NPPD GENERATION OPTIONS ANALYSIS, SPRING 2012 PUBLIC OUTREACH MEETINGS . . . NPPD is gathering input from stakeholders as it faces decisions about its future electrical generation options. These generation decisions will determine whether or not NPPD has enough room in its portfolio for additional wind energy generation, or not. Nebraska has the fourth most wind energy capacity in the nation, yet is far behind in both wind energy developed or as a percentage of our state portfolio when compared to other top ten wind capacity states or bordering states. If NPPD locks in more coal generation, they lock in less wind. This week there will be two open house meetings to gather public input on NPPD’s future electrical generation options: Wednesday, April 25th, at the Holiday Inn Kearney, from 2:00 to 8:00pm; and Thursday, April 26th, at the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, from 2:00 to 8:00pm. Please attend one of these public forums and share your support for wind energy as a part of a more appropriate state portfolio.
GREENS ARE GATHERING SIGNATURES . . . NGP is gathering signatures so Nebraskans will have the choice of voting for the Green Party presidential slate. For brief information about current candidates for President, click here. In Lincoln, petitions are available at Meadowlark Coffee and Espresso, 1624 South Street. Registered Nebraska voters are invited to stop by for coffee, visit with Adam Hintz from 6:00am to 2:00pm daily, sign a petition, or pick up one to circulate. In Omaha, look for Charles Ostdiek at McFoster’s, 38th and Harney, to sign and pick up petitions.
If you would like to participate in the ballot access process in any way, please e-mail mjberry [at] inebraska [dot] com. Printable NGP brochures on FaceBook are here. Let’s take Our democracy back from Wall Street!
PAGE DOWN FOR KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE UPDATE.
Lincoln area: Congressional District 1
THINK YELLOW, GO GREEN . . . “Think Yellow, Go Green,” is the fourth annual Lincoln telephone directory recycling drive, now through Friday, April 27, 2012. Outdated telephone books can be dropped off at the following parks and recreation centers in and around Lincoln: Auld Recreation Center, Belmont Recreation Center, Easterday Recreation Center, F Street Recreation Center, Holmes Lake Park, Irving Recreation Center and the Cornhusker Council’s Outdoor Education Center in Walton.
VIGIL AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY . . . Every Monday, noon to 1:00pm, Nebraskans for abolition of the death penalty meet in front of the governor’s mansion when weather is good, 1425 H Street, Lincoln. When weather is bad, the vigil is inside the capitol, near the Information Desk. The lunch-hour presence reminds the governor of a constituency that does not want state killings. Weekly vigils have taken place year-round since July, 1991. All abolitionists are welcome to participate for a few minutes, or the hour. For more information about NADP, click here. “It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.” –George Bernard Shaw
OCCUPY EDUCATION . . . “American History: Mocking Ourselves With Falsehoods” is the current Occupy Education Series every Monday through April 23, 2012, 7:00 to 8:00pm, at Indigo Bridge Books, 701 P Street, #102, Lincoln. This series, led by Richard Hargesheimer, will address discrepancies about and within the traditional narrative of American History, from the Gilded Age to today, with focus on various movements to include the Labor Movement, Populism, and the Rights Movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Monday, April 23, 2012, will be “Part 5: Today’s Great Reversal – After So Much Progress, What Happened?”
TEACH-IN TUESDAY . . . Each week a different member of the Occupy Lincoln community will host a short class on a topic of their choosing, Tuesdays, 7:00 to 8:00pm through April 24th, at Meadowlark Café, 1624 South Street, in Lincoln. Tuesday, April 24, 2012, Linda Ruchala and Hank Van den Berg will present “The Dark Side of Outsourcing: Apple’s Problems with the Foxconn Sweatshops Are Only the Tip of the Iceberg.”
LINCOLN PEACE VIGILS . . . Lincoln peace vigils continue at the Federal Building, 15th and O streets, every Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:00pm. Contact Mark at 402.499.6672 or e-mail mark [at] weddleton [dot] com for more information.
BRING STUFF TO CIRCULATION DAY . . . Saturday, April 28, 2012, 9:00am to 4:00pm, EveryOne is invited to bring items they don’t want anymore to the Unity Lincoln parking lot, 135 North 31st Street. EveryOne can than take whatever items they want–no money will be exchanged. Leftover things will be donated to an appropriate thrift store. Drop off clean items in good repair from 10:00am to 6:00pm, Monday through Friday, or bring them on April 28th.
