Houston Area Move To Amend Discusses Money & Politics
This week the Supreme Court removed the aggregate limit of dollars that anyone can spend in any election cycle. This puts our entire democracy up for sale to the highest bidder. There are organizations throughout the nation building grassroots movements to amend the constitution in order to fix this constitutional aberration. One of the most successful ones is Move To Amend.,
After the Supreme Court ruling, an affiliate of Move To Amend, Houston Area Move To Amend (Facebook) effected a successful protest in Houston. I am honored to have three of their leaders discuss the corrosive nature of money in our body politic, the apathy that it has caused, and the solutions. Madeleine Crozat-Williams, Mike Badzioch, and Ben Ball will spend the hour with us and will be ready to answer questions.
Give me a call at (713) 526-5738. That is 713-526-KPFT. Remember you can also send me a tweet to @egbertowillies. Let us engage. It is politics done right.
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Madeleine Crozat-Williams is an LSU graduate with BS and PhD degrees in Chemistry. She has lived in Houston since 1973. She was a textile and mixed media artist and taught Textiles and Visual Merchandising at the University of Houston and Weaving at Texas Southern University in the mid to late 1980’s. She owns and operates Las Manos Magicas, a folk art gallery specializing in fine Mexican and Guatemalan folk art and fine ethnic jewelry and ethnic textiles. She is not new to activism. She was a co-founder of the Park Civic Association (and their citizens’ patrol) in the Montrose area, which formed because of the high incidence of drug dealing and prostitution which resulted from the severe economic downturn of the area. She has been active with Code Pink, Keystone XL, and Iraq War protests among others, and helped to organize two public hearings, more recently about overly aggressive HPD behavior against demonstrators. She and her husband work together in many activist endeavors.
Mike Badzioch was born and raised in the Central Valley of California. After graduating from college he joined VISTA and served in northern Michigan where he met his wife who was also a volunteer. After his term ended he was a high school truant officer in Ohio for 5 years before starting graduate studies in Houston. He worked for 12 years at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in studies of familial cancers and became a collaborator in an international consortium for prostate cancer genetics. After completing a fellowship at the cancer research branch of the World Health Organization in Lyon, France, he was at the University of Washington, Seattle, until retiring. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mpumalanga Province, Republic of South Africa. Upon his return he helped start the local organization of Move To Amend in Houston.
Ben Ball, born and raised in Texas, received BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. After 30 years service with Gulf Oil Corporation he retired as Corporate Vice President. He then held for 25 years various teaching and research appointments at M.I.T., including that of Director of their international Integrated Energy Systems Program. As president of Ball & Associates for 25 years he served as a management consultant to dozens of corporations and governments worldwide, gave expert testimony in state and federal courts, the U.S. Congress and the United Nations as well as serving on committees of the National Academy of Engineering and the University of Texas Energy Laboratory. He authored or coauthored over 100 publications, including two books, and was a pioneer computer programmer, having written the first computer code in 1957 for the world’s first mass-produced computer. Now, at age 85, he has decided that if we don’t deny personhood to artificial things like corporations and get big money out of politics, nothing else will matter.
