Environment
Goose Island: The Beginning of the Next American Revolution?
Mon, 12/15/2008 - 03:17 — Bobbo
Goose Island is the only island located on the Chicago River. I suspect most Chicagoans would need MapQuest to even find Goose Island. Once a center for manufacturing, the neighborhoods surrounding it have been quietly gentrified over the years. Until quite recently, the island was most famous for the beer that is brewed at its local Goose Island Brewery.
But that was before the December 2008 sit-in by the employees of the Republic Windows and Doors plant located on Goose Island. When their plant suddenly and illegally shut down, the workers demanded a fair severance package and the payment of accrued and unused leave.They occupied the plant in an effort to win their demands.
"And who killed the miners? Say the grim bells of Blaina..."
Thu, 08/23/2007 - 08:42 — Bobbo
I
Yet this week it was hard to think of carbon as the element of life. There were simply too many deaths resulting from our mad addiction to the carbon that lies buried in the ground.
Is Labor Going...Going...Going...Green?
Sun, 07/22/2007 - 15:35 — Bobbo
Last fall two environmentalists did a barnstorming tour together touting the advantages of solar and wind to politicians in three states. Nothing unusual about that except that one of them was the president of the United Steel Workers union and the other was the president of the Sierra Club.
A hardhat and backpacker together? Yep, economic crisis.....meet the environmental crisis.
Walking through Glenmont, Maryland in 2005.
Sat, 06/30/2007 - 18:51 — BobboI was born in DC and was a baby and toddler at 13th and Clifton NW. We eventually moved out of inner city DC into the working class Glenmont area of suburban Maryland. I stayed there from 1951-1961. In the summer of 2005, I walked through my old neighborhood to see how it was doing.
My partner Estelle Carol and I emerged from the cool semi-darkness of the Glenmont, Maryland Metro station into the blazing August sun. Glenmont sure looked different from the newly bulldozed subdivision that had been cut out of the rolling hills of the Piedmont in the early 1950's. Back then, Georgia Avenue was a two lane country road narrow enough that I could bomb commuter cars with pine cones from a tree limb that stretched over the southbound lane from the adjacent Denley farm.
It's the troubles that cause the rebels.
