How can I have come so far and still have so far to go?
Ashleigh Brilliant
Monday, March 28, 2011
SWORDS AND PLOWSHARES
Swords and Plowshares
The phrase, to beat swords into plowshares, appears twice in the Bible: Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 both say: And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
But then there is Joel 3:9-10: …Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong.
So then, which shall it be?
Gramma Windy
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Questions for WV Democratic Gubernatorial Candidates Special Election 2011
[Thanks to Anita Rickenberg, Bjorn Larsen, Dale Brady, Carla Cook, Elaine Monroe, Evelyn Baker, Richard Reece, and others whom I may have missed on this list, for helping me to compile these questions to present to the six Democratic candidates for governor of WV in this special election of 2011.]
Gramma Windy
QUESTIONS FOR DEMOCRATIC GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATES
SPECIAL ELECTION 2011
Prepared March 2011
1. What do you consider are your qualifications that make you a superior candidate for governor of West Virginia?
2. What sets you apart from other candidates as to specific issues that you support or oppose?
3. What do you see as the most crucial issues confronting WV at this time?
4. How do you reconcile competing demands of business, economy, workers, citizens, and the environment in considering legislation?
5. What are your plans for building and maintaining highways and infrastructure?
6. What are your plans for bringing jobs to our state? Especially, what kinds of jobs other than extraction of natural resources? Do you support providing living wage for our workers? Do you support unions?
7. In these difficult economic times, how will you plan on modifying income and expenditures in order to provide for counties’ needs?
8. What is your stance on Mountain Top Removal Mining?
9. What is your stance on the role of WV Department of Environmental Protection in regulating and inspecting mines, and on monitoring the effects of MTR Mining on air, water, forests, and citizens’ health?
10. What is your stance on Marcellus Shale Gas Drilling?
11. What is your stance on the role of WV Department of environmental Protection in regulating and inspecting natural gas drilling sites, and on monitoring the effects of fracking on air, water, land, and citizens’ health?
12. What is your stance on the role of US Environmental Protection Agency in formulating and administering regulations affecting air and water quality in our state, and consequently, the health of the citizens of West Virginia?
13. What energy alternatives would you consider for our state that are environmentally friendly?
14. How is it that we can brag that our state is one of the richest in natural and mineral resources, and yet we rank near the bottom in terms of per capita wealth?
15. What is your stance on the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act?
16. What alternative do you propose to provide affordable, accessible health care to a state where over 250,000 residents were uninsured in 2009? Such as the proposed legislation to establish a health exchange program in WV?
17. What is your stance on the role of the federal government in the following privacy rights issues?
a. Right to bear arms vs gun control
b. Right of a woman to make her own reproductive decisions
c. Right of gays and lesbians to choose their own life partners according to laws afforded American citizens
18. What is your stance on the death penalty?
19. What is your stance on the illicit drugs issues and the penalty for drug use?
20. How will you improve law enforcement, courts and prison system, and subsequent parole and probation?
21. How will you support the education system in order to see every child through the highest level of which s/he is capable, so that all our children can compete on a level playing system, and qualify for successful employment? Will you support the principles set forth in Section A, parts 1-3, of the West Virginia State Party Platform?
22. Do you support the Clean Elections Bill that would take corporate funding out of campaigns?
23. Are you proud to be a Democrat? Will you so state on your billboards, yard signs, and campaign ads? Will you wear a donkey pin in your lapel?
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
What Rumsfeld said...
When I hear experts say that the mission or operation in Libya will only last a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, I am reminded of a quote by Rumsfeld, and so I had to look it up. Here it is.
