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.

Barack Obama is a United States Senator from Illinois, but is he running for President as an Illinois Democrat in particular?Barack Obama came to live in Chicago after law school. He wasn’t born there, and didn’t grow up there. Obama is not an Illinois native, any more than Hillary Clinton is a New York state native. Obama has as much heritage in Kansas or Hawaii, or Indonesia for that matter, as he does in Illinois. Since 2004, Obama has mostly lived in Washington, D.C.Barack Obama is really running as a national candidate with an overall appeal. He is not of one group over any other, ethnically or residentially.The following bumper stickers supporting the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 are available as singles, but at a better bulk discount rate in larger numbers:

My moment of realization about the political character of Congressman Dan Lipinski was a vote back in 2005. Representative Lipinski voted in favor of allowing government-funded programs to discriminate against workers on the basis of religion. Lipinski actually thought that it was a good idea to allow bosses to fire employees for not belonging to a church that they approved of.

Most of us Americans do not think it is the business of bosses to make decisions about which churches their employees go to. Dan Lipinski doesn’t see it that way, apparently.

The think about Dan Lipinski is that he just doesn’t see things the way most Democratic voters do. He is in favor of helping big oil companies wreck the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s no wonder, with the amount of big oil money Lipinski takes.

Dan Lipinski also votes like a member of the Religious Right on matters of reproductive freedom. He believes that life begins at the moment of conception, and that’s his personal right. Dan Lipinski doesn’t stop there, however. Through his votes in Congress against stem cell research and other related issues, Lipinski tries to force his religious beliefs on everyone else.

That’s not what being a Democrat is supposed to be about. The Democrats are supposed to be the party the respects constitutional liberty. Yet, Dan Lipinski has consistently voted to help George W. Bush set up Big Brother electronic surveillance programs that spy on the private activities of ordinary, peaceful, law-abiding Americans. Dan Lipinski voted for the Patriot Act - twice, without any amendments to protect the American people from having government spies snoop in their private lives. This August, in the middle of the night on a Saturday when he hoped that no one would be paying attention, Dan Lipinski voted for the Protect America Act, a new law that lets the government spy on the Internet activities of American citizens, even when they aren’t suspected of any crime - all without any search warrant or other form of supervision.

The Democrats of the 8th Congressional District in Illinois have had it with Dan Lipinski. That’s why, for the 2008 election, Illinois Democrats are coming together to support Mark Pera, a true mainstream Democrat who will not lose his spine and buckle under to pressure from the Republican Party in the way that Dan Lipinski does.

Please, visit Mark Pera’s web site and give him your support in his challenge to Dan Lipinski’s politics of cowardice.

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.

Yesterday evening in Chicago at Logan Square, people gathered in a vigil against the war in Iraq. It wasn’t a typical antiwar vigil. Rather, it was a pilot by MoveOn.org to test out a new approach to antiwar vigils, including a reading of a Toll Calendar - a day by day accounting of the dead and wounded Iraq, just over the last year. If the vigil is judged as successful, then it will be repeated around the country by local MoveOn groups in September.

Judging by the complete lack of coverage from the news media, and even the blogosphere, it seems that the external impact of the vigil was not very strong.

Perhaps that has to do with the top-down MoveOn approach. At a time when the Democratic Party has lost the trust of the antiwar community, people may not be feeling comfortable with a centrally-organized activist program. Perhaps people are reverting to genuine grassroots resistance, or individual work against the war.

Perhaps there’s vigil fatigue - a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but apt. The vigil is not any one evening with candles. The vigil is remaining active in resisting war even when years of such activism fails to end the fighting.