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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

Citizens across the country are taking to the streets to speak out against massive budget cuts affecting everything from health care centers for seniors to education.

On Saturday, an estimated 20,000 nurses, truckers, teachers, and other union members marched through downtown Los Angeles to support workers in Wisconsin and other states where they are under attack. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, told the crowd that “we need to reclaim our moral outrage because we are in the battle of a lifetime.” According to the AFL-CIO, it was the largest action by Los Angeles workers in recent history.

Over the past few days, citizens in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Jackson, Mississippi, New Haven, Connecticut, and Lansing, Michigan took to the streets to protest education cuts.

Yesterday, former Democratic Congressman Tony Hall and the heads of five anti-hunger groups began a fast to raise awareness about budget, poverty and hunger. In 1993, Congressman Hall went on a 22-day fast in response to budget cuts and the elimination of the House Select Committee on Hunger, which addressed the needs of poor and hungry people. Almost 20 years later, he’s fasting again. In the US, over 45 million people, including 15 million children, live in poverty.

Hundreds of people are expected to stand with the women of Wal-Mart outside of the Supreme Court today. Wal-Mart is asking the court to throw out what could become the largest sex discrimination class action lawsuit in US history. The case was filed 10 years ago by women workers who say the world’s largest public corporation pays them less than men to do the same work and has a culture that is “rife with gender stereotypes demeaning to female employees.”

If the court decides to let the case move forward, it could involve 1.6 million women. A decision is expected in about three months.

Tonight in Harlem, the group Harlem Fightback Against War at Home & Abroad is organizing a Hold Obama Accountable demonstration as the President attends a $30,000 a plate dinner. The group points out that Harlem’s annual median income is $25,000 and nearly 50 percent of black men in New York City are unemployed.

And finally, a broad coalition of organizations led by the AFL-CIO is holding a nationwide day of worker’s rights rallies and events on Monday, April 4.

The action is taking place on April 4 to remember the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was in Memphis, Tennessee standing with 1300 black sanitation workers who were on strike demanding dignity and the right to form a union. Police responded by beating the workers and spraying them with tear gas.

Dr. King said, “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”

His words still ring true 43 years after this death.

Rose Aguilar for Uprising.