Activism Across America

For the last century, Americans have been stuck in a simplistic mechanical model of prosperity: The more we produce, the more prosperous we become. One of the most profound refutations of that model is the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, a great area of the Gulf of Mexico, spreading from the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where no marine animals can live.

This dead zone is created by the great industrial agricultural push in America’s MidWest. For generations, farmers have been told by the government that they’ll be most successful if they fertilize their fields with fertilizers created, not through the natural decay of plant materials, but in factories far from the field. Those fertilizers then run off into streams that feed into rivers that feed into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico. There, the fertilizers create such an intense bloom of plant growth in the water that the decaying plant material creates a vast stretch of water in the Gulf of Mexico that is starved of oxygen, and kills any animal unlucky enough to swim into it.

The maps below show the results of a recent study by the US Geological Survey, tracing these fertilizers, nitrogen and phosphorus back to the states upstream where they enter the Mississippi River watershed.

The following states have only 31 percent of the area in the Mississippi River watershed, but they contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that lead to the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone:
Illinois
Iowa
Indiana
Missouri
Arkansas
Kentucky
Tennessee
Ohio
Mississippi

That study ought to have been done by the US Department of Agriculture, given that it’s agriculture that delivers so much of the pollution into the dead zone. People ask what good organic, sustainable farming does us. This new USGS study makes it clear. Organic, sustainable farming could spare us dead zones.

Today, South Carolina Democrats are going to the polls in their presidential primary, voting to award delegates to the Democratic presidential convention in Denver at the end of the summer.

Something else happened a couple of days ago, however, that ought to draw at least as much attention from South Carolina voters: South Carolina’s two United States Senators failed to stand against a law that would give telecommunications corporations legal immunity for violating their privacy agreements with their customers and engaging in massive electronic spying operations against the American people.

In just the second roll call vote of the year in the U.S. Senate, a motion to remove the proposed immunity for telecommunications corporations who secretly set up spy against Americans was defeated.

Senator Jim DeMint voted to defeat the motion. Senator DeMint voted to keep the provision to give special immunity to corporate spying on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Senator Lindsey Graham didn’t even bother to show up to vote.

I can’t decide which is worse.

The Nitpicker, a blogger once found at nitpicker.blogspot.com, seems to have run out of nits. Once, the Nitpicker brought a sharp progressive bit of news from the Kansas political scene. We’re sorry to see that the Nitpicker is no more.

That’s how independent news blogs often go. It’s an exhausting regimen for a person to hold up, given the fact that bloggers usually receive little if any money for their work, and have to hold down a day job in addition to their writing. It’s the establishment political voices, from Huffington to DailyKos, that draw in the big bucks, due to their insider contacts. Yet, we here at the Progressive States Directory prefer the smaller, truly alternative voices, because we’ve found that they’re more interesting and more trustworthy.

Goodbye, Nitpicker. Where you fall, the Kansas Equality Coalition rises, one thousand members strong.

I’m going through our directory of progressive resources for each of the 50 states, and it’s downright depressing to see the number of organizations and sources of information that have simply called it quits.

For the last few years, for example, at our page for Iowa, we have had a listing for “Iowa Peace and Protest Books” at IowaPeace.com. Now, the web site simply isn’t there. It’s held by a domain squatter who is trying to sell the domain for a profit.

Luckily, for every site that’s quit, a new site has popped up to keep the fight going.

So, we welcome Iowa Independent, Century of the Common Iowan, Bleeding Heartland, and Iowa Progress to our progressive directory of Iowa, along with the Iowa Secularists.

To these relatively new voices, I have this advice: Persistence is at least half of the political battle.

Just a few minutes from now, the Brandywine Peace Community will observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, not with some empty rhetoric, but by doing as Dr. King himself would have done. The group will be engaging in civil disobedience against Lockheed Martin, “the world’s largest weapons corporation and the Iraq War’s chief weapons profiteer.”

The antiwar demonstration will be taking place at the Lockheed Martin weapons complex at the meeting of Mall and Goddard Boulevards in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Only those who have received civil disobedience training for this protest with the Brandywine Peace Community will be engaged in that aspect of the protest, but many others will be there for support, and to engage in lawful acts of demonstration.

This morning, I stopped for a minute and thought about the larger meaning of a sign posted at the entrance of the Westin hotel in Long Beach, California. The sign read: “Warning: The Hotel Premises and Property Contain Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer and Birth Defect and Other Reproductive Harm.”

I concluded that it’s not just a warning sign for the people staying in the hotel.

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is home to a striking amount of biodiversity. Though this biological diversity cannot be seen by those of us who live above the waves, we benefit from it nonetheless.

I was shocked to discover that only one percent of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is actually a sanctuary. In a few weeks, Superintendent Paul Michel, who administers the Sanctuary, will decide whether to add marine protected areas (MAPs) in the federal parts of the Monterey Sanctuary to add protection to the fish who swim there.

The Ocean Conservancy is urging people to contact Michel, and urge him to support the additional protection. Please, if you live in California, give a few minutes to help out.

Baron Hill has a troubled history with the people in the 9th congressional district of Indiana, which he currently represents in Congress. He’s been voted out of office before, and only regained his seat in the 2006 congressional election. In 2008, Baron Hill is up for re-election, not just in November, but also in the Democratic primary.

Though he is a Democratic politician, Baron Hill’s position with Democratic voter is not strong. Congressman Hill has a long, sad history of voting in support of the policies of George W. Bush.

On the issue of liberty in America, Baron Hill has a particularly troubling record. Recently, Hill voted for the Protect America Act, a rotten new law that enables the federal government to engage in massive unsupervised electronic surveillance programs, reading our emails, listening to our telephone calls, and tracking us as we move around the Internet - and to do it all without getting a search warrant or providing any other evidence that the spying is anything other than politically motivated.

Why would Baron Hill vote in favor of such a thing?

Baron Hill has a lot of powerful allies who are determined to keep him in Congress, but he also has a dedicated challenger: Gretchen Clearwater. Clearwater wants to end Baron Hill’s arrogant abuse of Democratic voters in Indiana. Her platform is simple:

Philadelphia’s political activist community is getting very Caribbean today. Not only is there the noontime protest to shut down Guantanamo, but at 6:00 PM, the National Boricua Human Rights Network is organizing a protest in Philadelphia at 6th and Market Streets (the same place the Guantanamo protest will start).

The NBHRN protest is related to the subpoena of three Puerto Rican nationalist activists before a grand jury in New York City. They call these subpoenas “intimidation” of the activists. I’m not really clear on this issue, to tell the truth. How is a subpoena intimidation, and not a legitimate legal investigation?

If anyone can educate me on this matter, I’d love to hear what they have to say.

In a more general sense, it’s great to see free speech alive and well in the historical heart of American liberty.

Tommorow, at high noon, in the area of Independence Mall, citizens from the greater Philadelphia area will gather together to join in a protest against the shameful and illegal American prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The demonstration to shut down Guantanamo begins at noon in front of the Philadelphia Federal Courthouse, at the meeting of 6th Street & Market Street. Then, people wearing orange jumpsuits will be pulled in a symbolic procession that will walk past the Liberty Bell, past Independence Hall, ending at Constitution Center.

The same standards of justice and law must apply to everyone, or they apply to no one. This protest is not pro-terrorist. It’s pro-Constitution, and pro-law.

Wear orange to remind passers-by that when the Constitution is ignored, and the rule of law is no longer in effect, we are all prisoners.

For more information, visit the site of the Brandywine Peace Community.