When: Saturday 4/19 2pm – 1am:
Where: Evolution Arts Collective Warehouse Space, 202 S Dickinson St., Madison, WI

There will be informational talks, kids’ arts and crafts, food, music, a silent auction with fabulous items from local businesses to bid on! Door prizes! And more!

$10 minimum suggested donation gets you the chance to win a door prize, live music and awesome presentations. You are encouraged to bring a dish to pass for the 6pm potluck supper. BYOB after 9 PM.

The Global Climate Convergence is an education and direct action campaign that begins this spring, with “10 days to change course,” running from Earth Day to May Day. It builds collaboration across national borders and fronts of struggle to harness the transformative power we already possess as a thousand separate movements springing up across the planet. Earth Day-to-May Day 2014 (April 22 - May 1) will be the first in a series of expanding annual actions.

As you know, the movement for democracy and justice is sweeping the globe – from democracy revolutions to occupy protests, movements for the rights of workers, students, immigrants, women and Indigenous peoples; resistance to NSA spying, endless war, prison pipelines, tar sands, fracking, nuclear power, GMOs and more. The accelerating climate disaster – now predicted to dismantle civilization as we know it as soon as 2050 - intensifies all these struggles, and provides new urgency for collaboration and unified action. Clearly there is no time to lose.

The Convergence calls for a solution as big as the crisis barreling down on us – an emergency green economic transformation, including full employment and living wages; 100 percent clean renewable energy by 2030; universal free health care and education; food and housing security; an end to deportations and mass incarceration; economic and political democracy; demilitarization; ecosystem restoration and support for the rights of Mother Earth; and more.

These goals will only be achieved by masses of people coming together in a unified movement, which is exactly what the Convergence is working towards!

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is slated to roll out its annual "Rich States, Poor States" publication this week. The document, whose lead author is economist Arthur Laffer, is sold to the press as an objective, academic measure of state economic performance, but should instead be viewed more as a lobby scorecard ranking states on the adoption of extreme ALEC policies that have little or nothing to do with economic outcomes. This year, leaked documents revealed that the report is directly funded by the Kochs, on top of longstanding Koch support for ALEC itself.

Until recently, little information was available about the funders of Rich States, Poor States, but tucked in a cache of ALEC internal documents obtained by the Guardian in December was a spreadsheet (PDF pg. 40) that showed for the first time that Rich States, Poor States is funded by the Kochs' Claude Lambe Foundation, as well as the Searle Freedom Trust.

The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation is one of three Koch Family Foundations; this one is controlled by Charles Koch. The Searle Freedom Trust, was founded by David Searle, who made millions from aspartame marketed as Nutrasweet. Both foundations are major funders of a national right-wing infrastructure that includes ALEC and the State Policy Network, 64 state-based think tanks that produce academic reports, talking points and more to advance ALEC’s agenda of tax breaks for corporations, steep budget cuts and attacks on unionized workers.

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Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First in Washington, D.C., told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Laffer's report evaluates and rewards states that are suppressing wages and moving their tax burden from the rich to the poor. "This is all about regressivity," LeRoy said. The non-partisan, non-profit resource centers Good Jobs First and the Iowa Policy Project issued a report in 2013 which took apart Rich States, Poor States on methodological grounds. Their analysis criticized Rich States, Poor States for its "primitive approaches" and for ignoring decades of academic peer-reviewed studies on economic development.

Moreover, the 2013 Rich States Poor States appeared highly politicized, ranking Scott Walker's Wisconsin 15th in the nation at a time the state was ranked 44th for new job creation by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Laffer and his colleagues, which included Stephen Moore (formerly of the Wall Street Journal, now at the Heritage Foundation), seem intent on rewarding Republican governors who pursue austerity agendas even if that agenda hurts economic growth. Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker is a former ALEC member who signed 19 ALEC bills into law in his first two years in office, slashed government spending and eviscerated state unions prompting mass protests in February 2011.

She is repeatedly criticizing Pres. Obama for not responding more aggressively to Vladimir Putin. This is reckless talk. Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons. The last thing we need is to return to the days of a nuclear standoff. Several times during the Cold War we were lucky to escape global annihilation.

Obama has been right to try not to turn the crisis in Ukraine into a military confrontation with Russia. But Rice, who is the director of the Global Center for Business and the Economy at Stanford University, keeps egging the administration on. Speaking to the California Republican Party in March, she said, “America has to lead.” She acknowledged that the American people “are tired . . . after more than 10 years of war and terrorism and engagement abroad.”

But Rice and the other leaders of the Bush administration are the ones who are responsible for getting us tired of war and terrorism and military engagements abroad. As National Security Adviser, she was the main person responsible in the period leading up to September 11 for identifying and responding to terrorist threats. She ignored warnings that an Al Qaeda attack was coming, most infamously on August 6, 2001, in the Presidential Daily Brief titled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which Rice and Bush ignored. Rice was also one of the chief propagandists for the disastrous war against Iraq. She was the one who first used the phrase that “the smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud.” And she insisted in an op-ed for the New York Times in January 2003 that Saddam Hussein was lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Rice and her neoconservative colleagues in the Bush administration are in no position to be criticizing Obama’s handling of the crisis in Ukraine. That they are taken seriously is the only surprise, since they never have apologized for, or even acknowledged, the fundamentally wrong and misleading role they played when they were in power. Disregarding the disaster they created in Iraq, they once again seek to brandish the military might of the United States to send the message that Washington is still the big dog on the world stage. “Leaders can’t afford to get tired,” she said last month. “Leaders can’t afford to be weary.” Somehow she did not mention that leaders also can’t afford to ignore the facts, downplay the consequences of war or shamelessly scare the public.