Blogs this week: See articles on food deserts, concerns about a good census in Maryland, the struggle for education improvement and introducing our lead organizer in Baltimore. See below. Plus crossing the Bay, a Spanish-language workshop on school improvement, and cell transmitter health worries in Anne Arundel.

We folks at Progressive Maryland are not always fans of Prince George’s Del. Dereck E. Davis (nor vice versa). He is nailing it here, however -- an asset-stripping corporate predator is threatening one of the region’s stable and beneficial businesses, Shoppers Food, which has come to be a reliable provider of full-line grocery goods in many marginalized neighborhoods where other chain groceries have edged back. But is he overlooking the opportunity to actually involve workers and communities in the public interest?

“The top indicators for places that tend to be undercounted during the Census: low-income communities, communities with a lot of renters, communities with a lot of female-headed households, and communities where people have only recently moved in,” as this Maryland Matters report states. Progressive activists want to make sure these constituencies don’t get left behind in many respects, including the critical state census count, and members of an appointed “Complete Count Committee” are pursuing the question.

As Maryland progressives gear up for the 2020 election cycle and the 2020 General Assembly session, strategy and personnel mesh. We introduce here Progressive Maryland's new Baltimore City Lead Organizer Kenyarn Maxfield, who brings organizing at the college level and over a half-decade of work around the country in electoral campaigns to the work of building power for working families in his home town, Baltimore City.

In this week’s Memo, we have news about school improvement activism at the grassroots level across communities, the fuss about crossing the Bay, Medicare for All needs a signal boost in the House and the Prince George’s Council chair needs to introduce public safety bills. Plus our Progressive Maryland resources. Read on.

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As Hogan and his GOP minions jealously guard the budget against school improvement plans, the state Dems have urged him to wise up about the state's priorities and an advocacy coalition has scheduled 23 town-hall type information events around the state in the next several months.

We’ve heard a good deal of discussion about a public option in the healthcare system – the option that was too politically hard to wedge into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

Here’s a proposed public option for production and sale of prescription drugs – one that could very well ratchet down the prices of drugs from the grasping, pill-pushing Big Pharma, star attraction in the Wall Street Casino.

A new report published this week by The Democracy Collaborative proposes the creation of a public pharmaceutical industry as an alternative to privately owned drug companies, which are focused on the pursuit of profit at the expense of the needs of patients and communities.

"Now we all have a choice," climate scientist and activist Danielle Meitiv told a MoCo climate emergency town hall Saturday. "We can create transformational action that will safeguard the future living conditions for humankind, or we can continue with our business as usual and fail. That is up to you and me.”

Progressive goals and proposals are continually under attack by the people in power – not only the wealthy and corporate business interests in Maryland, but also the corporate Democrats who parrot neoliberal “wisdom” about staying in the middle of the road because that keeps their campaign coffers filled.

You know them when you see them, and so do we.

Their dependence on big money and its big spenders endangers the interests of everyday working families in Maryland.

Next Friday, Sept. 20, students around the world will strike to take control of the future that today's adults are denying them.

Here's a missive of hope that it's a teachable moment in which the students, who know better, do the teaching.

Because they are not asking. They are telling the unlistening, unwilling holders of power how it is going to be.