Activism Across America

No, it’s not what you typically might think of when it comes to the phrase anti-family, but it’s the best description I can think of to describe the bill that Tennessee’s US Representative Marsha Blackburn has proposed.

H.R. 381 would force substantial cuts in funding to hospitals, early childhood education, and health care for kids. It would also require cuts to programs like WIC, which supports pregnant mothers by giving them access to the adequate nutrition that their unborn children need.

It’s cruel to attack American families, especially at this time, when many Americans find themselves out of work, through no fault of their own, only because their employers couldn’t stay afloat. If you live in Representative Blackburn’s district in Tennessee, please call her office through her congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask her to rescind this bill. We don’t need Marsha Blackburn to kick American families when they’re down.

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.

Voters in Tennessee ought to have second thoughts about their support for the Republican presidential candidate in 2000 and 2004. Having a proponent of right wing economic policy in the White House hasn’t done much for the Tennessee economy.

Tennessee’s poverty rate and child poverty rate are both well above the national average. The right wing’s favored approach of neglecting the government’s responsibility to confront poverty, and just hoping out that everything will turn out all right in the end, has led to widespread economic failure across the state.

In 2008, Tennessee has the opportunity to start to turn things around - by supporting a progressive President instead of just another in a string of right wing failures.

Source of information on poverty: 2007 State of the States Report from the Food Research and Action Center

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”.

There are many of the new congressional Democrats of 2006 who come out of this weekend’s vote on the gestapo-style Protect America Act looking quite tarnished, but I am happy to find one diamond in the rough. Steve Cohen is the newest Democrat in Congress from Tennessee, and so one might think that he is the most susceptible to pressure from the Republicans in the White House.

Not so. Of the five Democrats from Tennessee serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, only Representative Steve Cohen had the integrity to vote against the attacks on freedom in the ill-named Protect America Act.

Cohen’s Democratic colleagues all failed the test: