Activism Across America

Right now, the Hoosier Environmental Council, as with many environmental organizations in the Great Lakes region, has been focused on the attempt by BP to get permission to dump noxious chemicals in Lake Michigan. Now, there’s news about BP’s attempt to get a special exemption for spewing pollution into the air.

The Hoosier Environmental Council provides a link to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management page devoted to the request for wastewater dumping.

The Indiana Sierra Club explains that BP has agreed not to dump extra waste into Lake Michigan, even if its permission to do so is upheld. No wonder, given that BP’s reputation in the region has taken a substantial hit.

However, BP’s community responsibility in Indiana was further tarnished this month when it leaked oil into a stormwater sewer in Munster.

Voices for Creative Nonviolence reports that independent journalist Mike Ferner will stand trial today at the Lake County Courthouse for trespass, obstruction and resisting arrest charges related to his coverage of a nonviolent civil disobediance protest on July 5 at the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command in Waukegan, Illinois. Three activists, Ceylon Mooney, Jeff Leys, and Diane Hughes entered the military office and began reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. Mooney and Leys are supposed to be on trial today with Ferner, but Hughes has entered an Alford plea, which means that she does not admit guilt, but acknowledges that sufficient evidence exists for prosecutors to obtain her conviction.

At this time, information about the results of the trial are not yet available.

You might think from the coverage of the unfolding Larry Craig debacle that Idaho is simply filled with angry right-wing white men who furtively meet in bathroom stalls. But Idaho is, and always has been, more complicated than that. New Yorkers might not believe it, but there is a community of progressive activists in Idaho who are engaged in important organizing and witnessing work. Take, for instance, the Idaho Peace Coalition, which has a full calendar of educational activities and protests for the months of August and September. This upcoming Sunday, as on every Sunday, members of the coalition will meet at the Anne Frank Memorial in Boise and walk along the Greenbelt in a persistent anti-war protest. That’s at 3 pm, folks. Will you add your body, your voice, your presence, your peaceful force?

They used to be over at NHGreens.org, and we were happy to provide them a link over at our progressive directory of New Hampshire, but now it seems that the New Hampshire Green Party has gone under, online at least.

The old site of the New Hampshire Green Party now sells debt consolidation, car insurance, and credit cards. That hardly seems like the Green Party approach. It’s a fill-in-the-blank site, of course, one that web host companies use to try to make a little peripheral profit when an account is cancelled. There is no sign of a new web site for the New Hampshire Greens.

Guy Chichester, a former Green Party candidate for Governor, has been appointed as the chair of New Hampshire Greens for Kucinich, but a Green Party activist endorsing a Democratic candidate for President is hardly a sign of a health Green Party in New Hampshire. It’s not certain how well Green Party activists can help Dennis Kucinch, when their own party infrastructure seems to be falling apart.

If there are any honest-to-goodness New Hampshire Greens who can point me the way to information about the demise of the New Hampshire Green Party, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

The following message comes from the Global Coral Reef Alliance, established in 1990 and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

“It is with great sadness that I must tell you that our dear colleague and leader, Wolf Hilbertz, died on August 11 2007.

He had become sick in Dubai, but recovered and went back to Bali on his last vacation before moving to Berlin, in order to photograph the Biorock projects, when he was stricken again.

They were unable to determine the problem and he was airlifted to Germany, where he was diagnosed with terminal cancer that had spread from his lungs to his kidneys and liver. He passed away peacefully and without pain.

Wolf was an inspiring pioneer of new technologies in architecture and marine habitat restoration. Although we can never replace him, now it is up to all of us to see that his work is carried on.”

The Global Coral Reef Alliance is a very important organization that studies, defends, and works toward restoring the coral reefs of planet Earth. We all, whether coastal or inland, depend upon the resources created by those reefs. Donations can be made to:

Global Coral Reef Alliance
37 Pleasant Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
617-864-4226 / 617-864-0433
goreau@bestweb.net
http://www.globalcoral.org

This week, the following states, along with the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Manitoba, announced the formation of the cross-border Western Climate Initiative, in which the member states and provinces agree to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent before the year 2020:

It’s a bitter irony this summer that many of the Republican politicians who have been the most stubborn opponents of the idea have come from the South and the Midwest, and those same regions have been hit this summer by a record-breaking heat wave that has killed scores of people and crippled local infrastructures.

