Free Speech online around the world

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Tell the folks at EFF you support their work to keep fighting for internet freedom here at home, China and elsewhere around the world. And please organize your own campaigns against Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and the other corporate American companies promoting censorship.

Yahoo gets a special award in the Police State Hall of Shame -- they turned in Chinese activists who are now in jail. Their crime? Promoting democracy in China in blogs. Chinese government officials told Yahoo to turn over blog records -- and Yahoo did just that!

Solar power meets climate political crisis

Friend,

There is no climate crisis.

There is no creativity crisis.

We are living in a time of political crisis.

We are looking around, hoping for the political fix that only you and I can provide to avert climate change from destroying civilization.

We need a field guide to social change that protects species including our own -- from ourselves.

The photo above is taken from a story in the New York Times on oil rich Chad's inability to distribute oil wealth to aid its citizens living in poverty.

It is a vivid picture of hell on earth.

The oil companies record record profits, yet do as little as possible to distribute this wealth from Chad and other countries back to its people.

It seems to me that we cannot talk about environment without confronting poverty.

And we can't confront our carbon addiction and the twelve or twenty steps necessary to break it without some easy to capture measure and accurate taxes to cover the carbon's cost.

Finally, there exists today a bright, green and healthy future for all of us.

The crisis we are living in right now is a crisis of taking back political power now in the hands of a few energy companies that is throttling change. Capitalism has been hijacked in the name of greed -- and it is time to take it back from the big oil companies and auto industry that are invested in status quo death spiral heat building carbon addicted behaviors.

Change can come in 5 years. We need a Marshall Plan similar to what has been proposed by Jay Inslee in Congress and the Apollo Project.

We can make it happen -- a note to courage you about solar power here.


It seems to me we have to stop calling gas stations gas stations. What should they be called so we connect more people to their deadly consequences?

I think of a campaign where this name we give gas stations gets printed on bumper stickers and stuck to gas pumps across the country.

Similar to the "I'm Changing the Planet -- ask me how!" bumper sticker popular a few years ago.

Ideas? Leave them here in comments.

with love all around,

Timothy

Hedgerows of Puget Sound Featured in Sunday Seattle Times by Val Easton

Drawing A Line Valerie Easton wrote a wonderful story about the importance of hedgerows to farmers in Washington. She chose to illustrate her story with Suzanne Duranceau's portrait painted for Good Nature Publishing

Grateful for the story, honored to have our art in the NW Flower and Garden Show edition of the daily paper.

Corporate Human Rights Violators: Practicing Evil

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Being Evil: American Corporations Protect Police States

American based corporations run by profiteers that collude with police state China to restrict speech, violating human rights, reporting on activists, and resulting in citizens going to jail.

"These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," said Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who is co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which organized the briefing. With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day," Lantos went on. "They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo join Caterpillar, KBR, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, Chevron, Coca Cola and Nestle and other Americans who magically lose their American values once they leave our shores, human rights being relative in their eyes.

These giant American corporations don't want to miss a dollar, even if it violates human rights. Of course this is nothing really new. Henry Ford made deals with the Nazis in World War II, as did GM, Chase Bank and several other giant American corporations.

The corporate response is cynical innocence defined: that they encourage more spread of information being in China and other oppressive countries than if they didn't profit there. We're just an innocent little corporation that can't do anything until government steps in.

Please!

Are you Americans or not? Do the values we stand for as Americans more important than short term profits or not?

Are you deaf to world wide cries for universal human rights, that includes not colluding with police state oppression -- silencing China's Tom Paine's?

Please define evil for me.