Special Programming: Public Affairs on 07/18/13

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Thu, 07/18/2013 - 5:30pm to 8:00pm
National Town Hall on Converting our Economy

The Santa Cruz, CA based non-profit, Article V Convention for Our Children’s Future (AVC4OCF), announced, today, the date of their first national, radio/internet town-hall meeting in a planned series of similar events that they are calling their National Campaign for Jobs in America.

 

On July 18, AVC4OCF will co-produce, with radio partners from Oregon to Texas, a collaborative broadcast that will create a national, town-hall forum in which citizens will have the opportunity to listen to experts on the subject of defense (or economic) conversion.  Congressional representatives are also receiving invitations from the non-profit requesting their attendance in this town-hall meeting.

 

AVC4OCF emphasized the importance of their campaign and this first town hall by referring to a statement made by one of the expert guests who will be attending this event, Col. (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, who said, referring to AVC4OCF’s stated goals for the national campaign, "Your three goals of addressing the nation's economic failures, energy needs and climate change challenges and completely dysfunctional government, comprise perhaps the most critical mission our Republic has ever shouldered--making the challenges of WWII or the Cold War pale in comparison."

 

According to statements published on their website, the non-profit’s primary goal for their campaign for jobs is the enactment in Congress of jobs and energy legislation that is based on a citizen-created blueprint developed by citizens in these town-hall meetings.  The plan is to collect the blueprints during the campaign and then construct a final version using the most popular, common components in those blueprints.  The planned result is a jobs-legislation blueprint composed of elements that are supported by constituents in congressional districts across the country – a characteristic that AVC4OCF is anticipating will provide the political power to achieve the goal of enactment in Congress of jobs and energy bills that are based on the citizen blueprint.

 

AVC4OCF’s strategy is to focus on defense conversion in this first town hall in July, which is intended as a primer for AVC4OCF’s main town-hall event in late August.  They plan to advocate for taking advantage of the opportunity for the nation to reap the benefits of a peace dividend, made possible by the ending of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, by reallocating defense spending to investments in clean-energy and energy-efficiency industries, national infrastructure repair and replacement, etc. – all of which should create more than a million good-paying American jobs.

 

The expert guests that will be attending this national, radio/internet town hall on July 18 will include Dr. Miriam Pemberton, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, who coauthors the annual “Unified Security Budget for the United States.”  This report, in 2011, made the observation that “the death of Osama bin Laden was accomplished by… a group of special forces roughly the size of a SWAT team… [a goal that a] … decade of war … [and]

a trillion-plus dollars … failed to accomplish – a goal that was finally achieved … through coordinated… investigative work, diplomacy, and minimal military force.”

 

Also attending the July town hall: Dr. Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute and economics professor at the University of Massachusetts.  Dr. Pollin recently authored the publication, “Back to Full Employment,” in which he “advances a progressive agenda for overcoming the employment crisis in the U.S. today… creating a sustainable full employment economy over the long run… and the imperative of building a green economy... [and] argues that the biggest obstacle to creating a full-employment economy are political, not technical.”  The abstract for this publication states that, “Ending the prevailing neoliberal opposition to full employment will require an epoch-defining reallocation of power away from big business and Wall Street and toward the middle class, working people, and the poor, while mounting a strong defense of the environment.”

 

The third expert who will be participating in this town hall on July 18, as mentioned earlier, is Colonel (ret.) Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell and, currently, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.

 

This first town-hall meeting in July, that will be launching AVC4OCF’s National Campaign for Jobs in America, will be simultaneously broadcast from the studios of KBOO in Portland, Oregon, KGNU in Boulder, Colorado, and KPFT in Houston, Texas, and will also be streamed (audio) from the websites of these stations.  Citizens anywhere in the U.S., or the world, will be able to participate in the town hall by calling one of these stations using their 800 number.

 

AVC4OCF recommends that citizens watch for the updates that will be posted on their website and suggests that interested citizens find their Nation Builder website by using Twitter and searching: avc4ourchildren (that’s “avc” – as in: Act, Virtuously, Congress – the number “4,” “our children”).

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