In the circus known as Illinois politics, the center ring corruption trial of former Governor Rod Blagojevich is coming to an end. Closing arguments are set for Monday, and a verdict is expected in August.

The trial is ending surprisingly early, as Blago told a judge this week he would not be taking the witness stand. “His attorneys rested their case quietly, without calling a single witness or putting on any kind of defense, and jurors looked at each other with raised eyebrows,” writes John Kass of the Chicago Tribune. “There was no cross-examination to worry about, no embarrassing tapes to explain, no jury comparing his credibility against FBI recordings in which he expressed his desire to ‘(bleep)’ the people of Illinois.”

Blago’s quiet defense lets a lot of other people off the hook, including Jesse Jackson Jr.

After Barack Obama was elected President in November 2008, Blago was left to fill the vacancy of the Illinois Senate seat. Blago’s top priority was taking care of himself and his family. He wanted to cash in with his choice.

His choices ranged from Valerie Jarrett to Oprah Winfrey, secret FBI recordings show.

But no one pushed harder for the seat than Jesse Jackson Jr. He commissioned a Zogby poll that showed him being the choice of most Illinoisans.

“Jackson was the most publicly aggressive candidate for the Senate appointment, launching a campaign-like bombardment of e-mails, petitions, and phone calls from supporters to try to pressure Blagojevich into appointing him,” write John Chase and Rick Pearson of the Trib.

The governor laughed off the idea at first, ridiculing the Congressman as a political lightweight.

Blago was right about that—Jackson hasn’t been the progressive politician many were hoping for. He hasn’t done all that much in Congress.

The governor and the Congressman knew each other back in the 1990s when both were ambitious, young pols serving in the Illinois Congressional delegation. They both had delusions of grandeur. “Jesse was leaking to the press his hopes to become the nation’s first black president in 2004; Blago was envisioning the governor’s office as a steppingstone to the Oval Office,” writes Carol Felsenthal in Chicago magazine.

But in Illinois, the governor’s office is more likely a stepping stone to a minimum security prison.

When Blago ran for governor, Jackson did not endorse him, and Rod’s ego has been bruised ever since. Perhaps this explains Blago telling his advisers (caught on those FBI recordings) calling Jackson a “a bad guy . . . he’s really not the guy I hoped or thought he was.”

But by December 2008, the governor was warming to the idea of appointing Jackson to Obama’s old seat. Why the change of heart? Money.

No one else in Washington or Illinois was interested in cutting a deal with Rod. “And I can cut a better political deal with these Jacksons and, and most of it you probably can’t believe, but some of it can be tangible upfront,” Rod tells his brother in a taped phone conversation.

Both Blagojevich and Jackson have a funder in common—Raghuveer Nayak, a prominent businessman. In an FBI recording, the governor’s brother told Blago that Nayak offered to do “some accelerated fundraising” on the governor’s behalf if Jackson got the seat.

Blagojevich met with Jackson to discuss the Senate seat the day before the feds closed in and arrested Blago on December 9, 2008.

Jackson has long denied knowledge or involvement of the alleged scheme to buy the Senate seat. But a few weeks ago, the federal prosecutors for the first time publicly suggested that Jackson was aware of efforts by his allies to swap campaign cash for his appointment.

At this point, Jackson hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing. He has kept quiet throughout the trial, promising to “clear up the misstatements made by some” when the trial ends. Then he faces the resumption of a House ethics probe into his actions.

It’s disappointing to many that it’s come to this. So many Illinois politicians knew to stay away from the corrupt governor. House Speaker Michael Madigan and his daughter, Attorney General Lisa Madigan, wouldn’t play this game. On those FBI tapes, Blago is heard calling the Madigans “the Madigoons.”

It begs the question: If the Madigan dynasty was smart enough to avoid getting ensnarled in a classic “Chicago Way” corruption probe, why wasn’t the Jackson dynasty?

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald may have saved the Dems from themselves. What more could he had found out if the wiretapping had continued?

Blago’s silence during his corruption trial doesn’t mean that his voice wasn’t heard in court. In one memorable recording, the governor talked with an advisor about the Senate seat pick and said, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing.”

