Concerned About Coal in Oklahoma?

Here is a link to Oklahoma Sierra Club, Working For A Coal Free Oklahoma.  They have links to several articles and reports that go into more detail about effects of Coal for energy as it relates directly to Oklahoma.  It also has links for letting your opinion be know to "the powers that be."  Right now, the EPA is accepting public comments on their proposed plan to protect air in Oklahoma by cleaning up or shutting down three dirty coal plants in the state. There will be two important EPA public hearings in Oklahoma City on April 13th and Tulsa April 14th.  Needless to say, there are interested parties in OK ready to fight any proposed plan from the EPA.
http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/ok/

Watch This Documentary

This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the elitist theory of democracy and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (Project Censored), John Stauber (PR Watch), Christopher Simpson (The Science of Coercion) and others.

A deep, richly illustrated study of the nature and history of propaganda, featuring some of the world’s most insightful critics, Psywar exposes the propaganda system, providing crucial background and insight into the control of information and thought. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/psywar/

My Favorite Writer for the End of an Empire

My favorite writer/essayist, Joe Bageant, died a couple of weeks ago.  I still weep when I think of how I waited with delicious anticipation for each new post on his blog.  Reading each new essay was like a taking long cool drink of water in the middle of an Oklahoma August, only funnier.  I have a link to his website in my list of important links.  Friends are keeping the site going, with it's huge accumulation of essays,  for the time being.  And it is possible that his writings might be published in a collection.  But for now, check them out while you can.  Here is a link that will enable you to download many of the best to your computer or electronic reader.  Some one has given them jazzy covers which are kind of funny but really, read them and enjoy!  http://coldtype.net/joe.html 

And consider getting his books.  I loved, "Deer Hunting With Jesus," and plan to purchase his last book, "Rainbow Pie," kind of a memoir, which was published right before he died.  Here is a link to an essay written about Joe by Marc Campbell which gives a good description of the man.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2011/04/joe-bageant-poet-redneck-revolutionary-rip.html#

Redefining Democracy

I just finished two documentaries.  I've been watching all day while I did some cleaning and reorganizing.  I found this website called Top Documentary Films.  There is a link here in my important links.  I watched one about Hugo Chavez.  How the US tried to help get him ousted.  I got a glimpse of what he is trying to do.  The second is here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/beyond-elections/  It is not short.  Find some clothes to fold or a closet to clean out.  And you will have to read a lot of English subtitles because a lot of it is in Spanish and Portugese.

It is very late and I need to get to bed.  I have been thinking about a bunch of things that I want to start a discussion about such as food and water to start.  What are the very basic needs that we have?  Can we fill these needs ourselves.  Which means you need land...  Maybe you catch my drift.  And what does Democracy from the bottom, up look like?  So watch the documentary if you have time and I'll write more as I go, after I sleep.

We Are One: Remembering King’s Struggle for Labor Rights

By Michael Honey

Michael Honey is editor of King’s labor speeches, “All Labor Has Dignity” (Beacon) and author of“Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike: Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign” (Norton).

“It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.  And I need not remind you this is our plight as a people all over America.” – Martin Luther King in Memphis, March 18, 1968

April 4 marks forty-three years since an assassin killed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis.  That date has special meaning this year.

“We Are One” events all over the U.S. are fighting for collective bargaining rights, and more broadly, a reversal of the current priorities and direction of events.  The connection of today’s union rights battle to King’s legacy is clear.  The strike of Memphis sanitation workers revolved around Mayor Henry Loeb’s refusal to grant collective bargaining rights and union dues collection.

These are the same rights that Governor Scott Walker just took away from public employees in Wisconsin.  Like Loeb, he knows this is a good way to kill a union.  Who would choose to belong to and pay dues to a union that cannot represent them at the bargaining table?

People across the country today are protesting the Republican attempts to utterly destroy the unions.  They are virtually the only group that still has the power to stand up against the power of organized money.

