UK LANDMARK ENVIRONMENTAL LEGAL VICTORY

An environmental activist in the UK has won the right to have the use of pesticides in England and Wales reviewed.

Georgina Downs has suffered from reactions to pesticides since she was a child. A high court judge's ruling will force Environmental Secretary Hilary Benn to start a review of their use.

A High Court judge said award-winning Georgina Downs had produced "solid evidence" that rural residents had suffered harm from crop spraying with toxic chemicals. He ordered the Government to reconsider how to protect the health of countryside communities.

Miss Downs, who lives on the edge of farm fields near Chichester, West Sussex, launched her independent UK Pesticides Campaign in 2001 and was recently named a "woman of the year". To support her campaign, she collected evidence on DVD from other rural residents reporting health problems including cancer, Parkinson's disease, ME and asthma they believe could be linked to crop spraying.

This is welcomed news, even on this side of the pond. Burlington's Board of Health has been reviewing the city's pesticide ordinance for well over a year. There is unanimous agreement of the board that the ordinance should be changed to make Burlington pesticide-free.

RESOLVE TO GO GREENER

Apologies for the self-promotion, but I'm thrilled that Episcopal Café's THE LEAD high-lights a post I made earlier this week.

Jay... makes a point about resolutions that each of us should bear in mind...

MORE SECRETS OF SOESTDIJK REVEALED

It's all the talk of Dutch media this week, but 52-year old news. It's about a political and royal scandal surrounding the role of Greet Hofmans, a faith healer, who became a confidante of then Queen Juliana and

sparked a marital crisis at Soestdijk Palace. Prince Bernhard leaked the story to the German press to force the Dutch government to take action and remove a potential threat to the monarchy. However, it took a second government commission as well as threats against the life of Greet Hofmans by former resistance fighters to persuade the queen to break all ties to the controversial faith healer.

There was talk of divorce and betrayal. What's been revealed this week were the death threats.

However, Juliana never stopped loving Bernhard, and the unSaintly Bernhard never stopped loving himself. The couple remained married for almost seventy years. I recall an interview with royal correspondent, Maartje van Weegen, where Juliana grabbed Bernhard's knee and asked, "We didn't do that bad, did we?" After the abdication in 1980, the couple seemed to become closer and had a mutual admiration for each other, despite Juliana's worsening Alzheimers.

nrc.nl/international has a background article on the Hofmans case here

MARC MULDERS UTRECHT

Photo: Marc Mulders - glas-in-loodraam voor het Oranjefonds

A Dutch friend has written me

This never hit the press.
The Orange Fund (Willem-Alexander & Máxima's wedding fund) commissioned Marc Mulders to make this stained glass window at their premises at Utrecht (at the Utrecht stately avenue/"mall" the Maliebaan). Our good man who designed the Silver Jubilee Window in Amsterdam...
Fascinating with that light falling through it.
It was unveiled by the couple Dec. 2007. They must love his work.
I hope they will commission him to make a work for one of the palaces once. Of course they will... The Orange artistic taste is impeccable.

Oranje Fonds window.

And yes, I was blown away by Mulders' Silver Jubilee window when I was in Amsterdam in 2000.

DUTCH ROOTS OF OBAMA?

As reported today in Telegraaf (Dutch)

'Ja wy kinne'
Nederlandse roots van Obama
AMSTERDAM - Zou de aankomend president van Amerika eerst nog Ierse roots hebben, een andere zoektocht naar de stamboom van Barack Obama leidt naar... Nederland

Well, it's already claimed the president-elect has Irish roots. But now are the Netherlands an Obamanation, too? His step-father was from Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) and Obbema is a Frisian word, but this has gotta be a hoax. There was a similar (Dutch) report last February in Volkskrant.

