Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

I wrote back to everyone and a few others:

Even more: boycott ExxonMobil because of human rights abuses and environmental destruction, as well as the economic exploitation helping to bleed us dry.

http://www.stopexxonmobil.org/

http://www.amnestyusa.org/page.do?id=1101642

ChevvronTexaco is pretty bad too.

Buy Citgo!

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

For about a year now, my mother can't get pictures developed decently.

This is a process that was perfected, worked great, cheap and available to everyone.

A little competition from digital, and suddenly no one even tries to do a good job at an affordable price of developing film photographs?

I'm not sure what the economic forces are at work here – except that with greater equality of wealth would come a greater emphasis on quality over being inexpensive.

http://coanews.org/article/2008/what-dead-presidents-can-do

Excerpts:

Dead Presidents is the story of a black veteran who -- upon returning to The Bronx after volunteering for two tours in Vietnam -- robs an armored car with his fellow vets since he can't find a living wage job that'll allow him to support a family. The acting, the soundtrack -- everything about this motion picture is perfect, but after [a romantic interest] saw it for the first time with me, all [she] had to say was, "I don't think Anthony [the protagonist] tried hard enough to find a job."

Hi ______,

Just to try to give the angle at which I come at the liberal / conservative question...

Instant Message conversation, Tuesday, February 26, 2008

prino1 12:41
i need quick help if you have a second... i am having a hard time understanding the conservative view of things

regardless of how I feel

i need to be able to explain and understad why conservatives think people are to blame for poverty

on a micro- individual level

i just can't wrap my head around it

benjamin melançon 12:42
and how am i supposed to help? the only thing conservative about me is that i don't like old things being taken down

In comments to an article on Clinton's NAFTA position:

Alexa, on February 25th, 2008 at 12:19 am Said:

[Very initial first rough start of a beginning of a draft.]

PWGD rules for being a PWGD service:
1. People rule. People who use your service can communicate with everyone else should they make a collective decision to do so. (This is why the democratically moderated communication is the base functionality.)
2. Free software (ideally, Affero GPL).

vegetable chili recipie (Cathy, 2/19/08 6:41 PM)

This comment follows up on this blog post, "the political left", and following discussion, wherein it is determined that all love blankets, and all should have blankets, but the method of obtaining them is in dispute. The original author, Mikkel, said in his last comments that yes, 'we should give them money-- by giving them a job.'

Let's give people money, by giving them a job, by making sure everyone has money.

Counterrecruiting: very much a project for which I personally want to use PWGD. (PWGD tools, of course, are freely available for everything. Universal. That's the point. But if we who build it don't have some specific things in mind, we really lack imagination and purpose!)

(A discourse regarding the hypothetical People Who Give a Damn website...)

PWGD.org helps people who give a damn find one another and organize to take effective action on issues they care about. Right now these tools for connecting are pretty weak.

Quoting myself from over at RuralVotes' The Field:

One thing is certain. As Tom W. points out, there is not much distinction between Obama and Clinton on policy, and the term movement is being used pretty loosely.

... but in a good way.

PWGD = fun and respect and love and success and kindness and hope

Here are my thoughts after talking to a friend upset by a professor who said ignorant things about the people of this hemisphere. He used the fact that most of the massive indigenous death in the Americas came from diseases, not guns, to dismiss the moral import of the centuries-long genocidal invasion of these continents by Europeans.

We need to make an exceedingly well backed up case to convince anyone of anything, or to build knowledge we can use to build a better world.