Knowledge Empowers Advocacy and Action

By Marilyn Dudley-Flores

I am your neighbor, Marilyn Dudley-Flores, at 2262 Magnolia Avenue in Petaluma. I have the background to see issues from many different perspectives. I am a Viet Nam Era veteran, I have worked a variety of blue-collar jobs, run a research and policymaking small business, and hold a clinical counseling credential. I also teach social sciences in colleges and universities. I am sure that knowledge empowers advocacy and action. As follow are a number of things that concern me and my "take" on them.

(1)Child Poverty in Rich Countries: 2005, The Innocenti Report Card No. 6. United Nations.

(*)International treaties marked by an asterisk in this position paper are those that the United States has not yet signed.

Postsecondary Education in California. The "Golden State" has one of the most rapacious caste systems of public academic labor in the United States, where, in the aggregate, more than half of its teaching cadre, the "untenured" professors, do not receive adequate salary for their services to make a decent living and often receive no health benefits. On top of that, they have no job security from one semester to the next. It is no wonder that Californians despair that their children will ever be able to get into a California college or university with public colleges and universities operated in the state like a system of peonage (see http://www.collegecampaign.org). When academic administrators bleed funding away from tenure or tenure-equivalent investment in professors, they are gutting students' access to college degrees, adequate education to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and they devastate the vigor of the knowledge base of the United States.

Environment and Space. Environmentalist Stewart Brand labeled the space satellite "an engine of the ecology movement" Imaging the planet, a direct product of space exploration, has enabled our larger awareness of the biosphere. Our world is undergoing global warming, which means we are beginning to experience climate change of epochal proportion. We need both our "hardware" and our "software" to live in a world that will become ever more challenging.(2) Monitoring the condition of the global environment adequately requires a scientific and technical base (our "hardware"), which means a healthy space budget. "Software" means signing international treaties like the Nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,* the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change,* and the Convention on Biological Diversity.*

(2) NASA's budget hovers around the same dollar amount as the nation's parks and recreation programs consume. And, for all the Bush Administration bluster about returning to the Moon and going to Mars, the empty rhetoric about long-duration exploration intentions masks an ultra-conservative and anti-intellectual effort that cuts NASA's programs and that blinds our eyes in space so that we cannot assess the condition of our planet or see the origins of the universe.

Energy. Let us re-regulate the energy industry. We must begin the transition to the post-petroleum economy posthaste and invest in new infrastructure to accommodate new energy innovations. There is no "secret plan" that will be trotted out once the last ounce of oil is sucked from the ground. More minds and jobs need to be devoted to these innovations now.

Workplace. Let us enact adequate state and federal oversight to ensure that workplaces provide meaningful occupations, livable wages, and state-of-the-art safety and health conditions to perform work, to include the enactment of laws against mobbing. Mobbing is a type of workplace violence that is common in the American workplace that sees supervisors and co-workers engaging in a regimen of systematic non-physical abuse against a worker as a perverse means of ésprit de corps (www.mobbing-usa.com). (3)

(3) MOBBING: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace" by Noa Davenport, Ph.D, Ruth Distler Schwartz, and Gail Pursell Elliott, Civil Society Publishing, Ames, Iowa.

Human Rights. Let us protect reproductive rights, extend marriage rights, establish the right to death with dignity, and sign the following international treaties: Anti-Personnel Mine Convention,* Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights,* Convention of the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women,* and Convention on the Rights of the Child.*

Crime and Terror. Let us enact stronger laws against corrupt lobbying practices, quarantine sexual predators, focus the War on Terrorism through international cooperation in police work and intelligence, and sign the Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons* and the treaty concerning the International Criminal Court.* Use of the United States Military/Veterans Affairs. Let us turn over peacekeeping in Iraq to the UN and discourage the development of "The Long War." Let us stand against the stinting of veterans on their benefits and services. Civil Diplomacy. Let us create a World Service Corps to foster a culture of service and global citizenship (http://dwaynehunn.biz/).

International Trade and Finance. Let us advocate for transparency in the World Trade Organization and in regional free trade agreements. Let us insist on Fair Trade and the reform of the International Monetary Fund.

Electoral Reform. Let us insist on the following:
--Redistricting reform (end gerrymandering).
--Free air time for candidates.
--Public campaign financing (clean money)
--Open-source software voting systems
--Instant runoff voting (ranked choice)
--National system for presidential primaries (end the Iowa---New Hampshire duopoly; give California a chance)
--Direct popular vote for president.

For a glimpse of more of my writings and positions, please see http://pweb.jps.net/~gangale/opsa/flores.htm