King supported unions from his earliest college days and called them the “first anti-poverty program.”  Unions provided King with staunch allies and provided his greatest financial support in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Birmingham movement, the March on Washington, and other battles.

Mainly because of King’s sacrifice, the sanitation workers in Memphis won their strike.  Their union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), now represents millions of government workers, including many African Americans workers in the District of Columbia.  Unionists regard King as an honorary member and practically a founder of AFSCME.

That’s exactly the union Republicans want to kill. AFSCME and a few other large unions provide the only major counter weight to corporate money in elections.  Kill the unions, and you cripple the Democrats and the ability of working-class folks to resist the political power of organized money.

While the Arab world struggles in pro-democracy movements, we in the U.S. are struggling to keep the union rights that King and others died to achieve.  Unions are an endangered species, as they were in Memphis before King came to that city.  Those of us rallying today feel we are making King’s legacy real in our own lives.  And we feel Americans need to reframe their understanding of King and his legacy.

Many think of King as purely a civil rights leader.  In addition, we need to recognize his fierce advocacy of labor rights and economic justice.  A child of the depression, King always expressed solidarity with poor people.  They included his neighbors, his parishioners, and his family.  His father fled sharecropping and arrived in Atlanta with only a few dollars; his grandparents had worked hard laboring jobs; three of his great-grand parents were slaves.

King was not only a leader for civil rights, which he called “phase one” of the freedom movement.  "We Are One" demonstrations on April 4 remember King’s launch of “phase two,” his Poor People’s Campaign demanding a shift in government priorities from warfare and tax cuts for the rich to creating jobs and enhancing health care, housing and education.

King had been on this path for a long time, speaking at union meetings all over the country.  He told the Illinois AFL-CIO in 1965, “It is a constitutional right for a man to be able to vote, but the human right to a decent house is as categorically imperative and morally absolute as was that constitutional right.  It is not a constitutional right that men [and women] have jobs, but it is a human right.”

King also warned the AFL-CIO at its national convention in 1961 that an alliance of business and right wing politicians in the future would threaten “everything decent and fair in American life.”  They are doing it now.

On this April 4, we should remember King’s words to the Memphis sanitation workers:  “All labor has dignity… You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights.”  There is no better time than the present to follow King’s lead and stand up for the rights of working and poor people.

Back to Issues of Land and Food

Here is a news segment on Real News describing the resistance in Honduras.  The peasant's land has been taken to grow Palm oil plantations.  Aside from the affects of large agricultural fields of mono-cultures on the environment, these small farmers were providing food for themselves and others on farms far less destructive to the environment.  When they are removed from their land, where do they go for food?  To cities looking for jobs?  Personally, I am trying not to buy any food containing palm oil.  There is absolutely NO REASON to even produce or use this stuff!  Except to make more profit for very rich people who care little about sustainability, the planet, the people.  People who have no desire to share with anyone.  People who will kill those who get in their way.

Survival of the Fittest?  Are these the people you want to pass their genetic characteristics on to more of their kind?  Or do you admire the Campesinos who know how to care for their community, know how to grow and share healthy food, dream of a better country and will fight for their fellow country men.  Who is the "fittest" human being?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6513

Did you hear about this?

250,000+ Protest In London SPREADTHISINFO3 | March 28, 2011 at 4:55 AM | Tags: 2011, 250 000, 250000,Britain, London, Protest, Protesters, Revolution, Spending Cuts, U.K., UK, World | Categories: Britain, News, NWO, U.K., World Revolution 2011 | URL:http://wp.me/p1jpRz-Hp

More than 250,000 people came from across the U.K. to protest in central London against public spending cuts and other issues on Saturday. In the largest public protest since the Iraq war rally in 2003, activists set off from Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park. The march began at 12:00 GMT, and it took more than four hours for the protesters to file past theHouses of Parliament on their way to the park. TheTUC organized the event, and said so many people turned out they stopped counting.

watch?v=Q4iM3dfDGI0