"It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." -in Feb. 2003
Gramma Windy
Monday, March 21, 2011
SPRING ON YOUR KNEES
Spring on your knees…
One might say that “Spring is bustin’ out all over…” even though it may be that you have to crawl around on hands and knees to find it—the first snowdrops (on the 8th); the species crocus “Tommasinus” and “Susiana;” the earliest daffodil, Rjinveld’s ‘Early Sensation’, and the species N. pseudonarcissus, with thousands more swelling buds in flower borders in garden and yard; Dutch crocus in brilliant yellows, purples, whites, stripes, and lavender; the purple Iris reticulata, and the sweet Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkins’. But then we can check things at knee level—Erica ‘Springwood White’; the first yellow blooms of winter jasmine, and hellebores in wine and white (on the 8th); then at waste level, winter honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima, winter spike hazel, Corylopsis spicata, Daphne mezereum, and the first buds showing color on winter forsythia, Abelliophyllum distichum. And then raise your eyes still more, you might require magnifying lens, but there at eye level there are indeed pink and white buds swelling on the fruit trees—apple, apricot, plum, peach. And overhead, the red tinge of maple blooms swelling.
If you are one who raises both peonies and rhubarb, then you may have noticed as I have that the first stout red buds pushing through the earth are virtually identical and show up on the same day. Find one, look for the other. Here, it was Saturday, the day before the vernal equinox.
Sensing rejuvenation of spirit and body on my walk, surrounded by the fresh scents of the blooms and the soil, the gentle warm breeze, the bird song in the trees, the vines, and the shrubs, and preceded down the garden path by a fat brown toad. Ahhh...
Inevitably, with temps reaching 70 and gentle warm breezes, I was drawn to sow the first seeds. In a 4x10’ bed in the kitchen garden, I sowed radishes, lettuce, spinach, swiss chard, carrots, sorrel, kale, parsley, chervil, and cilantro. And calendula. Warmed in the sun for a day or so before being pelted last night by thunder burst. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. They may not thrive, but if they do…
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Chris Hedges says we must say NO Part III
The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.
The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal” news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.
Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.
We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.” And if enough of us say “no,” if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. ... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. ...”
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Where two or three gathered together...
[On Tuesday there were 11 intrepid souls gathered in the rain, displaying limp bedraggled posters and waving at passersby, at the Court House in Romney, to express solidarity with unions and public sector workers in Madison, Wisconsin and other states where their very existence is being threatened. We know that what they do, and what their senators who protest administrative and legislative actions against their fellow citizens do, is not just for them, but for us all. And so our little rally was not for us, but for them. And that is what inspired me to write the following comment.]
Although we were few, and not seen by many, and didn’t make the news, we know it has been said, “Where two or three gather together…” We were there in solidarity for unions everywhere, in Madison and Ohio and Michigan and Maine and, yes, of course in West Virginia. In Egypt and Japan and Brazil. Whether they know it or not, we know it. Whether or not we believe in prayer, we are there because we believe that, in some way, our actions and our presence will be felt by all of those whom we support, that we are kindred spirits. Know that they know that we were there. Thank you to all of you for being there.
Windy
Chris Hedges says we must say NO Part II
“When you sell your product, you retain your person,” said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.”
As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.
“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,” Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].”
Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.” And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.
Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.
The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlements”—which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
CAN TAXATION BE FAIR?
