The oil industry spills again, this time in Michigan. Pipelines owned by Enbridge Energy Partners leaked crude into the Kalamazoo River. The EPA estimates more than 1 million gallons have been spilled.

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has criticized both Enbridge and the EPA for their inadequate response to the crisis. She warned of a “tragedy of epic proportions” if the oil reaches Lake Michigan, a distinct possibility.

What’s so striking is how formulaic the oil spill story has become.

First, there are the governmental notices of potential problems with the current system, in the months and years leading up to the leak. In this case, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration notified Enbridge that the old pipeline could be corroding and needed monitoring. The Detroit Free Press reports that it’s not clear if the company acted on the government notices or whether the concerns played any role in the leak.

Second, the company lowballs the extent of the problem. Enbridge says 800,000 gallons; EPA says 1 million.

Next, reporters trying to cover the leak are hampered in their work. A reporter and photographer from the Detroit Free Press were not allowed into a wildlife recovery area, but the newspaper doesn’t specify whether it was government or Enbridge that stopped them.

Then it’s time for the President to pledge swift response. Done.

Meanwhile, local pols say cleanup needs more resources. Granholm toured the affected area by helicopter and then met with state and federal officials. She remains unimpressed by current efforts. “From my perspective, the response has been anemic,” she said.

And this story always has a sad ending. The spill has already killed fish and soaked snails, frogs, and muskrats. Get ready for pictures of oil-coated king fishers and great blue herons.

Jesse Jacox, who enjoyed canoeing the Kalamazoo River, told the Free Press, “It saddens me to death. I don’t see any way they’re going to clean all that.”

Oil spills don’t “just happen.” Companies drill for oil because it makes them profits. Our economic system—one that demands growth, not sustainability—guarantees environmental degradation.

Until we start to heavily invest in renewable energy and get off the carbon economy, we are bound to hear this story over and over again.

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 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.

The folks at If It Was My Home created an amazing map that shows what the BP oil spill would look like in your backyard.

I knew the extent of the oil spill was massive, but seeing it mapped over Wisconsin really shocks. From Dubuque, Iowa, to Green Bay, Wisconsin, we’d be covered.

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?

Millions of people will lose unemployment benefits in the coming months unless Congress takes action. Now’s the time to extend the social safety net programs in the stimulus package.

Here in Wisconsin, the first state to enact unemployment insurance, the headlines blare that more than 100,000 Wisconsinites could lose their unemployment benefits by the end of April.

Wisconsin legislators are contacting members of its congressional delegation and sent a letter to Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asking for a reauthorization of critical benefits in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

“Without this extension, 104,000 Wisconsinites will lose their benefits by the end of April, 2010,” reads the letter. “The job market has not rebounded.”

While state legislators write to Congress, the state’s Department of Workforce Development is sending out letters notifying people their unemployment benefits will end within several weeks.

2009 was a tough year for Wisconsin. Places like Janesville have been hard hit by the downturn in the automotive industry. The state has lost about 163,000 jobs during the past year. Wisconsin’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is just under 9 percent, which is below the national rate but far higher than the state rate of 5.9 percent from a year ago.

But those numbers do not portray how bad it is. In 2005, The Progressive published a story called “The Stealth Depression in Black America.” Among African American men, Milwaukee’s jobless rate stood at 59 percent. And that was before the recession started.

Like other states, Wisconsin’s unemployment fund is in crisis. Wisconsin will have to deal with a projected deficit of about $2.8 billion by the end of 2011.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state facing depleted funds as this so-called jobless recovery continues. A new National Employment Law Project report finds that without congressional action, nearly 5 million jobless workers will lose benefits by June.

Congress needs to act now and extend these benefits.

I am deeply saddened by the news of the death of Howard Zinn. He was a longtime columnist for The Progressive, and his most recent piece, “The Nobel’s Feeble Gesture,” expressed his dismay about President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Here’s an excerpt:
“I think some progressives have forgotten the history of the Democratic Party, to which people have turned again and again in desperate search for saviors, later to be disappointed. Our political history shows us that only great popular movements, carrying out bold actions that awakened the nation and threatened the Establishment, as in the Thirties and the Sixties, have been able to shake that pyramid of corporate and military power and at least temporarily changed course.”

It was a “classic” Zinn piece—piercing but playful, saying in no uncertain terms what needed to be said. It’s not surprising he was a favorite columnist for many of our subscribers. He was my favorite, too.

On matters of war and peace, he was absolute. In our July 2009 issue, he wrote, “We’ve got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that war cannot be accepted, no matter what. No matter what the reasons given, or the excuse: liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.”
What I loved most about Zinn was his sense of humor, which didn’t always translate onto the page. I didn’t know how funny he was until I heard him speak at our 95th anniversary party six years ago. He was gracious enough to attend our recent 100th birthday bash, too.

When I was a just becoming politicized, I read A People’s History of the United States and it blew my mind away. Reading Zinn’s book was a rite of passage in my activist circles, and I hope it still is.

It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve read A People’s History, and it is no small thrill to be at a magazine that regularly publishes the work of a peace mongering historian, a World War II soldier who flew bombing missions over Europe but later staunchly advocated for peace. That was thing about Zinn—when he spoke of war, he knew what he was talking about.

Back in 2003 when George W. Bush was gunning for Saddam Hussein, Zinn wrote a cover story for The Progressive called “A Chorus Against War.”

This is how it ends:
“If Bush starts a war, he will be responsible for the lives lost, the children crippled, the terrorizing of millions of ordinary people, the American GIs not returning to their families. And all of use will be responsible for bringing that to a halt.

“Men who have no respect for human life or for freedom or justice have taken over this beautiful country of ours. It will be up to the American people to take it back.”

I would have loved to read what Zinn thought about the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing even more money into our political system. Or what he would have written after hearing Obama’s first State of the Union Address. The President’s speech hasn’t even started yet tonight, but this much I do know: Zinn would have reminded us, as he did over and over, that we need to organize our neighborhoods and workplaces and schools in order to create change, and not leave it up to the politicians.

“Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war,” Zinn wrote in a piece called, “Election Madness” back in March 2008. “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”