EVERYTHING IS ENVIRONMENTAL NOW

God knows there were a slew of resolutions - 7 in all, and that doesn't include the courtesy ones - at the recently completed 2008 Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. I’ve always questioned the purpose of resolutions at these conventions. This was my first time as a delegate from my parish, but I’ve also been a delegate at conventions in another diocese. Mostly I find resolutions are just puffed up words that make the promoters and delegates feel good and think they’ve done something noteworthy. Usually these pithy expressions get hidden away in the diocesan journal and forgotten forever.

At this year’s convention “A Resolution to Help Prevent Phosphorous Pollution in Water Bodies” passed easily.

RESOLVED, That the 176th Convention of the Diocese of Vermont agree with Resolution D046 of the 2003 General Convention urging dioceses, parishes and communicants to regard water resources as precious, to encourage all to become active stewards of water resources, and to promote the education of congregants in faithful stewardship of Earth's resources; and be it further

RESOLVED, That the 176th Convention instruct the Diocese of Vermont, parishes and communicants to seek alternatives to phosphorous-laden fertilizers for use on diocesan, parish and communicants’ properties, and to use phosphorous only when soil tests indicate that it is needed for proper soil-plant health.

Resolution 6 was entirely in keeping with the bishop’s address and convention theme: "Tending God's World – NOW!" Bishop Tom Ely said

I believe it is imperative that we take seriously the crisis of global climate change as a spiritual as well as a practical matter, accept the sacrificial life style changes needed, and make our homes and churches a blessing for God’s creation.
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Our Baptismal Covenant calls us to participate in this ministry - Christ’s ministry of global reconciliation - which is the missio dei, the Mission of God. The reconciling work needed in order to sustain the future of our planet is inherent in every dimension of our mission and ministry - locally and beyond.

If the bishop, clergy and delegates really took the keynote and forum speakers' - environmentalist/author Bill McKibben's and Middlebury College activist Sierra Murdoch - empowering words seriously - solutions to mitigate the effects of global warming - I hope that members of Vermont’s parishes will transform the words of the resolution into (sacrificial) action. Everything is environmental now.

A WEEK LATER....

Vermont election results can be found here in various formats.

From vt.Buzz

Independent Anthony Pollina finished second in the governor's race over Democrat Gaye Symington by 257 votes. Of course, both of them are well behind Republican Jim Douglas, by like 100,000 votes.

The results offers some interesting fodder. To wit:

- Pollina discounts the fact that his 21 percent of the vote showing is less than the 25 percent he received in 2002 in the lt. gov. race. You'll recall, too, that during the campaign he made note of that 25 percent and said that if those 25 percent bring a friend, he'll win. Well, the 56,564 people who voted for him in 2002 don't seem to have many friends. He had 69,791 votes this time.

- Symington pointed out that every Republican governor in the country won re-election last week, a suggestion that incumbency prevailed over the Obama wave in all governor's races, not just here. Except that there were only a few Republican governors up for election this year - Vermont, Utah, North Dakota and Indiana - and those other states are hardly Obama-friendly in the way Vermont is. Vermont, I would venture to guess without even checking, is the only state where the Democrat came in third in the governor's race.

- Progs took it on the chin in the congressional race. Thomas Hermann came in fourth, after winner Peter Welch and independents Mike Bethel and Jerry Trudell.

Liberty Union Party has lost its minor party status. To maintain it, a party has to garner at least 5% of the vote (not including the vote for Congress).

So what does this mean? Not a lot. The Liberty Union Party doesn't have to bother with a primary in the next election and might get invited to fewer debates, though they were not on a lot of people's invite list this year

Also on the debate-ignore list were Sam Young, Cris Ericson, Tom O'Connor, Larkin Forney, just to name of few of the candidates who took the initiative to gather signatures and get on the ballot. What the Buzzer hardly mentions is the power of money.

LOWER VOTER TURNOUT IN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND

Brattleboro Reformer Glenn Adams Associated Press 11 November 2008

The nearly 327,000 Vermont voters who cast ballots accounted for 66 percent of the state's eligible voters. Of those, 29 percent -- also a record -- did so via early and absentee ballots, according to Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz. Last Tuesday's turnout percentage of eligible voters falls short of the 1992 figure, she said.

