24×18 black ,white and red acrylic with black magnum sharpie

Here’s the board I made for the Board IV show at Art Walk tonight. Make sure you come check it out. I’m selling the board for $15, but most importantly created it to shed more light on the construction of the enormous new courthouse downtown. I know the old courthouse is becoming overcrowded, and as our city slowly grows crime levels will rise. But why not use the money to invest in education?

If our children are being taught by motivated teachers, and we have programs like art, music, and recreation creating an inviting educational environment, the generations to come won’t have an overcrowded courthouse but a vibrant community.

“Move Your Money” is an electrifying slogan that’s lighting up the Internet because it shows people how they can push back against the big dogs of banking. The concept is simple, but this is a big idea that could alter the timid direction of financial reform.

This campaign is potentially more than a feel-good gesture. If coordinated with institutional reform efforts, it could lead to a broad rebellion against the financial system, with citizens reclaiming the power to act directly when politicians are too intimidated by moneyed interests to act in the public interest. Economist Jane D’Arista put it crisply: “We are not a nation of widows and orphans. We have quite a lot of money, and people control some of it. They might ask why they don’t control more of it.”

The campaign was launched just before New Year’s Eve by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Rob Johnson of the Roosevelt Institute. An influential bank-rating firm, Institutional Risk Analytics, donated a website window (moveyourmoney.info/find-a-bank), where citizens can find banks in their ZIP code that IRA certifies as safe and sound.

In the first forty-eight hours more than 100,000 responded with inquiries. Within a week, people had searched for good banks in 16,631 ZIP codes–nearly 40 percent of the nation. The search tool is now getting 45,000 users a day. Naturally, the corporate media promptly assured readers that “ordinary Americans lack the power to hurt the big banks,” as a Washington Post headline put it.

Wrong. The cynics either do not understand banking or misunderstand the widespread public anger. Dennis Santiago, IRA’s CEO and managing director, explained that banks compete fiercely for the “core deposits” provided by individual and small business accounts–this stable money is their preferred base for profitable lending. Take away core deposits, and bankers feel immediate balance-sheet stress. Expand the account base for community banks, and they gain greater stability and greater lending power. “Will moving your money have an effect?” Santiago asked. “And by effect, I don’t mean making a momentary political statement. I mean making a structural difference to the country’s financial system. The answer is yes.”

Structural change ought to be the primary goal of financial reform–breaking up the concentrated power held by mega-banks and creating a balanced system of smaller, more diverse lending institutions that thrive by serving local credit needs. Alas, the Obama administration and Congress are pursuing the opposite goal–rescuing the behemoths that failed and encouraging even greater financial concentration. This will lead to more reckless adventures, more “too big to fail” bailouts.

“Move Your Money” is an important model for teaching people how to change a dysfunctional system. The same principle of taking control of your own money is at work in related reform movements. A campaign launched by faith-based community organizations associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation identifies sky-high interest rates on credit cards and other lending as the ancient sin of usury. IAF groups are asking churches, foundations and local governments to withdraw funds from the usurious banks that profit by destroying borrowers. Organized labor, likewise, has launched an aggressive movement to insist on responsible investing values for the pension-fund wealth of working people, urging state treasurers and fund managers to invest for society’s interests as well as good returns.

Changing the nature of finance capitalism is a long road, to be sure, and the industry will resist change every step of the way. But the fight begins in earnest when people decide to move their money.

Last night we got an email from a Republican member of Congress
calling for public access to any health care bill conference
committee (H.Res.847). As you should well know by now, we are NOT
Republicans, we’ve only been advocating for every possible
progressive action for the last five years. But what progressive
could possibly be opposed to public scrutiny for the legislative
process? And sure enough, our most reliable hero Dennis Kucinich is a
sponsor as well.

The fact is, it’s not just the Republicans who have been shut out of
the debate to set national health care policy. The American people
have been completely shut out as well. This goes all the way back to
the beginning of the process, when activists were arrested and hauled
out of the Senate Finance committee for protesting the preemptive
exclusion of any discussion of Single Payer (Medicare for all) as a
basis for reform.