Tennessee has received particular attention, with Nashville’s 12-day streak of temperatures above 100 degrees, heat days shutting down Tennessee schools, and a Tennessee Valley Authority power meter registering such a surge in power usage for air conditioners that it literally burst into flame.

The most infamous opponent of global warming reality in Congress has been Senator James Inhofe. I wonder if he would call the the special heat advisory, and heat-related hospitalizations and death across Oklahoma a “hoax”.

This Saturday, August 25th, starting at 10:30 AM, there will be a rally and march for peace in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the Bush family, including President George W. Bush, “summers”. That’s an upper class term for having a long, long vacation.

In addition to the rally and march, there will be an antiwar activist celebration, with the Indigo Girls, Dave Rovics, Inanna, Pat Scanlon, the Leftist Marching Band, Bojah & the Insurrection, Emma’s Revolution, SON of NUN, the Congolese Banya Mulenge Tutsi Choir, and the Aserela Acholi Singing And Dance Group playing music long after the Bush family servants have shuttered up their windows to protect America’s aristocracy from the hoi polloi.

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich will be there too, so you’ll have the chance to hear his ideas, and maybe ask him a couple of questions too, if you attend.

The next meeting of Humanists Hawaii will be on Sunday, August 26th, at 10:30 AM, in the room 112 of Krauss Hall at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. At the meeting, speaker Jim Lomont will encourage the examination of unrecognized assumptions that underlie social power structures. The title of his talk will be, Internal Repression among Humanists and other Americans. Repression is, in this sense, internal to the individual, a psychological phenomenon that expresses itself on the shared social scale.

I wonder, though, if one is able to recognize a repressed assumption, whether t can truly be called repressed.

For more information on the program, contact Humanists Hawaii President Andi van der Voort at 261-3452. Also consider volunteering for the position of Program Chair, which is currently vacant.

This August, Hawaiians are scratching their heads, trying to figure out what Senator Daniel Inouye was thinking. In the last hours before the United States Senate’s summer vacation, Senator Inouye abandoned the Democratic majority in order to join the Republican Party in spporting George W. Bush’s plan to give extraordinary new spying powers to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Director of National Intelligence, John Michael McConnell.

It’s a perplexing decision, given that Alberto Gonzales had been exposed as lying to Congress on multiple occasions, and abusing the power of his position as the nation’s top law enforcement official to promote the partisan political interests of the Republican Party. Why on earth would Daniel Inouye reward such outrageous behavior by giving Alberto Gonzales additional powers?

The Protect America Act gives Alberto Gonzales and John Michael McConnell the power to run electronic eavesdropping programs that create an immense dragnet scooping up the private emails, telephone calls, and web activity of American citizens. Essentially, there is no oversight of the spying - not from judges who would ordinarily give search warrants, or from Congress, which is supposed to have the power to conduct oversight of espionage - especially when it is directed against Americans. Only McConnell and Gonzales have the power to ensure that abuses do not occur. They’re given the power by the Protect America Act to be their own supervisors, with no one else able to say no to them.

In fact, the Protect America Act makes it a crime for anybody to deny an order from Alberto Gonzales or John Michael McConnell to join in an electronic spying operation. You can be thrown in prison for refusing their commands. You may not remember when you signed up for the Homeland Security Citizen Spy Brigade, but the Protect America Act doesn’t quibble about such things.

Why would Senator Inouye vote in favor of such a law? Part of the explanation may be that Inouye voted for the law without bothering to read it. After all, the Protect America Act was voted on just two days after being introduced into the Senate.

If that’s not the explanation, then I have no clue why Daniel Inouye would support such an obviously outrageous and unconstitutional law. If you’re one of Senator Inouye’s constituents in Hawaii, why don’t you call his office and ask his staff for an explanation:

808-541-2542