"Progressive" is not an iconic moniker for a sectarian perspective, "Progressive" is the continuity of the Universe to move from crude toward subtle, a momentum innate in and substantially exalted through the sublimity of human evolution.
This is Progressive Utilization, for flourishing the wellbeing and happiness of all, in every realm of life. Explore this magnanimous paradigm through the dedicated postings below and the menu and links to your right.
New app aims to help citizens record police brutality using cellphones
The Mobile Justice app allows users to send video directly to the local ACLU chapter where it can be reviewed by lawyers and not confiscated by authorities
A major push is on to equip police officers with body cameras but it is citizens’ cellphone footage that has helped bring cases of police killings of citizens to light. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
In an America engulfed in #BlackLivesMatter protests following the highly publicized deaths of black men and women at the hands of police officers throughout the last year, the battle for recording cameras is on.
But the question of who should carry them – whether police officers or civilians – and why remains unresolved. A government rush to arm law enforcement officers with body cameras is being matched by citizens’ routine use of cellphone video cameras during both protests and police interactions.
To help give ordinary citizens institutional and legal backing , the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has slowly been rolling out a Mobile Justice App for Android and iPhones over the last few months, specifically designed for citizens to film interactions between themselves and police.
For Justin Hansford, a 33-year-old law professor at the St Louis University School of Law, growing up black in America meant regular harassment, humiliation and being stopped for little to no reason while driving by police, he said.
It’s a set of negative experiences that were the norm for him and his fellow African Americans, he said, but the extremity of the interactions were such that they were sometimes difficult to convey to a broader public, that was either inclined to believe, or hopeful the claims were false.
Cellphone video footage is changing this.
“We’re accused of making things up. But we don’t have to make up stories. Now we just have to get the video. That’s enough,” Hansford says.
Last month, a cellphone video shot by a passerby recorded the fatal shooting of unarmed black man Walter Scott at the hands of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager. The video contradicted the incident’s police report and helped charge Slager on a first-degree murder count.
The ACLU Mobile Justice App hopes to take citizen video one step further. The app connects mobile phones directly to citizens’ local ACLU chapter, and to their team of lawyers.
Users can immediately send footage to the ACLU with a single shake of their phones. Received videos are systematically reviewed and screened for potential legal action by ACLU staff. This means users don’t risk losing footage if their phones are confiscated or destroyed by police, Jennifer Carnig with the ACLU’s New York chapter, the NYCLU, said.
The Mobile Justice App, which launched last November and has so far been adopted by ACLU chapters in Missouri, Mississippi, California, Nebraska and Oregon, was based on the success of a Stop and Frisk App, launched by the NYCLU in 2012 to tackle stop-and-frisk interactions.
Despite the fall in logged stop-and-frisk incidents in the city, the New York app has been downloaded 35,000 times and 40,000 videos have been submitted – all of which were reviewed by ACLU staff, Carnig said.
The newer ACLU app also enables users to see if they are close to another user either experiencing or witnessing a police-citizen interaction.
The app has not yet led to any need for specific legal action by the ACLU.
“We haven’t had a Rodney King incident,” Carnig says referring to the capturing on video of taxi driver Rodney King being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, whose acquittals are credited with causing the 1992 LA riots.
“But we have seen many videos that served to confirm anecdotal evidence of intimidation, disrespectful words, people being roughed up. All of those types of police interactions are violent interactions.”
So far, the app has been downloaded just under 9,000 times on Android, and 1,250 times on iPhone since it became available less than a two weeks ago. In Missouri, the state that has been the stage of many protests following the August shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the ACLU chapter says it has so far received and reviewed 600 video submissions.
Justin Hansford, a young law professor who has been active during the protests against police brutality and is part of the Ferguson legal defense committee, says the need for such an app was there.
“It’s very important that we put videos somewhere they can’t be damaged, destroyed or manipulated by government,” Hansford says.
