Blog Archives - PACG - Progressive Action for the Common Good

5 Calls Action Alert! What You Can Do Now

2/25/2025

Remember 5 Calls? It's more important than ever. Action Alert

Board of Directors

In 2017 PACG introduced our community to 5Calls.org as an ongoing way that we can push back when our progressive values are at risk. We really need it now! You can download the app right to your phone or use the online version (https://5calls.org) on your computer.

From 5Calls.org: Calling your representative is the best way to make your voice heard.

Once your congressperson forms a public stance on an issue, it’s hard for them to walk it back. The earlier they hear your opinion, the more likely it is you’ll make an impact. Calling is by far the most effective way to ensure that your representative hears you before they take a public stance.

They even have a page called "Getting Started." By typing your Zip Code into the phone app you can be connected directly to your US legislators' offices. Choose one of the (presently) 29 topics and get a script to help you make an informed statement to those offices. The topics change as issues of concern change but as of today they include Protect your IRS data from DOGE, Protect medical funding, Protect the Mission of the EPA and many many more. Check it out!

David Anderson (he/him)

Nonviolent Resistance training - What You Can Do Now

2/19/2025

Nonviolent Resistance and Civil Disobedience Training
Wednesday, February 26th at 8:00 am via Zoom

One Human Family

PACG encourages any of its activists interested in protest during the upcoming year to take this training from Rev. Rich Hendricks, hosted by One Human Family QC. PACG members at our events need to commit to nonviolence. Learn how to keep yourself safe while participating in the resistance.

This successful training will be repeated as often as possible. The information is the same in each class so if you have taken it one time you will know how to protest with nonviolence.

Please join on this link or from this website.

Alta Price (she/her)

Hands off my pronouns - Action Alert!

2/19/2025

Hands off my pronouns! Action Alert

Gender Equity Forum

from ABC News.com (January 31, 2025)
Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day
Employees at multiple federal agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures by Friday afternoon, according to internal memos obtained by ABC News that cited two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office seeking to curb diversity and equity programs in the federal government. "Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5.p.m. ET on Friday," according to one such message sent Friday morning to CDC staff.

from Very Well Mind:
Why Are Pronouns Important?
Pronoun usage may feel important or unimportant to you personally, but on the whole, they are an important matter. That's because by using someone's correct pronouns, you validate their identity, whereas by using the wrong pronouns for someone, you may invalidate it. Using incorrect pronouns for a person can feel harmful to them.

Let's push back on the current administration's policy and show our support for the nonbinary community. Effective immediately, you will be given the opportunity to include your pronouns in your submissions to the Progressive Action Update (see my example below).

Another easy thing to do is to update your own email account signature to include your pronouns. You can search your email platform online to find directions to do this. And remember that you can include your pronouns in your Zoom name when you are at a meeting!

Alta Price (she/her)

Fashion and Our Environment - March Green Drinks PACG Event

2/19/2025

March Green Drinks - Fashion and Our Environment
Thursday, March 6th at 5:00 pm via Zoom

Environmental Forum

Join us on Thursday, March 6th for Green Drinks. Do you know that the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry after the oil industry? Come and find out how it impacts our environment and what you can do to make changes in your lifestyle to cut down on waste.

Please register for a Zoom link to join the meeting.

Susan Leuthauser (she/her)

John Lewis Tribute Rally - PACG Event

2/16/2025

John Lewis Tribute Rally
Saturday, February 22 at noon IN PERSON

Slumberland Corner
16th St. and John Deere RD
Moline, IL 61265 (map)

Liberty And Justice Movement and PACG Civil Rights Forum

News Release:

Progressive Action for the Common Good (PACG) and the Liberty And Justice Movement announce a rally to honor former US House of Representatives civil rights activist John Lewis on Saturday, February 22, 2025 at noon at the corner of 16th ST and John Deere RD in Moline. Members of Liberty And Justice will be joining PACG’s weekly Racial Equality Rally that has been ongoing since George Floyd was murdered in 2020.

John Lewis was a remarkable American who championed voting rights and civil rights. He lived with his parents and brothers and sisters in the house his father built. John took care of his family’s chickens and would calm them with his soothing manner of talking. He said this helped him as he grew to express himself calmly and nonviolently.

As a teenager, he recalled not being able to understand his parents’ acceptance of the way things were for Black people in 1955 Alabama. He was just a year older than Emmett Till who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered that August in Mississippi. This death affected young John and influenced his actions the rest of his life.

In 1961 he became one of the original 13 Freedom Riders planning to ride interstate buses from Washington DC to New Orleans. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. John and others were beaten and arrested after crossing the Selma, Alabama bridge during the Selma to Montgomery March on March 7, 1965. He continued to advocate for civil rights, equality and voting rights throughout his life, including serving 17 terms in the US House of Representatives.

Join the PACG Racial Equality Rally this Saturday as we recognize and celebrate the birth of John Lewis. Bring signs or use ours.

As progressives, PACG empowers people to take action for positive change and social justice by coordinating a network of community forums and events aimed at educating and engaging citizens to work for the common good of all. Our core values are Social Justice, Empowerment, Diversity, Sustainability and Community.

For more information about this event, please visit the Progressive Action for the Common Good website or contact Randy Flowers at [email protected]

Protect the Milan Bottoms - Action Alert!

2/11/2025

Protect the Milan Bottoms - the Quad Cities' largest intact natural area! UPDATE
Monday, March 17th at 5:30 pm

Rock Island City Hall
1528 3rd Ave
Rock Island, IL 61201 (map)

Environmental Forum

UPDATE: Join us for a Save the Eagles protest at 5:00 pm at the City Council Chamber at City Hall.

