The 2023 Washington State Legislature Activity
Summary of some of the 2023 Washington State Legislature activity by Bruce Radtke You may have been watching the Washington House and/or Senate to see if a bill you favor passed. For further information on any bill, look online app.leg.wa.gov/billinfo. It is an excellent website. If it was to ban the sale of assault-type weapons in WA, that bill passed (HB1240). Another gun safety bill requires a background check and a 10-day waiting period for firearms purchases, and it also passed (HB1143). A major goal for several legislators was to pass housing legislation to increase housing. Housing discrimination due to restrictive real estate covenants was covered by a bill to create covenant home ownership accounts (HB1474). Another bill that passed…
Education in Finland
Education in Finland by John M Repp Finland has one of the best educational systems in the world. Yes, they are a small country compared to the United States, but we must remember that our school systems are city, county or state based, not nationally based. One of the biggest barriers to improvement in the United States is the idea, often unstated, that we cannot learn from other countries. This is a recipe for failure. We can learn a lot from Finnish educational practices, and we know that improving our educational systems should be a key focus of our efforts to make our country better. Finns want to have a trust-based system, not a control-based system. Finland trusts its teachers.…
Poetry by Jean Gant Delastrada
Wish Poems #1 and #2 by Jean Gant Delastrada I wish the leaders of nationsCould talk like four-year-olds doAt their preschool peace tables. I wish the urge to competeCould fade into The urge to cooperate I wish people hated war So much they would Give their all for peace. I wish there were remediesFor greed and crueltyAnd the human weakness of tribalism. I wish inventors wouldConcentrate on eliminating evil. I wish more people could learnTo love their enemies I wish peace and loveWould prevail for everyone Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Fragment of a Poem by Jean Gant Delastrada Ring the bells,Wave your signs on streetcorners,Nuclear Weapons are now illegal! January 22, 2012The Treaty has entered into force. Of…
Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths
Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Deaths by John M Repp Harvard Environmental Law Review recently accepted a 70-page paper to be published in 2024, suggesting that prosecutors start charging the big oil companies with homicide for the deaths caused by climate change. Oil companies have already been sued by cities for financial damages caused by heat waves, wildfires, and rising seas. And federal prosecutors charged British Petroleum with manslaughter for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. The company pleaded guilty and paid billions in fines and penalties. It is well known that the oil companies were told by their own scientists as early as the 1950’s that the use of their product would cause climate change. Their response was many massive…
Cracks in the Oligarchy
Cracks in the Oligarchy by John M Repp Jimmy Carter said in 2015 that the United States of America is “an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”. In response to a question on the Thom Hartmann talk radio show about the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, Carter added: “we have just seen complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” So, even though we still have elections at local, state, and federal levels, we are not a democracy. Of course, we hear the contrary all the time, especially when our system is compared to our geopolitical rivals, Russia, and China. Oligarchy means rule by the few. In the United States today, the few who rule are the…
2023 WWFOR Spring Assembly: Report
2023 WWFOR Spring Assembly The theme of the 25th annual WWFOR Spring Assembly was Evolving Nonviolence. by David Lambert. David chaired the planning committee for this event. Our keynoter, Helena Cobban, shared her background of growing up in England. At age 21, she worked as a war correspondent in Beirut, Lebanon, while caring for her two small children. She came to the thinking that no matter how the war started, it needed to be stopped! She took her two children and left the Lebanon and her work there as a war correspondent in 1981. She has witnessed many war zones, reporting that just as many people die from lack of hygiene, medications, food, and lack of other humanitarian needs as…
Crisis for Pacifism – Again
Crisis for Pacifism – Again: Thoughts on Ukraine War and other Crises by Jean Buskin Recently, I followed a link to this article: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/20/2159214/-No-more-Ben-Jerry-s-founder-comes-out-as-tankie . There I learned two new words “tankie” and “Holodomor,” so that’s something. If they are new to you too, each one has a Wikipedia page. This article criticizes Ben Cohen, the Ben of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, for opposing the U.S. sending weapons to Ukraine. Ben has company, such as Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and Helena Cobban. I count myself among that school of thought. Weapons to Ukraine will only prolong the suffering of the Ukrainians, yet in this camp we are seen as enemies of Ukraine, and sometimes seen as apologists for the Russian…
Book Review: Insurrection
Pacific Call newsletter editor, John M. Repp has reviewed Insurrection (Pigeon Editions, Seattle, 2023) by Nate Gowdy, with an introduction by Michael Rowe, and foreword by DC Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges. Nate Gowdy, a photographer from Seattle, took hundreds of photos on Jan 6, 2021. He was shooting for Rolling Stone. Click on the link below to see the review which includes some of the photos and a number of quotations about the violent Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol in Washington DC which delayed the counting of electoral college votes to install Joe Biden as President. Click here to see the article
The Second Bill of Rights
by John M Repp After seeing a film in Fremont that mentioned the Second Bill of Rights, Mike Yarrow organized a leafleting at the next showing to explain more about the idea. Also called the “economic bill of rights”, the idea was proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union speech. FDR intended to put these rights into law rather than amend the Constitution. The speech, given towards the end of World War II, pointed out that the sacrifices the American people were undergoing due to the war were recognized and FDR wanted a new bill of rights to reward the people for their sacrifice. FDR said that the first bill of rights were political rights…
How Our Government Has Used Nuclear Weapons since 1945
by John M Repp The possible use of nuclear weapons is back in the news after Vladimir Putin made veiled threats that if any nation tries to stop his aggression in Ukraine, he will use nuclear weapons. Putin knows he has not done anything worse than the United States has done over the past seventy-seven years. However, he threatened publicly, while American presidents have threatened using diplomatic channels. Most people think President Truman used atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force the Japanese to surrender. But Truman already knew the Japanese were ready to surrender because the U.S. government had learned to read their communications. Actually, Truman dropped the two atomic bombs the United States had constructed to show…
