Stand Up! Take Action! Vote!
On this call we introduced the new co-chairs of this IOT – Marcy Winograd and Steve Carlson. We apologize for the poor quality of this recording.
1. We reviewed both the Cleveland and Albany conferences.
2. Discussed Accountability & Transparency for War Voting (BBLV’s)
3. Wikileaks/Bradley Manning Defense Committee
4. Iran, House Res. 1553 (46 Republican co-sponsors pledging US support to Israel for attack on Iran)
5. Why are 46 US warships being sent to Costa Rica? Venezuela connection.
7. BDS/Israel/Palestine
Robert Naiman
August 9, 2010
Join PDA’s End War and Occupations, Redirect Funding Issue Organizing Team (IOT); learn more here .
Published by ZNet.
Is there a man or woman in America today who is willing to stand at noon in the public square and claim that demands to bomb, invade, and occupy other people’s countries have anything to do with human liberation?
If such people can be found, let them answer a few simple questions about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Ray McGovern
July 29, 2010
See John Nichols interview Daniel Ellsberg at the PDA Grassroots Leadership Conference in Cleveland.
Published by Alternet.org.
Photo: US Army Sergeant Dostal adjusts the scope of his sniper rifle in eastern Afghanistan (AFP – Simon Lim).
The brutality and fecklessness of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan have been laid bare in an indisputable way just days before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to throw $33.5 billion more into the Afghan quagmire, when that money is badly needed at home.
Take Action: PDA’s Amend to Suspend Corporate Personhood Conference Call is TONIGHT, Wednesday, July 28.
Learn more here: https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/309/personalopt1.asp?formid=meet&c=387273
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From David Swanson
July 5, 2010
What it means: The Peace Movement’s Progress.
How it worked: Democrats Forced to Cheat to Fund War .
What it looked like: Live Blog of the Vote .
How they voted on the Rule that allowed the war escalation funding to move forward.
Dan Froomkin
June 14, 2010
Take Action: Tell your senators and members of Congress “Cut the military budget, NOT Medicare and Social Security” at the next Brown Bag Lunch Vigil .
Local Focus: Cost of War to Sonoma County
Published by The Huffington Post
When you think about ways to tame the nation’s long-term deficit, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Slashing benefits for the old and sick? Or taking a few whacks at the spectacularly bloated defense budget?
by Chris Borland
People,
Did you know ARCO gas was BP?
The very LEAST we can all do to protest BP’s reckless and deliberate ignorance of it’s environmental responsibilities and ethical and legal duties as a corporate entity is to boycott ARCO and other BP brands. There certainly are plenty of other places to buy gas, etc.
Here’s a list of BP companies:
On the May 26 Amend to Suspend Corporate Personhood call, participants heard from David Cobb of Movetoamend.org and John Bonifaz of freespeechforpeople.org as each made their case for amending the constitution to limit corporate personhood. We discuss the three tracks PDA will follow: Track 1–deny corps all personhood rights; Track 2–Deny corps all rights under the first amendment; Track 3–deny corps first amendment rights ONLY as relates to elections.
Next Amend to Suspend Conference Call is Wednesday, June 30: https://www.thedatabank.com/dpg/309/personalopt1.asp?formid=meet&c=2503667
The Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County will be dedicating the next peace vigil – Friday, June 4th, 5:30 to 6:30, Courthouse Square, Santa Rosa – to condemning Israel’s killing of international human rights activists who were trying to deliver aid to the imprisoned people of Gaza. Israel sent armed commandos onto a civilian ship in international waters – an illegal act which culminated in civilian deaths.* The Center, while condemning all acts of violence, takes particular issue with violent acts committed in our names and with our tax dollars. The United States, in both word and deed, through Republican and Democratic administrations, continues to fund and support extreme and disproportionate acts of violence from Israel, of which the current action is but one. Come tell Obama that “regret” is not enough. Hold Israel accountable.
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It was like Grand Central Station in Washington, D.C., last week when PDA teams of citizen-lobbyists took to three different tracks on Capitol Hill.
The Stop Global Warming/Environmental Issues Organizing Team has been focusing most of its energy on passing a good climate/energy bill, which actually addresses the problem. Frustrated by the many flaws in the bills under serious consideration, this IOT decided it was time to start the push for Plan B—the carbon tax with revenue returned to households.
May 19, 2010
Dear Representative Woolsey,
May should be a time of celebrating the beauty of living, with spring in full bloom and the recognition of our mothers as our source of life. But there have been too many events that make celebration difficult, if not impossible, for the members of Progressive Democrats of America.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 18, 2010
Local PDA Chapter Joins Nationwide Protests in Opposition to $33 Billion War Supplemental
Progressive Democrats Sonoma County, the local chapter of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), to hold noon hour “Brown Bag Lunch Vigil” in front of Rep. Lynn Woolsey’s Santa Rosa office to stop the escalation and funding for war.
We thank Rep. Woolsey for signing on to support HR 2454, calling for an exit strategy from Afghanistan & HR 3699, prohibiting any increase in the number of U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan.
