Global

Our Jam-packed GREEGREE #126 starts with NY’s JULIE WIENER reporting from the NY legislature on hackable voting machines.

Ohio’s RACHEL COYLE tells us about the astounding trial in Columbus about the $61 million a nuclear utility slipped to the speaker of the Ohio House to get a $1 billion bailout for two atomic reactors.

The question, says Rachel, is whether in the world of Citizen’s United, it is perfectly legal to buy (or rent) a state legislature. 

“You couldn’t write a movie better than this,” she says.  It’s a trial to legalize bribery, with major national repercussions. 

PACO FABIAN then tells us about the successful and impactful progressive campaigning of OUR REVOLUTION.

We merge in the possibility of using referenda to help get out the grassroots vote, particularly on the issues of Choice, Gerrymandering, Marijuana and Expanding Medicaid. 

Our Revolution also focuses on raising the minimum wage, as was tried in California, demanding clearer messaging.

LORENZO CANIZARES gives us the news from Peru, where a Revolution is definitely not being televised.

For a whole year, Israel has struggled in its attempts to articulate a clear and decisive position regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The reason behind the seemingly confused Israeli position is that it stands to lose, regardless of the outcome. But is Israel a neutral party?

No doubt everyone grows old in their own way.

But once you actually hit it — that three letter word, “old” — watch out: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .”

So wrote William Butler Yeats, back in the last century, conjuring a mystical journey to the spiritual city of Byzantium in order to escape his entrapment in that word, and in the world that values only youth. Hey Bill, how does it feel to be so old?

Rogue Machine’s very first musical, Diane Frolov’s wacky Come Get Maggie, is simply out of this world. And Judith Borne must be the craftiest PR genius on this or any other planet, as she is uncannily promoting Maggie by arranging for the U.S. military to shoot down UFOs, just as this play about flying saucers debuts. Talk about publicity stunts! (Just don’t tell NORAD…)

The eponymous Maggie (Melanie Neilan) has the misfortune of having the brains of a nuclear physicist but living during America’s conformist fifties. Pressured to get with the patriarchal program, Maggie makes an ill-considered marriage to stick-in-the-mud Hugh (Chase Ramsey, who appeared on Broadway in The Book of Mormon and in episodes of Law and Order and Yellowstone). Feeling straightjacketed by her straitlaced suburban existence, hemmed in by the droll “Mothers Militia” and by Hugh’s Auntie Ruthie (Ovation and NAACP Theater Award winner Jacquelin Lorraine Schofield), who all enforce strict adherence to bourgeois society’s notions of norms, Maggie breaks free of this orbit of conventional expectations through the juiciest deus ex machina since Aristophanes: Alien abduction.

“Coup in Dallas” by Hank Albarelli Jr (coauthors Leslie Sharp and Alan Kent) is both the most important and the most difficult book I have read in my 68 years on this planet. The genius of the book is that it investigates the true plotters of the assassination, which occurred at a very high level. Having finished reading it for the second time, I find reviewing it to be as difficult as reading it. Although I have read hundreds of books on the assassination of President John F Kennedy by the National Security State, there are many researchers who have read so many more. For example, Hank Albarelli, who has tied various people and events together in a comprehensive way in this book. He has left no stone unturned, as they say, yet is very careful in his analysis.

Though it was clear that Burkina Faso was eventually going to follow in the footsteps of Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), Ouagadougou’s decision to break military ties with France was not as simple as media sound bites want us to believe. 

 The conventional wisdom is that these countries are walking away from their former colonial master, France, to forge alternative alliances with a new ally, Russia. These convenient analyses are largely shaped by the geopolitical tug-of-war between old and new superpowers: The US and its NATO allies on the one hand, and Russia and China on the other. 

Writer/performer Kayla Boyle nails this role as the title character in her one-woman show, Call Me Elizabeth, as – who else? – none other than the legendary Elizabeth Taylor. The one-acter takes place in 1961 in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel where the superstar unspools her personal and professional saga through the plot device of revealing details about her tumultuous life and loves to journalist Max Lerner. He is taping her confessions for a planned biography about the actress who’d go on to depict Katharina in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (one of only three movies Taylor ever produced, although she appeared in about 75 silver screen productions).

When I tell some people that the inhabitants of certain mountains in Montenegro are trying to protect their home from being turned into a giant military training ground by NATO, they inform me that the training ground (which, up until that monent, they’d never heard of) in Montenegro (which they’d never heard of) is absolutely required because of Putin.

Needless to say, I think that Putin (and every living U.S. president, and quite a number of other world “leaders”) should be prosecuted for their crimes. But are we supposed to imagine Putin as the enemy of mindless support for militarism we know nothing about? I thought he was supposed to be the enemy of democracy.