The City of Rock Island has proposed developing ten acres in the Milan Bottoms into a cannabis growing facility and dispensary and a full service truck stop. This 3,500 acres of hardwood and wetlands is the largest documented bald eagle night roost site in the lower 48 states. It is also home to hundreds of wildlife species, including fish, mussels, and migratory waterfowl. The 24/7 light and noise pollution from the proposed truck stop will threaten the homes of bald eagle and other wildlife species.

A public hearing concerning this project will be held on Monday, March 17th at 5:30 pm in Rock Island City Hall. A group of local environmental advocates are working together to urge the City Council to reconsider the plans. We need to protect the eagles and the entire Milan Bottoms.

Our requests are:
1. Move the truck stop away from this location.
2. Shrink the proposed TIF (Tax Increment Financing) district so that it does not include wetlands or areas that are in the current floodplain. [A TIF is a public financial tool that cities and counties use to stimulate development and redevelopment in specific areas. This mechanism allows for the reallocation of newly generated tax revenue for up to 25 years, supporting local projects. Changing this district could help save the wetlands. FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) has designated this area as a floodplain.]

For more information on this effort please visit this Facebook page.

If you support our effort to protect the eagles and Milan Bottoms, please sign the petition here.
Encourage your friends and neighbors to support our effort and sign the petition.

Susan Leuthauser

Call to oppose DOGE - Action Alert

2/11/2025

Call and email your US legislators about DOGE - Action Alert

League of Women Voters of Iowa

Members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are unelected, unvetted individuals who have been given control of crucial government systems and allowed access to classified information, including the personal information of millions of Americans via access to Social Security numbers and tax records. They are attempting to dictate federal spending without the legal authority to do so and without oversight.

This attack on our democracy encourages distrust in government operations and leaders. Legislators must fulfill their oversight duties and ethical responsibilities to protect and serve Americans and our democracy.

Action: Call and email. Calls are more effective. Please do both. The links below are for email messages.

Illinois
Senator Durbin – phone: (202) 224-2152

Senator Duckworth – phone: (202) 224-2854

Representative Sorensen – phone: (202) 225-5905

Iowa
Senator Ernst - phone (202) 224-3254

Senator Grassley - phone (202) 224-3744

Representative Miller-Meeks - (202) 225-6576

Susan Leuthauser

PACG Book Club - "Barons", April 2025

2/8/2025

PACG Book Club - Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry by Austin Frerick
Monday, April 21th at 5:15 pm - in person

Edwards Congregational UCC
3420 Jersey Ridge Rd
Davenport, IA (map)

PACG Book Club

Our April book is Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry by Austin Frerick. The author is a 7th generation Iowan and has had a lot of good reviews. This was the first book of J.D. Scholten's book club, and he also interviewed the author. Scholten writes You're Probably Getting Screwed on Substack. His interview with the author is here.

If you want to come on Zoom, contact me for the link.

Alta Price

Here is more about the book from Goodreads:

"Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy? Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefitted from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation’s rural towns and local businesses."

"Along with Mike McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries, with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil."

"These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled in these pages are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. Barons paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it."

Alta Price (she/her)

PACG Book Club - "Lightning Men", March 2025

2/8/2025

PACG Book Club - Lightning Men (Darktown #2) by
Thomas Mullen
Monday, March 17th at 5:15 pm - Zoom only

No meeting in February!

We will continue to meet via Zoom in March, but will go back to in person meetings in April. For March we will read and discuss the second book in the Darktown series by Thomas Mullen, Lightning Men.

For those wanting to get a head start, the April book is Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry by Austin Frerich. The author is a 7th generation Iowan and the book was recommended by J.D. Scholten. Read more about it at this PACG blog post.

Contact me for the Zoom link to the March meeting.

Alta Price (she/her)

Here is more about Lightning Men from Goodreads:

"From the acclaimed author of The Last Town on Earth comes the gripping follow-up to Darktown, a “combustible procedural that will knock the wind out of you” (The New York Times)."

"Officer Denny Rakestraw, “Negro Officers” Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, and Sergeant McInnis have their hands full in an overcrowded and rapidly changing Atlanta. It’s 1950 and color lines are shifting and racial tensions are simmering. Black families—including Smith’s sister and brother-in-law—are moving into Rake’s formerly all-white neighborhood, leading some residents to raise money to buy them out, while others advocate a more violent solution. Rake’s brother-in-law, Dale, a proud Klansman, launches a scheme to rally his fellow Kluxers to save their neighborhood. When those efforts spiral out of control and leave a man dead, Rake is forced to choose between loyalty to family or the law."

"He isn’t the only one with family troubles. Boggs has outraged his preacher father by courting a domestic, and now her ex-boyfriend has been released from prison. As Boggs, Smith, and their all-black precinct contend with violent drug dealers fighting for turf in new territory, their personal dramas draw them closer to the fires that threaten to consume Atlanta once again."

Chilling trans military order - No Hate in Our States

2/7/2025

The Chilling Line Trump Just Crossed On Transgender People

With the latest trans military executive order, the administration has given up all pretense of "evidence-based care," and has moved to the kind of dehumanization meant to justify atrocity.

From Erin in the Morning

President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

See from the executive order:

Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

Read the article from Erin Reed's Erin in the Morning substack

Please consider signing up for Erin's Substack. She is a trans woman and a journalist covering trans rights.