Even in Montgomery, Alabama, Some People Still Believe in Workers’ Rights

A YouTube video snapshot of the first rally for unions in the South

Glynn Wilson

by Glynn Wilson

Almost 100 people from all over Alabama showed up on the old Capitol steps in Montgomery on Saturday for a “Save the American Dream” rally in support of organized labor and the protesting public workers in Madison, Wisconsin, who seem to have been inspired by the people of Egypt — and spawned a movement that appears to be spreading across the country.

“I’m for the unions,” said Jim Allen, 75, one of the speakers at the rally.

“I’m a slow learner,” Allen joked. “But here’s something I think I’ve gotten. We hear a lot of talk about defending our American freedoms, our liberty, especially in connection with wars that aren’t going to have anything to do with that. But what I’ve observed is that comes most often and most from people with the biggest megaphones, the people with the money.”

What he has figured out is that those people want us to think only about our “individual liberty,” he said. “They don’t want us getting together. Remember, the people united can never be defeated.”

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Rally Planned for Saturday at Noon in Montgomery, Alabama

Inspired by the events at the Wisconsin state capitol for the past couple of weeks, union members across the country are getting fired up to keep that energy going and growing throughout the country.

This Saturday at noon, working people in all 50 state capitals and other major cities will join in a massive, national show of solidarity with embattled workers in Wisconsin and other states.

Some unions are planning a “Save the American Dream” rally in Montgomery, Alabama this Saturday at noon.

“The protests in Wisconsin have inspired us all and created an opportunity we’ve got to seize,” according to a press release from the national AFL-CIO. “For too long, CEOs and the politicians whose campaigns they financed have dominated the debate over the economy. But this time, they’ve gone too far. America is listening — and Saturday we’ll make our voices heard for good, middle-class jobs and working families who need them.”

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Thank Dog for Mississippi

by Glynn Wilson

Mississippi is home to the largest percentage of self identified political conservatives among the states in the U.S., with a slim majority identifying their political views as conservative, while Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, and Utah come close to the 50 percent conservative identification mark, according to Gallup’s latest poll on the subject.

“Mississippi is the first state to exceed 50 percent conservative identifiers in the three years Gallup has compiled ideological identification at the state level,” Gallup reports.

Vermont, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia showed the greatest percentages of self-identified liberals, according to the survey. The most conservative states are typically in the South and West. The least conservative states are in the Eastern part of the country and on the West Coast.

The top 10 rankings make clear that conservative identification is much more common than liberal identification, with each of the top 10 conservative states at or above 45 percent identification and only the District of Columbia exceeding 31 percent liberal identification.

In the nation as a whole, Americans are about twice as likely to identify as conservative as they are to identify as liberal, a pattern that has persisted for many years since Ronald Reagan made conservatism popular in the 1980s and began to turn Americans against government and liberals. Americans are also more likely to say they are conservative than moderate, a trend that displays the power of political propaganda transmitted through the mass media to influence public opinion over time.

Not surprisingly, then, conservatives outnumber liberals in every U.S. state. Only in the District of Columbia do liberal identifiers exceed conservative identifiers (41 percent to 18 percent). Vermont (30.7 percent conservative to 30.5 percent liberal), Rhode Island (29.9 percent to 29.3 percent), and Massachusetts (29.9 percent to 28.0 percent) have the closest state-level division between conservatives and liberals.

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WKRG.com News

Cleanup crews paid from the $20 billion seized from BP by the Obama administration for Gulf of Mexico restoration have been digging up oil and sifting sand from the beaches along the Gulf in the effort to deep clean them in the wake of the largest and worst environmental disaster in U.S. history when BP’s well blew up and sank April 20 of last year.

Now there’s a research effort ongoing to assess the results of that cleanup effort.

“We’ve been interested in the impacts of beach systems since the oil spill,” Auburn Civil Engineering Professor Joel Hayworth told a local television news station. “We’ve been looking at various aspects of those impacts from a research standpoint. At the end of this what we would like to say is if this beach is cleaner or not cleaner and here is the data to support that statement.”

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Justin Geiger

While attention has, of course, been focused on Madison, Wisconsin, it is not just the state Capitol that is witnessing historic amounts of grassroots actions opposing Gov. Scott Walker’s extreme political attacks on working families, according to AFL-CIO Political Communications Director Eddie Vale.

Wisconsin’s workers already have agreed to Walker’s proposals on wages and benefits, but he refuses to negotiate or compromise and is continuing to insist on stripping them of their bargaining rights.

“It’s time for lawmakers to work across party lines, come to the table and get Wisconsin moving forward again,” Vale said.

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Stork Bucks?

Kristen Schaal wants to cut funding for any organization that has anything to do with abortions, including firefighters, the FAA and NASA.

Guest Column
by Gerald W. Johnson
Capital Survey Research Center

Winston Churchill, in a speech to the House of commons on Nov. 11, 1947, stated, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

What Churchill meant is that democracy is both a challenge and an opportunity, but its value is worth the effort to make it work. It is not neat or tidy; it is not efficient or particularly timely; it is sometimes ugly, even corrupt; but it extols the individual and thereby generates the liberty and freedom that fuels a free people to organize collectively and thereby have unparalleled political and economic systems.

Democracy, however, because of its freedom, is vulnerable to abuse, misuse, unfairness and inequities. Thus, as Churchill suggested, we have to work to make democracy work. We are now in a political period in our state in which we must work extra hard and wisely to make democracy work.

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Guest Column
by Michael William Mullen

The recent column by Alabama’s new Public Service Commission member Twinkle Cavanaugh seeks to stir up folks about the costs of energy bills that are stalled in Congress and potential U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations to address emissions responsible for climate change.

If she were doing her job, she would be researching all aspects, including hidden costs associated with production of electricity from coal. However, she appears to be much too busy writing op-ed pieces that seek to maintain the status quo to do serious research that might benefit the citizens of Alabama.

If one takes a comprehensive look at all of the costs of producing electricity from coal, not just the price of electricity, he or she will very quickly understand that coal is destructive, dangerous and deadly. The facts, when examined with an open mind, bring one to realize that electricity produced from coal is simply a fool’s bargain.

To understand the true cost of electricity from coal, one has to add up all the external costs. These costs include the health costs — black lung disease suffered by miners, increased asthma rates and associated costs and deaths suffered by the public who breathe the coal plant emissions, impacts upon water quality and associated costs for providing clean water, the costs associated with wear and tear on roads, costs associated with acid rain, sludge spill costs, the accumulation of the nerve poison mercury released from coal burning in fish and fish consumers, including human beings, the miners killed in accidents and many other costs not listed here, including horrific environmental impacts.

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Bikini Bear and David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club

Guest Column
by David Underhill

Bikini Bear entered the lion’s den the other day. She is a polar bear.

The compulsively literal might say she is a person dressed in a polar bear costume. But all would agree that she was wearing a yellow polka dot bikini.

The lion’s den was a meeting room in the state’s handsome Five Rivers facility on the causeway across Mobile Bay. Presiding were officials from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — formerly the Minerals Management Service until the exploding BP oil well prompted a reorganization and name change. They called this meeting, and two others along the Gulf Coast, to solicit comments about their plans to expand the offshore areas leased for oil and gas drilling.

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