In the past couple of weeks, I've been following the local Occupy Wall Street movements that have sprouted up in the area. About fifty miles to the north, Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland have been causing big news with their clashes with the police and their large scale protests. I've been participating with protests closer to home, donating food to the Occupy San Jose encampment, and joining rallies in Occupy Palo Alto and Occupy Mountain View. I've been a fervent follower of the Occupy Wall Street protests because I share their fears about the growing economic inequalities in this country and agree with their criticisms of the financial institutions. As the holiday season gets underway, a perenniel Christmas chestnut is playing across the nation's playhouses and schools and it shares the same criticisms of economic injustice as the Occupy Wall Street protests. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol" shares with the Occupy Wall Street protests an indignation of economic injustice and asks us to help relieve the plight of the victims of our economic system.

Last Wednesday, I dropped by the offices of California Representative Mike Honda to attend a gathering of political activists to ask Mike Honda and our government representatives to focus more on creating jobs. I had received an email from Move On that this was part of a nationwide grassroots effort called "Jobs Not Cuts" to try to shift the government focus from cutting vital social services and focus instead on job creation. It was a moderately attended gathering, about thirty people from different walks of life who care deeply about the issue.

The current situation is not hard to grasp. Harry Reid and the President have offered the Republicans in the House more right-wing meat than Reagan or either Bush ever dreamed of (and more than I would give without a much bigger fight): huge cuts in services for poor and working Americans, with possible cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and continuing dramatic tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. They have offered this to the far, far right (even many Republicans think it is too much), in order to get the (allegedly) Tea-Party-controlled Republican House simply to agree to pay our bills – bills that Congress already agreed to pay.

Yet the Republican House so far refuses this offer, unless it can get all this AND the right to go for more in six months, thus effectively thwarting the rest of Obama’s presidency by bogging it down in a perpetual fight over whether we will pay our bills (ruining Obama’s presidency seems to be their main goal).

In the 1960s, during the heat of the civil rights, student rights and anti-war movements, women, both black and white, found themselves relegated to the domestic side of leftist activism. Much to the surprise and disgust of leftist activist women, left-wing males let movement women know that their role was to cook, clean, make the coffee, and make themselves available for sex whenever the men wanted it. Author Gail Collins covers this issue in her book, When Everything Changed, an overview of the women’s movement during the last fifty years.

Not every man treated every woman as a subservient being, but the treatment was widespread enough that many women finally decided to form their own movement groups, giving birth to the Second Wave of the women’s liberation movement.

On May 1, 2011, I went to downtown San Jose, California to participate in a march for immigrant rights. It is an important issue for me as the child of Filipino immigrants to support the rights of Latino immigrants, especially since many of these immigrants have been exploited for their cheap labor while being denied many rights to redress injustices inflicted upon them. It's something that other immigrant groups from past have suffered through as well, from the Chinese and Irish immigrants of the nineteenth century to the Filipino, Japanese and Mexican immigrants of the twentieth century. I only began attending public demonstrations about two years ago, when I first attended a vigil for health care reform, and I've learned a lot from walking with activists and listening to their stories.

In American history, there is a proud tradition of grassroots activism, of the early abolitionists, women suffragists, labor organizers, civil rights protesters, antiwar activists, and feminists. I think the people who participated in the immigrants rights march are in the spirit of the early Founding Fathers who wanted an involved and active citizenry willing to petition for their rights.

Name of the game seems to be ‘sock it to the working people and protect the rich even more.'

From the time I left home to the time her mind became too clouded with Alzheimer’s disease to do so, my mother wrote to me once or twice a week, newsy letters about family, friends, and neighbors. We kept up a long, steady correspondence during the years before e-mail ended the practice of letter writing.

My mother did not have a college education, but she was intelligent, artistic, and adept at math. At one point she went to business college, taking enough classes to allow her to work as a bookkeeper at the Empire District Electric Company. Then, after all us kids grew up and left home, she began working as a tax preparer.

On April 5 — one day after the We Are One rallies -- over 175 college campuses in 37 states will be participating in a national teach-in on debt, austerity, and corporate greed.

The teach-in is being organized by two long-time pro-labor public intellectuals, sociologist Francis Fox Piven and philosopher Cornell West.

Scheduled for April 5th at 2 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Savings Time), the event seeks to counter the drumbeat of right-wing propaganda. Content will be streamed live to teach-ins organized in local communities from the national teach-in at Judson Memorial Church in New York City. The local teach-ins will use the streamed material and add their own speakers that focus on their community. DSA has endorsed this program and is encouraging local groups and YDS chapters to organize local events that connect to the national teach-in. Jobs with Justice, the Student Labor Action Project, and others are promoting the teach-in.

Over the past month, the eyes of the nation has been transfixed by the fight going on in Wisconsin for workers to preserve their right for collective bargaining. Workers have gradually been losing bargaining powers as unions have been in decline for the past 30 years. As I read about the protests in Wisconsin, I began thinking of Charlie Chaplin's movie Modern Times.

When Chaplin was creating Modern Times, the United States was deep in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Depression had its starting point in the Wall Street Crash of October 24, 1929. From October 24 to October 29, 1929, the market lost $30 billion in value. In July 1933 some $74,000,000,000, or five-sixths of the value of the stock market of September 1929 disappeared. The American Federation of Labor recorded the rise in unemployment: unemployment in October 1930 was 4,639,000; in October 1931 unemployment was 7,778,000; in October 1932 unemployment was 11,586,000; in early 1933 employment was over 13,000,000. The nation's industrial production in 1932 was 47 percent below normal. Between 1929 and 1932, farm values declined 33 percent and farmer's gross income declined 57 percent.

John F. Kennedy famously said: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

With you I am watching the people of Egypt and other Arab nations try to step out from under the boot of tyranny. I hope it’s not too late for Obama to seek out and support the civic activists throughout the Middle East who want justice, and to live in a free society.

While many in the Islamic world, including those in the streets, are dangerous anti-American and anti-Israel religious fanatics, to the surprise of most Americans I bet, many others are concerned about getting things like good jobs and their children an education.

Many involved in the demonstrations are poor, factory workers and jobless. But also on the front lines are professors, members of soccer clubs, workers in human rights groups, and in places like the Al-Nakheel Association for Women and Children. They are journalists, lawyers, religious moderates, secular leftists, union organizers, bloggers, filmmakers and artists, some of whom, from their space in the civil society, have fought the despots, without much help from the United States, and usually paid dearly.

I've always admired the Quakers. I admire the Quakers because they have always been among the first advocates of the various civil rights movements that have weaved its way through our American history: they were in the forefront of the abolitionist movement, the right of women to vote, and the antiwar movement. Around three years ago, I attended two Quaker services in San Jose, California, and found it to be a really meditative service. Though I eventually became an Episcopalian, my admiration for the Friends remains. The American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker group that was founded in 1917 during World War I. Since its founding, the AFSC has continued to put Quaker values into action in our country and around the world.