and asked to speak to President Bush. "I'm sorry madam but Bush is no longer our president, Mr. Obama is now the president" she was told. Well, my sister told the man on the other end of the phone, "You'd never know it by the expanding war and corporate bank giveaways that Obama is now doing. This isn't what he promised during the campaign." My sister told me she just wanted me to know that she is reading my blog. Good on you younger sister. I am proud of you. She told me that folks are angry out there in Central Florida.

I think she is right and they are mad here in Maine and all across the country and all around the world too about the corporate domination of all of our governments. I hear the same kind of stories and rage daily coming from South Korea, Japan, Australia, England, and beyond.

The question is how do we get out from under this corporate drowning of our democracy? How do we get the people to make a historic move to take back our governments before they completely turn us once again into serfs and slaves? These are the questions we need to be talking about in our local communities.

A great Italian organizer, trying to get the people of Sicily to stand up against the domination by the Mafia, realized he had to start from the beginning. The people had lost their sense of their own humanity. So he gathered them and asked them this one simple question: "What is the difference between you and a tick?"

What is the job of a human being today? What is our role on this Mother Earth?