I begin my book - Sometimes David Wins - with the Ludlow Massacre,  in 1914 during the Coal Field War in Southern Colorado.  Part of my motivation derives from the uncertain role my grandfather, Silas Gilbert Pierson, an executive with Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I), played as the event unfolded.  Another part flows from  Ludlow's prominence in labor history and United Mine Workers of America organizing. 

You can pre-order my book here:  https://actapublications.com/sometimes-david-wins/

TOGETHER NEW ORLEANS TO UNVEIL COMMUNITY LIGHTHOUSE PLAN AT COUNCIL
Releases two-minute video short  TUESDAY, MARCH 22, 10AM
CITY COUNCIL CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY COMMITTEE
CITY HALL, 1300 PERDIDO STREET
To confirm your attendance at the hearing, click here
To watch the video short on the Community Lighthouse Project, click here
(available after 2pm Saturday)

New Orleans - It's been in the works since the days immediately after Hurricane Ida, but the Community Lighthouse Project will get its first formal unveiling this Tuesday, March 22nd at New Orleans' City Council.
The Community Lighthouse idea, a brain-child of Together New Orleans, is an ambitious plan to build a network of resiliency hubs at eighty-five community organizations and congregations across South Louisiana, each with commercial-scale solar and backup battery storage to serve as response hubs in the wake of a disaster.
The project, as its organizers are quick to point out, is still in an early phase of development, but it's getting plenty of street buzz and mainstream recognition already.It received prominent mention in a Wall Street Journal feature story last month about back-up power systems across the country. 

And last week, the US Department of Energy selected the Community Lighthouse Project to be one of fourteen proposals nationally to receive technical assistance under its Energy Storage for Social Equity initiative.

This Tuesday, March 22nd at 10am, at the invitation of At-large Council Member and Committee Chair Helena Moreno, the Community Lighthouse Project will get its most thorough public airing to date at City Council's Climate and Sustainability Committee.

In advance of the hearing, Together New Orleans is releasing a two-minute video short about the plan which will be available on youtube after 2pm Saturday.

Walt Whitman -- Democratic Vistas (1867) 


"America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down.  But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me.  Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood......It is the fashion of dilettants [sic] and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from.  See that you do not fall into this error.  America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers."

Building the Institutions for Revolt
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/building_the_institutions_for_revolt_20170115/
Posted on Jan 15, 2017
By Chris Hedges

The pandemic offers Americans a chance to look hard at the ways in which government has failed society—but also a chance to do something about it.

As Judt said and then wrote, 11 years ago, “Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘free market’ and the much-advertised horrors of ‘socialism’? Our disability is discursive: we simply do not know how to talk about these things anymore.”  Read it here.