A is for April...and Action

April 1:

House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-NY) announced today [March 25] that the Committee will hold a hearing on reforming the health care delivery system. The hearing will take place at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 1, 2009, in the main committee hearing room, 1100 Longworth House Office Building.

In view of the limited time available to hear witnesses, oral testimony at this hearing will be from invited witnesses only. However, any individual or organization not scheduled for an oral appearance may submit a written statement for consideration by the Committee and for inclusion in the printed record of the hearing.

This is a bolt from the blue, so spread the word. For exact instructions on how to express the urgency of Single-Payer/Medicare for All, read the whole House Ways and Means Committee advisory.

April 3-4 Wall Street Peace Actions, NYC:

Dr. King understood that the struggle for economic and social justice at home is tied to our work for peace abroad. On April 3 and April 4, we are taking the next step on this journey. By bringing people into the streets of the financial center on these two days, we will send a strong, clear message: Now is the time to raise our voices in a unified call for the changes we know must be made, the changes millions of people are demanding!

The activities on Friday, April 3 are being led by the Bail Out the People Movement and the April 4 activities are being led by United For Peace and Justice. On Friday, April 3, United For Peace and Justice will join Bail Out the People's program on Wall Street. On Saturday, April 4, Bail Out the People Movement will gather on Wall Street and join United For Peace and Justice's March on Wall Street that will end at Battery Park. We encourage you to participate in both days of action, but if that's not possible, we hope you will be out with us on at least one of these days.

April 11: Netroots-spawned local actions for bank nationalization!

On April 11, 2009 at 2pm ET/11am PT, there will be protests in cities across the country to break the power of the financial industry and the bankers that caused the current economic crisis. With growing frustration over unemployment, foreclosures and how the government has responded to the economic crisis so far, a web organizing platform, http://www.anewwayforward.org, has emerged to allow people and groups to organize around a progressive approach to economic recovery. The ground up, localized organizing effort to influence national policy is expected to culminate in at least one protest in every state.

This website was put together to facilitate people all over the country to share a path and organizing tasks towards economic recovery. We used open source software we built and is freely available on the web.

This project is not funded or initiated by any organization. The individuals who helped to bring the website together in our ealier days are Zephyr Teachout, Morgan Knutson (amazing designer), Nicholas Reville, Tiffiniy Cheng, Andrew Packer. This has been an all-volunteer, grassroots effort. We have all worked on public-interest projects on issues like the music industry (Downhill Battle) and have been active in politics. Individuals and organizatios have been instrumental in launching this project and we hope to involve them more formally. We have worked together on various technology projects in the past and currently. Tiffiniy Cheng worked on the Obama campaign in MO, helping with Get-out-the-vote efforts.

The website proposes three key principles for economic reform:

NATIONALIZE: Insolvent banks that are too big to fail must incur a FDIC intervention -- no more taxpayer handouts.

REORGANIZE: Current CEOs and board members must be removed and bonuses wiped out. The financial elite must share in the cost of what they have caused.

DECENTRALIZE: Banks must be broken up and sold back to the private market with new antitrust rules in place-- new banks managed by new people.

The site allows anyone to sign up their city for a protest and begin working out the details with other local protesters in designated forums. Though each protest will be executed differently by different groups of people, the website provides a national community that will help draw attention, support and resources to the local efforts.

Like ol' Studs Terkel used to say, 'Take it easy, but TAKE IT!'
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