Today’s “We the People” rally featured some great speeches from activists local and national. Too bad there was such poor attendance — about 150, I estimate. Rev. Robin Meyers’ speech was very thoughtful, Rep. Pittman was like a preacher herself with some great motivational oratory(despite the unfortunate habit of calling the SCOTUS justices “justices of the peace”), and Max Blumenthal and David Cobb, the out of towners, set the Citizens United ruling in historical and social context. The content from the podium was as good as any rally I’ve attended/viewed in D.C. or elsewhere.

I wish I wasn’t so depressed and stressed, I could do more than complain about the progressive scene in Central OK. Thanks to Barbara McKay, Susan McCann, Steve Hunt for getting the event together, and to all others who organized on this end. Rev. Robin Meyers, Rep. Anastasia Pittman and Reggie Cervantes were locals who spoke and did a great job rallying the sparse troops, giving a lot of motivation and energy with their tireless commitment and passion. And thanks to Max Blumenthal and David Cobb who made the trip here for what must have seemed pretty lame turnout, even for a state as red as OK.

There continues to be a lack of communication tools for getting turnout to such events, but without enough folks with sustained energy and will to fight against the tide, nothing will change.

We The People Rally

I was told that most of the speeches were taped, and hope to be able to listen to them again, because they did the job of a rally speech quite well. Maybe with a recording, we can at least spread their message to all those Oklahoma progressives who weren’t there — and make them sorry enough to have missed it that they will be sure to make it to the next one.

Susan McCann posted this note on the Facebook page for the event:

TODAY we reached beyond Party and Administration on an issue that transcends and requires urgency of action. We were honored to have such a diverse, interesting and informed group of speakers and want to thank each of them for attending.

Photos and Video will be posted tomorrow and emailed to all.

Thanks from Change Oklahoma and We the People- Oklahoma.

Susan McCann

A transcript should be up here at some point tomorrow.

Whenever PBS airs a big program/mini-series there is an announcement at the end. “Corporate sponsorship of Name of Mini-Series was brought to you by Name of Corporation.” This had unfortunate and amusing results for General Motors’ sponsorship of Ken Burn’s The War.

But this is an idle bemusement relative to the core problem with Burn’s whitewashing of The War.

In every media interview he gives, Burns preempts the inevitable questions about the current war in Iraq by pointing out that he began his project before the 2003 invasion. And diplomatically refusing to make any comparisons, he insists that “there’s not a political bone in this film.”

One can understand Burns’s need to not alienate his sponsors. Yet one cannot help but wonder if his desire to avoid the politics of the present did not also severely shape his telling of the past, for, as much as he attends to America’s racial injustices, he drains America’s second world war generation of any real political commitments or aspirations.

Burns’s narrator appreciatively states that Roosevelt redirected the energy of the New Deal to the war effort, and Burns’s now-elderly storytellers recall how FDR’s voice inspired them. Yet we hear nothing about what the New Deal entailed and why it mattered. We also never hear FDR pronounce the “four freedoms” or call for a second bill of rights for all Americans.

We never hear about the hundreds of thousands of housewives who volunteered to police local businesses in support of wartime price controls. And we never hear about labor unions, whose membership during the Depression grew from three to nine million, and during the war to 15 million. Burns makes no reference to A. Philip Randolph’s AFL Pullman Porters and the March on Washington Movement that pushed FDR to integrate the war industries, or the CIO’s policy of biracial unionism.

We need to know about those things to better comprehend how, in the wake of a devastating and in critical ways persistent depression, Americans – of every colour and ethnicity – were both ready and eager to fight not only imperial Japan, the country that attacked them at Pearl Harbor, but equally and, all the more aggressively at the outset, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. We need to know those things to better understand the commitment to and confidence about America that we hear so beautifully expressed by Burns’s own storytellers. And we need to know those things to grasp more fully why we look back to our parents’ and grandparents’ generation as we do.

In The War, Burns has produced a masterpiece of oral history. But no more than Stephen Ambrose in Citizen Soldiers, Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan or Tom Brokaw in the Greatest Generation does he ever really get at what prepared, encouraged and sustained young Americans in all their diversity to fight fascism and imperialism.

Failing to address the aspirations, struggles and developments that made the nation more democratic, gave Americans the confidence and hopes needed to pursue the war and left a legacy and a vision to challenge later generations, Burns fails to cultivate the kind of memory that might truly enable us to transcend the divisions that rend the nation’s social fabric today. He fails to speak to his fellow citizens of America’s historic purpose and promise and to remind us that we have been at our best when we have united and sacrificed, motivated not by fear, but by progressive solidarities and possibilities.

May 2005 Engineer Update
In the 50-square-mile part of Oklahoma known as the Tar Creek Superfund Site, tainted waters run orange in creeks and streams, poisonous mountains of chat (mining cast-off) define the horizon, hundreds of dangerous and deteriorating open mineshafts dot the landscape, sinkholes constantly threaten, and children have high blood lead levels.

A partnership including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, with support from the state of Oklahoma and Quapaw Tribe, is stepping in to clean up the area.

An unprecidented coalition of federal agencies, the state of Oklahoma and tribal governments are working on addressing this really critical area. No mention, of course, of the mining companies that created the problem.

Here at the UnCJournal, our team of writers will bring you news, commentary, and analysis on topics such as:

• Income disparity
• Privatization versus public ownership
• The corporate erosion of democracy
• Corporate crime
• The IMF/WB/WTO
• Workers’ rights
• Unions and labor organizing
• International solidarity movements
• Free trade vs. fair trade debates
• Anti-globalization perspectives and alternatives
• Sustainable development
• Progressive science and healthcare policy
• The environment

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other.