Mobilization to End Poverty (liberal Christian event)

[clear eye]

April 26 – 29, 2009
Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place, NW
Washington, DC 20001

The Mobilization to End Poverty will be a historic gathering. Thousands of Christians will come together in a powerful movement committed to the biblical imperative of reducing domestic and global poverty. The Mobilization will call the new President and Congress to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and cut domestic poverty in half within 10 years.

Then President Obama will address the gathering and there will be speakers, workshops, trainings, leading up to group lobbying of one's members of Congress.

For more information and to register go to http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=events.m2ep&item=m2ep-home&source=rsvp_0811_mob_ec

[VAliberal]

1. Thanks for the link

I had not heard about this conference - I'll be registering to attend.

[norepubsin08]

2. This sounds great!!!

[norepubsin08]

3. Thanks for posting this-

I am going to apply-Mike C

[norepubsin08]

4. Just applied hope I get in!

[Morpheal]

5. The Cold War Shame of America

In line with the necessity to overcome the soul destroying, body destroying, mind destroying effects of poverty we must remember what one of the major causes of decline and ignorant disregard for the well being of the people and for the maintaining and improving of infrastructure and much needed services really was. Certainly a far too excessive and increasing emphasis on profit rather than on what is good has had its growing impact. There is
however something else, less easily remembered or understood.

It was the severity and intensity of the Cold War that led to disregard for many of the human values that are hardly able to reassert themselves today.

The belief in immanent destruction of society and infrastructure due to immanent war has an immense impact.

Why maintain, and improve, infrastructure when you believe it will all be immanently destroyed in an apocalyptic conflict ?

Why eradicate poverty if the survivors of apocalyptic conflict must learn to live even more poorly than the poorest in our society today ?

In a war scenario of that magnitude and severity it is the poorest survivors in society that are deemed the most likely to continue survival
from among the ruins of that society. Post war survival skills are learned from extreme poverty. From homelessness. From indigence.
From scavenging and foraging. They are not learned from living comfortable secure lives. So, when you believe that the world of comforts
is about to be destroyed you create more poverty planning for some of the poorest to be the survivors who have learned enough about
survival under the most brutal conditions that society as it exists in a pre war mode can offer to them. Even hippy communal life and
survivalist experiments were sanctioned as potential post war conditions where isolated groups might survive in ways far different from
the comfortable living in cities, with relative affluence and luxury. None of that is by chance. It is all by design. Poverty is often part of the
design, the plan, not really simply "bad luck" and "twist of fate". It is built into the system for a purpose.

It is that thinking, that grew and prevailed since the Truman era and the start of Cold War politics that still asserts its influence over
America today. America has not really recovered from the Cold War mentality. It is not thinking about that mentality critically enough
and overcoming the brain washed mentality that made America blind to the Cold War effects upon itself.

Even many of America's most significant highways were improved to move military hardware once all out war with the USSR and
possibly including communist China, broke out. It's industries were often dual purpose meant to produce war materials for a world
consuming conflict. Peace was not even considered a real option. War dictated every policy, including the condition of ghettos, slums,
the failure to maintain and improve infrastructure, the poverty of much of education as it existed in many places, and much of the
ideological emphasis predominating over America to maintain and excerbate the east west divide. After all you cannot readily destroy
people who are too similar to yourselves. You have to have exaggerated differences. This dominated over economics, politics,
and social engineering in ways that are still not fully self examined and comprehended.

Poverty is but the tip of that ice berg.

America must change its own course or it will itself become a Titanic disaster.


Robert Morpheal