Silence is golden, too. But the time for Jesse Jackson Jr. to remain silent is over. His constituents and progressives who believed in him deserve to hear him speak.

The World Cup is getting lots of coverage these days. But we’re not hearing enough about the demonstrations taking place in South Africa.

There have been a “series of  strikes at almost half of the World Cup stadiums as guards are being paid less than one tenth of what they were promised when they were employed,” reports AllAfrica.com. Seems like a newsworthy event, but the camera lens is focused on the soccer stars, not the working stiffs.

Yesterday during a sports panel hosted by journalists Davey D, Dave Zirin, and artist Favianna Rodriguez, longtime activist Trevor Ngwane joined us live via Skype from South Africa. It was so cool.

Ngwane talked about the “FIFA mafia” and said he “wouldn’t wish the World Cup on any country.”

The Anti-Privatisation Forum and other groups have been protesting throughout the games.

“The government has the wrong priorities,” said Ngwane. “The government shouldn’t prioritize mega-sports and mega-sports stars.”

Ngwane listed what the South African government should be prioritizing: housing, education, health care; youth unemployment is above 80% he said.

He added that there needs to be a more sustainable basis for unity for the poor besides the World Cup.

More marches are planned for next week in J-burg. Now if we could only get some coverage of that.

Speaking of television coverage, Dave Zirin mentioned a really shocking and sad statistic: only 40,000 Africans outside of the host country are watching the World Cup on TV. The TV rights are too expensive. There are probably more Americans watching the World Cup in New York City than in Africa (outside of South Africa).

And that’s one of the problems with these big games, be it World Cup or Olympics. Corporate rights get prioritized over human rights.

The U.S. Social Forum kicked off Tuesday, June 22, in Detroit. The social forum is a gathering of activists from around the country. It’s a chance to catch up, network, and organize under the banner of “another world is possible.” Organizers are expecting as many as 20,000 people to participate.

I tried to register today several times but the lines were incredibly long. At one point registration was closed so folks could participate in the opening march.

Why Detroit? It’s easy to think Detroit as a city of decay, poverty, and violence. But there is so much more to the city.

To give but one example, Detroit has a vibrant community garden scene. Today I went to a workshop about the Greening of Detroit.

Detroit’s population has shrunk to about a quarter of what it was forty or fifty years ago, leaving lots of open green space. But neighborhood groups are transforming these vacant lots into community gardens.

The Detroit Garden Resource Program Collaborative is the hub of this effort. In 2003, four organizations–the Greening of Detroit, Detroit Agriculture Network, EarthWorks Urban Farm/Capuchin Soup Kitchen, and Michigan State University–began working together to provide support for the city’s urban gardeners.

Seven years ago there were 8o community gardens, consisting of neighborhood gardens, backyard patches, and school gardens. By 2009, there were 800 community gardens. This year there are 1200, including some urban farms.

Education, nutrition information, shared tools, workshops (on topics ranging from how to build hoop houses to composting lessons) are some of the things the garden resource program excels at.

A few years ago, gardeners decided to sell the food they produced, starting at local farmers markets. In the first year, they made just under $1000. This year, they expect to rake in between $60,000–$80,000.

And they’ve branched out beyond farmers markets. They’ve created relationships with Detroit restaurants to sell locally produced veggies and fruits.

Ultimately, these community gardens are a way to do community organizing. And that’s what makes it so inspiring–and necessary. And community organizing is at the heart of the US Social Forum.

It’s exciting to see the outpouring of support for human rights in light of Arizona’s sweeping new immigration law.

The protests are spilling now over into baseball. New York City Congressman Jose Serrano is calling for Major League Baseball to pull the 2011 All-Star game out of Phoenix.

“Baseball and the Latin community, it’s a close relationship,” Serrano told the Chicago Tribune. “Latinos, they will be the ones, more than anyone else, who will be stopped on the street in violation of the constitutional rights. . . . States (that) make those decisions need to know that there are consequences to those decision.”

Arizona has felt the economic consequences before. The National Football League pulled the 1993 Superbowl from Tempe due to the MLK holiday flap. A baseball spokeman estimated that pulling the All-Star game could cost Arizona $40 million.

