Five people boarded an immense coal barge and chained themselves to the ship, immobilizing it for 3 hours. At about the same time, a group of protesters stood on a road with signs protesting mountaintop removal coal mining. They blocked 9 coal trucks for the duration of their protest.

The road protesters were dispersed by police without arrest. The protesters on the barge are facing criminal charges.

Why protest the PGA? One big reason is that the golf course on which the Senior PGA Championship is being played, starting today, was taken from the people of Benton Harbor. That land had been part of a public park, which was supposed to remain open to local citizens in perpetuity. It’s now part of a golf course that can be used only by well off tourists with enough money and time to devote to the sport of scooting around in motorized carts over a gigantic, excessively manicured lawn. The creation of the Harbor Shores golf course is a potent symbol of the way that public goods that have been present for the use of everybody have been taken away and given to the 1 Percent most wealth Americans, as playthings.

One of the presidential candidates has been paying attention to the injustice of the Benton Harbor land grab. One of the presidential candidates will be present today and participating in the protest against the PGA.

That presidential candidate, of course, is not Mitt Romney.

Barack Obama won’t be there, either – even though he was only an hour’s drive away from the protest site just yesterday.

It’s the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein who will be taking part in the protests.

On Election Day 2012, where will you be: With Jill Stein as she protests with the Occupy Movement, demanding economic justice for all Americans, or with the other presidential candidates as they cozy up with their big corporate contributors?

Let me get right to the point: I need your help. I’d like to let people know of populist and populous protests being planned. Do you know of an upcoming protest? Post a comment with a link to protest information and I’ll pass it on. Even better, tell everyone how you found out about that protest so that we can follow your example in the future.

Thanks in advance for your help. Let’s help grassroots activism keep going. Let’s keep spreading the word.

Starting today, and going all weekend long, Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, is going to be out on the streets of Chicago, taking part in the anti-NATO protests there that have been organized by Occupy Chicago.

Yesterday afternoon’s protests saw a horde of bicyclists occupy Chicago streets, and a collection of fit young demonstrators perform a die-in on the blacktop, covered in crude oil under a banner reading Planet Before Profit. A presidential candidate who joins in with this movement isn’t just engaging in Barack Obama’s game of sending carefully coded signals at gala fundraisers that he’s secretly sympathetic with liberal concerns.

Jill Stein is out in the open, actively working to promote the liberal vision. Will your vote be with her, or back in the closet with Barack Obama?

Measured in these terms, the anti-fracking movement is a success. Investor and investment advisor David White is advising people that the price of natural gas stocks is too high and that investors should sell shares in natural gas stock:

There are many other reasons for RRC to fall. RRC is primarily a natural gas company. Its production is approximately 78% natural gas, 16% natural gas liquids, and 6% oil. Its great natural gas resources are primarily in the Marcellus Shale. Much of these are in Pennsylvania. This comes under Pennsylvania law, and Pennsylvania has recently passed the Unconventional Gas Well Impact Fee Act (Feb. 2012). This law imposes a new fee on every unconventional natural gas well drilled in the state. This is a non-negligible fee. RRC reported a $24 million (or -$0.15 per share charge due to this fee in Q1 2012). The fee will continue to be a problem for all new wells drilled in the state. On top of this new fee, the US Congress has recently introduced a new “Anti-Fracking” bill in both the House and the Senate. This could cause problems and expenses for RRC too.

The legislative action David White describes is a direct result of the political agitation engaged in by Marcellus Shale Protest and other anti-fracking movement groups. Their actions threaten natural gas stock prices. Consequently, it’s in natural gas corporations’ economic interest to address concerns about gas fracking pollution. The anti-fracking movement has succeeded.

Photo: ArckiiART

The New York Times (you know, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”) refuses to cover it anywhere on its front page, where over a hundred other news headlines sit.

Photo: OccupyWallStNYC

Among the stories the New York Times decides is “fit to print” on its front page — unlike the news of thousands of people taking over Times Square in protest — is the exclusive breaking news that Van Cliburn is going to sell one of his pianos.

Photo: OccupyWallStNYC

I note two excerpts from yesterday’s New York Times:

1. “94 percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993…”.

2. “Across the country, elected officials are increasingly unwilling to assume a large share of the bill for public colleges and universities, which seven out of 10 students attend. The change has contributed to sharp increases in tuition and more fund-raising — and the need for students to borrow more. From 2001 to 2011, state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent…”.

Education is not charity; it is an investment in the future which pays off dividends in human success that is as beneficial to our society as it is to each individual successful human being. Cuts to education cuts are cuts to these future dividends — and they are being made so that America’s individual and corporate wealth-holders can maintain higher income today. The burden of drastic tax cuts for America’s wealthiest people is being borne by America’s poorest people at the same time that investment in the future of America’s poorest people is being slashed. In a generation’s time, we will all bear the cost for not investing in our future. America’s wealthiest can absorb the cost. The rest of us will suffer, with deeper enslavement to debt, poorer health, higher levels of crime and greater levels of political disengagement…

… unless we reverse the trend now. American governments cannot pull away from investing in the future and change policy to line the wallets of the rich unless the American people cooperate with these changes. If we reject fat-cat-crony candidates for public office, if refuse to cooperate with these changes, if we resist these changes, we can make the difference.

