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Click on points on the map below to see coverage of protests, marches and arrests from this year's May Day demonstrations. 

Map courtesy of Media for the 99%, powered by The Media Consortium

As Antonia Juhasz reports this week in The Nation, what is perhaps the worst public health tragedy in the last fifty years continues to unfold -- the fallout of the BP oil spill and cleanup taking place in the Gulf. Compounding the injustice are BP and the government's efforts to elide and misplace responsibility for the suffering.

 TO DO

The health hazards to Gulf residents in the wake of the "toxic gumbo" of chemicals unleashed by the oil spill and cleanup have produced enormous suffering. The RESTORE Act, being shepherded through both houses of Congress by Louisiana legislators Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Mary Landrieu, would designate 80 percent of the fines from the 2010 oil spill for the five Gulf States thus providing a chance for those who were devastated by the oil spill to reclaim their lives. On April 17, the House passed the act. Now the legislation goes to the Senate. Please implore your Senators to support the RESTORE Act and move it quickly to passage. Tell them that it's outrageous that, nearly two years after the spill, not a single bill has been signed into law to protect or restore the ecosystem and communities of the Gulf. After making your voice heard, share this info with friends, family, Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The Sanford Police maintain that George Zimmerman's lethal shooting of Trayvon Martin was legally justified under Florida's "Stand Your Ground" legislation. The law eliminates the duty to avoid a confrontation and authorizes the use of deadly force upon a "reasonable belief" that it's necessary to "prevent death or great bodily harm."

As The Nation editorialized this week, the Sunshine State's "Stand Your Ground" law may be the first and most famous of its kind, but similar measures exist in more than twenty other states. Lurking behind this wave is the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, better-known as ALEC, which has peddled the bills for years at the behest of one of its largest funders, the NRA. Florida's law was sponsored by Republican legislators who were ALEC members. They dismissed repeated warnings that the measure would encourage needless shootings, as did Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who signed the bill and declared it a “common sense” reform. While the ink was still drying on the Florida law, ALEC moved to take it nationwide.

The Center for Media and Democracy has worked to expose ALEC and is now focusing on its funders, not just the NRA, but a range of prominent household names like Kraft, Wal-Mart, UPS, Bayer, State Farm and AT&T who all help fund ALEC's work, sit on its board, vote on its task forces, and access lawmakers through its networking. The CMD is calling on the corporate leadership of ALEC to withdraw its funding from the group.

To casual observers, it might appear as if the Occupy movement faded away this winter as suddenly as it burst onto the scene in September. But, in fact, in living rooms, in donated office spaces and in indoor parks, Occupy organizers are busy planning for a spring of concerted action.

Occupy Our Homes has been particularly active in resisting foreclosures and evictions in dozens of cities nationwide. Meanwhile, other Occupy activists have been undertaking an aggressive effort to get the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA) to do its job, which seems impossible under the leadership of Edward DeMarco. A host of community groups are calling for his resignation, on the grounds that he has repeatedly sided with Wall Street and big banks and blocked requests by Congress and the Obama administration to provide relief to millions of homeowners by reducing mortgages to their fair market value.

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