For this newsletter, I only have one Evanston news item to share (Wild Onion Market). But there’s a lot of important national news with (a) local connections, (b) local impact, and (c) local actionability — with lots of interconnections among the areas of Money, Banking, Food, Farms, and Democracy. Two items have action deadlines. I hope […]
Transition to real democracy
I just got great news from Ken Pentel in Minnesota (Ecology Democracy Network), who has been working on one of the two bills that U.S. Ilhan Omar (MN) is packaging as Establishing a 21st Century Economy for All — Support the GPI Act and SUPPORT Act. According to Ken, the GPI Act and the SUPPORT Act will be […]
The renewable quality—the sacredness of every living thing, that which connects human beings to the place they inhabit—that quality is the single most liberating aspect of our environment. Life is renewable and all the things that support life are renewable, and they are renewed by a force greater than any government’s, greater than any living […]
Today, March 23, 2021, the Financial Institutions Committee of the Illinois General Assembly is hosting a “subject matter” hearing on state banks, as promoted in a current bill HB0089, “Community Bank of Illinois Act”. Members of the informal Illinois public banking coalition were invited to provide testimony. Knowing how these hearings sometimes go, I opted […]
Just like the Whole Earth Catalogue did for my generation of urban folks (Baby Boom), I think The New Farmer’s Almanac can help to reconnect urban & suburban people—70% of U.S. voters—with the land, earth cycles, and our own human cycles. So that collectively, we make better decisions—climate-wise and democracy-wise. This right to food, right to garden legislation will […]
NOTE Dec. 28, 2020:This was originally published by Dear Evanston, a local (Evanston, IL) outlet supporting racial justice. Thanks to editor Nina Kavin for inviting me to submit this article and for soliciting some comments by Alderwoman Robin Rue-Simmons. Original post was published on July 2, 2020 and includes some nice photos. Evanston resident Debbie […]
Letter-to-editorSubmitted to The Chicago Sun-Times in response to Op-ed “Why Chicago should start public bank” (Dec. 7, 2020) Thanks to Daniel LaSpata, Matt Martin, Robert Peters, and Ameya Pawar for a very readable, understandable, and practical description of what a public bank could do for the City of Chicago, and why public banking is a missing […]
In my June 14, 2019 blog on Presidential Politics + Food & Farm Justice, I quoted journalist John Nichols extensively about how the appointment of a U.S. Secretary of Agriculture was, for Trump, “an afterthought” (see Nichols’s book on all Trump’s cabinet appointments, Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse). In fact Sonny Perdue was the last cabinet appointment that Trump […]