Now we hear that they don’t even plan on having a conference
committee to reconcile the weak bill passed by the House with the
total insurance industry sell out passed by the Senate. No, they are
just going to make another back room deal and install the worst case
Senate version by fiat. Even our House of Representatives is to be
shut out unless they entirely capitulate as well.

Action Page For Public Conference Committee:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1026.php

We all know the Republicans just want to obstruct the process,
whether the bill is good or bad. And we say bring it on, let the
American people SEE their obstructionism on our TVs. But shame on the
Democrats, shame, shame, shame, for giving the Republicans good cause
for doing so. And shame on us, if we for our own partisan reasons do
not protest this outrage. The public’s business must be conducted in
the full light of day.

You would be wrong if you were to think you are doing the President
and the Democratic Congress a favor, by not calling them out for
betraying the hope of the American people for a robust public plan.
Such a plan is broadly supported and would be wildly popular. It
would cement the Democrats in power for a generation. Instead, the
current administration seems bent on forcing through a medical
insurance industry sell out that will discredit the leadership of the
Democratic party beyond redemption.

You see it happening already. Joe Lieberman, the guy who demanded any
public option be taken out of the bill, including a possible expanded
Medicare buy in proposal, is seeing his approval ratings tank down to
George Bush numbers. And that same fate awaits ANY Democrat who does
not stand up now and demand better. Because when the American people
wake up to what a sick suck up to the insurance industry this bill
is, there will be hell to pay at the polls.

And the dirtiest shame is that the Republicans are getting a free
pass in all this. Nobody will remember that they actually opposed a
strong public plan too. All anybody will remember is that they
opposed the bill that everybody hates the guts out of, the bill the
Democrats forced through without even a fair conference committee,
that passed without a single Republican vote.

Action Page For Public Conference Committee:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1026.php

How can the Democrats be so utterly tone deaf, so politically stupid?
Who can save them from themselves? How could they be so perversely
determined to thrown away every scrap of good will and optimism that
the American people had riding on the outcome of this last election.
We’d better all speak up, and the Democrats had better listen, or the
current majority will be very short-lived indeed. And that’s not what
any of us want.

For Facebook Participants ONLY:

Once again, the regular action page links above are for anyone. But
we told you two years ago, when we developed Voices, our action page
application for Facebook, that we could change the world with
Facebook alone. At that time they had about 50 million participants.
That number is now up to 350 million, and they are now the biggest
social media network there is, 3 times bigger than MySpace. There are
totally frivolous GAME applications on Facebook now with 75 million
users. That’s more people than it takes to elect a president of the
United States.

We have gigantic mobilization plans for Facebook, but the first thing
we need all of you to do, if you are on Facebook already, is to get
your OWN Voices application tab on your own profile page, a new
capability they just made possible. This is what will enable you to
watch and submit action pages over there and to mobilize and alert
all your friends to do the same. You can even create your own action
pages on any issue you care about. You can put the Voices application
tab right on your own personal profile page, just as Democrats.com
has already done.

http://www.facebook.com/democratscom?v=app_2370152746

So if you are already on Facebook, go to the link above, check out
what the application does, and most importantly, click on “Get
Application Tab” in the menu at the top for quick and easy
instructions on getting your own Voices tab for your profile page.
Three simple steps. Do it now. When you submit an action you can
automatically alert all your friends. Why aren’t we taking more
advantage of this built in mobilization engine?? Now we are.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you haven’t seeing Avatar, then you are missing out a good movie, and I suggest you watch it its 3D version. The film excels in creativity, imagination and technical work, the result is overwhelmingly pleasing to the senses.

Most importantly, there is a clear message in the film beyond the typical boy-girl romance story, and that is the main reason to see this film. No, I don’t want to spoil your experience by telling you all about it; however I would like you to understand the context of its main story.

Avatar is real: Pandora exists in South and Central America, and the Na’vi peoples are being displaced and killed right now. The names are different, but the facts are almost the same.

In the next generation, Central and South America will be the next battle fields for rich countries to fight over natural resources like minerals, oil, water, gas, which they need to continue growing and keeping up to their consumerists, excessive ways of life. The last pristine, virgin forests on Earth will be taken over by rich and powerful military armies, working on behalf of the interests of multinational corporations, especially those coming from the U.S., Europe and Canada; and soon India, China, Brazil and of course Russia.

