As my partner Lisa said “it’s always worth the bruising moto ride out to the school. The enthusiasm of the students and teachers is inspiring and it’s good to see that the water has receded from the school building and the children are studying again.” The organization we volunteer for MCC Cambodia was able to purchase Hygiene Kit materials locally and distribute them to all the students in the very rural Angkearhdei Elementary School. The director Sat Mern facilitated getting local health care trainers to come in and train the teachers so they could do a training with the children in order to facilitate best use of the kits by each family.

Mok Aim from our Prey Veng office facilitate the purchasing and delivering of supplies. Because of it’s remoteness and the terrible road conditions the truck delivering the kits couldn’t make it all the way to the school. So the teachers had to drive motorcycles out and carry the supplies the last mile on their motos.

To see a video of the Hygiene Kit distribution and training click here: http://youtu.be/mXRe4_ZXs4A

Off to the sea and an Island ASAP

10 Things We Want
A Proposal for Occupy Wall Street
Submitted by Michael Moore

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.

6. Reorder our nation’s spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.

8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can’t run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have. These include:

a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots.

b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations.

c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a “second bill of rights” as proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.

Let me know what you think. Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don’t have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier. You are one just by saying you are. This movement has no singular leader or spokesperson; every participant is a leader in their neighborhood, their school, their place of work. Each of you is a spokesperson to those whom you encounter. There are no dues to pay, no permission to seek in order to create an action.

We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we’ve been hoping for, waiting for. If it’s going to happen it has to happen now. Don’t sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Flood waters have prevented us from taking a boat to Batambong. Go figure! It took us close to an hour for our mini bus to get us to the bus station only to find that the bus had gone though the flood waters downtown. When we arrived people were waiting in thigh deep water and we had to wade into the bus. All the luggage had to go inside the isles of the bus. All the motorcycle shops have been swamped (pun intended) all morning with people who have water in their engines. But our bus is attempting to leave town. We were scheduled for a boat but after getting up at 5 AM we found that the boat wasn’t running. So we bought tickets on a 8:30 AM bus only to be informed that that wasn’t going to be going either. So I worked all morning trying to get a taxi and we changed our tickets to the 1:30 PM bus. Our friends Kirsten and Daren got a taxi out and then I found one that would take all 4 of us and our luggage. But then the bus wouldn’t refund the bus tickets. So as of now we are on the 1:30 bus which left at 2:15 and we have our fingers crossed.