I attended a public viewing of the Pope’s address to Congress at the shared worship space of the First Congregational Church (FCC) of Sonoma and the Shir Shalom synagogue. There were over 50 people gathered at the church, mostly drawn from FCC Earth Care Committee... Continue
Progressive Majority Coalition
This monthly column was forged out of my resolve to do the intellectual work of defining the progressive agenda and applying a ‘best practices’ matrix to the toolkit of tactics for achieving that agenda in the real world. That template could be applied to the... Continue
Last week, hundreds of grassroots meet-ups for Bernie Sanders for President were held from coast to coast, with nearly 100,000 participants registered to confer on how to get Senator Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Party nominee for the presidency. These live-stream meet-ups are sponsored... Continue
The cascade of social change in the last few weeks has been startling for politically jaded activists who have come to expect progress to come in incremental steps, if at all. Biologists refer to the phenomenon of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to describe the rapid and dramatic... Continue
The rise of the Fox News/conservative radio network has challenged the traditional assumptions about the standards for political discourse and the very concept of facts as a basis for political decision-making. The most astute observers of this phenomenon have been comedians like Jon Stewart on... Continue
When Senator Bernie Sanders threw his hat in the ring for the Democratic Party primary last week, the dread and ennui that I have felt about the 2016 campaign dissipated. With a steadfast and articulate progressive like Bernie Sanders in the primary debates and out... Continue
This secretive trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been quietly under negotiation by corporate lawyers and trade representatives for years, is finally surfacing to public attention as Congress is set to vote for ‘Fast Track’ authority, which would limit Congress’s role to a... Continue
The Sonoma based nonprofit Praxis Peace Institute recently sponsored a lecture by Professor Richard Wolff at the Sonoma Community Center. Wolff has taught at Yale University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and is currently a visiting professor at the New School University in New York. Wolff... Continue
President Obama released the White House budget plan for 2015 this week, and even thought it is widely considered ‘Dead on Arrival’ in Washington-speak, he has set the predicate for the 2016 presidential election. It is encouraging that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,... Continue
The 2014 midterm election double-shellacking has forced the issue of reform of the Democratic Party to the front burner. The most telling fact of that election cycle is this: wherever progressive issues like minimum wage increase, paid sick days, and marijuana legalization were on the... Continue