FAIRNESS IN TAXATION ACT Rep Jan Schakowski The most popular way to reduce the deficit, according to 81% of Americans? Put a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year. -- NBC/Wall St. Journal Poll, March 2, 2011 WASHINGTON, DC (March 16, 2011) – Today Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), member of President Obama’s 18-member Fiscal Commission, introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act, which would create new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires. Original co-sponsors include co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), as well as Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR). Income inequality in America is the worst we’ve seen it since 1928. Wages have stagnated for middle and lower income families despite enormous gains in productivity. Where has all the money gone? “In the United States today, the richest 1% owns 34 % of our nation’s wealth – that’s more than the entire bottom 90%, who own just 29% of the country’s wealth,” said Rep. Schakowsky. “And the top one-hundredth of 1% now makes an average of $27 million per household per year. The average income for the bottom 90% of Americans? $31,244. It’s time for millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share, which is why I introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act. This isn’t about punishment or revenge. It’s about fairness. It’s about avoiding budget cuts that harm middle class families and those who aspire to it. We can choose to cut education, job creation and health care, or we can choose to ask those who can contribute more to do so.” The current top tax bracket begins at $373,000 in income and fails to distinguish between the “well off” and billionaires – like the top 20 hedge fund managers whose average income last year was over $1 billion. The Fairness in Taxation Act asks enacts new tax brackets for income starting at $1 million and ends with a $1 billion bracket. The new brackets would be:
The bill would also tax capital gains and dividend income as ordinary income for those taxpayers with income over $1 million. If enacted in 2011, the Fairness in Taxation Act would raise more than $78 billion. Support for Schakowsky’s Fairness in Taxation Act: “I think very wealthy people like me should pay substantially higher taxes, since we have done exceedingly well in the last few decades,” said Katharine Myers, a millionaire from Pennsylvania whose income comes from royalties from the Myers-Briggs personality test, created by her mother-in-law, which she has managed with Peter Myers since the 1980s. “Our taxpayer-funded government contributed to my success.” Myers has been a supporter of United for a Fair Economy and its Responsible Wealth project for many years. “It’s time we treated multi-millionaires the same way we treat working families – by creating a tax bracket to match their income,” said Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “There’s no reason to treat the wealthiest one percent of the country any more specially than anyone else, and right now that’s exactly what our tax system is doing. The Republican war on working families means cutting from the middle and handing the savings to the top. Instead, let’s have everyone pay their fair share to create jobs and get the economy moving again.” “Millionaires and billionaires should be giving to charity not getting it,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The middle class is shrinking and deficits are rising because Republicans are giving a pass to special interests who aren’t paying their fair share. This bill is part of a plan to level the playing field.” “A tax system where families earning several thousand dollars are taxed at the same rate as millionaires is unfair, and unsustainable,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD). “The Fairness in Taxation Act is a common sense solution to eliminating this inequality and balancing the federal budget. At a time when House Republicans are demanding that working families, teachers, and firefighters bear the burden of reducing the deficit, millionaires should be required to contribute their fair share.” Groups that have endorsed Schakowsky’s Fairness in Taxation Act: United for a Fair Economy, Citizens for Tax Justice, Citizen Action Illinois, U.S. Action, Campaign for America’s Future, Wealth for the Common Good, and The Agenda Project. Congresswoman Schakowsky has shown that there is another way,” said Steve Wamhoff, tax expert from Citizens for Tax Justice. “Her proposal would make the federal income tax more progressive by introducing higher rates for taxpayers with income in excess of $1 million. Millionaires have benefited disproportionately from the tax cuts enacted over the past decade, so it seems entirely reasonable that they share in the sacrifices needed to get our fiscal house in order.” “The budget cuts being debated in Washington shamefully require middle class families to pay the price for the recklessness of the Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers who broke our economy,” said Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy. “Instead of punishing middle class families and de-funding America, the Fairness in Taxation Act asks those who have benefitted so heavily from the economic bounce of Wall Street to share responsibility for getting our nation's finances on track.” “Any sensible program for deficit reduction must begin with changing the massive tax cuts for the very wealthy,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “Those tax give-aways were a major cause of our current deficit. In an era of excessive inequality we should end Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. We need progressive revenues not just to bring down deficits, but also to finance investments in job and sustainable growth. The introduction of the Fairness in Taxation Act is an important step that will be popular with the American people.” |
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Chris Hedges says we must say NO! Part I
Hedges: Power Concedes Nothing Without Demand -- We Must Say, "NO!" to Wall St., the Kochs, and Our Cowardly Political Class
By Chris Hedges, TruthdigPosted on March 14, 2011, Printed on March 15, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/150248/
http://www.alternet.org/story/150248/
The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.
The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother” Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big” Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”
Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.