CITY-WIDE RECYCLING DAY . . . Saturday, April 28, from 9:00am until 4:00pm, the City of Lincoln will host its first annual City-wide Recycling Day to benefit the People’s City Mission. Bring unwanted clothing and accessories (shoes, hats, purses, belts, etc. IN ANY CONDITION) to any Super Saver or Russ’s Market location in Lincoln. The City Mission will give them away, or recycle them. For more information, click here or call 402.475.6888. Useable items can also be dropped off daily at the Homeless Prevention Center, 21st and N Street.
SPRING AFFAIR . . . Saturday, April 28, from 9:00am until 4:00pm, more than 500 plant varieties will be available at the Lancaster Events Center, 84th Street and Havelock Avenue, Lincoln, for the annual Spring Affair. Educational talks and garden vendors will also be part of the day-long sale event. Admission is free.
FINANCIAL CRISIS PANEL . . . Saturday, April 28, 2012, 3:00 to 5:00pm, there will be a session on the financial melt-down of 2008, focused on what the Wall Street banks and investment houses did to create it, featuring a video segment from Bill Moyers, “John Reed (former president of CitiBank) on Big Banks Power and Influence,” at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, 6300 A Street. A panel discussion with Q & A will follow. The Panelists: Author/UN-L Economics Professor Hank Van den Berg, Les Manns, Professor of Economics at Doane College in Crete, and Mark Vasina, who worked for federal banking regulators in New York during the U.S. banking crisis in the 1980s, and spent the 1990s working in risk management for Wall Street firms Bear Stearns and Oppenheimer. All are welcome at this free presentation.
NATURE CAMP SCHOLARSHIPS . . . Friends of Wilderness Park is awarding scholarships to members whose children have an interest in attending the Wilderness Park Nature Camp this Summer. If you are interested in applying for the scholarship or know a child who is deserving of the experience please contact Adam Hintz by May 1st at 402.421.8464 or e-mail friendsofwildernessparkne [at] yahoo [dot] com. For more information on the camp, call 402.441.7895.
OCCUPY LINCOLN . . . “City officials and Occupy Lincoln have reached an agreement that will keep tents pitched on Centennial Mall until May 1, two months later than the city had planned.” Read Lincoln Journal Star coverage here.
The Occupy Lincoln camp site is located on Centennial Mall north of the state capitol. There is a General Assembly every Sunday, 1:30-2:30pm, at Bennett Martin Library, 14th and N Streets, in the 4th floor auditorium; Wednesday, 6:30pm at Indigo Bridge Books; and Friday, 6:00 to 9:00pm. The Facebook page is here. The Twitter feed is @OccupyLincoln. For more information, e-mail occupylincoln [at] gmail [dot] com or phone 402.585.5865. Corporate Greed is Revolution’s Seed!
SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, May 5, 2012, 1:30 to 3:30pm, 350.org Connect the Dots Event – Give Our Children a Future – at Hyde Observatory in Holmes Park. Be part of a global movement to solve the climate crisis by helping bring awareness in Lincoln. Watch a 2 minute video here and mark your calendars for May 5th.
Omaha area: Congressional District 2
OMAHA TAX BURDEN FORUM . . . How our tax dollars in Nebraska are divided among the rich, middle class and poor will be discussed on Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 4:00pm, at Hot Shops, 1301 Nicholas Street, Omaha. UNO’s John Bartle, and State Senator Abbie Cornett, Chair of the Revenue Committee, will be featured speakers. Click here for more information.
OMAHA PEACE VIGILS . . . Omaha peacemakers vigil every Wednesday, 4:30-5:30pm, at StratCom/UN-O, 6801 Pine Street, east of the Scott Technology Center on the UN-O campus. Free parking is available at the NE Corner of 67th Street and Pine in a student lot. For more information, phone Jerry Ebner, 402.502.5887. Every Saturday, 1:00-2:00pm, there is a Peace Vigil at 72nd and Dodge Streets. Park next to 72nd Street, in the pet store parking lot. Contact Steve Horn at 402.426.9068 for more information about Saturday vigils.
OMAHA PEOPLE’S FILM FESTIVAL . . . There is a People’s Film Festival every Wednesday evening, 7:00pm, at McFoster’s Natural Kind Cafe, 38th and Harney in Omaha. Wednesday, April 25, 2012, the film will be “Burzynski,” a documentary about biochemist Stanislaw Burzynski, who won a legal battle against the Food & Drug Administration in U.S. Discussion will follow the film. For more information, click here. The People’s Film Festival – Expanding Political Consciousness Since 2004.
