by Michael Braunstein Special to the Locust Fort News-Journal
View photos with this column at Michael’s Flickr Photo Stream
NEW YORK – The occupation started as a call out for a short weekend occupation by the activist group Adbusters and quickly swelled to include Anonymous, US Day of Rage, and was soon joined by a large cadre of activist groups and a very large number of activist citizens.
A group of college kids with signs has expanded into a self-sustaining city that spontaneously organizes to help itself eat, sleep and take wet sleeping bags to the dry cleaners.
During my visit, there was an operations central, a refectory, a library, and while I was talking to somenone, a spontaneous group formed to take wet sleeping bags to the laundry. People were tabling for organziations, making signs and engaging passers-by with thought provoking conversations.
Back in 1971, the environmental movement was just a dream in the minds of people who wanted the governments and the corporations of the world to respect the planet that we all live on.
In other words, quit setting off nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, and quit spewing toxic chemicals into our air, our water sources and on our land. Back then we still had lead in our gasoline, with Los Angeles and other big cities covered with air so toxic it was literally killing people.
Our national forests were being treated as a piggy bank for the large lumber firms who clear-cut the forests and turned them into agricultural plantations, row after row of straight lines that wiped out most of the forest eco-systems. Our rivers were used as dumping grounds for chemical manufacturers, fouling our drinking water and poisoning any living thing that lived on or near it. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio actually caught fire.
An awareness of those problems led to the first Earth Day, and to passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, as well a host of other environmental regulations that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
After the latest Teabagger debate circus, one wonders what kind of infection could cause the human brain to suffer so much reason-bleed.
Capital punishment celebrated, death of the uninsured cheered, the social safety net pilloried. All just the latest in more than two years of increasingly bizarre statements and craven behavior from teabag rabble.
When the debate was raging about whether the feds should rescue the auto industry, afflicted teabagger types argued that President Obama wanted to “bail out” car makers because he wanted to take over Detroit’s decision-making and run the car companies himself.
There’s no turning back the hands of time, except in pictures
by Cliff Griggs
Ten years, heinous acts by madmen, and thousands of lives ruined by war and hatred, have gone by, and it still isn’t over. Even though we are trying to extricate our country from Iraq and Afghanistan, that leaving is still years away.
As for the costs, best estimates are that we have spent, or obligated our country to $2.6 trillion that we didn’t have, to pay for two large wars, and now a host of smaller ones that we will be involved in for years to come.
It would be easy to dismiss this as religious in nature, similar to disputes in Ireland, Catholics against Protestants, here Islam against Christianity. But I don’t see it that way.
I see it as a result of the petulance of a rich kid, used to a lot of attention when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, who suddenly was ignored after they left. So he went out like a stupid kid who only gets attention when he does something really bad.
ARAB, Ala. — It is summer time in Alabama and this is the time of year when we celebrate Freedom in America in July and honor American Labor in early September.
“We the People” takes on special meaning for all of us whether you are eating hot dogs or baby back ribs.
Since 1776 we have attempted to throw off the yoke of imperial rule by kings and oligarchs. We make some headway and then the corruption of bought off politicians answering to the rich has once again turned us into a group of desperate, disheartened peons without hope of ever changing the system to make it fair for all.
Many people don’t vote. What’s the use they say? It is never going to change. The only difference between us and the people of Greece, or Egypt, or Tunisia, or Libya is that our poor don’t organize and rally in the town squares.
The nation gained 117,000 jobs in July while the U.S. unemployment rate dropped slightly from 9.2 percent in June to 9.1 percent last month, according to Department of Labor data released Friday morning. Analysts had predicted jobs would grow by about 90,000 in July.
The unemployment rate has topped 9 percent in 10 of the last 12 months. The decrease in the jobless rate last month was entirely due to the increase in the number of unemployed workers who stopped looking for work and are no longer counted in the government’s figures, says Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute.
Companies hired 154,000 new employees last month while some 37,000 jobs were lost in the public sector. This rate of a rate of job growth “keeps us firmly in low gear and on track for persistent high unemployment,” Shierholz says.
Health care employment continued to grow, adding 31,000 jobs in in July. Manufacturing employment also increased in July by 24,000.
Editor’s Note: You won’t see this on TeeVee news, or read it in the newspapers.
David Underhill
New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox
Guest Column
by David Underhill
NEW YORK – In baseball the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox has the passion and jagged edge of an ancient cultivated rivalry like Alabama vs. Auburn in football.
With this difference — to get a ticket you don’t have to be a cousin of a university trustee, or be a legislator with a grip on the schools’ funding, or dangle on a waiting list for generations. If you happen to be in New York on a day the Yankees and Red Sox are playing, you can get a ticket that morning, though the stadium will be sold out by the time the umpire hollers “Play Ball!” that evening.
Major league baseball shuttles through spacious stadiums daily for six months every year. You can always snare a seat, often in the cheap(er) outfield bleachers, and at the stated price, not jacked up scalpers’ rates. But when the Red Sox come to town, the bleacher tickets are long gone, and your only chance is the gilded sections behind home plate.
Everybody’s list of things they’d like to do before saying goodbye is distinctive and quirky. But if New York against Boston at Yankee Stadium is on yours, and you have a chance to check that off, even at a plastic-money-melting price, you don’t let it pass. This puts you in socially unfamiliar territory.
Your bridges are burning now.
They’re all coming down;
It’s all coming ‘round.”
- Foo Fighters
Guest Column
by Ray Vaughan
Founder and Executive Director WildLaw
Dear Friends:
Many of you may have heard rumors about the future of WildLaw and what is happening with our organization. Due to tough economic times drying up all our major funding sources and due to some other factors, WildLaw, quite simply, has no future; the organization is done and wrapping up operations.
WildLaw will cease operations on May 31, 2011, and after 25 years of public interest legal work, I am retiring. This memo contains my thoughts and reflections on what an incredible journey WildLaw and I have had.
I am an educator in the state of Alabama. I have been under attack in my native home. Since the session began in March, so have you!
It appears that some members of the legislative body have forgotten that educators are living, breathing human beings. Apparently, we are just dollars and decimal points on a piece of paper, or a name on an association roster. Perhaps, we are their favorite target, or bless his heart, perhaps Dr. Hubbert is.
If that is the case, we obviously fail to be seen behind him. We are continuously taking on shrapnel, and the children of Alabama are being hit with falling debris.
Whatever the case, I, like many of you are being pushed to the brink of poverty. Professional chaos and disorder in my career, loom in the shadows, its name is “Putting Students First Act.” With the signing of Senate Bill 2, when we were told what we could do with the money in our own paycheck, the parade of injustice began.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
