Target: G8 Leaders: Developing nations struggle to provide healthcare, education and HIV and AIDS prevention/treatment for their citizens. Debt relief or debt cancellation gives the opportunity for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) to reprioritize funds and focus on development, creating programs and opportunities that benefit their citizens. Debt relief already has proven successful in parts of Africa.

For example, after recent debt cancellation, Nigeria now expects to employ 120,000 new teachers enabling 3.5 million children to receive an education. In Tanzania the number of children receiving primary education has doubled. They are making excellent use of 1,000 new schools and 31,000 new schoolrooms. Choosing to relieve the debt of HIPC will not hurt those countries receiving debt payments because the payments are insignificant in comparison to the powerhouse economies of the lenders. It is time to help the world's poorest by giving HIPC the chance to develop. Tell the G8 world leaders to act in a timely manner forgiving debt to all indebted nations.

Take Action

I think the peace movement and every justice movement in the United States should simply overwhelm Congress members during the next two months with one and only one demand: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act in January. This is, of course, the bill that the labor movement has been trying to pass for years, and that Democrats in Congress and President Elect Obama have committed to making law: http://aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca

Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system?

First let them remake what they destroyed.

GM responded to the 1970s gas crisis by handing over the American market to energy-efficient Toyota and Honda.

GM met the rise of the hybrids with “light trucks.”

GM built a small electric car, leased a pilot fleet to consumers who loved it, and then forcibly confiscated and trashed them all.

GM now wants to market a $40,000 electric Volt that looks like a cross between a Hummer and a Cadillac and will do nothing to meet the Solartopian needs of a green-powered Earth.

For this alone, GM’s managers should never be allowed to make another car, let alone take our tax money to stay in business.

But there is also a trillion-dollar skeleton in GM’s closet.

This is the company that murdered our mass transit system.

The assertion comes from Bradford Snell, a government researcher whose definitive report damning GM has been a vehicular lightening rod since its 1974 debut. Its attackers and defenders are legion. But some facts are irrefutable:

I am writing this as someone who joins Americans and others across this planet in their elation over your victory.

Many of us want to join with you in working to solve the challenges that you, our nation and the world face. One of them is the decision you will make about Iran. According to Carol Giacomo’s article “ New Beltway Debate: What to Do About Iran” in the November 3, 2008 issue of the New York Times, a range of military and economic options against Iran are being considered by your new administration.

Because of the magnitude and possible repercussions of the decision you will ultimately make I encourage you to seek out a range of informed opinions on this subject to supplement the guidance you receive from your advisors.

One such source could be the current and past members of the upper echelons of our military who opposed the plans for such an attack under the Bush administration, some of whom resigned in protest or threatened to do so. In addition, available to you are the opinions of many groups that have carried on a campaign to prevent the Bush administration from attacking Iran.

I hope it’s time, if nothing else, to retire cynical bumper stickers, such as: If elections could change anything, they’d be illegal.

The air remains thick with a sense of history and change, if not mandate. People are still buying last Wednesday’s newspaper, as though to prolong a moment that has already passed. But we know the significance of this election is still to come, right? We know that the forces of business as usual are closing ranks around the rock-star president-elect, and that the young idealist from Illinois we voted for could turn into a purely pragmatic centrist in the Clinton mold, right? The Democrats, after all, have a long history of ignoring their base.

Can we prevent this from happening? Yes, we can!

“The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times shortly after the election. This is the energy, released after eight years of agonizing simmer and disbelief, that swept Barack Obama into office, and it must not be allowed to dissipate. We have our country back — now we have to hold onto it.