PETITION TO REVERSE DECISION CLOSING POLLING STATIONS IN DOUGLAS COUNTY . . . Open and accessible polls are essential to a representative democracy. Commissioner Phipp’s decision to close half of the county’s polls resulted in disproportionately closing more polling locations in low income areas of Omaha where citizens do not have their own personal transportation. Find more information here, and here. Election Commissioner Phipp’s CAN reverse this course of action. His decision was made without ANY public input or notice until he stated it was “too late.” Demand Election Commissioner Phipps make our elections accessible by calling 402.444.8683, and sign the petition here.
OCCUPY OMAHA . . . The official Occupy Omaha website is here. The FaceBook page is here. The Twitter feed is #occupyomaha
ENGAGE OMAHA . . . One of the nation’s first city-wide, virtual town hall websites, EngageOmaha, is now online. Omaha residents may weigh in on issues for the city to consider. Pick a topic, and join the mix here.
Greater Nebraska: Congressional District 3
KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE UPDATE . . . An AP report April 19, 2012 by Grant Schulte begins “Officials unveiled a new preferred route Thursday for the Nebraska portion of the stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline that avoids the state’s groundwater-rich Sandhills region.”
“New route proposal for Keystone XL pipeline,” by Art Hovey, for Lincoln Journal Star April 20th: “Just two days after Gov. Dave Heineman signed supportive legislation into law, the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality is circulating a preferred alternative corridor for taking the Keystone XL pipeline around the Nebraska Sandhills. So far, an option that would add about 25 miles to the controversial project’s north-south movement across the state is the preference of pipeline builder TransCanada only. The work of the state’s environmental regulator is just beginning.” The article, including a map, is continued here.
A new post by Deena Winter April 18th reporting on “TransCanada’s new preferred pipeline route,” for Nebraska Watchdog describes preferred “corridors” for a newly routed pipe. The report recommends “a 174-mile-long route that crosses 65 bodies of water, 1.76 miles of “ecologically unusually sensitive” areas and one mile of a wild and scenic river, according to the report. It also crosses the Ogallala aquifer, which lies below most of Nebraska and all but the first 10 miles of the pipeline study area.” Read the post here.
BOLD Nebraska created a new video to honor Earth Day. “Stand and Defend, Stop the TransCanada Pipeline,” by Jane Kleeb, April 21st, begins “We created this new video (thanks marty, mitch, landowners, fighters and everyone else) to honor Earth Day and to be used at a conference in New York next week to tell our collective story. But most of all to say we are not done fighting and will not give up until we stop the pipeline.” Watch the 3:03 minute video here.
An Omaha World-Herald letter to the editor by Kim Harris, “TransCanada’s Bailout Bill” was published April 13th. “Taxpayers spent money to have a special session and now we are all slapped in the face with a new bill that wipes out what was already done back in November. According to the Unicameral Update published April 5, 2012, Senator Smith introduced this bill because the federal government halted the process. Why are we allowing a bill to be introduced that bails out TransCanada? Why should a foreign pipeline company be able to use eminent domain prior to a permit approval? Any other company to my knowledge NOT building a pipeline that is trying to obtain an easement cannot use eminent domain prior to permit approval. How is this not special legislation? …It has always been the American Dream to be able to own property. This new special legislation not only tramples the rights of the landowners for a foreign pipeline company but it crushes the sentimental values that families hold over that American Dream and Freedoms of owning property. Please stop the non-sense Senators and start representing and LISTENING to your citizens to protect our futures, land and water.”
Click here to review the KXL pipeline timeline for a better sense of TransCanada constant change of message depending on the situation, and the many ways that LB 1161 sacrifices Nebraska’s landowners and waters for the interests of a foreign corporation. Tweet (or Facebook): Gov. Heineman goes back on his word to Nebraskans Now says only concerned with Sand Hills, forgets Ogallala Aquifer.
Sign a Natural Resources Defense Council Action Alert telling Congress to reject all attempts to force approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline by attaching it to any unrelated legislation. The Keystone XL will deliver billions in profits to Big Oil while the people get stuck with poisoned water, contaminated land and an overheated planet.
Reminder: “The Keystone pipeline will spew a massive amount of carbon pollution into our fragile atmosphere. It should be stopped. ” –Jill Stein, 2012 Green Party Presidential candidate.