The fatal arrest of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, is captured on cellphone video.Also vital is to have citizen-shot videos reviewed before they are uploaded to social media, says Hansford who has recently downloaded the app, as they can sometimes be used to incriminate those citizens who he says are the victims.
Sarah Rossi who is the director of policy and advocacy at ACLU’s Missouri chapter, says that the app is also an educational tool that seeks to empower citizens.
“I think that it is important for our citizens to feel comfortable filming the police and exercise their first amendment right to do so,” Rossi said. “And it is important for them to then have an organization that they can send it [the video] to whose objective it is to defend those constitutional rights.”
In Ferguson, by the time a new wave of protests started in October 2014, following the initial wave in August, police officers had already been geared up with body cameras.
But more cameras in the hands of police may not necessarily mean more transparency.
In Missouri, two bills have since been introduced in the senate and the house to stop the state from forcing police to have dashboard cameras and body cameras, and greatly – or even completely – limit access of footage from these cameras to the general public.
Hansford sees police treatment of black and brown individuals as a form of bullying, and video use by citizens as a way of beating back the bullies.
“We try and have dignity. This is about human rights and human dignity,” he says. “The videos are now showing the truth.”
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What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE
In 2010, the 500 largest companies in the United States, otherwise known as The Fortune 500, generated $10.7 trillion in sales, reaped a whopping $702 billion in profits, and employed 24.9 million people around the world.
Historically this has been good news. After all, when these corporations have invested in the productive capabilities of their U.S. employees, Americans have typically enjoyed plentiful well paying and stable jobs. That was the case a half century ago.
Unfortunately, as Bill Lazonick points out in the interview below, it’s not the case today.
For the past three decades, top executives have been rewarding themselves with mega-million dollar compensation packages while American workers have suffered an unrelenting disappearance of middle-class jobs. Since the 1990s, this hollowing out of the middle-class has even affected people with lots of education and work experience.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement correctly recognized, the concentration of income and wealth of the economic top “one percent” of society has left the rest of us largely high and dry. Corporate profits are increasingly going to share buybacks or dividend distribution, but very little is going back into research and development efforts, capital reinvestment, and employment.
Corporations, in other words, are devoting increasing amounts of their considerable and growing financial resources to redistribution rather than innovation. And they are doing so based on the justification of “increasing shareholder value.”
However, as Lazonick points out, when the shareholder-value mantra becomes the main focus for companies executives usually concentrate on avoiding taxes for the sake of higher profits and don’t think twice about permanently axing workers. They also increase distributions of corporate cash to shareholders in the form of dividends and, even more prominently, stock buybacks.
When a corporation becomes financialized in this way, the top executives no longer concern themselves with investing in the productive capabilities of employees, the foundation for rising living standards. Instead they become focused on generating financial profits that can justify ever higher stock prices – in large part because, through their stock-based compensation, high stock prices translate into megabucks for these corporate executives themselves.
It’s not a pretty state of affairs. Lazonick discusses how we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics.
Lazonick makes a very powerful case that the ideology of “maximizing shareholder value” primarily works to the benefit of the very corporate executives who make corporate resource allocation decisions, and who derive high levels of remuneration from munificent stock option awards. As for the rest of us, we’re left to fight over the crumbs.
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After centuries of psychic, social, and intellectual entrapment by religious predators constipating human evolution in favor of raucous parasitism of religious imperialism, liberation through factuality, material science, and democratic expression and disposition gained prominence around the planet. Many of today's prevailing bigotries, however, much like those of previous centuries, are now in the hands of pompous skeptics -- vicious deniers of mind and its subtleties -- determined to erase any practice, science, tradition demonstrating mind trumps matter in subtleties and influence upon life. Such is reminiscent of Old Major Chairman Mao who all but obliterated Chinese history and the evolutionary excellence Chinese ancestors have contributed to humanity, resulting in today's Chinese youth not having a clue as to who native Chinese such as Lao tze, Chuang tze are, of the influence of Buddha's teachings affecting Chinese life for millennia, or of the substantial contributions they've made through Taoism and Buddhism and their extraordinarily positive influences around the world.
