Indigenous American’s Role in the American Revolution and other provocative ideas in The Dawn of Everything:
A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), 692 pages. A short review by John M Repp of parts of the massive book. Before the French and Indian War, there had been several hundred years of French colonization in the New World around the Great Lakes. Many Jesuit missionaries learned the language of the natives to try and convert them to Christianity, and the missionaries reported back to the educated public in France. Several transcribed dialogues between the Jesuits and native intellectuals became best-selling books in France. This is at the time when the whole French branch of the movement we call the Enlightenment was being born in the…
December 2021 Newsletter print edition
The latest print version of Pacific Call is now available as a pdf to view or download. See the latest articles including the ones posted since our last newsletter issue! Plus some excellent letters to the editor, interesting graphics, and tidbits. Click here Full URL is https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PacificCall1221.pdf
Washington Poor People’s Campaign
Forward Together! Not One Step Back! by Dorothy Van Soest and Romy Garcia, Members of the Washington Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee Our goal is to create a Beloved Community and this will require a qualitative change in our soul as well as a quantitative change in our lives. —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. At the November program meeting of the Seattle Fellowship of Reconciliation Chapter, we began our presentation about the Washington Poor People’s Campaign with the vision of a beloved community, the concept first coined by philosopher and theologian, FOR founder Josiah Royce, and then popularized by Dr. King, himself a member of FOR. Dr. King’s beloved community philosophy centered on the belief that “racism, bigotry and…
Government Spending & MMT
The Truth about Money Can Allow Us to Spend More Federal Dollars to Help People Post-Pandemic – Without More Taxes by Vandana Whitney In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Fifty years later, the members of Congress seem convinced we’re still on the gold standard and they are not alone in that mistaken belief. While going off the gold standard made radical changes to our monetary system, the national conversation about how money works barely changed at all. Under the gold standard, the federal government was very restricted as to how much currency it could issue because dollars had to be backed up by a certain amount of gold. If the public or other trading countries…
The Difficult Problem of Climate Change
by John M Repp Many people think the problem of climate change will simply require that we change how we get energy; that there is a technological solution. I thought that until recently. We just need to switch from fossil fuels to renewables. Build hundreds of wind farms and put solar panels on roofs everywhere. Electrify our cars, trucks, and trains. Start by withdrawing the subsidies from fossil fuels embedded in the tax system. All it will take is the political will. We were shocked last summer when a “heat dome” parked itself over the Pacific Northwest. There were temperatures of 121 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in British Columbia. Too much of the fruit crop in Eastern Washington and British Columbia…
The Rise and Subsequent Downward Slide of the Middle Class in the United States Since 1938
by John M Repp An economic historian looking at the USA over the past 70 years would be alarmed, assuming they wanted the American people to be healthy and happy. The two charts below tell much of the story. In the first chart, the minimum wage kept pace with the rise in productivity from 1938 to 1968 as the left-hand half of the chart shows. That was the period when the great American middle-class came on the stage of history. After 1968 the productivity curve climbed ever higher but the minimum wage and the general wage level stagnated. This means there was a great increase in wealth creation, but the wage earners, which was most of the American population, were…
September 2021 Newsletter print edition
The latest print version of Pacific Call is now available as a pdf to view or download. See the latest articles including the ones posted since our last newsletter issue, plus some enlightning tidbits! Click here Full URL is https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PacificCall0921.pdf
Afghanistan : Notes from the Editor (Larry Kershner)
Reposting, written November 8, 2011, after a month in Afghanistan, midway through the 20 years of US. occupation and war in Afghanistan. This is the last entry from the journal of our recent trip to Afghanistan. I now realize how little I have known and still know about Afghanistan and the people who live here. Afghanistan appears to me to be teetering on the brink of collapse despite “the light at the end of the tunnel” talk by the militarist machine. Three and a half billion people on the globe live on less than $2.50 a day- most of the people of Afghanistan among them. Many people here express the desire that the apparent stability maintained by the military presence…
The Braver Angels Workshop: July 17, 2021
by David Lambert It was just a few minutes into the recent WWFOR sponsored Braver Angels workshop held virtually this past July, that I realized I had not been chosen as a participant in work/sharing groups. Instead, observing this workshop proved to be an enlightening and rewarding experience for me. I had earlier this year participated in another three-hour Braver Angels workshop with the identical title: Depolarizing Within. This previous experience with the workshop content assisted me in my observer role; a role I perceive the Braver Angels staff wanted me to be in. Following my short welcome, Dee Edelman, the principal Braver Angel Moderator, mentioned that this workshop was geared to help members and supporters of WWFOR and other…
Western Washington FOR Youth Program: Gathers Strength Online
by Bruce Pruitt-Hamm, reprinted from Fellowship, summer 2021 (the national FOR magazine) …our elders have lots of wisdom and experience to share with us, and to make changes to the world, our movements must be intergenerational. … But young people? We are yet to be broken and burned out. We are still closer than adults to that part of ourselves that is full of questions, challenges, and a refusal to accept the state of the world around us. We have fresh energy, insight, and a unique power to create change in our world. Jamie Margolin, 2017 Mike Yarrow Peace FellowYouth to Power, p. xiv. Hachette Books. Kindle Edition (2020) The Mike Yarrow Peace Fellowship is a unique long-term training program…