It’s happening already in the Amazonian forests of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, where mining, oil, tourism, real state and lodging corporations are trying to take over the Indigenous peoples ancestral lands, in complicity with the local puppet governments.

Sebastian Machineri is a leader of the Yaminawa people that live in the border area of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, deep in the Amazon forest. He was in Washington, DC, recently and told me at the end of a working meeting at Organization of American States that Indigenous peoples in Brazil are being killed, attacked, displaced, and exterminated by the government and the private ranch owners. “I have no hope that anything will change in the future” he also said that international declarations of Indigenous peoples rights -like the OAS- aren’t helping much, when powerful interests are pushing governments to destroy our planet.

In 2009, Indigenous peoples in all over the Americas faced increasing violence, deadly military attacks, displacement, persecution, and incarceration from governments, paramilitaries, guerrillas and military forces linked to corporate interests.

In order to do displace Indigenous peoples, governments and interest groups in Latin America passed special legislation based on the “free-trade” policies models, designed by Wall Street. This has opened the doors of protected areas to any corporation with enough money and the right connections.

Last year in Peru, hundreds of Awajun and Wampis Indigenous farmers were massacred by US-trained militarized police forces of Peru, in the Bagua region. The Natives were protesting government legislation that would allow corporations to take over their lands resources, without previous consultation.

In several regions of Peru, mining corporations are causing pollution and poising Indigenous towns, and many community leaders have been incarcerated when protesting against the government plans to lease 73% of the Amazon forest to corporations, and extensive areas of the Andean mountains. Last year, the Awajun and Wampis peoples of Peru detained five employees from the Canadian mining company IAMGOLD, which did not have any authorization to enter their territory.

Also in Peru, the authorities of Cusco were forced to pass legislation that bans biopiracy or “the appropriation and monopolization of traditional population’s knowledge and biological resources”, in order to prevent the negative effects of the unpopular and controversial U.S.-Peru free trade agreement.

In Colombia, the Amazonian Indigenous peoples are caught in the middle of the internal war between the government, the guerrillas and the government-supported paramilitary. Twenty members of the Awa Indigenous community were killed in 2009 by the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), by the end of the year 74 more Awas were killed by apparent paramilitary groups linked to the illegal drugs traffic.

More than 2,000 Indigenous Embera people in Colombia abandoned their 25 villages from their territory to escape violence from paramilitaries. Meanwhile the Colombian House of Representatives approved a controversial program to convince local Women to submit to sterilization. This same type of program affected over 330,000 Indigenous people in Peru in the 1990’s decade.

According to information posted by Intercontinental Cry, an Indigenous news website, these are some of the most violent attacks faced by Indigenous peoples in Central and South America in 2009:

In central Brazil, the Yanomami community of Paapiu began calling for the immediate expulsion of illegal gold miners occupying their land. Survival International reported, “[the Yanomami] say they are prepared to use bows and arrows to expel the invaders themselves if the authorities do not take immediate action.”

The Guarani Kaiowa community of Apyka´y in Brazil was attacked by ten gunmen, who fired shots in to their camp, wounding one person. The gunmen also beat up and injured others with knives and then set fire to their village. This was the second village torched in less than a week.

As many as 300 troops from Panama’s National Police demolished a Naso village in Bocas del Toro–for the second time. No injuries were reported, however, some 150 adults and 65 children were left with no shelter and limited access to food and water.

Following an overturned eviction, an Ava Guarani indigenous community in Paraguay’s Itakyry district was sprayed with toxic chemicals, most likely pesticide, resulting in nearly the entire village needing medical treatment.

In Guatemala, a group of Maya Mam villagers set fire to a pickup truck and an exploration drill rig, after the Canadian company Goldcorp repeatedly failed to remove the equipment off the community’s land.

In Chile, several Mapuche communities began to reclaim lands in Araucania, a region located in central Chile, which they say were stolen from them in the XVI century during the Hispanic invasion. At least five people have been killed by the Chilean government, which has passed anti-terrorism legislation to imprison and trial Mapuche leaders.

