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Greetings!
Saturday, February 2, 2013
8:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
3rd Annual Bay Area Social Justice Forum
People of Hope, Agents of Change
Valley Center for the Performing Arts
Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd, Oakland
Program & Registration
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This Social Justice Newsletter has two articles from MIT's Technology Review about capabilities for collecting data about registered voters. In the future this may lead to less reliance on TV ads and more efforts to ascertain and respond to voter sentiments and more reliance on one-on-one interactions between campaign volunteers and voters. Clearly, the effectiveness of our democracy will still depend on the willingness of citizens to be informed and make their views known.
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Financial Cliff News
from Catholics Confront Global Poverty
The Good News: Last minute negotiations over the New Year holiday between the White House and Senate resulted in legislation that the Congress passed and the President signed into law that prevented our nation from going over 'the fiscal cliff.' Specifically, the law prevents income tax rates for most Americans from going up, and delays automatic across-the-board spending cuts to most U.S. government programs, including poverty-focused international assistance.
The law also extends the Farm Bill that had expired on September 30, 2012. It authorizes the continuation of lifesaving international food assistance until September 30, 2013, including our nation's ability to provide food and nutrition to chronically hungry communities and helping them to become self-sufficient through long-term development programs. The Farm Bill extension also enables our nation to respond to the food needs of people affected by natural disasters and other emergencies.
The Bad News: The law that prevented the fiscal cliff only addresses tax issues and postpones until March 2013 deep spending cuts across all government spending, also known as 'sequestration.' This coincides with the March 27 expiration of the stop-gap spending bill that funds most U.S. government activities for this current fiscal year, as well as another round of negotiations regarding raising our nation's debt ceiling. While we hope that our elected officials will find a bipartisan, comprehensive solution to avoid sequestration, all signals indicate that we will once again need your concerted effort to protect lifesaving poverty-focused international assistance from steep cuts.
Please stay tuned and stand ready to raise your voice once again to tell your elected officials that CUTS COST LIVES and that they must protect lifesaving poverty-focused international assistance.
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Upcoming Events
National Migration Week, January 6-12,
Click on link
Saturday, January 19, 9:00 A.M. - Noon
MedShare
CCOP will have groups of volunteers sorting medical supplies at MedShare in San Leandro. Those interested in participating must contact Mark Nevins, menevi@sbcglobal.net, preferrably a week or more in advance.
Saturday, February 2, 8:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
3rd annual Bay Area Social Justice Forum
Holy Names University, 3500 Mountain Blvd, Oakland, Program & Registration
Friday, Saturday & Sunday, February 22-24Los Angeles Religious Education CongressAnaheim Convention Center Click on http://recongress.org/
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Action Alert
Send an email Postcard to Congress and tell your Senators and Congressional Representatives that Catholics and other supporters of immigrants want them to enact meaningful, compassionate and comprehensive immigration reform legislation.
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How Technology Has Restored the Soul of Politics
[From 1980 to 2010] poll-driven television ads sucked the heart and soul out of politics without much challenge. But during the very years that politics stagnated, technology evolved to allow people to share ideas and stories or sell and buy things from each other in ways that really improved their lives. By late 2002, political professionals from both sides of the political spectrum believed that it might be possible to take on the top-down, money-driven, television-ad-centric approach to politics and instead use technology to build a bottom-up, people-centered politics...
... There will be plenty of actors in both politics and business who will use the innovations of the Obama 2012 campaign as tools to manipulate people. But for me, right now, it feels as if technology has empowered people and given politics back its soul.
Excerpts from an article by Joe Trippi, writing for MIT's Technology Review, full article
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A More Perfect Union
How President Obama's campaign used big data to rally individual voters
The Obama 2012 campaign ... overturned the long dominance of TV advertising in U.S. politics and created something new in the world: a national campaign run like a local ward election, where the interests of individual voters were known and addressed.
Obama's campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obama's analysts could look at the Democrats' vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obama's 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts. [They experimented by testing the effectiveness of various messages on randomly selected voters. They also sent volunteers out to persuade voters through one-on-one interaction.]
Excerpts from an article by Sasha Issenberg writing for MIT's Technology Review, full article
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Brief Links
Public Policy Institute of California, http://www.ppic.org/main/home.asp
UC Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies, http://igs.berkeley.edu/
Pax Christi - monthly news of activities, link
TV program about Albert Barnes (1872-1951) and the new Barnes Foundation art museum in Philadelphia, link
The 100 greatest non-fiction books, selected by the writers for the Guardian's Books Desk, link |
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