Process reminiscent of '93 Brown County State Park hunt
June 30, 2012
A recent late-night walk with my border collie Zoe has transported me back to one of the darkest, dreariest days of my 30-year journalistic career. Following her gaze down a utility easement east of Bryan Park a half mile south of downtown, I saw a young whitetail deer, frozen by our presence, hauntingly backlit by a streetlight half a block to the south. Since then, I have read documents from, and stories about, the Bloomington-Monroe County Deer Task Force, which is poised to recommend that city deer be shot.
"Many an urban deer’s days may be numbered if Bloomington adopts the expected recommendations for 'lethal solutions' from its deer task force," a May 15, 2012, Bloomington Herald-Times story began. The group's report includes several such deadly solutions, among them sharpshooters baiting and plugging deer in city parks and on private property, an image that took me back to the Dec. 5, 1993, story I wrote for the H-T titled "Park hunt kills 370 deer."
June 29, 2012
News Release
Citizens Action Coalition
Fed up with the undue influence of the energy companies, utilities, lobbyists and other interests that are making it impossible for Washington to move forward decisively in achieving America’s clean energy future, Citizen Action Coalition (CAC) is joining forces with 35 other citizen organizations with more than 1.1 million combined members to advance a nine-point “American Clean Energy Agenda” and to push for a serious renewable energy agenda no matter who is the next president or which party controls Congress.
The American Clean Energy Agenda is available at the CAC website.
June 26, 2012
Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:
- New national diners’ guide helps make wise restaurant choices
- Dell 20th corporation to stop funding ALEC
- New Venezuelan laws give more power to communities
- TIAA-CREF divests from Caterpillar
- Increasing repression against Iranian labor rights activists
- Israeli 'refuser' on a hunger strike
- Philadelphia adopts resolution to redirect military spending to communities
- FDA helps companies exploit patients with Alzheimer’s
- Nonprofit organizations with ties to industry
- Congress poised to slash food stamps, program that helps minority family farmers
Unchecked global capitalism produces massive poverty locally, worldwide
June 25, 2012
By any measure, from the observational to the documented, corporate governance and the global economy have spawned an epidemic of poverty, from Bloomington to Bakersfield to Baltimore and beyond.
The streets and alleys of downtown Bloomington are homes and hangouts to growing numbers of the economically displaced. The latest U.S. Census Bureau data suggest the number of Hoosiers living below the poverty line grew by 65,000-plus between 2009 and 2010. A November 2011 analysis of that census data by the Brookings Institution said the first decade of the 21st century drove the number of impoverished Americans to a record high 46.2 million.
June 22, 2012
The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:
- Threats to Indiana forests multiply
- Big Coal running out of room for disposing coal ash
- Vast amounts of waste from factory farms
- Whales under threat from Japan
- FDA rejects petition to ban bisphenol A for humans
- Congress considers wilderness-protection bills
- Gasoline Regulations Act attacks undermines clean air and public health
- Planting genetically modified crops before they’re proven safe
- Extending nuclear reactor operating licenses for up to 80 years
Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.
Jessie Jackson Jr., Ralph Nader push minimum wage hike into the debate
June 16, 2012
Preliminary echoes from the 2012 presidential campaign don't bode well for social, environmental and economic justice in America, yet again. President Barack Obama is, with cynical predictability, adopting populist rhetoric on justice issues like student debt, gay marriage and immigration. But after four years of his pursuing moderate Republican policies, progressive voters find it impossible to take him seriously. Mitt Romney is the quintessential 1 percent candidate who instinctively parrots plutocratic doctrine, no matter how contradictory on its face.
On the alternative party front, Dr. Jill Stein, who once opposed Romney in a race for Massachusetts governor, garnered enough delegates in California's June 5 Green Party Primary to clinch its nomination at the Green's July convention in Baltimore. But what little media coverage there was of Stein's achievement focused on Roseanne Barr, who lost to Stein in California and then announced she will continue her candidacy and form a new party called the Green Tea Party.
War | Politics | Occupy! | Labor | Human Rights | Economic Justice | Activism | 'Peace & Justice news'
June 16, 2012
Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:
- Chinese labor leader Li Wangyang: suicide or murder?
- Antiwar feelings high among vets of recent wars
- Victory for reproductive justice in the House of Representatives
- U.S. military patrolling American streets
- A win for Brooklyn Bridge arrestees filing a class action suit
- Drones used over U.S. to be weaponized
- TIAA-CREF’s role in the Israeli occupation
- Working Families Party victorious in Oregon primary
- Lawsuit against State of California for use of solitary confinement
- Arson at Miami travel agency that arranges trips to Cuba
How do 'conservatives' justify authoritarian business models?
June 14, 2012
It is doubtful that schemes to refine synthetic gas and liquids from coal will ever be economical. Indeed, only two countries have used such technology, because they were desperate for transportation fuels. And they were expelled from trading with other countries.
The first was Nazi Germany. The second was apartheid-controlled South Africa.
But that fact seems to escape those who seek giant profits by forcing unwilling consumers to buy their fuels and assume tremendous risks. That is the case in tiny Rockport, a town of a little over 2,000 people on the Ohio River in southwest Indiana. There, a Wall Street-based hedge fund called Leucadia National has developed a business.
June 10, 2012
On May 23, 2012, John Rowan, national president of Vietnam Veterans of America, sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting his “immediate assistance in staying de-regulation of Dow AgroSciences much ballyhooed 2,4-D-resistant corn seed until an environmental impact study can be conducted and its subsequent results evaluated by scientists who are not affiliated with Dow AgroScience.”
Rowan is concerned about the use of the herbicide 2,4-D on 2,4-D-resistant–corn because it constituted half the ingredients in the defoliant Agent Orange used by the U.S. during the Vietnam War and is causing serious ailments in vets and Vietnamese civilians. Agent Orange was contaminated with dioxins, the most potent synthetic class of carcinogenic chemicals known, second only to radiation in potency as a carcinogen. Although most of the dioxins were from the 2,4,5-T half of Agent Orange, 2,4-D was also contaminated.
June 8, 2012
The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes
- Radiation released at Fukushima higher than originally reported
- Important Canadian environmental research center to close
- Watering your garden can be dangerous to your health
- Mega-sprawl “village” plan near wildlife refuge defeated
- Promising new chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
- Industry pays people to wear pro-coal t-shirts at EPA hearing
- Children protest fracking near their schools
- Stopping Shell from drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean
- Ohio set to beat Pennsylvania at passing a bad fracking law
- Halting uranium contamination of Navajo drinking water supplies
Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.