“They’re making history in Madison—that’s why I’m here,” said musician Tom Morello, as he kicked off the noon rally at Wisconsin’s capital.
We are one week into the showdown between workers and Governor Scott Walker. Despite the frigid temperatures (it feels like 14 degrees) and snowy skies, about 5000 people rallied outside the Capitol building at noon.read more

More than 10,000 people protested Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to end collective bargaining rights for state and local employees.read more

Back in 2008 at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, Arianna Huffington was on a journalism panel entitled, “A New Media System? Or Old Wine in New Bottles?”
Huffington said that the bottles are definitely new, but it’s not entirely new wine. It’s a mixture. “There’s an awful amount of good that we want to keep from the old media: accuracy, fact checking, ferreting out the truth,” she said.read more

Wisconsin State Representative Don Pridemore has released a draft of a bill inspired by the racist Arizona SB 1070.
“I want Wisconsin to be recognized as a state that will be on the side of Arizona,” Pridemore told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last fall after Republicans took control of the state legislature and the executive branch.read more

More than half of all states are getting a new governor this year, making this incoming class one of the largest in American history. The Republicans made huge gains in the states, with 18 new GOP governors taking office.
The Midwest took an especially hard hit, as most Great Lakes states now have Republicans in their governor’s mansions.read more

Call this Wisconsin mining company to oppose its lawsuit against El Salvador.read more

A mining company based in Wisconsin is suing the government of El Salvador for one hundred million dollars under the Central America Free Trade Agreement, also known as CAFTA.
The company is taking advantage of “foreign investor protections” in the free trade agreement. These protections for capital can undercut local environmental laws. And that’s the case in El Salvador.
Commerce Group, which is based in Milwaukee, owns the San Sebastian Gold Mine near the town of Santa Rose de Lima in eastern El Salvador.read more

“Ramrodding bills through because you’ve got the clout to do so—rather than because you’ve got arguments on your side—is not a good way to do the people’s business,” Barack Obama once said about Bill Daley, his new chief of staff.
But that was back in 2003, when Obama was just in the state legislature, and Bill Daley was the head of SBC. Obama was criticizing Daley for his heavy-handed lobbying drive that benefitted the telecommunications company.read more

1. Local Community Radio Act

After more than ten years of grassroots organizing, we can celebrate the passage of the Local Community Radio Act, which will open up the radio dial to more communities around the country.

This is a major victory. It is the result of grassroots organizing: long-term commitment and vision, coalition building, and outmuscling corporate power.read more

Don Blankenship, CEO of West Virginia coal giant Massey Energy, is resigning at the end of the month. Blankenship, whose tenure oversaw the worst mining disaster in forty years that left twenty-nine dead, will receive a golden parachute, much to the dismay of angry shareholders and critics.read more

As holiday travelers grumble about the TSA’s airport screening practices, the manufacturers of full body scanning machines have increased their lobbying efforts.read more

As holiday travelers grumble about the TSA’s airport screening practices, the manufacturers of full body scanning machines have increase their lobbying efforts.
USA Today reports that “companies with multimillion-dollar contracts to supply American airports with body-scanning machines more than doubled their spending on lobbying in the past five years and hired several high-profile former government officials to advance their causes in Washington, government records show.”read more

Patti Smith has won the non-fiction prize for her beautiful memoir, Just Kids: the tender story of her longtime relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.read more

Patti Smith just won the National Book Award for her beautiful memoir, Just Kids (Ecco Books). Smith gives us the tender story of her longtime relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The two met in the summer of 1969, when both were hungry and homeless in New York City, and quickly fell in love. They were proverbial starving artists and often faced a choice between buying art supplies or day-old bread.read more

This week, the Justice Department found that inmates and employees at ten federal prisons were exposed to toxic metals while processing e-waste for recycling. The report confirms a March 2009 article in The Progressive.read more