NGC protest gears up in seattle

national gov convention-peoples carnival
author: alice
Jul 03, 2004 00:05

“{True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature.”




Come one, come all, to the FESTIVAL of resistance-the autonomous art community of Seattle will presen an ecstatic and joyous carnival of de-sublimation:


“The sacred presides even over the struggle against alienation.”

The National Governor's Association is meeting this year on July 17 th in Seattle . This is a closed door meeting. Attendees will include all 50 Governors and the Corporate Fellows Program, which consists of 1,200 corporate representatives. According to a pitch on the official NGA website, this is an opportunity where “… Corporate Fellows can offer perspectives to Governors and their staff on issues of mutual concern.” They are invited via donations, but the public is not, regardless of donation (Labor groups have tried).


So we are inviting ourselves! Our voices are necessary for a truly democratic society. Therefore we are organizing a march in the streets of Seattle that will be heard loud and clear. Whether your concern is tuition, taxes,war or labor, you need to make your voice heard.


http://www.ngaaction.org/
“Myth is sustained by rewarded sacrifice. Since every individual life is based on its own renunciation, lived experience must be defined as sacrifice and recompense. As a reward for his asceticism, the initiate (the promoted worker, the specialist, the manager—new martyrs canonized democratically) is granted a niche in the organization of appearance; he is made to feel at home in alienation. But collective shelters disappeared with unitary societies, all that’s left is their later concrete embodiments for the benefit of the public; temples, churches, palaces…memories of a universal protection. Shelters are private nowadays, and even if their protection is far from certain there can be no mistaking their price.”

What is their purpose?

Their stated mission is to “ support the work of the governors by providing a bipartisan forum to help shape and implement national policy and to solve state problems.” (from http://www.nga.org)

The purpose of the meetings is to establish public policy for the upcoming year, using available input from fellow attendees, as well as the Governor's assembly.

How has it gone astray?

At its base, the NGA is a good thing. A dialogue amongst Governors is beneficial to the future of a federalized nation such as the United States .

In 1988 however, the NGA's Corporate Fellows Program was founded. This is a group of corporations that have the Governors' ears in setting priorities in the upcoming year.

These corporations have given a donation to be invited to this closed door meeting. Labor groups and environmental groups have tried to get an invitation in the same way that the corporations were allowed to, but they were denied.

What can we do to correct it?

The NGA is meeting in Seattle this year, on July 16, 17 & 18. Since we can only be heard from a distance, we must be louder than ever. Students, activists, progressives and labor groups are mobilizing in the streets of Seattle this summer during the convention, and we will all make our voices heard.

“There is a place where you create yourself and a time in which you play yourself. The space of everyday life, that of one’s true realisation, is encircled by every form of conditioning.”

Get Involved


July 17th, 2004

You are invited to join us in Seattle on July 17th to tell our governors to represent you, not just the big corporations. There will a student procession from the intersection of Roy and Broadway which will end at the Festival For Public Priorities in Westlake Park. It begins at eleven and ends at noon.

Bring anything you can think of, especially:

Banners
Flags
Costumes
Puppets
Musical Instruments
Family, Friends, and Neighbors!




Until Then...


In the Seattle Area

Join us Fridays at 5:30 PM to discuss the preparations for the NGA Call To Action on July 17th. The meetings are being held at the Caffe Vita in Seattle.

“…the alienated share an implicit positive search in a common direction. Their philosophies emphasize the value of passion and feeling, the search for awareness, the cultivation of responsiveness, the importance of solitude, and the need to somehow express their experience of life. Their main values are therefore ‘expressive’ or aesthetic, in that their main focus is the present, their main source is the self, and their main aim is the development of awareness, responsiveness, expressiveness, and sentience. Rejecting the traditional American values of success, self-control, and achievement, they maintain that passion, feeling, and awareness are the truest forces at man’s disposal. For most of them the primary objective in life is to attain and maintain openness to experience, contact with the world, and spontaneity of feeling. Anything that might fetter or restrain their responsiveness and openness is opposed: the goal, as one student puts it, is ‘circumscribing my life as little as possible.’ And the same student goes on to say that he will some day be able to ‘express all or part of what I feel about life.’”

In the Olympia Area

We also hold weekly coordination meetings every Thursday at 1:15 PM at the The Political and Social Resource Center in the Student Union Building at the South Pudget Sound Community College in Olympia. Come hear face to face discussions about the NGA, the issues involved and what you can do to help.

“For all its quirkiness, the counter culture dared to envision a better future, and in fact the one interesting postindustrial vision we have thus far been offered. I have always imagined it to be an Arcadian commonwealth much like the utopia William Morris envisioned in his News From Nowhere, but with the addition of a ‘small is beautiful’ technological base to relieve the drudgery. There the free flowering of personality, the ideal of organic community, the adventure of ethnic diversity, the exploration of the further reaches of human nature, life lived gently on the earth, an economics of permanence, a new bio-centric contract between our species and the more than human world from which we draw our sustenance become the priorities of the day. The only reason all this ever had to be a counter culture was because the culture it opposed—that of reductionist science, ecocidal industrialism, and corporate regimentation—was too small a vision of life to lift the spirit.”

Homeland Security
Governors Laud Homeland Security Funding Task Force's Work, Recommendations

NGA urges Congress to follow task force's lead in appropriation debate.

NGA pledges to work with federal and local partners to implement recommendations that will ensure a more efficient distribution of homeland security funds to state and local first responders. The Homeland Security Funding Task Force has completed its report examining the grant funding process, and its report does not fault states for delays.

“So in order to be true to one’s conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.”
89, MLK

“…Grandjan proved to be a simple, kindly soul, a born rebel, the artist and idealist in the truest sense. He was at work on a set of drawings depicting phases of proletarian life. His idea was to portray labour, pathetic in dumb helplessness, slowly awakening to the consciousness of germinating strength. He expressed his belief that the mission of art is to inspire the vision of a new dawn. ‘In this respect all our artists are revolutionaries…’they are bringing art in rapport with the currents of life, the great human struggle for the right to know and live life.”

We Will Shut Them Down...