Stand up for Responsive Government, Drive Thru Ban & Our Civil Rights Vs. War on Marijuana

The Press Democrat published a Close to Home commentary today on "Responsive Government." It focuses on the courageous action of Sebastopol's City Council in taking on the Corptocracy by banning drive through windows, as well as the County Supervisors recent 5 to 0 vote against an expansion of our taxpayer funded Sheriff Dept's militarized war on our fellow citizens who grow licensed legal medicinal marijuana.

The article is here
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/articl...=1&tc=pg&tc=ar
and pasted below:

The Comments section of the PD, as well as a letter in today's paper by Linda Johnson, slams our City Council, our desire, as the majority of us in Seabstopol's community, to create a sustainable, thriving green local economy, and our right to voter sanctioned medicinal marijuana.

WaccoBB is our greatest conscious community resource; and I am grateful for the many folks who contribute and add their voices to this forum. If anyone has the time and inclination, it would be great if some of us so to the Comment and letters section of the PD, to defend, in the "court of public opinion," our courageous Council members in what is going to be a controversial battle against the Corptocracy, as well as Supervisors in their struggle with the police/prison industrial complex and its war on our fellow citizens.

We have some incredible elected officials in office right now, thanks to the work of hundreds of us, and groups like Sebastopol Tomorrow, during the past few elections. Now that we have representatives doing what we elected them to do, they are, and will, face huge resistance from the corporate and fear-mongering profiteers who have become accustomed to controlling our laws and public discourse. The election is over, but the time for EACH OF US to press our political power as citizens, to shift the balance of power back to our common humanity and ecology, has begun in earnest.

Thanks friends!:heart::waccosun:

Today's Commentary:

Go Local for Responsive Government

By Jonathan Greenberg

You don’t need to be a revolutionary to be disappointed with our federal government. Even as catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy and the Newton massacre threaten the ecological and humanistic foundations of our civilization, even as glaciers melt and environmental disaster looms, our federal government moves at a glacial pace. “Change We Can Believe In,” from Washington D.C., is close to becoming an oxymoron. Modern America’s largest institutions, our federal government and the mega- corporations whose profits seem to be its primary concern, are failing, even as the health of our people, and our planet, is being destroyed.

Like many, I have come to feel that the most meaningful change we can bring about is within each of us, as well as, politically, the communities that we are part of. Here in Sebastopol (“Peacetown U.S.A.”), and in Sonoma County, we are experiencing a resurgence of change we can truly believe in, through “Responsive Government.”

This means government that works for the people in the community that it governs. Not for the largest corporations with the biggest lobbying muscle. Not for the police/prison industrial complex, which plays on our fears to expand their own authority, and budgets, by criminalizing the victimless behavior of our fellow citizens.

Two recent events encourage me that our elected representatives in Sebastopol and Sonoma County are practicing Responsive Government.

Most recently was the 5-to-0 vote at the first meeting of Sebastopol's new populist majority City Council, to ban drive through windows. Sebastopol banned these for restaurants in 1994, but neglected to mention pharmacies. The unpopular CVS Development, at the traffic chokepoint of our community, planned to exploit this loophole,

As they did last summer, when CVS' developer convinced three out of five Council members that Sebastopol would be sued if they did not override our city's Design Review Board, Armstrong Development threatened legal action should our Council vote to ban drive through windows. Drive through windows cause enormous carbon monoxide emissions from idling cars, but they are the economic driver behind new CVS developments.

A wide majority of Sebastopolians believed that the CVS project bad for local business, traffic, and ecology. We voted accordingly on November 6, electing two candidates who vigorously opposed the project. As a result, lawsuit threats, and the lie that what's good for Wal-Mart is good for Main Street, failed.

Sonoma County witnessed a similar 5-to-0 vote by our Supervisors on December 7. After 200 irate citizens showed up to denounce a hastily-drafted bill that would have reduced the permitted number of marijuana plants for licensed growers from 30 to six, and in the process, make criminals of hundreds of our neighbors, the bill was voted down by the very Supervisors who proposed it.

In the process, taxpayers learned that our Sherif's department increased marijuana arrests by 250% since 2006. It now spends $2 million annually enforcing marijuana prohibition. The new law could have doubled this cost. Meanwhile, to save just $650,000 a year, our 13 County libraries remain closed on Mondays for the first time in history.

If you polled taxpayers as to whether we would like to restore library hours, or cut back on $2 million for pot busts, probably 80% of us would choose to restore library funding. That our Supervisors never have to publicly vote on whether to fund libraries or our Sheriff's war on marijuana is an indication that responsive local government still has some way to go.

But we are off to a good start.

Jonathan Greenberg, a nationally published investigative journalist, is the founder of Progressive Source Communications, Progressive Sebastopol, and ww.KnowGMO.org.