Serrano told the Trib that he may reach out to club owners and even ask players to boycott the All-Star game. Considering that 27 percent of the baseball players on Opening Day rosters were born outside the United States, this boycott isn’t just symbolic.

The Arizona Diamondbacks rolled into Chicago to play the Cubs, and the team was met with protesters. (The Diamondback’s owner, Ken Kendrick, is a major financial backer of the Republican Party in Arizona.)

Who knows, maybe boycotting the Arizona Diamondbacks could be something that brings Cubs fans and White Sox fans together. White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen was blunt in his criticism of the new law.

“That’s no respect of human rights,” he said. “Being illegal in any country, that’s not good, period. But the immigration (service) has to be careful about how they treat people.”

“I want to see one day with Latin Americans—it can be Mexican, Costa Rican—I want to see this country two days without them to see how good we’re doing. Everyone comes to this country to work, and I don’t think they’re going to do bad stuff here. They just come here to make things happen, to make a better life. I guarantee you whoever comes to this country and they don’t have their papers, they’re straight and narrow. They’re scared to be deported.”

Guillen, who was born in Venezuela, didn’t become a U.S. citizen until after he won the World Series.

President Obama is a White Sox fan and I can only hope he’s listening to what Guillen has to say.

It’s hard to imagine that 40 years ago, 20 million people, or 10% of the U.S. population, participated in Earth Day.

Earth Day was the brainchild of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson.

On April 20 and 21, the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies held a conference entitled “Earth Day at Forty: Valuing Wisconsin’s Environmental Traditions, Past, Present and Future.”

The conference was terrific and included a number of fantastic speakers, including author Margaret Atwood and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Atwood talked about the need for power to be decentralized, and proposed a new principle for the environmental justice movement: Eco-Mercy. Rather than haggling over injustice, let’s focus on compassion.

Kennedy acted as the provocateur, saying “the best thing for the environment is free market capitalism.” He said what we have now is “corporate crony capitalism.” It’s time to end all the subsidies—hidden and obvious ones—of the carbon-based economy. De-carbonization will lead to prosperity, he said.

Tia Nelson, the Senator’s daughter, spoke tenderly about her “Papa” and how he never would’ve imagined that his legacy would be forty years of environmental activism.

Senator Nelson wrote about the degradation of our planet in the pages of The Progressive. In 1967, he wrote a piece for us entitled, “The National Pollution Scandal.”

“The natural environment of America—the woods and waters and wildlife, the clear air and blue sky, the fertile soil and the scenic landscape—is threatened with destruction,” Senator Nelson wrote. He outlined “this new American tragedy,” and noted, “It must be attacked for what it is: a sinister byproduct of the prosperous, urbanized, industrialized world in which we live.”

In November 1969, he wrote a piece for The Progressive called, “Our Polluted Planet.”

“I am convinced that all that is needed now is the trigger to activate the overwhelming insistence of the new generation on environmental quality,” he predicted. “It is the young who can begin to stem the tide of disaster. To marshal such an effort, I am proposing a National Teach-In on the Crisis of the Environment to be held next spring on every university campus across the nation. The crisis is so imminent, in my opinion, that every university should set aside one day in the school year—the same day across the nation—for the Teach-In.”

Tia Nelson spoke about Gaylord’s numerous attempts to get Congress and Presidents to take seriously the destruction of our landscapes. The original Earth Day would not have happened without the Senator’s willingness to fail over and over again. Earth Day, she said, spoke to the power of an individual to make change.

But individual acts are not enough. As Kennedy noted, where there’s environmental destruction, there’s also a destruction of democracy. Elected officials need to be visionaries like Gaylord Nelson, and create policies that will end pollution-based prosperity.

The Tea Partiers held a Tax Day demo at the Wisconsin state capital today. The local organizers said the crowd totaled 12,000. Seemed like a stretch. Much closer to 3000.

Tommy Thompson took the stage late in the rally. His face was as red as his tie. He was so fired up, I was worried he’d have a heart attack and we would see “ObamaCare” in action.