But this year's raw participation figure was higher than in the 2004 presidential election, when 314,220 people cast ballots.

While voter participation by absentee ballots was heavy if not a record in all three northern New England states, it did not translate into record turnouts.

"What was interesting to me was that our (town) clerks were reporting that they thought it was going to be much higher. In part, that was because they had such an overwhelming demand for early ballots. Election Day in Vermont began weeks before Nov. 4. So it wasn't as busy as it could've been," Markowitz said.

Find out how New Hampshire and Maine did here.

AT LEAST IT'S NOT IRRITATING POLYPS

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

NOT IN MY CHURCHYARD

The title is from a post over at MAD PRIEST

From THE LONDON INFORMER:

Kensington and Chelsea Council decided on Tuesday night that Grade II listed St Jude's Church in Collingham Road, Earl's Court, which was built in 1870, should be transformed into a training centre for up to 200 would-be theologians. But the application has drawn letters of objection from 25 households which surround the Victorian building. Many are concerned that students will increase the numbers of visitors to the nearby communal gardens.

Another Courtfield Gardens wrote: "The influx of so many people to our quiet residential square, even if they are theology students, is not welcome."

I lived on the same street and would pass by St Jude's daily en route to my bus stop. It's typical of small and struggling London churches, trying to survive and also reach out to others.

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

DEMOCRACY NOW!

AMY GOODMAN Ralph Nader, welcome. Your thoughts on this election?

RALPH NADER: Thank you, Amy. Well, obviously we all congratulate Barack Obama. We wish him well. But the precursor to his election has not been very encouraging, and he has repeatedly taken up the positions of the corporate supremacists, not just his latest vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, but a whole string of votes and policy positions. He opposes single-payer health insurance. Well, the HMOs and the insurance companies do, too. He wants a bigger military budget. So does the military-industrial complex. His idea of a living wage on his website is $9.50 an hour by 2011. That would make it less than it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

He matched McCain in the third debate, belligerent—belligerency for belligerency, toward Russia, toward Iran, more soldiers in Afghanistan, supporting the Israeli military repression and occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank. And virtually nothing about 100 million poor people in this country. That’s why I really fault him, that he played the Clinton linguistic game by talking constantly about the middle class and not mentioning the word “poor.”

And we expect more of him. And I don’t think he has a public philosophy of where corporations must operate in this country. How? Under what rule of law? Under what regulation? Under what vulnerability to litigation in the courts? He’s proud of tort reform, supports the nuclear industry, supports the coal industry. So we’re really talking about just more of the same, in terms of the corporate domination of Washington.

I detected no concern, no quaking of concern, among the drug industry, oil, gas industry, nuclear, coal industry, Wall Street, over his probable election in the last few weeks. Usually, when they’re really worried about a politician, they will issue warnings. But Barack Obama has raised far more money than John McCain from Wall Street interests, corporate interests and, above all, corporate lawyers. And the question to be asked is, why are they investing so much in Barack Obama? Because they believe he’s their man. So, prepare to be disappointed, but keep your hope up.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ralph Nader, you go now from being a presidential candidate to what you have always been, and that is a citizen activist. What are you going to do about it?

RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, we’ve got a website called november5.org, which is designed to test whether there’s support in this country to build strong Congress action groups in every congressional district. Certainly, we know the outlines of it. We take the many long overdue future directions in our country, that are on our website, votenader.org—just go to the “issues” page—and, of course, it’s many of the familiar ones: living wage, full Medicare for all, solar energy, energy efficiency, peace advocacy, reduce the bloated military budget, put in a whole public works program, transform the tax system to tax what we like the least or dislike the most, like securities speculation. All of these and others can be a package of reform and redirection, spearheaded by laser-like Congress action groups with full-time staffs in each congressional district. That’s a tall order, but we have to try to aspire to it, because Congress is the pivot institution now. If you can turn Congress around, which is the most powerful branch of the federal government under the Constitution, you can turn the federal government around. So if you’re interested in a preliminary examination of this effort, just log into november5.org.

