In June, the Oregon Supreme Court ordered the release of 20,000 pages of files kept by Boy Scouts of America on “ineligible volunteers.” Portions of those documents were released online last week. But included, among those leaders accused or convicted of molesting Scouts, were files on several suspected gay Scout leaders who were never accused of any inappropriate behavior.

KING 5, a Seattle television station, reports that of 50 cases it reviewed from the files, 48 involved allegations of molestation, but two did not. Among those:

One file is about a scoutmaster form Ellensburg who was ousted from Scouting in 1974 after the organization had collected evidence he was gay. A memorandum from a Scout Executive in Yakima to the organization’s Registration and Subscription Executive at BSA headquarters in Texas explains they’d “become aware of a suspected moral problem” with (the Scout leader). The Yakima executive received information that the man had previously been discharged as a Scouting camp counselor “on suspicion of homosexuality.” The Scouts continued to build their case in the file by obtaining “proof” of their suspicion. The record is a four page letter handwritten by the scoutmaster where he confides to a friend, “Yes, I am gay (homosexual)”. It’s unclear from the file how BSA obtained the letter. The following month BSA leaders in Texas completed their file with a lifetime ban on the scoutmaster. Their “Confidential Record Sheet” lists one reason ...

Yesterday, September 17^th, 2012, marked the first birthday of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Peaceful demonstrations were planed in 30 cities world wide, including its birthplace in New York, for the purpose of celebrating the anniversary of the original protests and to breath life into the atrophying movement before the November elections.

Over 1,000 occupy protesters and supporters armed with posters, camera-phones, as well as guitars and drums assembled in Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district. In the spirit of the OWS, the demonstrators had no set agenda or itinerary of activities except to express their dissatisfaction with the power and influence of monied lobbyists in Washington, the ever-widening income disparities, and the sky-high unemployment rate, among many other issues. According to one report, the protesters had separated lower Manhattan into different section, each representing a different cause.

The situation became volatile when occupy protesters attempted to block the entrance to New York Stock Exchange, the symbol of political nepotism and corporate greed for the demonstrators. The protesters clashed with a large, well-organized and armored police force. The police officers bounded the streets and sidewalks leading toward the exchange with metal barricades and requested identification for anyone seeking entrance, including employees.

Despite the police presence, occupiers continued to march though the streets, waving banners, strumming guitars, and banging on drums. At several points during the morning, crowds of protesters numbering in the hundreds briefly blocked intersections before being dispersed, with arrests in some instances.

By the end of the day, over 180 protesters had been arrested in New York.

Demonstrations were more peaceful elsewhere in the US. In San Francisco, for example, a crowd of 250 protesters from the city and the greater Bay Area, including ...

Are you disgusted and outraged by the recent decision of the Boy Scouts of America to reaffirm its exclusion of gay members from the organization? You’re not alone. Some of scouting’s highest-ranking participants feel the same way. And they’re sending back their Eagle Scout badges as an act of protest.

In late July, as the New York Times explained, the BSA upheld “its longtime policy of barring openly gay boys from membership and gay or lesbian adults from serving as leaders....The exclusion policy ‘reflects the beliefs and perspectives’ of the organization, the Boy Scouts said in a news release from its headquarters in Irving, Tex.”

Invoking your “beliefs and perspectives” to justify discrimination makes for a sorry display. But it has also prompted some dignified defiance.

One of the more powerful things I’ve read in the past week is the collection of letters from former scouts who have come to the decision that they must renounce their affiliation with the organization in order to stay true to their own values. As of August 4, over eighty Eagle Scouts had returned their badges and shared their letters of ...

Organizations that usually demand cancellation of the crippling debts owed by impoverished countries in the global South are now calling for debt forgiveness for a different group of borrowers: U.S. students.

With soaring tuition, poor job prospects, and loans that take decades to pay off, there’s no question that students need a year of jubilee. Yet, the idea that groups accustomed to running international solidarity campaigns have taken up their cause is an unexpected twist.

I’ve always liked the Jubilee debt campaign. For a couple of decades now, it has been an impressive and truly international drive, with strong leadership from the global South. In this country, the Jubilee USA Network has done a great job doing interfaith organizing and bringing in non-religious allies as well. Also, importantly, the campaign has been winning.