Rumors have been flying about the possibility of Tommy running against Russ Feingold this year. Much to the dismay of the people who chanted “Run, Tommy, Run,” he has decided not to. Like just about everyone else who spoke, he had a very pro-God ending.

I did speak to Terrence Wall, a local Madison developer, who is running against Feingold. He criticized Feingold, saying he’s been in office since 1982 and is now a career politician. “He hasn’t accomplished anything,” said Wall.

Wall said that his top priority is to get jobs started and rebuild confidence in the state, and “get government out of the way.”

I asked him, given what he said about the government being in the way, where he came down on civil liberties. Would he have voted for the Patriot Act? (Feingold was the only Senator to vote against it.)

Wall said he would have voted for the Patriot Act. It’s about “striking a balance” between security and rights. “I’m for civil liberties,” he said. “And they’re going after terrorists; they aren’t going after you and me.”

Well what about the No Fly Lists? “I had a friend who was on one of the those by mistake.”

Wall should be an easy target for Dems. Wall says he’s against taxes, and oh, is he ever. According to the Capital Times, “Wall has not paid personal state income taxes in nine of the past 10 years, according to the state Department of Revenue. That’s quite remarkable, as Wall is a son of privilege who has always enjoyed great wealth and whose real estate empire has, according to his own campaign spokesman, incurred tens of millions of dollars in tax obligations over the past five years.”

The Capital Times continues: “Let’s consider Feingold’s record. According to Department of Revenue figures, the senator paid net taxes between $6,000 and $9,400 each year from 1999 to 2008. So how come Russ Feingold pays more net taxes than Terrence Wall? That’s easy. Feingold’s one of the great mass of Americans who work hard, pay their taxes and try to abide by the rules. Wall’s one of the elite few who think that their money and position give them the privilege to write a special set of rules for themselves. Feingold thinks everyone should pay their fair share. Wall thinks that working Americans should pay their fair share — and his.”

Top Ten Signs at the Mad Tea Party:

“One Nation Under God, not Obama”
“Your dog has birth papers Do You Mr. President”
“First they ignore you . . . Then they laugh at you . . .then they try to fight you . . . then you win. –Gandhi”
“Cap your income and Trade your freedom”
“Chris Matthews needs a diaper change”
“Teach a man to fish and you lose a Democrat voter”
“On the eighth day, God created capitalism”
“Free markets not Free loaders”
“I will not grab my ankles”
“Social Justice sucks if you work hard”

There were some non-Tea Party people around too. A group of young women with glasses and short hair had signs that read “Giving tea a bad name.”

But the most ironic moment was hearing the organizers blaring Rage Against the Machine. Huh?

“Bicycling, once largely seen as a simple pleasure from childhood, has become a political act,” writes Jeff Mapes in his new book, Pedaling Revolution–How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities.

Mapes, a Portland-based reporter for The Oregonian who regularly commutes by bicycle, offers a thoughtful account of the bike scene, past and present, with a glimpse of the future.

I read the book after the UN Climate Change talks broke down in Copenhagen. Bikes, Mapes notes, could play a crucial role in shrinking the U.S. carbon footprint. He cites some startling data. “If everyone cycled for an hour and reduced their driving by an equivalent distance, the U.S. would cut its gasoline consumption by 38 percent,” he writes. “Greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 12 percent, which is greater than the reductions called for in the Kyoto treat.”

But Mapes isn’t naïve about getting every American out of a car and onto a bicycle. It was his love of bicycling that inspired him to write the book, not a churlish attitude towards cars.

Mapes fell in love with bicycling as a kid, but didn’t think seriously about it until the 1990s when Portland embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of bike lanes, trails, and bicycle boulevards that crisscrossed the city. “The improvements helped turn me into a daily bike commuter,” he writes.

He first traces the history of bicycle advocacy in the United States. Then he tours around the world, stopping in bike mecca Amsterdam, Davis, California, and New York City.

One of the things I found compelling about the book is Mapes’ analysis of the two philosophical camps within the bike scene: those who want to bike on the roads like a vehicle and those who advocate for separate space.

