Assuming that everyone is as beleaguered by passionate requests for aid, attention and funds for worthy causes, I thought it might be helpful to offer one possible hierarchy of priorities for making decisions.
NUCLEAR ISSUES.
This is the most immediate and the most under-reported threat facing the planet. A threat to all life with replicating cells. People may not be aware that the US and Russia still have 4,000 nuclear missiles pointed at one another on hair-trigger alert. Just how edgy and dangerous this condition is can be made clear by the following story:
In the late 90's a Norwegian weather rocket was launched and the note alerting the Russians to it was lost by the Russians who mistook the missile for an incoming US ICBM. Yeltsin was dead-drunk. The nuclear football was opened, and five minutes before he had to make the retaliatory decision the Norwegian missile wandered off course and was blown up.
Besides the automated Russian response, there are literally tons of radioactive waste leaking out of the Hanford Waste Dump in Washington State; more tons in rusting barrels dropped into the ocean by the Farallon islands in San Francisco and more tons sitting outside every nuclear power plant while we wonder what to do with it.
Furthermore, we left 30,000 tons of depleted uranium residue in the Balkan war and another 30,000 tons in Iraq where it's mixed with the dust and sand, kicked up in every explosion, inhaled by our troops and the Iraqis, causing an epidemic of childhood leukemia, and an escalating number of birth-defects in the children of U.S. soldiers here at home. These DU shells remain radioactive for @ 150,000 years, as does the nuclear waste. When you consider that cities were created only 7,000 years ago, you'll get some sense of the impossibility of keeping this most toxic poison in creation completely isolated from the biosphere, essentially forever. There is no government, no social stability that can guarantee it, and 50,000 years from now it will kill as lethally as it will today.
An accident of any sort with nuclear weapons or waste short-circuits all political games, diplomacy; cuts short our time to "work things out", and breeds defects into the gene pool of humans and animals forever. Makes this a real priority.
THE ENVIRONMENT
Whether you consider Global Warming, diminishing resources of fresh, clean water, the mega-extinctions taking place all over the globe, the environment is the "set-of-all-sets" within which all other activities take place. Business is a sub-set of the environment, not the other way around. The idea of having a healthy economy in a degraded environment is a mental pet that ought to be taken out and shot immediately. We are killing ourselves with our own toxic waste and lack of understanding that our life does not exist independently of the microbes in our intestines; the insects that pollinate our plants, or the sunlight and rain and soil.
The dirty little secret of the environmental movement is that nothing about our current American life-style is sustainable. In order to take our feet off the necks of the majority of the world's population who spend a substantial amount of time searching for enough twigs to make one hot meal, we need to cut the number of calories of energy we use substantially. In order for this not to mean squalor and social unrest, we need something on the order of a Manhattan Project to address everything from manufacturing to consumption to increase efficiency geometrically; and to create zero-discharge manufacturing techniques. We should have started in 1973 when the first oil-crunch came and we didn't. Now we've lost New Orleans, and a significant part of upstate New York and still our politicians are dithering.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE;
Neither of the first two priorities will ever be reflected in public policy until the corporate dominance of the civic sector is broken. The only way that can happen is to demand the public financing of State and Federal elections. Clean Money alternatives exist and are currently in use in Connecticut, Maine, and Arizona, where candidates who choose to can have their campaigns fully funded by the tax-payer. Those candidates are winning in most contests.
It is impossible to expect candidates put in office by corporate largesse to discipline their own masters. Yet unless the concentrated power, wealth, and efficiency of corporations are harnessed and held in check, we will have no civic life. It is no accident that the Democrats for instance have never pressed for living wages, national health care, or cleaning up the 1100 plus illegal, coal-fired power plants in the country which are toxifying our rivers and streams to the degree that there is no State where some species of fish cannot be eaten due to excesses of mercury in their flesh. They cannot, because the DNC made the decision under Clinton to go after corporate money and that's just what they've done. They will not make decisions that displease their major funders, so it will be up to us, the civic sector, to demand this from them, or we might as well reconcile ourselves to a life of perpetual begging and fund-raising.
THE VOTE
The last of my four top priorities concerns the integrity of the vote itself. Two Presidential elections have been stolen. If you're not convinced read RFK jr.'s piece in the last Rolling Stone or the Conyers Report for the U.S. Congress. No one steals a Presidency to keep it for just four years. Democrats are already down by over a million votes going into the next election. This was done legally, by purging eligible voters from the voting rolls (as they did in Florida) and the rest of the deal will be sealed by manipulating the electronic voting machines which can be set wirelessly with a Blackberry. If you think that I'm being alarmist, I'm not. I have helped raise money for a successful law-suit where Voter Action sued the Registrar of Voters in New Mexico for fraud in the last Presidential election and we won! On the basis of that victory, the Governor of New Mexico cancelled electronic voting machines (DRE's) in his state. We are currently pressing the case in 10-14 others.
The manipulation of the vote is the stealth attack par excellence on Democracy. The Democratic party has been totally asleep at the switch, so don't look to them for leadership. Democracy is being siphoned off while the media and the Congress sleep, and so it's up to us, bloggers, malcontents, writers, thinkers, just-plain-folks who give a shit to demand plain, old-fashioned paper ballots. We don't need to get fast results for the nightly news. We need accurate results that reflect the will of the people.
After these four, all other causes and cases are free picks. But my feeling is that if we're not doing some work on these four, it's like fiddling with the roof of a house with a collapsing foundation.