Community Viewing of Getting a Just Price on Carbon in Washington State, a Training Webinar

Wednesday, April 5.  Please arrive before 6 pm.  EUUC - Rooms 1 & 2.
Hosted by the Peace & Justice Committee

The Carbon Tax initiative did not gain the support it needed to pass in the November election.  However, since then, the Blue/Green Alliance and Climate Solutions helped to write a bill that has been before the legislature this session.  This bill represents a broad consensus on how to approach a carbon tax to address clean energy jobs, create a just transition, and bring down Washington’s carbon footprint.  Although there has been much lobbying in support of the bill, it is not expected to pass.  The next step is to have an initiative campaign.  The effort will need many people out in communities across the state that understand the bill and can communicate effectively on why it is important for our state to take this step. 

The webinar is sponsored by The Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy.  Although you can participate in the webinar at home, it is often better to do so in community.  EUUC will be gathering people to view this together and discuss how people in our community can support this effort. 

You can bring food for yourself, or to share.  The webinar is one and half-hours, plus discussion afterward.

 Please invite anyone concerned about climate protection.  If you would like to watch the webinar at home, please email  

and we will send you the information on how to connect.

 

April is a busy month for marches! 

We will be focusing on coordinating folk to attend the Science march and Climate march (supported by our Congregational Stand on Global Warming), but will help you with the other marches too.  Email

, tell us the march you’re interested in, and we will suggest carpool/bus locations, and provide meet-up info so that you can find each other and march together.  Don’t forget to wear your yellow Standing on the Side of Love shirts!

• April 15:  Black Lives Matter Tax Day March, 2 – 5 p.m., Westlake Park    
• April 22:  March for Science on Earth Day, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Cal Anderson Park to the Science Center (Rally at 10; march starts at noon)
• April 29:  Peoples’ Climate March – Seattle, 10 a.m., Occidental Park to Westlake Park
• May 1:  May Day March – Workers’ and Immigrants’ Rights, details TBD

 

SJ Reading Circle: The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear, by The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II.

There will be a book discussion and potluck dinner on Friday, April 28, at Rachell Maxwell’s home in Edmonds.  If we outgrow this space, the gathering will be held at EUUC.  Email

to register or sign up at the Social Justice Bulletin Board in the Narthex.  If your budget doesn’t stretch to book purchases, please check with a Social Justice Desk volunteer for a copy on loan.  (Copies are available through amazon.com for $8.80.)

Book review from amazon.com:

A modern-day civil rights champion tells the stirring story of how he helped start a movement to bridge America’s racial divide.

Over the summer of 2013, the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II led more than a hundred thousand people at rallies across North Carolina to protest restrictions to voting access and an extreme makeover of state government. These protests—the largest state government–focused civil disobedience campaign in American history—came to be known as Moral Mondays and have since blossomed in states as diverse as Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New York.

At a time when divide-and-conquer politics are exacerbating racial strife and economic inequality, Rev. Barber offers an impassioned, historically grounded argument that Moral Mondays are hard evidence of an embryonic Third Reconstruction in America.

The first Reconstruction briefly flourished after Emancipation, and the second Reconstruction ushered in meaningful progress in the civil rights era. But both were met by ferocious reactionary measures that severely curtailed, and in many cases rolled back, racial and economic progress. This Third Reconstruction is a profoundly moral awakening of justice-loving people united in a fusion coalition powerful enough to reclaim the possibility of democracy—even in the face of corporate-financed extremism.

In this memoir of how Rev. Barber and allies as diverse as progressive Christians, union members, and immigration-rights activists came together to build a coalition, he offers a trenchant analysis of race-based inequality and a hopeful message for a nation grappling with persistent racial and economic injustice. Rev. Barber writes movingly—and pragmatically—about how he laid the groundwork for a state-by-state movement that unites black, white, and brown, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, religious and secular. Only such a diverse fusion movement, Rev. Barber argues, can heal our nation’s wounds and produce public policy that is morally defensible, constitutionally consistent, and economically sane. The Third Reconstruction is both a blueprint for movement building and an inspiring call to action from the twenty-first century’s most effective grassroots organizer.