The number one reason why more people don’t bike is safety. “As long ago as 1996, the U.S. surgeon general, in a landmark report on physical activity, said that 53 percent of people who had cycled in the previous year said they would commute to work by bike if they could do so on ‘safe, separated designated paths,’ ” Mapes writes. 53 percent!

Separate paths of bikeways may be the future (some cycle tracks already exist in Portland and New York City). Currently the most popular and cheap way to accommodate biking is bike lanes.

While critics say bike lanes can give a false sense of security, there is some safety in numbers. Mapes quotes Jane Stutts, a retired safety researcher from University of North Carolina, who acknowledges a paucity of hard data. “About best you can do is show [bike lanes] increase bike traffic without increasing crashes,” she says.

After reading Mapes’ book, it seemed to me that we need more bike lanes, more bike ways, and more cycle tracks.

It’s a sign of the “mainstreaming” of bicycling that funds from the stimulus package include spending on improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians. Republican Senators John McCain (AZ) and Tom Coburn (OK) attacked the funding as “pork.”

Streetsblog reports:  “McCain and Coburn released a report criticizing 100 projects being funded by the Obama administration’s stimulus law. On the senators’ hit list were three bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure projects, in Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood fired back at McCain and Coburn’s report  on his blog:

“We’ve worked hard this year to get our Recovery Act dollars out to the states quickly and effectively. Yes, some of those projects include bike paths, a key ingredient in our livability initiative to allow people to live, work, and get around without a car. . . . We don’t call that waste; we call it progress.”

It is progress! Bikes may only get 1 percent of the transportation budget, but it’s something.

The book ends with a chapter called “Bringing Kids Back to Bikes.” Too many kids do not ride to school, often because their schools lie on the outskirts of cities near dangerous intersections. He suggests bike clubs, held after school. Kids would get the exercise they need and learn to become safer riders.

What I appreciated most about this book was the tone. Mapes does an exemplary job explaining the arcane workings of federal funding and offers readers a ride through cities we may never get to visit. He also describes the sadness of a memorial ride for a young cyclist who was killed by a cement truck turning right on red.

But he has no fury towards cars. At the core of the book is joy—Mapes really does love his bicycle.

(I interview Mapes on WORT-FM on December 23. Click here to listen. It starts 45 minutes in.)

Hilarious. Tender. Brutal. These are the trademarks of one of America’s most dazzling writers, Sherman Alexie. His latest book, War Dances (Grove Press), a collection of poetry and short stories, renders emotional landscapes—anger, joy, anxiety, grief, fear—with skill.

In “War Dances,” the short story that lends its name as the book’s title, the narrator remembers visiting his sick father in the hospital. His dad, post-surgery, is cold in bed, and the narrator asks a busy nurse for a blanket.

“With blanket in hand, I walked back to my father,” the narrator notes. “It was a thin blanket, laundered and sterilized a hundred times. In fact it was too thin. It wasn’t really a blanket. It was more like a large beach towel. Hell, it wasn’t even good enough for that. It was more like the world’s largest coffee filter. Jesus, had health care finally come to this? Everybody was uninsured and unblanketed.”

War Dances contains good poetry, too. My favorite of the bunch is his “Ode to Mix Tapes.” The digital revolution has changed how people create these soundtracks of seduction. Alexie writes that it’s too easy to make mix tapes these days with CD burners, iPods, and iTunes.

But I miss the labor

Of making old-school mix tapes—the
midair

Acrobatics of recording one song

At a time. It sometimes took days

To play, choose, pause,

Ponder, record, replay, erase,

And replace. But there was no magic
wand.

It was blue-collar work. . . .

But O, the last track

Was the vessel that contained

The most devotion and pain

And made promises that you couldn’t
take back.

Malalai Joya’s A Woman Among Warlords (Scribner) tells the amazing story of one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists.

The Progressive had the opportunity to meet and interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her steadfast resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

So it was a real pleasure to find out more about her life by reading her autobiography. As a girl she loved poetry and would “read late into the night by the light of our propane lamp” the works of Langston Hughes and Bertolt Brecht. Inspired by her father’s own activism, she tells of opening secret schools for girls in basements, calling it “the most important act of rebellion against the Taliban.” On her wedding day, for security reasons, her bodyguards had to search every flower arrangement for explosives.