American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,” is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Pelosi writes Boehner cost of defending DOMA
When President Obama directed the Department of Justice not to go to court to defend DOMA, Speaker Boehner (R-OH) proclaimed that the House would mount a defense of the act. Minority Leader Pelosi (D-CA) wrote the following letter to Speaker Boehner. [You may check out http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/pelosi-wants-to-know-how-much-is-defending-doma-going-to-cost/#comment-1797228 for the complete article about this and for readers’ comments] [italics are mine]
Dear Mr. Speaker:
The House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) voted this week by a 3-2 margin to direct the House General Counsel to initiate a legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). As you know, the Democratic members of the BLAG voted against directing the House Counsel to initiate the costly defense of a statute which many believe to be unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause.
While respecting the role of the BLAG to make such decisions, I disagree in this circumstance because of the number of cases, at least 10. There are numerous parties who will continue to litigate these ongoing cases regardless of the involvement of the House. No institutional purpose is served by having the House of Representatives intervene in this litigation which will consume 18 months or longer. As we noted, the constitutionality of this statute will be determined by the Courts, regardless of whether the House chooses to intervene.
The resolution passed by the BLAG also directs the House General Counsel to hire private lawyers rather than utilize his own office to represent the House. The General Counsel indicated that he lacked the personnel and the budget to absorb those substantial litigation duties. It is important that the House receive an estimate of the cost to taxpayers for engaging private lawyers to intervene in the pending DOMA cases. It is also important that the House know whether the BLAG, the General Counsel, or a Committee of the House have the responsibility to monitor the actions of the outside lawyers and their fees.
The American people want Congress to be working on the creation of jobs and ensuring the continued progress of our economic recovery rather than involving itself unnecessarily in such costly and divisive litigation.
Thank you for your responses to these questions concerning the cost and oversight of the litigation as it proceeds through the courts.
Best regards,
NANCY PELOSI
Democratic Leader
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Suiting Action to Words?
[A few days ago I posted a quote by Reagan that was supportive of unions and collective bargaining, as well as recognizing the parallels between our nation’s unions and those in other countries. But either he was only giving lip-service to the concept of unions, or he surely failed to suit action to words. Following is an abridgment of an article by Dick Meister.]
Reagan, in any case, was a true ideologue of the anti-labor political right. Although he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was notoriously pro-management, leading the way to a strike-ending agreement in 1959 that greatly weakened the union and finally resigning under membership pressure before his term ended.
Reagan's war on labor began in the summer of 1981, when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, that was "an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad."
Reagan gave dedicated union foes direct control of the federal agencies that were designed originally to protect and further the rights and interests of workers and their unions.
Most important was Reagan's appointment of three management representatives to the five-member National Labor Relations Board which oversees union representation elections and labor-management bargaining. They included NLRB Chairman Donald Dotson, who believed that "unionized labor relations have been the major contributors to the decline and failure of once-healthy industries" and have caused "destruction of individual freedom."
Under Dotson, a House subcommittee found, the board abandoned its legal obligation to promote collective bargaining, in what amounted to "a betrayal of American workers."
The NLRB settled only about half as many complaints of employers' illegal actions as had the board during the previous administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, and those that were settled upheld employers in three-fourths of the cases.
Reagan's war on labor began in the summer of 1981, when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, that was "an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad."
Reagan gave dedicated union foes direct control of the federal agencies that were designed originally to protect and further the rights and interests of workers and their unions.
Most important was Reagan's appointment of three management representatives to the five-member National Labor Relations Board which oversees union representation elections and labor-management bargaining. They included NLRB Chairman Donald Dotson, who believed that "unionized labor relations have been the major contributors to the decline and failure of once-healthy industries" and have caused "destruction of individual freedom."
Under Dotson, a House subcommittee found, the board abandoned its legal obligation to promote collective bargaining, in what amounted to "a betrayal of American workers."
