Wednesday, October 29, 2008

bloc vote with jayne street

each year my roommates and i make a handy voter guide. this is edition number three.

year 1 was very a fairly simple email sent to our friends. due to our incredible research and wit in this first edition of the jayne st voter guide, we received very good feedback and demands to continue this in subsequent years. thus, we made this our civic duty for other elections.

year 2 we upped the ante a little bit and sent out a very impressive word document with three columns and a watermark that said: "jayne st voter guide". it looked pretty official.

and so, we are onto year 3. this year we also created our beautiful word document with watermark (that some of you might be lucky enough to get in an email), and we also decided to post our voter guide on "the ballot.org" so our amazing guide could be accessible to a wider audience.

JAYNE ST. VOTER GUIDE - CLICK HERE! (also click to join our voting block!)

if you care about our process, we spend many nights reading about the different candidates, proposition, local measures, etc. this year we invited a couple of trust worthy jayne st allies to join our process. we research materials sent in the mail, endorsements, just about every other voter guide we can find, and articles written in the local papers. we then talk about each ballot measure/candidate and decide upon how we shall vote. we sometimes do not reach consensus, and in such cases we do not give an endorsement.

we find the most valuable part of our voter guide not necessarily the specific stances (up or down, so-in-so or so-in-so), but rather the reasons and considerations we give to certain broader political and societal issues. we send this out to people, not just to bloc vote with us (although that is cool if you do), but also to promote greater dialogue on issues. for instance, with proposition 5, although we support decriminalization and further rehabilitative services, we spent a very long time thinking about what it means to place drug rehabilitation programs under the department of corrections and the impacts this has on the prison industrial complex. although we did not reach consensus on this issue, it was a valuable discussion, and we hope that such considerations accompany your thought process when deciding how to vote.

thanks for reading and hope you vote tuesday, if you are able to vote and live in the U.S. (because i realize i do have an international readership! thank you- i am flattered really!) also, this guide is mostly relevant to california, and more specifically, bay area voters)

5 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Disclaimer - I am an anarchist and do not condone voting, but I will engage those who are interested in voting in discussion about their rationale and their decisions.

President - NONE. But if you MUST pick one, please vote McKinney, and don't worry about Obama - he will win or lose w/ or w/o your vote, but your vote may mean a great deal for McKinney and progressive agendas in the country, and around the world.

1A - YES! California High Speed Rail is essential. Planes = lots of pollution and too costly to be accessible by low-income families and not easily scalable (it's way more environmentally unfriendly and costly on the public to expand airports than to develop a high speed rail system). We need public transportation on a wide scale. A high speed train would create transportation hubs in the majorly populated areas in California, and while not directly addressing the issue of poor local transportation systems, it would drive counties and municipalities to take advantage of their hubs and expand, integrate, and generally reinvest in a state-wide public transportation system. ALSO, FUNDAMENTALLY important, is that liberals get away from the "we don't have enough money for good thing A and good thing B, we must choose." This is a false premise created by conservatives to breed infighting among liberals and to force liberals to cut their own feet out from under themselves. California is one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Even amidst the housing crisis and economic recession, our state is vastly wealthy. What we lack is the political will. Liberals should not be "reasonable" and undercut their own progressive agendas. Instead they should push ALL fronts and demand that the conservatives find compassion in their hearts and reason in their brains, or shut the fuck up. We must advance state-wide, energy efficient, reasonably priced transportation AND local public transportation, and forget the idea that we must choose. No, conservatives must choose: Raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, or die.

5 - An apprehensive yes. I haven't done my research on this, but I lean towards yes, while also sympathizing with the concerns regarding the PIC.

7 - YES. While small wind and solar companies are important, what's more important? Global warming or small businesses? I sympathize with the small business owners that would have issues, but the urgency of environmental collapse may require making some uncomfortable economic choices. Instead, support prop 7 and also advocate for even FURTHER promotion of small business renewable energy providers (remember: liberals need to stop cutting themselves short. Push forward ALL of your agendas. Demand that big companies increase their renewables AND that small companies be supported in advancing their innovative solutions.)

beth bikes! said...

carlos- hurry up and finish med school already so we can open a really cool health clinic together!!! miss you!

Dino Dante said...

Will the health clinic feature quad measurements? 58.2. That's +0.8. See you at the RTWC on Nov. 15th???

Unknown said...

yo, i'm working on it! but hey, no reason to wait, we can get started now. You probably know way more than I do about what you need to get a clinic started. If it helps, currently my interest lies in addressing the needs of immigrant families, primarily Spanish-speaking families, in California. Addressing the needs of the undocumented, low SES/literacy/education status/etc especially. My methodological theory currently emphasizes COPC (Community Oriented Primary Care) heavily focused in engaging the community in addressing their own health needs and barriers, and prioritizing interventions by the community's own desires, and empowering them to collect and utilize their own epidemiological data in order to assist in the prioritization and implementation process. Sounds good yeah? But I know squat when it actually comes down to getting something like that started. So that's where you come in. And I imagine that the planning and preparation process will be lengthy, so if we start now, we'll probably be good to go by the time I'm board certified. And if it makes a difference, I will try desperately to get my residency in California, UCSF in particular, in Family Med (unless there's another California school with a better COPC program).