Joya fearlessly denounced the warlords at the constitutional assembly in 2003, which she attended. Two years later she ran for office and won, becoming the youngest member elected to parliament. She was later suspended from office for her persistent criticisms of corruption and advocacy of human rights.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke, and warns about Obama’s further escalation of the war. “It could well be that people in Afghanistan will soon say that Obama is even worse than Bush,” she writes. She urges the American people to pressure Obama to withdrawal all our troops.

“In the past thirty years, every kind of atrocity has been committed in Afghanistan in the name of socialism, religion, freedom, democracy and liberation,” she writes. “Now these acts are justified by a so-called war on terror.”

With A Woman Among Warlords, Joya takes her place alongside such leading democracy activists as Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi, and Rigoberta Menchu. It was Joya who should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.

Click here to read Favorite Books of 2009 by editors and writers for The Progressive magazine.

Looking back and looking forward  . . . to Copenhagen

November 30 marks the tenth year anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, a proud moment in activist history when protesters shut down the free trade talks of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Thousands of people—unionists, students, environmental activists, farmers–took to the streets and joined a nonviolent direct action blockade which circled the Kingdome, where the WTO talks were held.

Police responded in a violent way and tossed tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray at demonstrators, and made around 600 arrests. The city declared a state of emergency and suspended basic civil rights in the downtown area.

David Solnit was living in a Seattle at the time and organizing with the Direct Action Network, one of the main groups behind the Seattle demonstrations.

He, along with his sister, author Rebecca Solnit, offer their takes on what happened, and tackle the myths surrounding the uprising in their new book, The Battle of the Story of the Battle in Seattle (AK Press, 2009).

David Solnit describes the activist myths, such as Seattle was a spontaneous uprising. Solnit points out the massive organizing, alliance building. and strategy that allowed thousands of people to participate. What made the Seattle protests effective, Solnit writes, was “a common strategic framework and massive grassroots education, organizing, alliance building, and mobilizing.”

Solnit also addresses the myth of activist violence in Seattle. Some members of the “black bloc” broke windows of businesses, against the agreement to not engage in property destruction. Solnit notes that authorities have attempted to criminalize protests since Seattle by propagating myths such as “protesters throwing urine,” and fabricated references to overturned police and emergency vehicles. These kinds of fables are used “to create greater public acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties and the use of violence and repression against protests and participants,” Solnit writes.

While Solnit spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the Hollywood movie by Stuart Townsend, The Battle in Seattle, he does offer an insightful analysis about lessons learned from successfully shutting down the WTO.

Rebecca Solnit, too, challenges the myth of the savage activist. She even takes on The New York Times for perpetuating the stereotype of the riot-prone protester. “The significant violence in Seattle was police violence,” she asserts in a letter to the paper.

The correction The New York Times printed gave Solnit no solace. She writes:

“What remains relevant is why the myth of activist violence persists. My belief is that those who characterize us as violent correctly perceive us as a threat. But to acknowledge us as a threat to the status quo is to acknowledge many dangerous things: that there is a states, rather than a natural order, that it is vulnerable, and that actions in the streets can chance it.”

This book is a great read for any activist. It also includes a day-by-day “view from the ground” by Chris Dixon, a participant in the demonstrations.

A few pages later Dixon writes, “As the day [November 30] drew on, confrontation between police and protesters intensified once again. Thos of us near major blockades became more and more used to the burning sensation of tear gas, and a few angry protesters began throwing the canisters back. Like many others, I was hit with rubber bullets while retreating from an intersection.”

Looking back at Seattle ten years later is extremely valuable in and of itself. (The book reprints the original information published in the Direct Action Network broadsheet.)

But now we are days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Copenhagen December 7-18. Activists are planning public protests in Copenhagen to push governments to demand action on climate change.

And the environmental group 350.org is advising people to have events and vigils in their hometowns.

With little doubt, activists will once again be portrayed as violent. But we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the COP15 talks. Civil society has been busy making preparations, and hopefully taking the lessons of the Battle of Seattle to heart.