November 5. 2008 from Tarek Milleron on Vimeo.

The November 5th Movement

GAYE SYMINGTON FOR GOVERNOR

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL WEEKS, I've been phone banking for the Gaye Symington for Governor campaign and am impressed by Gaye's dedication to Vermonters and good government. If you remain uncertain, please take two minutes and read the column, "Courage Outside the Comfort Zone," found here.

ONLY NADER IS RIGHT ON THE ISSUES

CHRIS HEDGES --

Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. He can’t win. A vote for Nader is a vote for McCain. He threw the election to George W. Bush in 2000. He is an egomaniac.

There is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues. Sen. Barack Obama’s vote to renew the Patriot Act, his votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the bailout are repugnant to most of us on the left. Nader stands on the other side of all those issues.

So if the argument is not about issues what is it about?

Those on the left who back Obama, although they disagree with much of what he promotes, believe they are choosing the practical over the moral. They see themselves as political realists. They fear John McCain and the Republicans. They believe Obama is better for the country. They are right. Obama is better. He is not John McCain. There will be under Obama marginal improvements for some Americans although the corporate state, as Obama knows, will remain our shadow government and the working class will continue to descend into poverty. Democratic administrations have, at least until Bill Clinton, been more receptive to social programs that provide benefits, better working conditions and higher wages. An Obama presidency, however, will make no difference to those in the Middle East.

I can’t join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

I can’t join the practical because I do not see myself exclusively as an American. The narrow, provincial and national lines that divide cultures and races blurred and evaporated during the years I spent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Balkans. I built friendships around a shared morality, not a common language, religion, history or tradition. I cannot support any candidate who does not call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to Israeli abuse of Palestinians. We have no moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation. And we will recover our sanity as a nation only when our troops have left Iraq and our president flies to Baghdad, kneels before a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and asks for forgiveness.

We dismiss the suffering of others because it is not our suffering. There are between 600,000 and perhaps a million dead in Iraq. They died because we invaded and occupied their country. At least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of the occupation forces for every foreign soldier killed this year. The dead Afghans include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by an air assault in Azizabad in August and the 47 wedding guests butchered in July during a bombardment in Nangarhar. The Palestinians are forgotten. Obama and McCain, courting the Israeli lobby, do not mention them. The 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza live in a vast open-air prison. Supplies and food dribble through the Israeli blockade. Ninety-five percent of local industries have shut down. Unemployment is rampant. Childhood malnutrition has skyrocketed. A staggering 80 percent of families in Gaza are dependent on international food aid to survive.

It is bad enough that I pay taxes, although I will stop paying taxes if we go to war with Iran. It is bad enough that I have retreated into a safe, privileged corner of the globe, a product of industrialized wealth and militarism. These are enough moral concessions, indeed moral failings. I will not accept that the unlawful use of American military power be politely debated among us like the subtle pros and cons of tort law.

George Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the treatment of detainees in our offshore penal colonies. Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. The president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the “crime of aggression.”

AN OPEN LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA FROM RALPH NADER

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," "change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an "undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote "Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the Israeli state."

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: 2008 IS JUST THE BEGINNING

ELECTION FEARMONGERING IN VERMONT

With all of this year's local media attention given to Brooke Bennett the Burlington Free Press links Ms Bennett's accused murderer to Larkin Forney, a candidate for state senator in Chittenden County who's

running to bring public attention to flaws in the criminal justice system -- and to let the world know he's no pedophile.

He knows his background may scare off some voters, but he figures honesty might win him some votes in the race for one of six at-large seats representing Vermont's most populous county.

