End the Brutality, Find Common Purpose

We saw Michael Moore's latest movie at the community hall last night. Where to Invade Next is quite brilliant and I highly recommend it. There wasn't much in it that I was unaware of (the big hearts of Norwegians took me by surprise), but his premise and the things his interviewees had to say were really evocative -- and provocative.

However, the part of the movie that made me gasp was his clips of the sheer brutality of prison guards towards inmates in the United States. And it struck me ... if Americans of every ilk (but especially young male African Americans) are living in that kind of constant fear, no wonder they 
don't give a flying leap about climate change. 

I don't know when Canada's neighbour to the south adopted this ethos of inhumaneness, though I suspect it coincided approximately with when Exxon decided to withhold its scientists' knowledge of climate change and start funding denial.

I do know this. We need people to be afraid, very afraid. Of the climate change emergency, not each other and certainly not people in uniform. 

So here's a simple compassionate climate action:

1. Watch Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next.

2. Do what you can to end the brutality, the inhumanity, and the what seems like complete lack of sensitivity in America. Let's encourage Americans to bring some heart and humaneness back to their country.

3. Help any friends and relatives you might have in the US (and elsewhere) see that it's no longer "us and them," it's now us and us. We must work to find common purpose -- and that focus must be climate change. We're all on the same side now!

A Movie to Depress You on a Saturday Night — So Do Something

We watched Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story at the community hall last night. I don't have to tell you what the movie's about, except to say that the subtitle is a tongue-in-cheek play on words.

Moore explains (and I'm never really sure if he knows how astute he is!) why Obama had to get elected in the USA — if he hadn't, there would have been a revolt against the nightmare of capitalism and a revolution in favour of a new economic system.

One of the film's finest moments came at the beginning of the credits when DO SOMETHING was flashed across the screen. I just visited the film's website (Capitalism: A Love Story) and discovered a list of five "somethings" that can be done. Note that the last one deals with the Earth.

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand nothing less, no compromises allowed. Click here to join the fight!

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for a preview of the ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ DVD extra, ‘The Socialist Bank of — North Dakota?’)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!! [Visit Moore's Do Something webpage to see his links.]

Now let's imagine a list like this for getting people to help mitigate the global climate change emergency! What five "somethings" would we ask everyone (or even just our elected officials) to do?