Rupert Sheldrake clearly articulates properly disposed breadth of mind germane to scientific dispositions, while contrasting such healthy-mindedness with the current state of affairs by most of whom define what science is today, a nefarious dementia of intellectual and moral perversity that is the very antithesis of what science actually is.
**Editor’s Note: Reprinted with permission from Rupert Sheldrake, the ideas in this article are further explored in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery. Please also visit his website, Sheldrake.org, for more of his fascinating articles and insight into nature and human consciousness. **
The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.
Yet in the second decade of the 21st century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world, and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off with-out them: freer, more interesting, and more fun.
The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.
These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they do not. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.
The Scientific Creed
Here are the 10 core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.
1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.
2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.
3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).
Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative.
It was our local credit union that saved us. “You’re owned by your members? What’s
so odd about that? We’re owned by our members,” the president of the Kitsap Credit Union mused.
With that financing, we were able to build 30 affordable homes and a common house, and to make space available for gardens, an orchard, a playfield, and a tiny urban forest. In 1992, we moved into Winslow Cohousing, the first member-developed cohousing community in the United States.
Co-ops—just like people—can get more done together than anyone can do alone. The good news is that co-ops come in many forms and are more common than you might imagine. They are owned by workers, residents, consumers, farmers, craftspeople, the community, or any combination. What they have in common is that they circulate the benefits back to their member-owners, and these benefits ripple out to the broader community. As Marjorie Kelly explains, cooperative forms of ownership allow the well-being of people, the planet, and future generations to take priority over profits for shareholders and executives.
This is an exciting moment for cooperatives. A growing disillusionment with big banks and corporations is sparking interest in economic alternatives, and new opportunities are opening up:
• The United Steelworkers and other unions are exploring worker-ownership as a means to assure stable, living-wage jobs that can’t be outsourced to low-wage regions.
• Communities seeking alternatives to profit-driven corporate health insurance are forming health care co-ops.
• Hundreds of thousands of people who “moved their money” from Wall Street banks to local banks and credit unions now have a say in how their money is used.
• Consumers are turning to co-ops like Equal Exchange for ethically produced goods, and Equal Exchange, in turn, supports co-ops made up of farmers and producers in some of the world’s poorest regions.
These cooperatives can be powerful forces for change. Vancity, Canada’s largest credit union, targets its investments to local enter- prises that have positive impacts. It divested its holdings in Enbridge due to concerns about the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. And it adopted a living wage policy that applies to its own employees and to service providers.
Cooperative structures can strengthen an economy. For example, Italy’s Emilia Romagna region, where about a third of the economy is cooperative and has far less inequality. Most people there can find living wage jobs, and quality of life is high.
Last year, Winslow Cohousing celebrated its 20th year, and the grown sons and daughters of the early members returned to share what it meant to them to grow up in a community, surrounded by love and support.
My hope? That many more children have the opportunity to grow up in cooperative spaces; that more adults get the respect and empowerment that comes from working in cooperatives and buying from co-ops; and that over time, diverse forms of democratic ownership displace predatory capitalism as the foundation for our economy.
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From now on, the global mantra for filling market gaps is going to be, “There’s a co-op for that.” But co-ops need customers, money, and training. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation?
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, businesses, products, and services that benefit people, communities, and the planetÑinstead of a few megabanks and billionaires—have been in higher demand. The International Cooperative Alliance's recently published "Blueprint for a Cooperative Decade" lays out a long-term vision to make cooperatives not only the fastest-growing form of business but the acknowledged leader in environmental, social, and economic sustainability. From now on, the global mantra for filling market gaps and new demands, according to Eric DeLuca of the National Cooperative Business Association, is going to be, "There's a co-op for that." But co-ops—like any kind of business—need customers, money, training, political support, and help from their communities. How do we shift from business as usual to the work of cooperation? Here are a few strategies.