Further, we call on Rep. Woolsey to publicly commit to voting “No” on any bills that fund wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen, and to publicly urge her colleagues and the House leadership to make the same commitment.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
12 PM – 1 PM
Office of Rep. Lynn Woolsey
1101 College Avenue
Santa Rosa , CA 95404
Norman Solomon
May 10, 2010
If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens—and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it’s part of a pattern.
The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.
“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. “They are technologically very advanced.”
Why is progressive Lynn Woolsey working so hard for center-right Jane Harman?
By Norman Solomon
bohemian.com
May 5, 2010
This is a grim story about the care and feeding of a Blue Dog.
Right now, Southern California congresswoman Jane Harman is facing a serious primary challenge from a genuine progressive. Harman is a member of the center-right caucus of House Democrats known as the Blue Dog Coalition. She has chosen not to join the Progressive Caucus.
In sharp contrast, her opponent, Marcy Winograd, is calling for the government “to invest in housing, education, healthcare, transportation—not to perpetuate a war economy that is draining us, robbing us of money that we desperately need.” And Winograd adds: “I challenge my opponent to stop voting for this war machine.”
While belonging to the largest caucus on Capitol Hill (with a membership now above 80), some members of the Progressive Caucus often say that they need more colleagues who’ll be willing to vote against war and in favor of a truly progressive legislative agenda. But if Progressive Caucus members want to move the House of Representatives in a progressive direction, you’d never know it when there’s a real chance to replace a Blue Dog with a progressive.
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April 21, 2010
Earth, Taxes, and a Supplement à la carte
March saw the seventh anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and many Brown Bag Lunch Vigils (BBLV) commemorated that. This month, over one hundred vigils across the country will remind our elected representatives and neighbors that our tax money goes in the wrong direction when it goes to military spending.
Chris Hedges
April 7, 2010
Take Action: Fight corporate personhood!
Sign the motion to amend | Get involved at FreeSpeechforPeople
Published by Truthdig.
Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.
Dan Murphy
April 6, 2010
Take Action: Tell Congress – No Money for War
Published by Christian Science Monitor.
A video released on the Internet Monday by WikiLeaks, a small nonprofit dedicated to publishing classified information from the US and other governments, appears to show the killing of two Iraqi journalists with Reuters and about nine other Iraqis in a Baghdad suburb in 2007 that is sharply at odds of the official US account of the incident.
John Nichols
April 6, 2010
Published by The Nation.
The video is clear, and devastating.
It shows a U.S. military helicopter targeting, shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver in a July 2007 attack in Baghdad.
The U.S. pilots are heard reveling in their “kills.”
April 2, 2010, Marina del Rey, CA
Congressional Candidate Questions Opponent’s Complicity
PDA-endorsed congressional candidate Marcy Winograd (CA-36) applauds federal judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal, and questions why her opponent Jane Harman went along so readily with a violation of the Bill of Rights.
Says Winograd, “As a ranking minority leader on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman had a duty to provide oversight of the Bush administration. Instead, she went along with its law breaking, failing to clearly object to the wiretaps or hold hearings on abuses of executive power.”
Members of PDA national team will be on the road in Pennsylvania and California from April 7th to the 21st, so we have had to change the conference call schedule a bit.
March 9, 2010
We highly encourage signing up for a PDA Issue Organizing Team (IOT) if you wish to actively engage in the work of PDA and PDSonoma County. If you have not already done so, you can get started by clicking on ‘Committees’ on the menu at the top of this website page and there you can:
**sign up for a PDA Issue Organizing Team via the PDA website and
**find the name and contact information for the local PDSonoma chapter team leader for that IOT. If you have not already done so, let that person know that you have signed up for the PDA IOT and they can add you to their local chapter list of activists on that particular issue.
Norman Solomon
February 25, 2010
Take Action: Tell Congress Stop funding war
Playwright Lillian Hellman said: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
The statement was in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The year was 1952. We tell ourselves that the McCarthy era was vastly different than our own—but what about the political fashions of 2010?
This year’s fashions cut mean figures on Washington’s runways. Conformities lie, and people die.
By David Swanson
February 21, 2010
Everything you’re reading about torture lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee getting off the hook is wrong. They are not torture lawyers, they are not off the hook, there never was any hook, they may not be lawyers for long, impeachment and indictment are on the agenda, and you have a role to play.
By Marcy Winograd
For OpEd News
February 22, 2010
Imagine if in 2010 we did not spend one more borrowed penny to manufacture new weapons, occupy new lands, or recruit new mercenaries. Going cold turkey on military spending would wipe out nearly $1 trillion of our 1.6 trillion dollar deficit. A year and a half of war & weapons abstinence could erase our debt entirely.
We are an affiliated chapter of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA)
MOVIE NIGHT!
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
NOTE: Early start time for Wednesday’s meeting, in order that we may enjoy Movie Night and still have time for an endorsement meeting to follow.
PDSonoma meets the 2nd Wednesday of every month except December.
New Members and Guests Always Welcome!
Refreshments can be ordered and enjoyed in our meeting room. Please arrive early if you wish to order refreshments.
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