STOP FRACKING NOW . . . Quoting Bill McKibben in “Why Not Frack?” “The planet is running short of the easy stuff, where you stick a drill in the ground and crude comes bubbling to the surface. The great oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Mexico have begun to dwindle; one result has been a rising price for energy. We could, as a civilization, have taken that dwindling supply and rising price as a signal to convert to sun, wind, and other noncarbon forms of energy-it would have made eminent sense, most of all because it would have aided in the fight against global warming, the most difficult challenge the planet faces. Instead, we’ve taken it as a signal to scour the world for more hydrocarbons. And it turns out that they’re there-vast quantities of coal and oil and gas, buried deep or trapped in tight rock formations or mixed with other minerals. Getting at them requires ripping apart the earth: for instance, by heating up the ground so that the oil in the tar sands formation of Canada can flow to the surface. Or by tearing holes in the crust a mile beneath the surface of the sea, as BP was doing in the Gulf of Mexico when the Deepwater Horizon well exploded. Or by literally removing mountaintops to get at coal, as has become commonplace across the southern Appalachians.”
“Confirmed: Fracking Caused Ohio Earthquakes,” by Brad Johnson, ThinkProgress, in Reader Supported News March 10, 2012 reports “A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.”
Petition Congress: “We, the undersigned, call on Congress to pass the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act this year. It’s time to hold the oil and gas production industry to the same standards as any other industry to ensure the safe protection of America’s drinking water.”
PETITION THE EPA . . . Tell the Environmental Protection Agency to immediately prohibit the use of clothianidin and conduct a full scientific review to determine its impact on honey bee populations. Learn more about clothianidin and sign the petition here.
TELL PRESIDENT OBAMA NOT TO CAVE TO MONSANTO AND THE BIOTECH INDUSTRY . . . The Obama administration has unbelievably chosen to approve three biotech crops, Roundup Ready genetically modified alfalfa, Roundup Ready genetically modified sugar beets and a new industrial biotech corn for ethanol production. These decisions are a devastating blow to our democracy and the basic rights of farmers to choose how they want to grow food on their land and the rights of consumers who increasingly choose organic and sustainably grown food for its positive health and environmental impacts. Please tell the President it’s time to stand up to Monsanto and reject GMO crops.
From FitLife.tv, “In the wake of a 12-year battle to keep Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered crops from contaminating the nation’s 25,000 organic farms and ranches, America’s organic consumers and producers are facing betrayal. A self-appointed cabal of the Organic Elite, spearheaded by Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm, has decided it’s time to surrender to Monsanto. Top executives from these companies have publicly admitted that they no longer oppose the mass commercialization of GE crops, such as Monsanto’s controversial Roundup Ready alfalfa, and are prepared to sit down and cut a deal for “coexistence” with Monsanto and USDA biotech cheerleader Tom Vilsack.”
“Monsanto’s Roundup Shown to Be Ravaging Butterfly Populations,” by Mike Barrett, Natural Society, for Truthout, March 9th: “Although the butterfly population may be suffering, humans are taking heat from Monsanto’s creations as well. Past research has shown that Monsanto’s Roundup ready crops are leading to mental illness and obesity, primarily by destroying the amount of good bacteria found in the gut. The corporation’s Roundup, containing glyphosate, has also been shown to cause infertility and birth defects.”
To help organize or coordinate a Millions Against Monsanto and Factory Farms Truth-in-Labeling campaign in your local community, sign up here. To pressure Whole Foods Market and the nation’s largest supermarket chains to voluntarily adopt truth-in-labeling practices, sign editable text here.
BUY FRESH. BUY LOCAL . . . . Farmers, gardeners, and craftspeople meet through The Nebraska Food Cooperative, an on-line, year-round farmers’ market and local food distribution service offering the best in local freshness. For ordering and pickup schedules, refer to the calendar here. Click here for products and prices from North Star Neighbors, a Cooperative member that doesn’t therapeutically medicate or unduly confine animals. Click here for Tomato Tomäto, Omaha’s year-round indoor Farmer’s Market at 156th & West Center. Shop for fresh foods grown in or very near your own community at Open Harvest, Lincoln’s member-owned natural foods retail cooperative at 1618 South Street. Buying local grows family farming, grows the local economy, and is thousands of miles fresher.
HELP NEBRASKA GREENS WITH GOODSEARCH . . . Each time you search the Internet (or shop online at a participating store), a donation can be made to Nebraska Green Party at no cost to you! To help NGP in this way, enter Nebraska Green Party where it asks you to name your cause here. Bookmark the GoodSearch Homepage, or make it your own Home Page. Enter the url you want in the GoodSearch search box. Each time you do, one penny will be donated to Nebraska Greens. THANK YOU for your support!
Remember, every man-made by-product of the petroleum industry could be replaced by hemp. “Help Save the Earth, Time to Substitute Hemp for oil.“