TIME: 7:30 p.m.
DATE: Wednesday, May 17th
PLACE: Unitarian Universalist Society of Northampton and Florence, 220 Main Street, Northampton.
Hosted by Shays 2: Western MA Committee on Corporations & Democracy www.shays2.org
Kickoff speaker, John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute - www.nvri.org - opposing corporate-provided voting machines that lack paper trails or access to computer codes for accountability.
He is a candidate for Mass Secretary of State - www.johnbonifaz.com - an office from which he can protect the integrity of our election procedures (he needs 15% of the delegates at the MA Democratic Convention early next month in order to insure a place on the primary ballot in September).
He will be the first in a series of Shays 2-sponsored speakers on local control in the face of corporate instrusion.
Bonifaz will offer ways we can work to overturn undue corporate influence in our region. An open discussion will follow.
He will discuss:
• how each state can oppose electronic voting machines with no paper trails or access codes that can steal our elections. Bonifaz is leading the fight in the courts for a full recount in Ohio of all of the votes cast for President in the 2004 general election where voting machines with no paper trail were involved.
• an initiative to protect local control by keeping multinational corporate funds out of our elections, the "Measure T" referendum in Arcata, Humboldt County, CA where elections are slated for June 6th.
• his involvement in landmark cases against Texaco Oil Co. in Ecuador and Unical Oil and Gas Co. in Burma for human rights abuses – and the Amnesty International report calling for International accountability for corporations for human rights crimes.
• his constitutional challenge to President George W. Bush's authority to wage war against Iraq absent a congressional declaration of war or equivalent action,
• how we can fight Supreme Court decisions about corporate money equaling free speech.
Join us! JOIN OUR ACTION COMMITTEES!
We are part of a nation-wide movement to build real democracy in America. Explore how growing corporate "rights" undermine our Constitutional rights and democracy … and how we can resist together, advancing our diverse issues as activists and citizens.