If you are in or near New York City tomorrow, you can help make the difference. You can help flood Times Square:

TUESDAY MAY 15 @ 6 PM
MASS CONVERGENCE IN TIMES SQUARE

Say no to the system that produces record profits for the 1% by impoverishing the 99% of us; say yes to a fair city and a better world!

Culminating on May 15th in a mass convergence at Times Square, NYC organizations and individuals from all across the city will join together in action around the many issues we face: from cuts in social services, to an austerity agenda that redistributes your tax revenue into private hands, to the financial institutions (that we bailed out) that continue to make record profits at our expense.

As part of a global resistance, as part of the Occupy movement, as a broad movement for social, political, and economic justice, we say enough! We reject Bloomberg’s New York, and we demand another city. We reject the notion that there is no alternative, and we demand a better world. Join the week of actions, take to the streets, raise your voice, and come to Times Square on May 15th at 6 PM to stand together as a global movement and declare that another city, and another world, is possible!

When people stand up, declare they’ve had enough and demand the attention of the powerful, the national conversation can change. It’s happened before. It can happen again. Will it happen this time? That’s up to us.

Other guests, not invited by NATO, will also be meeting – out in the streets. Large numbers of people belonging to the Occupy Movement will be in Chicago protesting against NATO.

Why protest NATO? The reasons range from killing by NATO military drones to massive military spending. NatoProtest.org provides a long list of reasons Americans are upset with NATO.

Actually, Occupy activist projects associated with the upcoming NATO summit have already begun. Yesterday, Dr. Cornel West gave a lecture criticizing Barack Obama’s rather un-liberal policies at the University of Chicago. Tonight, there’s a training session in methods of nonviolent activism at DePaul University, and a meeting going over Occupy movement building ideas. Tomorrow, there’s another meeting organizing housing and food for all the Occupy activists coming to town.

This weekend, the The People’s Summit will be held by Occupy activists. This summit has a rather different purpose than the NATO summit: “To educate our communities about war, austerity, global capitalism, and corporatization in the 21st century, and what it means for the ways we live in this world.”

If you want to participate in the anti-NATO protests in Chicago, but don’t live in Chicago, 99% Solidarity can help. The organization is putting together free bus rides for Occupy activists from many cities to Chicago especially for this month’s protests. Non-violent activist training will be held on the buses en route.

Unfortunately, the right wing Democratic mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, is also planning. Mayor Emanuel has created a long list of new restrictions designed to confine and confound protesters, including the requirement that protest organizers pay large amounts of money to the city of Chicago in exchange for permission to protest. What’s more, although Emanuel initially promised that the restrictions on protest would only be temporary, lifted after the NATO summit, he has since reversed this promise, and declared that the anti-protest measures will now be permanent.

“Grass-Roots” is a strange term for what the articles describe, which is an organized effort to channel money from a few extremely wealthy individuals into centrally-controlled organizations that will then attempt to manipulate people into voting a certain way. The idea of grassroots organizing is that it’s supposed to be supported from the lowest levels first, like the way that grass grows, without reliance on centralized organizations or large sources of support. In grassroots organizing, people who have little power individually can form networks together that cannot be easily defeated because even when one part of the organization is attacked, new shoots can rise up to fill in, just as grass roots run in a complex weave of long thin contributions from many different plants to occupy a large space. In a piece of genuine turf, individual roots aren’t growing to create some kind of predetermined shape. The strong mat of green that results from their work is a result of unpredictable growth that doesn’t have a pattern that’s easy to pick apart. Its strength is that it is a jumbled mess.

What George Soros and his wealthy fellows are doing is giving a big load of fertilizer to a group of organizations that grow more like trees. These organizations have a centralized trunk and root system, and without those centralized systems, the organizations will die. Cut them back from the top, and they won’t regrow. They haven’t grown spontaneously from a network of small individuals. They’re the results of single seeds that have grown individually large and powerful.

The New York Times articles writes that the big donations to support the Democratic Party will fund “‘get-out-the-vote efforts’ directed toward young voters, single women, black voters and Latinos”. If the donations truly supported grassroots efforts, these get-out-the-vote campaigns would be directed by young voters, single women, black voters and Latinos, not directed toward them.

Big media organizations such as the New York Times have lost touch with what genuine grassroots organizations look like. What these corporate news operations describe with the the term “grassroots” nowadays is rather like their own organizations: Designed for consumption by individuals, but only though a system of distribution controlled from the top down, powered by large payments from a few sources with a lot of money. What’s supposed to make these efforts “grassroots” in this newspeak is that people of low and moderate income are supposed to be enticed to volunteer, but their efforts as volunteers are controlled from central offices. These supposedly “grassroots” volunteers don’t get to contribute ideas to influence the central organization’s mission. They’re more like members of The Borg than they are like real grass roots.

The contributions of George Soros and other wealthy individuals to these political organizations is being characterized as “liberal”. I’m a liberal, and so I may be expected to clap at this big infusion of cash. However, the money’s focus is actually more to support the Democratic Party, which is increasingly opposed to the implementation liberal ideas.

Organizations more deserving of the terms “liberal” and “grassroots” have been unpalatable to the Democratic Party. They’re the locally-created, loosely interconnected but independent organizations of the Occupy Movement.