The NLRB settled only about half as many complaints of employers' illegal actions as had the board during the previous administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter, and those that were settled upheld employers in three-fourths of the cases.
Most of the complaints were against employers who responded to organizing drives by illegally firing union supporters. The employers were well aware that under Reagan the NLRB was taking an average of three years to rule on complaints, and that in any case it generally did no more than order the discharged unionists reinstated with back pay. That's much cheaper than operating under a union contract.
The board stalled as long before acting on petitions from workers seeking union representation elections and stalled for another year or two after such votes before certifying winning unions as the workers' bargaining agents. Under Reagan, too, employers were allowed to permanently replace workers who dared exercise their legal right to strike.
Reagan's Labor Department was as one-sided as the NLRB. It became an anti-labor department, virtually ignoring, for instance, the union-busting consultants who were hired by many employers to fend off unionization. Very few consultants and very few of those who hired them were asked for the financial disclosure statements the law demands. Yet all unions were required to file the statements that the law required of them (and that could be used to advantage by their opponents). And though the department cut its overall budget by more than 10 percent, it increased the budget for such union-busting activities by almost 40 percent.
Union-busting was only one aspect of Reagan's anti-labor policy. He attempted to lower the minimum wage for younger workers, ease the child labor and anti-sweatshop laws, tax fringe benefits, and cut back job training programs for the unemployed. He tried to replace thousands of federal employees with temporary workers who would not have civil service or union protections.
The Reagan administration all but dismantled programs that required affirmative action and other steps against discrimination by federal contractors, and seriously undermined worker safety. It closed one-third of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's field offices, trimmed its staff by more than one-fourth and decreased the number of penalties assessed against employers by almost three-fourths.
Rather than enforce the law, the administration sought "voluntary compliance" from employers on safety matters - and generally didn't get or expect it. The administration had so tilted the job safety laws in favor of employers that union safety experts found them virtually useless.
The same could have been said of all other labor laws in the Reagan era. A statement issued at the time by the presidents of several major unions concluded it would have been more advantageous for those who worked for a living to ignore the laws and return "to the law of the jungle" that prevailed a half-century before.
Their suggestion came a little late. Ronald Reagan had already plunged labor-management relations deep into the jungle.
Copyright © Dick Meister
The board stalled as long before acting on petitions from workers seeking union representation elections and stalled for another year or two after such votes before certifying winning unions as the workers' bargaining agents. Under Reagan, too, employers were allowed to permanently replace workers who dared exercise their legal right to strike.
Reagan's Labor Department was as one-sided as the NLRB. It became an anti-labor department, virtually ignoring, for instance, the union-busting consultants who were hired by many employers to fend off unionization. Very few consultants and very few of those who hired them were asked for the financial disclosure statements the law demands. Yet all unions were required to file the statements that the law required of them (and that could be used to advantage by their opponents). And though the department cut its overall budget by more than 10 percent, it increased the budget for such union-busting activities by almost 40 percent.
Union-busting was only one aspect of Reagan's anti-labor policy. He attempted to lower the minimum wage for younger workers, ease the child labor and anti-sweatshop laws, tax fringe benefits, and cut back job training programs for the unemployed. He tried to replace thousands of federal employees with temporary workers who would not have civil service or union protections.
The Reagan administration all but dismantled programs that required affirmative action and other steps against discrimination by federal contractors, and seriously undermined worker safety. It closed one-third of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's field offices, trimmed its staff by more than one-fourth and decreased the number of penalties assessed against employers by almost three-fourths.
Rather than enforce the law, the administration sought "voluntary compliance" from employers on safety matters - and generally didn't get or expect it. The administration had so tilted the job safety laws in favor of employers that union safety experts found them virtually useless.
The same could have been said of all other labor laws in the Reagan era. A statement issued at the time by the presidents of several major unions concluded it would have been more advantageous for those who worked for a living to ignore the laws and return "to the law of the jungle" that prevailed a half-century before.