In Ecuador, Indigenous peoples are suing U.S. oil corporations for damages due to land and water pollution, while the leftist government in power tried to betray its electoral promises by selling extensive lands to oil and mining corporations, the response was a strong national strike and social protests.

Meanwhile in Bolivia, Indigenous people, are moving towards self-government under their own cultural traditions, after the December 6 presidential and legislative elections, when 12 of the 327 nation’s municipalities voted in favor of indigenous self-government, giving them control over the natural resources on their land. The same model, but at a smaller scale is being applied in Venezuela, by the government of president Hugo Chavez.

In the U.S. the Obama administration and the biased U.S. media have decided to attack the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, while remaining silent in the massacres of Indigenous peoples in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and the violent repression in Chile, Ecuador, and the violent coup regime of Honduras, where death squads trained in the U.S. have reappeared, attacking the Garifuna, Meskito and other Indigenous groups.

The future of South and Central America depends directly of how much power are given to multinational corporations today. In the last decades, Wall Street and London have told the world that small governments are the key for progress of third world countries. The less control, the more democracy, human rights and foreign investment. What we see right now happening in Congo with 6 million people killed and 500,000 raped Congolese is a painful proof of that mistaken model.

Growing in South America, we were told that Indigenous people were exterminated, disseminated, gone. They taught us in the school that nothing was left to reverse the colonization, but there is so much to do in order to stop it. We can see how rich countries are still oppressing poorer nations with with military force like in Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, or with violent forced private “investments” like we see in Latin America.

During the Bush administration, the strategy to take over the natural resources of Latin America was domitated by free-trade agreements (FTA) and the funding of violent conflicts in Colombia, Haiti, and Mexico. In 2009, with Barack Obama in power, the U.S. government has stopped policies but it has announced that will be opening seven military bases in Colombia, while it increased its presence in Peru with possible three military stations.

Colombia is the second biggest recipient in U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel, and its neighbor Venezuela is not taking this too lightly, and has bought armament from Russia, China and possibly Iran. Meanwhile the Pentagon’s South Command increased military exercises conducted with Peru, Panama, and Colombia militaries, while Chile received approval from U.S. Congress to buy high technology missiles.

In the James Cameron’s film Avatar, the US military became a sophisticated army of private mercenaries, working for huge profits resulting from extractive industries, and no matter what they need to destroy or who they will kill, they will get the job done.

Beyond the silly way -and offensive for some- that Indigenous peoples are portrayed in this movie as half animals, actually they are the peoples of Avatar, not humans. However in reality that is how some people see our Indigenous peoples in the South side of the Americas, almost as sub humans.

Thus, a mostly-white US war command leadership along with their corporate bosses are leading destructive enterprises in distant regions of green, tropical forests that are rich in beauty but also abundant in minerals and unknown treasures hidden behind human’s eyes. In Central and South America, there are signs of U.S. military and corporate involvement in coups, paramilitary groups, military training of torturers and repressive forces, and financing of anti-Indigenous governments.

In the film as in reality, these thugs are a bunch of cold hearted and insensitive people who would invest tons of money in science, research and cultural programs in order to get into the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples, who are living in the sacred, untouched, pristine forests of a balanced but fragile environment. Those places are the final destinations for destructive mining machinery, ready to extract the insides of the mother land.

Luckily, not all US soldiers are money-obsessed beasts. Some of them, a multiracial group we should notice in Avatar, take action to protect the Indigenous populations and their sacred land.

As a result of fantastic experiments, some mercenaries become laboraratory-mixed with the Natives and become a new race, mixed, mestizo individuals called Avatar, who are physically similar to the Indigenous, but mentally more aware of certain things. They learn the spirituality and sciences of nature from the “savages” and with time, they learn that mining is not worth the price of the destruction it causes. So they become the protectors of Natives, who using a mixture of knowledge, both human and Indigenous, eventually kick the invaders out of their land by actually killing most of them. Sorry I just told you the movie, but at least I didn’t reveal the romantic story part.

Avatar will represent a new step in the filming, not just because it mixes high technology animation with reality fiction, but also Avatar is showing us the most likely future of this planet, presented as fiction but not really.