1. Find Money
Where do you get the money to finance a new co-op? Traditional banks are loath to lend to co-ops, often because they are unfamiliar with them or do not trust that a cooperative business model can yield profits. But there are institutions that can help.
The National Cooperative Bank (NCB) has become a leading funder for new housing, business, and consumer cooperatives. Chartered by Congress in 1978 and privatized as a member-owned financial institution in 1982, it has provided more than $4 billion in loans and investments to co-ops all over the country—from a New York City housing co-op to an organic grocery in San Francisco to a solar project at Denver International Airport. Most recently, NCB has been working with PNC Bank in Pittsburgh to allocate $13 million in loans to local co-ops.
The nonprofit Heartland Capital Strategies Network—allied with NCB and other credit unions—is another rapidly growing source of funding for cooperatives, especially for the union co-op movement. The organization has committed billions of investment dollars to profitable projects in green construction, manufacturing, affordable housing, and transportation.
McKusker's Market photo courtesy of Franklin Community Co-op.
2. Convert to a Co-op
Some cooperatives get their start from traditional sole proprietorships or corporations. This can happen, for example, when a business owner wants to retire or move on and the employees buy the business.
Franklin Community Cooperative (FCC) in Greenfield, Mass., acquired McCusker's Market, in nearby Shelburne Falls, when the owner of the longstanding natural foods store was ready to retire. A third of FCC's members lived near McCusker's. The purchase allowed FCC to keep its commitment to serve downtown Greenfield while solving its space problem at its popular flagship store. All of McCusker's Market's staff were rehired and retrained, and sales went up 15 percent during the store's first year as a cooperative. Since the purchase, the cooperative has attracted many more members all over the region.
3. Hook Up With Big Partners
Bring co-op business to the mainstays of your community—hospitals, schools, government services—which are already committed to community-scale investment and the public good. It's a mutually beneficial relationship: The co-op keeps money circulating in the community; the institution provides stable demand for the co-ops services or products.
Ohio Cooperative Solar photo courtesy of the Cleveland Foundation.
"If you can get even a small bit of a university's goods and services devoted to your co-op," says Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz, "you can go to any bank, and they'll be happy to finance you, because you've got a market."
The Evergreen Cooperative Initiative, a group of local, sustainable, and worker-owned co-ops in Cleveland, is built on a strong partnership between the co-ops and local institutions—such as Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Western Reserve University—which have a combined annual buying power of more than $3 billion.
Ohio Cooperative Solar, another Evergreen business, is in the process of installing photovoltaics at these three institutions and has also placed nearly 700 solar panels on the city hall and library rooftops in nearby Euclid. Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (a green cleaning operation) washes bed linens for Judson Retirement and McGregor Homes, two large nursing homes in the area.
The film Shift Change gives an inspiring look at worker-owned enterprises, from the Mondragón co-ops in Spain to the Arizmendi bakeries in San Francisco to Isthmus Engineering in Madison, Wis.
4. Be Co-op Curious
You can learn more about the business of sharing—how co-ops work, why they're important, how to support them, and how to start and manage one—from organizations across the country working to promote cooperative enterprise.
The Bay Area group Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES) was founded in the 1990s to help immigrant women form cooperative housecleaning services. Now they are creating toolkits for anyone looking to start a green cleaning co-op. "With all the emphasis on co-ops coming on the heels of the Occupy movement, we're seeing an increased interest right now," says Elena Fairley, who is working with WAGES as an AmeriCorps VISTA member.
College and university programs are also training the next generation of cooperative entrepreneurs. The Cooperative Teach-In is a nationwide initiative that has connected colleges, universities, and programs like AmeriCorps VISTA with cooperatives across rural and urban America.