One of the great accomplishments of the global justice movement that exploded internationally around the year 2000 was to convince the world that onerous debts owed by poor countries were an unjust and prohibitive barrier to sustainable development. In many cases such debts were accumulated by ...

There are plenty of times when an individual comes up with a great idea for a group’s next direct action. But when Martin Oppenheimer and I wrote A Manual for Direct Action during the civil rights movement, we also wanted to offer a tool that would help a group, collectively, to generate excellent ideas. So Marty and I created a tool that has spread far beyond that time and place: the Spectrum of Allies.

Here’s how it works: The facilitator puts on the left side of a large sheet of paper or chalkboard “We,” and on the right side “They.” The “We” represents the activist group or campaign; the “They” represents the extreme opponents.

The polarization placed on the board needs to be specific, regarding a particular issue or goal. A given religious group might be extremely opposed to you on reproductive rights, for example, but on immigrant rights it may be in a different spot. Note that the government may not be the most extreme opponent in a particular struggle — for example, for us the government was potentially friendlier than the Klu Klux Klan.

The distance between the two poles — “We” and “They” — represents a spectrum of positions and tendencies, with some groups in society leaning toward us and some leaning toward “They.” Some groups are in the middle, on the fence.

We show the spectrum by placing a horizontal line between “We” and “They,” then by drawing half a circle above the line, like a half-moon. Lines are drawn between the circle and the center of the horizontal line, making the graphic look like half a pizza pie with a lot of pre-cut slices.

We then insert in the slices the groups that belong there. What groups, for example, are in the slice next to “We” — the kinds of ...

In my last post, I noted that the Council had adopted the Carbon Neutral Goal with some confidence that it is attainable, and that part of the basis for that conclusion was the findings in the report we commissioned from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). SEI was tasked with creating a scenario for achieving Carbon Neutrality by looking at currently available and plausible technologies and estimating what we could achieve if we were able to get those technologies widely implemented around Seattle.

The results of the SEI study provided us with solid information that there is at least one pathway to carbon neutrality that is clearly within our technical capabilities. There are many other possible pathways that were not examined, of course, and there is also a wide array of potential pathways that are not currently feasible but that could emerge as technologies evolve.  And, while this report verified technical capability, it did not look at political feasibility—which may make all the difference as we actually try to implement specific strategies to maximize implementation. Building the political will and working out the ways to change culture towards a less carbon intensive way of life is the biggest political challenge. But we couldn’t even begin to work on that unless we knew that there was a path forward that is technically possible.

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Amber, 24, who’s been living on the streets half her life, was sitting on a sunny sidewalk in downtown Berkeley last week, cuddling her three-month-old puppy and talking to a friend. But if voters approve a measure the city council placed on the November ballot, sitting on the sidewalk – after a warning – could cost her 75 dollars.

“That law will give us tickets we can’t pay, then we’ll have warrants and end up in jail,” said Amber, who “spranges” – asks for spare change – to feed herself and her unborn child.

Although the council chambers was packed with those opposing the law, the city council, at the end of a dramatic meeting that went past midnight on Jul. 11, approved putting the sit ban to a vote. The proposed ordinance is similar to statutes in Seattle, Washington, Anchorage, Alaska and Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Palo Alto, California. It would ban sitting on the sidewalk in commercial areas between seven a.m. and 10 p.m.

Some four dozen public speakers addressed the council, many arguing that the economic downturn is to blame for Berkeley’s vacant storefronts, and that punishing the homeless won’t bring back business.

John DeClercq, Berkeley Chamber of Commerce CEO, the sole speaker favoring the measure, said the law would make the city’s business districts “more welcoming”.

Once the public speakers queue wound down, the meeting took an unexpected turn when several activists stood up and led the public in the civil rights protest song, “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

The three council members opposing the sit ban joined the sing-along, as the five other council members present left the room. When they returned, in the midst of chaos, the majority voted to place the measure on the ballot.

The dissident council members contend the vote was taken without council debate and therefore illegal. “They ...