Come to a Town Hall Meeting to Affirm

We Are the Change We Need!

 
Monday Nov. 17, 2008
7-9 PM
First Unitarian Church
2125 Chestnut St. Philadelphia
 
Neighborhood Networks agrees with President-Elect Obama that we have to be the change we seek. To get universal health care, or to achieve independence from big oil, we have to be organized in the communities where we live.
 
Since 2005 Neighborhood Networks has organizing where we live in communities throughout Philadelphia.
 
On November 17 we will have a Citywide Town Hall meeting to engage everyone who participated in the Obama campaign to continue with us in building progressive infrastructure everywhere in our City.
 
Here's what we'll do on November 17. First we'll hear from two inspiring young Philadelphia leaders:
 
Maria Qunones-Sanchez, Elected to City Council in 2007
Seth Williams, former Philadelphia Inspector General
 
Then we'll hear Marc Stier, PA State Director, Health Care For America Now, and Carol Rogers of AFSCME District Council 47, talk about ways to work for health care for all.
 
Then we'll break into small groups and meet our neighbors who share our commitment to stay together and move ahead. And then, everywhere in the City we'll work to insure that the change is real.
 
Yes, We Can!
 
A Philadelphia Neighborhood Networks event.
http://www.phillynn.com 215-568-4990
 
Featuring Snacks, Song & Commitment

As the drama of the bursting bubble of Wall St. gives way to a slower, but steady and painful, economic decline, the first and most important question we should ask is "Should we try to blow another bubble, or should we reject bubble culture values for something entirely different?"

If we agree that we need a new culture, this leads to the question "Can we take advantage of the opportunity afforded by this collapse, by the exposure of a failed system, to establish new "rules for the house" (the root meaning of "economy" from the Greek)?" 

If the house, metaphorically, is Planet Earth the way we have enjoyed it for millennia, then making the choice now to change to a sustainable economy is the best way to turn the apparent lemon of this economic contraction into the best lemonade in history.

The current economic contraction has been developing for almost 20 years, and for the last four or five has appeared inevitable to anyone not under the spell of the "free market" fantasy. It is the result of an economic system which was able, briefly, to ignore and disregard its natural limits and restraints. Finite resources were seen as infinite entitlements. Politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals of all stripes and ideologies shared a complete failure to understand the material basis for their apparent prosperity, arrogantly claiming to be its controlling agents, rather than understanding a unique and lucky convergence of cheap energy, political alignments, and misunderstood technology as the basis for their dizzying growth. The few economists and others trying to call attention to its faults were drowned out by those focused on the immediate financial gains.