Green Options

CNN highlights the Billionaires for Wealthcare enthusiastically singing the praises of a public option, as they entertained unsuspecting attendees at a health insurance conference in Washington DC last week. Wolf Blitzer and Jeanne Moos discuss the increasingly popular use of guerilla musical theatre across the nation. Cleverly orchestrated performances and mini-musicals seem to have become much more popular with folks now than rabid screaming teabaggers.

The brave Billionaires for Wealthcare are back in fine voice. This group of talented guerrilla performance artists graciously entertained attendees at a conference of health insurance industry workers with a seemingly spontaneous performance of a clever operatic anthem about our desperate need for a public option.

At the annual conference of America’s Health Insurance Plans, (the corporate lobbying group that recently released a threatening report about how any inclusion

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First Lady Michelle Obama talks straightforwardly about women and why we all so urgently need health care reform in this five minute short that was just released by the White House. At the moment I know that I am existing in something of a self-absorbed cancer bubble of my own, but I actually found this quite moving and powerful.

Years before he was a well-respected United States Senator, Minnesota native and satirist Al Franken was also “Supply Side Jesus“. He gives voice to this witty and sardonic animated allegory, “The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus”.  Franken is quite effective as the overtly capitalist Christ who embraces supply side economics above all else; indeed Jesus and Franken are both Jewish. This five minute cartoon manages to

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Florida Rep. Alan Grayson has just utterly transformed the health care debate in the United States with his speech from the House floor. “I’m just saying what everyone else has been thinking,” explains Grayson.

Last week Florida Congressman Alan Grayson accurately and succinctly explained the Republican Health Care “Plan”: Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, just please die quickly. His passionately honest retort against our nation’s “no-mongers” has spread across the country faster than a California wildfire.

Brave New Films has just created this short video which clearly exposes the utter hypocrisy and obdurate cruelty of Republican

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Environmental care is a practical, worldly thing. But it is also a step in one’s personal evolution. On the one hand, it is a practical response to the environmental problems we are facing. It is also a foresighted response to the issues (economic and environmental) that we might be facing if we don’t think more about the environment we live in and rely on. But, on the other hand, it is much more than that.

Billionaires for Wealth Care have created this rousing anthem to satirically support our nation’s for-profit health care industries. The group was counter-protesting at last week’s teabagger anti-health care reform 9/12 rally in Washington D.C. (which was funded by major health insurance corporations). The Billionaires were dressed in top hats, tuxedos and evening gowns, and carried placards like: “Fight Socialism—End Medicare Now!” and “Let Them Eat Advil!”.

According to the Billionaires’ website they are:

A grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, HMO lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system. We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We’re simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of “Change.” We’ll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to health care, if we ain’t broke, why fix it?

We know that we are supposed to do what is good for the environment. We know that the time we live in requires a great change in what we consider to be normal lives. We have inherited living habits and basic expectations about what we should have in our lives from the grand developments of the last one or two hundred years.

These developments made our lives much easier and more comfortable (in some respects) but they also pulled from the Earth and pulled more than we could initially see. We now see that we have pulled more, and polluted more, than we should have and that our great systems need to innovate further if we are going to continue on in anything similar to the world we live in now.

In the meantime, we know that we have to change. Our systems have to change, and in order for that to happen we need to change.

So far, there is not much new in what you are reading. However, there are many options in how we view this demand to change.

1) We can take the view, that many of us here today are taking, that we have to change in order to ’save the world’ (the world as we know it).

2) We can take the view that we need to change because it is our personal responsibility to not live beyond our means and since we are currently living far beyond our means we need to change.

3) We can take the view that this life of ours is more than a physical experience, more than a brief human lifetime, and this challenge is a challenge we are facing for the purpose of spiritual development. It is this option I am going to elaborate on.

Pictured here from right to left:

• Can Your Jewelry Save the Earth? Pictured colorfully above, in a rainbow assortment are Relief Beads, which were created to raise awareness and money to aid refugees in Darfur. Relief Beads, is selling handcrafted bracelets made from sand in Ghana, Africa. “Each purchase helps to fund Relief International’s medical clinics for women and children, educational programs for students and counseling for victims of violent acts.” To make this good cause even sweeter,