On July 1, journalist Bill Moyers gave a reading from his new book Moyers on Democracy at Barnes & Noble in New York City’s Union Square. Bloomington Alternative editor Steven Higgs was on hand for the event and asked Moyers during the question-and-answer segment about the Interstate 69/NAFTA Highway and the role of resistance and civil disobedience in effecting change in America today.
What follows is a transcript of Higgs’ question and Moyers’ response.
The day after John McCain flew to Canada to glorify the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 73-year-old Rosie Edwards repeatedly laughed about her flood-ravaged home in Martinsville.
"I've cried all I can cry," the grandmother of 55 grand and great-grandchildren said on June 21 in her moldy, now-gutted home of six years. "I've lost everything."
Just across State Road 37, which Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Democratic opponent Jill Long Thompson envision as an extension of the Interstate 69 NAFTA Highway, Bill Bergman likewise chuckled. He became a minor media star after painting "Mitch, Make Me an Offer?" on the side of his home and signed it "I-69 Backer."
"If I don't hear from him soon, it's going to be 'Ditch Mitch' on the roof," said Bergman, who sees I-69 as "part of progress."
At 9 p.m. on June 21, dozens of protesters gathered in People’s Park. With signs, whistles, 10-gallon buckets, firecrackers, and torches -- real fucking torches! -- we marched through downtown Bloomington to protest the building of Interstate 69 and the recent arrests of the Evansville and Berkeley tree sitters.
As we moved from Kirkwood to the Courthouse and past the jail, the march amassed both police and onlookers.
At the start of the event, I was carrying a banner at the front of the march. Eventually I managed to free myself up to take pictures. Unfortunately, those pictures were terrible, just awful. So I stopped taking pictures and started asking questions.
On May 19, a group opposed to I-69 set up a tree sit along the path of planned construction, just north of Evansville. Located at the north end of the first 1.77 miles of the proposed route, the aerial occupation sits between space cleared for the highway and an off-ramp to State Road 68.
While the small stand of trees is not slated for clearing, demonstrators have anchored their lines to felled trees and debris in the route's path. The sit is composed of two platforms suspended 35 feet in the air. While two activists occupy the platforms at all times, several protesters have taken their turns in the trees. Others have rotated duties as ground support, acting as police and media liaisons, as well as supplying the sitters with food, water and other equipment.
As the aerial occupation enters its third week, it is the longest running Indiana tree sit in seven years. For an inside look at this most recent act of I-69 resistance, The Bloomington Alternative interviewed Bloomington residents Jill and Steven, who have been involved in the tree sit and just recently returned from Evansville.
According to a state funded "Needs Assessment for Local Roads and Streets" from the Indiana LTAP Center at Purdue, 86% of the county roads in Indiana are rated in "critical" need of repair, 30% of our bridges and culverts are rated structurally or functionally "deficient", and 55% of our county bridges have some component with an estimated life of less than 5 years.
The Bloomington Police Department wouldn't issue a parade march to opponents of Interstate 69, but that didn't stop protesters from taking over downtown Bloomington streets on Saturday, April 19 -- accompanied all the way by the Bloomington Police Department.
The parade was sponsored by Roadblock EarthFirst! and was endorsed by the Indiana Forest Alliance, NoSweat!, the I-69 Listening Project and Indiana Students Against War.
Roadblock Earth First! said in an e-mail that the march kicked off a reinvigorated campaign against the road that is sure to last well into the future.
If the treatment afforded Pauline Oxby is any indication, Indiana's 20-year I-69 epoch has only gotten uglier under Gov. Mitch Daniels. The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) took her property through eminent domain and dropped I-69 on her front doorstep.
Oxby, an 83-year-old rural Oakland City woman, said she fought INDOT for economic justice as far as she could. Her son handled the negotiations, the 20-year widow said, and she doesn't recall exactly why the state said it wouldn't buy her house.
"I don't remember anymore," she said in late March, a couple weeks after INDOT contractors took down the row of trees that fronted her property, some since before she and her husband bought it in 1953.
But Oxby's memory doesn't fail on the gist of what INDOT said: "They just said, 'No, we're going to take your yard.'"
Dear Jill,
It's us, again. You know, the coalition from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. We don't know why you won't return our calls, but we'd just like to say how much we like and admire you, and how much we'd like to get fired up about your candidacy for governor.
We're already getting fired up for the presidential race. It's been a long time since we had one candidate, much less two, as exciting and different as the two now vying for our party's nomination. And, not since JFK, have we seen the machine offer up anything as exciting as Obama. Could it be possible in our wildest dreams that we Hoosier Democrats are actually going to be given a meaningful chance at shaping that nomination?
Fantastic.
Yes we can. Change. Those are the words and sentiments that resonate among us and our party. Those are the words and sentiments that will bring a wave of the young, the hopeful and the willing into the voting booths this spring and fall.
While traveling the state this past year and considering an independent run for governor, Steve Bonney learned that his political agenda mirrors that of his fellow Hoosiers. What they spoke to him about most often were property taxes, the state of the economy, job losses and quality of life.
"Those are the issues that I always heard," Bonney said during a videotaped interview in The Bloomington Alternative studio on Feb. 15. "They're always the issues that I focus on anyway."
And as he expounded upon his political views and his efforts to get on the 2008 ballot, Bonney called for more than just new political leadership in Indianapolis. He proposed a new way of thinking.
"You cannot solve any single issue without a context," he said. "And the context is holistic thinking."
U.S. District Judge David Hamilton's ruling on a citizens' lawsuit against the I-69/NAFTA Highway should be a call to action for Americans who care about the future of life on the planet and the fate of their democracy.
The 58-page ruling exposes the nation's environmental protection laws as laughable frauds and offers insight into the political mindset that earned Indiana its 49th-place ranking in Forbes Magazine’s October 2007 "Greenest States" list. "Indiana received across-the-board low marks," the influential business magazine said.
Hamilton's decision also details how federal laws are flouted and manipulated by the public-private forces of greed and environmental devastation in corrupt, toxic backwaters like Indiana.
