Workshop with Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.

Saturday, September 24th, 9AM – 4PM

Pierce Hall Community Center

38 Main Street, Rochester, VT

A day-long workshop exploring the Great Unraveling of civilization and what it means in our lives. In this workshop we will explore:

• The power of myth, story, drumming, and ritual to move us beyond the head and hand aspects of Transition to the deeper story it calls us to enter.
• Moments of community which erupt out of collective opening to the evolutionary threshold which lies at the core of Transition.
• Who we truly want to be in the face of collapse of civilization and what collapse may be calling us to do.
• An opportunity to begin the journey of emotional and spiritual preparation for collapse, Transition, the Great Turning and the next culture beyond industrial civilization.

Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. is a storyteller, drummer, and a student of myth and ritual. She is the author of Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition. Carolyn maintains a Transition Counseling/Coaching practice and will be available for private sessions before and after the workshop.

Please click here for Registration and more info

First the pictures. Words will follow.

For more information go to the Vermont Alliance for Local Action at VTALA.net!

Click on a thumbnail for a larger picture:

Hundreds of these flyers were distributed in Warren & Montpelier.

To build upon these gains and bring the independence movement to the next level, we’re pleased to announce the formation of a new organization: the Vermont Independence Alliance (VIA). Intended to be grass-roots and democratic, VIA will provide a “big tent” under which the diverse supporters of a Free Vermont can organize locally around the following principles:

1. Local Action: We believe that increasing the resilience, autonomy, and self-reliance of our communities is essential to the prosperity and happiness of the people of Vermont. We are therefore dedicated to supporting service projects which strengthen our communities and strive to meet local needs with local resources.

 

2. Electoral Reform: We believe that the two-party system fails to honestly represent the interests of the people of Vermont; consequently, we support electoral reforms aimed at allowing for the true diversity of Vermonters’ opinions and ideas to be represented in a fair, multi-party political system.

 

3. Political Independence: We believe that Vermont should return to its status as an independent republic through peaceful withdrawal from the United States of America, and affirm that such an act of self-determination is both legal and legitimate as long as it reflects the will of the people of our state. As such, we are committed to educating our fellow citizens about the advantages of independence, and actively back candidates for public office who support that goal.

In order to advance these shared principles, VIA chapters will first be organized in each of our state’s counties. These groups will serve as local hubs of both political activism and community service, forming the movement’s sturdy, grass-roots foundation. Once a sufficient number of counties are organized, a convention will be held to constitute a state-wide organization. While most resources and responsibilities will remain at the county level, the state organization will take the lead in coordinating large events and supporting state-wide candidates for public office.

If you support our principles and goals and would like to get involved in your county, please enter your information into the form here. Once enough people in your county have expressed interest in starting a VIA chapter, we will schedule an organizational meeting and help you get this project underway in your community!

Get in touch with VTIndependence.org!

“The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to end it must be ours.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking of Vietnam.

This week the Pentagon sank to a new low: claiming that Dr. King would “understand” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. King’s legacy is clear: he opposed war and other violence and condemned war as “an enemy of the poor.”

Help us stop the Pentagon’s lies and attempts to justify the brutal, futile war in Afghanistan. Spread the truth by sharing this video with your family and friends.

Would like to share the final advice of a giant, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The last two paragraphs sum up the essence of why we Independents are running for public office in Vermont:

In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.

Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls 'enemy,' for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:

Who was Henry George? Click the pic to find out!

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would hgave to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.

This proposal is not a “civil rights” program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. I hope that both Negro and white will act in coalition to effect this change, because their combined strength will be necessary to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically anticipate.

Our nation’s adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income. Indeed, it is a symptom of our confused social values that these two groups turn out to be the richest and the poorest. The wealthy who own securities have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits.

John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as “not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by ‘experts’ in Vietnam.”

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.