The Teach-In uses creative tools to help participants learn the importance of cooperative economics. For example, the "Democracy Rating Warm-up Exercise," an interactive survey, allows participants to "rate the level of democracy in the institutions they interact with on a daily basis," and group discussions explore how the cooperative model differs from typical business models. And a fun way to gear up for a cooperative future is to play a round of Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.
As interest in cooperative business has grown, some young entrepreneurs have taken it upon themselves to learn more. For example, Co-cycle is a group of 15 undergraduates who crossed the country last year on their bicycles, visiting more than 70 co-op organizations and building a network of like-minded communities. "A year ago I didn't know what a cooperative was," writes Co-cycle participant Riko Fluchel on the riders' blog. "Now, after the nine weeks of touring cooperatives across the continental United States, I know first-hand that cooperatives empower people's lives."
The Co-cycle journey is chronicled by a team of filmmakers from New York University in the forthcoming feature-length film To The Moon, which will introduce viewers to the ideas that guide cooperatives and Co-cycle—like teamwork and dedication to a new shared economy.
Arizmendi Bakery photo by Tony Nguyen.
5. Shop Co-op
By buying from co-ops or using cooperative services, you can create local jobs, keep wealth in your community, and shop according to your values.
The most comprehensive directory of U.S. cooperatives is CooperateUSA.
Looking for a co-op starting near you? The Food Co-op Initiative maintains a map of co-ops still in the organizational stage.
The new Data Commons Cooperative is building a "Stone Soup" directory,find.coop, created by members.
6. Make Co-op Friendly Laws
Cooperatives are often at a financial and technical disadvantage in an economy dominated by quarterly profits and shareholder returns. The United Nations recently resolved "to encourage governments and regulatory bodies to establish policies, laws, and regulations conducive to cooperative formation and growth." In 2012, the United Nations celebrated the "International Year of Cooperatives," noting that co-ops "build a better world" and "empower people."
How credit unions put members' money to work right where they live.
At the federal level, supporters of cooperatives are pushing for the National Cooperative Development Act (H.R. 3677) (NCDA), which would create a national development center designed to bring federal resources to cooperative development. From loans and seed capital for start-ups to funding for technical assistance providers, passage of the NCDA would not only help level the playing field for co-ops but increase economic development and create much-needed jobs in underserved areas of the country.
A different bill would raise the cap on small business loans from another type of co-op: credit unions. Fifteen years ago, the banking industry lobbied for and obtained this cap to throttle its competition. The Credit Union Small Business Jobs Bill (S. 2231) would more than double the limit to nearly 30 percent of assets. According to the Credit Union National Association, this would enable credit unions to loan an extra $13 billion of their $300 billion lending capacity to small businesses in the first year alone, helping to create as many as 140,000 jobs.
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We may not all agree with the final healthcare bill, while behaving like Bolsheviks and Taliban, the behavior of parasitically regressive Republicans is whorishly unconscionable.
Chronical of Conservatives and Republicans blovatenating to Liberals, Democrats, Obama, and other Human Americans about HealthCare:
Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."
See Video Below
Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."
Jan 2009: "We're gonna shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare."
July 2009: "We'll fight to death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."
Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."
March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."
April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."
Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."
Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."
Feb 2012: "We're gonna elect a candidate who'll revoke healthcare NOW."
June 2012: "We'll go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."
Aug 2012: "American people'll never re-elect you-they don't want healthcare."
Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."
Nov 2012: "We can't believe you got re-elected & we can't repeal healthcare."
Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."
June 2013: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."
July 2013: "We're going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare."
Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing and ripping apart healthcare."
Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"
Exclamations from the Bowels of Ignorance: Gratuitous Flauntulence from the [G]rand [O]ld [P]otty.
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What are essential ingredients assuring progressive sustainability bereft of the vicissitudes of economic or political predation, privation or disparity? Learn more HERE