"All my skeletons are out in the open, while other people continue to deny theirs," he said.
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His name appears with 13 others on Tuesday's ballot, under the Justice for Vermonters party label. In his campaign literature, he says diagnosed sexual predators and pedophiles should be sent to prison for life; marijuana should be legalized; and U.S troops should be withdrawn from Iraq.

For the Free Press, sensationalism sells. I've met Larkin Forney and plan to vote for him. He's a long-shot, for sure, but he's dedicated to democracy and his message is one which should be heard.

THE TRAIL OF BROKEN PROMISES

MATT GONZALEZ, Ralph Nader's vice presidential running mate writes

On the street when I am approached by an Obama/Biden volunteer or someone who tells me they’re voting for Obama, I usually ask “What about the FISA vote?” And each time I hear in return “What’s that?” Or if I say, “You know he supports the death penalty,” I usually hear in response, “No he doesn’t.”

At what point will there be intellectual honesty about what is
happening? People are voting for Obama because they find him to be an engaging public speaker and like his message regardless of his history of being part of the very problem he professes to want to fix. Most people don’t want the actual facts to interfere with the desperate hope that he is everything they want him to be.

Do you really want to vote for someone who has already voted to take away your civil liberties because of some vague wish that he’ll act differently as president? Obama himself, speaking of Sen. Hillary Clinton, made a remark that could just as easily apply to him, and, unwittingly makes the case for why no one should vote for him: “We can’t afford a president whose positions change with the politics of the moment. We need a president who knows that being ready on day one means getting it right from day one.” (Salem, OR, 3/21/08).

If voting for war appropriations and taking away civil liberties was bringing us closer to a more democratic and egalitarian society, well, I would advocate it. But it isn’t doing that.

What is your breaking point? At what point do you decide that you’ve had enough?

What do they have to do to lose your vote?

36 HOURS IN BURLINGTON

Back in September, 2007 The New York Times had a commissioned puff piece marketing Burlington's waterfront, which I discussed here. Yesterday's travel section featured Burlington again as a get-away venue - for 36 hours. There are some photos, too. Typical of the Times to focus on all the trendy places where out-of-towners may spend their cashed in 401(k)s. I guess it's the personal opinion of author Katie Zezima, but she leaves out an awful lot of other delights of Burlington. (How do certain restaurants get reviewed and others don't?) I guess it's because I live here; I am aware of the places she highlights, but the Burlington she describes is a tourist one that most residents don't experience or don't connect to. (Just as when I lived in Houston, London or NYC, I only visited touristic sites with relatives or visiting friends.)

She describes a nice little known oasis just three minutes' walk from my home.

Not sure of the time? Find out at the Burlington Earth Clock, a 43-foot-wide sundial at Oakledge Park and Beach (end of Flynn Street) made of slabs of granite from local quarries. Stand in the middle and look toward the mountains; the stones in front of you represent where the sun sets during equinoxes and solstices. On the other end of the park is a studio-size treehouse, suspended among nine large trees. It’s a childhood fantasy come true.

No doubt city councilors will praise this article (as they did the one in 2007). I guess I should be prepared to see lots of out-of-state license plates in my neighbourhood. No wonder Kiss and the councilors are urging us to vote yes tomorrow on the $5.5-million bond issue for a 3-year upgrading of Burlington's rundown streets. Fuck the tax payers: Gotta keep those tourists coming into our city so they can avoid the bumps on Flynn Avenue as they drive down to connect with nature!

DENNIS KUCINICH'S CLEVELAND

Dennis Kucinich gives the Observer's Paul Harris a tour of his Ohio district.

VERMONTERS DIVIDED OVER USE OF VOTING MACHIINES

BURLINGTON FREE PRESS

RUTLAND — Since the 2006 election when human error prompted a recount and reversal of Vermont’s election for auditor, 30 more Vermont communities now have vote-tabulating machines bringing the total to 103.

But some communities still favor tradition over technology and will continue to hand-count the results in Tuesday’s election.