admin December 6th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Today and tomorrow, the 2007 Recipients of the Right Livelihood Award are being honored in Stockholm. Often called the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” the Right Livelihood Prize “celebrates and supports people of vision. People who have ideas and apply them in concrete initiatives for the public good. They give hope for tomorrow, for a world in peace and balance. They demonstrate how we can overcome oppression, war, poverty, the destruction of our environment, and a widespread sense of meaninglessness and fear.”
This years laureates are: Christopher Weeramantry (Sri Lanka), and Dekha Ibrahim Abdi (Kenya), both engaged in promoting understanding between Islam and Christianity; Percy Schmeiser (Canada), who together with his wife Louise fights against Monsanto’s abusive marketing practices; and Dipal Barua (Bangladesh), Managing Director of Grameen Shakti, which has installed more than 120,000 solar home systems in rural Bangladesh.
Our congratulations to this year’s recipients also spur reflection, as today marks the 20th anniversary of Frances’ selection for the Right Livelihood Award. In 1987, only the fourth American to win the prize, Frances was given the award for her “vision and work healing our planet and uplifting humanity.”
Peace, Mark
admin November 28th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Bernie Sanders posted an interesting article on global heating on The Nation today. It’s worth a visit, but the gist is: we can fix our climate problems with new technology.
“[T]he situation is by no means hopeless.”
I resonate with the content of Sanders’ article, especially the need to keep a positive frame of mind and to strive after solutions that are substantive, not what Frances calls “random acts of sanity,” but which are genuine efforts made with every belief that we are, indeed, hope in action. Still, there is an even deeper need I fear Sanders doesn’t address.
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admin November 16th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) John Zogby, of Zogby International, posted an interesting letter to the editor in his hometown Utica Observer-Dispatch (find the entire article here). Zogby reads government’s consistently poor performance in polls [congressional democrats fair worse now than OJ in ’95?!] to suggest that the next president will have to redefine federalism.
“Voters are angry and disillusioned. Their faith in governmental institutions is at a record low. Much of that has to do with failure in Iraq and our damaged image abroad, but even more it has to do with Katrina and a pervasive sense that government at all levels is disconnected from Americans’ needs and from the capability of handling a major catastrophe.”
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admin November 15th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Frances will be the featured speaker for the 14th Annual Berklee College of Music Liberal Arts Symposium next April. Both faculty and students are gearing up to consider where art and action meet, in the words of Camille Colatosti, Chair of the Liberal Arts Department, “to use our creative energy to build a world that promotes ‘living democracy,’ that empowers individuals and emphasizes community.” In the process, Berklee is reaching out to the entire Boston educational community.
University outreach has been on my mind for some time, and this is a sign of much more to come. You‘ve read Frances’ posts about Suffolk and Worcester. She has also visited the University of Connecticut, Portland State, Denver and Washington in St. Louis. Just after Thanksgiving, she is going to Calgary and to Santa Clara. Frances has tremendous rapport with students, creating tremendous synergy.
I, however, have a slightly clandestine interest in university outreach (cue the lightning flash and thunder clap).
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mark November 13th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) This morning I was following up on some media. Two weeks ago, Frances submitted this great article to the Capital City Hues in Madison, WI. Since she was on the road, a few of us were shepherding the piece. In editing, we did a word count. What had begun as an almost 1,200 word essay had dropped to 700 words.
That was pretty amazing, but we had made some cuts, and if MSWord told us there were 700 words, there were 700 words. A few days later, we reflected on the drop, but didn’t question the count.
Today I went to the Capital City Hues website, but something seemed amiss. Seeing the text on one page, no way that was 700 words. Uh-oh, could we have sent the wrong file?
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mark November 7th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Thom Hartman posted a wonderful piece on The Nation. It begins as a story about a personal political revolution, a conscious migration from conservative to liberal. Yet, like every good story, there is more than meets the eye. Hartman uses the story as a call for more effective personal communication.
You really ought to read the article, but here is a pivotal point:
“To be an effective communicator, we learn how to tell a story, with whom to share that story and why.”
“Everyone is a communicator, and we all communicate constantly. Some of us … are born storytellers and natural communicators. The skill of communication and persuasion seems innate and effortless. Folks like that are unconsciously competent at communicating. Most of us, however, are not very competent at communicating; what’s more, we don’t know that. We are unconsciously incompetent.”
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admin November 2nd, 2007
(Mark - Media Marketing Director) I want to begin by sharing some thoughts John Nichols posted on The Nation website:
“Frances Moore Lappé has, for the better part of four decades, done her very best to guide the United States toward a more rational relationship with the planet and its inhabitants … to renew civic and democratic values, to restrain corporate excess and governmental abuse, to stop fearing fear itself and to start embracing the radical responses that will make America and the planet as peaceful, as healthy, as humane and as fulfilled as our knowledge and our technology makes possible.”
“That’s the “gospel” Frances Moore Lappé preaches in her terrific new book, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad.”
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mark October 22nd, 2007
(Mark) A story came to my attention over the weekend that brings out every reason why Clean Elections as the only way forward. This Wired story spotlights two batches of questionably-motivated—and extremely-poorly-timed—political contributions. With a bid for immunity heating up the political wires, executives from Verizon and AT&T wrote some dubiously-intended checks to Senator Jay Rockefeller, the reported hand-on-the-wheel of the Senate Intelligence Committee & a key player in whether the telecoms’ collective head goes on the block for unwarranted wire-tapping
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mark October 17th, 2007
(Mark) I’ve had an article from a local paper sitting on my desk for a few weeks simmering. “Student loan costs stifle economy:” an AP story about the debt college grads are accruing. For many, it probably seems like just another ripple in the tsunami of fiscal concerns: sub-prime, predatory lending, housing worries, and fuel prices. “Oh, and students are taking their lumps, too,” the piece seems to say.
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mark October 12th, 2007
(Mark) An English friend used to needle me endlessly about Americans: “You can always tell the Americans, because all they say is ‘Wow!’”
He meant this, of course, to suggest that Americans are not as cultured and refined as his fellow English. In some ways, I guess he was right. Being from Texas, I never really aspired to ‘cultured’ status, but over the years, I’ve come to a different understanding, having said my fair share of ‘Wow’s.
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