The possible military conflicts to take place in Central and especially in South America in the next years, are related to corporate greediness and special interests. This is the scary future that awaits for future generations, unless of course, the United States ends its colonialist, imperialistic policies that are designed and dominated by a corporate and military machine regime, and the people regain its true democracy. And the same should happen all over the world, before we become a true Pandora.

18×24 black and white print with F-U-C-K cut out.

Bush in, the media conglomerate’s capitalize and subdue with chants of change. Bush out, Obama in. They now thieve on bashing socialist ideals and slow compromised, marginal changes.

16×20 mixed media on canvas.

Why is Jacksonville wasting so much money on a new courthouse? I don’t think it’s going to solve any of our economical problems. It’ll just put more money it the construction industries hands. If we really need a new courthouse, why not renovate one of the growing number of empty buildings downtown. How did they spend $64.3 million dollars on site before even breaking ground?

Nobel prize for a war president and privatized companies banking on the continued wars.

Dig the bag. Check it out here.

We will start in the Plaza and proceed along the bayfront to Orange to Cordoba and back to the Plaza where dinner will be served. This march is to draw attention to the increasing number of homeless, unemployed and working poor in our community. It is also the celebration of Food Not Bombs’ 6 years of serving meals in St. Augustine. Last year about 200 people from all sectors of our community participated. It was an amazing display of solidarity among our homeless, Food not Bombs, PUSH and members of the public, including agencies and clergy.

President Obama will unveil his new Afghanistan policy tomorrow. But we must not let up! Last week, we flooded the White House with so many calls that the White House Comment Line was continually busy! Now is the time to keep the pressure on and keep the calls coming.

Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Tell President Obama to send NO additional troops to Afghanistan, WITHDRAW the troops already there, begin serious DIPLOMACY with all parties to the conflict, and REDIRECT the money wasted on the Afghanistan war to people’s urgent needs at home.

UFPJ member groups are already planning protests either Tuesday evening or Wednesday at Federal buildings or other public places. Check the listings to find a protest in your area, or organize one if none has been planned and post it here. Be sure to notify the press using this sample press release.

We oppose the war because:

• 298 U.S. soldiers lost their lives so far in 2009. Tens of thousands of returning troops are damaged by physical injury, PTSD, psychological damage, suicides, and domestic violence. There is a backlog of up to 1 year for veterans waiting for VA care.

• The war is unaffordable. The White House says we are paying $1 million a year for each soldier sent to Afghanistan. At that price, the war will soon cost $100 billion a year. Yet Congress is not willing to pay that kind of money for health care, jobs, housing, or environmental protection.

• The war is making conditions worse for the Afghan people. UNICEF reported last week that eight years after the start of U.S. military occupation of that country, Afghanistan is the world’s worst place to be born. Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world — 257 deaths per 1,000 live births – and 70 percent of the population lacks access to clean water. Afghanistan ranked 181st out of 182 countries in the UN’s human development index for 2009. The presence of U.S. troops breeds resistance, conflict, and instability.

• The war is not helping Afghan women, whose conditions are as bad as ever. The government turns a blind eye to rape and violence against women. Civilian casualties, who are primarily women and children, are rising each year as the violence increases.

• In addition to being wrong, the war is also unwinnable. As U.S. troop levels have grown from 15,000 in 2004 to 68,000 now, more and more Afghans have joined the Taliban and resistance groups to defend against foreign invaders. Yet The Nation reported this week that the U.S. military cannot even protect the trucks which bring gasoline and other supplies to outlying U.S. bases, and that contractors are paying protection of $800 to $1500 per truck to the Taliban.

• War funding is feeding corruption, private armies, and the drug trade. The more money the U.S. and NATO pour into Afghanistan, the greater the rake-offs and corruption among U.S. contractors and the U.S.-supported Afghan government. President Karzai’s re-election was confirmed even though his supporters had stuffed boxes with more than one million fake ballots. Five ministers in Karzai’s cabinet have been given immunity from prosecution for corruption.

Call the White House today at 202-456-1111. Be out in the streets if the President does order an escalation of troop levels. Let Americans know that we will not be silent and we will keep opposing this needless, senseless war for as long as it takes.