Their suggestion came a little late. Ronald Reagan had already plunged labor-management relations deep into the jungle.
Copyright © Dick Meister
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Taxes, Spending, and Dumpsters
This is an exchange I saw in the comments section following a Think Progress article about Republican legislatures raising taxes on food and gasoline while cutting taxes on corporations.
1st person: When are people going to wake up and realize that we all are going to be dumpster diving for meals if the [Republicans] get their way?
2nd person: The greedy chumps will make sure a new law goes into effect that makes it a felony to dumpster dive.
3rd person: They’ll just install pay dumpsters.
Reagan and Collective Bargaining
[Reagan quote re: Collective Bargaining in response to the conflict in Poland in the 1980's. Read this, read it more than once, read it aloud, engrave it on your brain.]
"They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children and it would disappear everywhere in the world. Today the workers in Poland are showing a new generation how high is the price of freedom but also how much it is worth that price."
And…
“Collective bargaining in the years since has played a major role in America’s economic miracle. Unions represent some of the freest institutions in this land. There are few finer examples of participatory democracy to be found anywhere. Too often, discussion about the labor movement concentrates on disputes, corruption, and strikes. But while these things are headlines, there are thousands of good agreements reached and put into practice every year without a hitch.”
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Valerie blogs
[ I just wanted to share these with you these two blog entries which my daughter, Valerie, wrote on Sunday, Feb 27, while visiting with me after her attendance at DNC in DC, in her capacity as VC of the Washington State Democratic Executive Committee. She also visited our local HCDEC meeting on Monday the 28th, where she shared with us some ideas for revigorating our democratic party. She mentions here ‘An American President,’ which we watched together during her visit. Valerie writes at http://blueframeworks.blogspot.com/ ]
One thing at a time
"We don't have time to do one thing at a time." (Lewis, played by Michael J Fox in An American President)
While I visit my mom, watch An American President, balance my checkbook, try to keep a cat from walking on my laptop, I am thinking about the DNC meeting and what to blog about, but I'll step back to the beginning of this trip.
Back on Monday, which I am sure was really a month ago, I attended a training in Lacey, Washington.
One message that carried through several of the sessions in varying degrees was this:
* Whose life would you like to improve? *
If you are thinking about running for office, currently are running for office, or are even holding office presently, please ask yourself 'Whose life would you like to improve?' Every step you take, plan you make, and vote you take should have that underlying question addressed in some way.
Celebrate that with every breath of your political life and lift up those around you and they will lift you up on their shoulders. When they can stand up straighter you will be taller in their midst.
Now I'm sure that everyone should watch An American President, I feel more eloquent and inspired as a result.
While I visit my mom, watch An American President, balance my checkbook, try to keep a cat from walking on my laptop, I am thinking about the DNC meeting and what to blog about, but I'll step back to the beginning of this trip.
Back on Monday, which I am sure was really a month ago, I attended a training in Lacey, Washington.
One message that carried through several of the sessions in varying degrees was this:
* Whose life would you like to improve? *
If you are thinking about running for office, currently are running for office, or are even holding office presently, please ask yourself 'Whose life would you like to improve?' Every step you take, plan you make, and vote you take should have that underlying question addressed in some way.
Celebrate that with every breath of your political life and lift up those around you and they will lift you up on their shoulders. When they can stand up straighter you will be taller in their midst.
Now I'm sure that everyone should watch An American President, I feel more eloquent and inspired as a result.
Political Immersion
I was sure that a three day DNC conference was about as deep an immersion you could get into political conversation.
I was wrong.
I am now immersed in a level of political thought that I didn't know existed.
My mother.
When I come up for air I will try to pick out a few waves to splash about in, but for now...
Valerie, out and under...
I was wrong.
I am now immersed in a level of political thought that I didn't know existed.
My mother.
When I come up for air I will try to pick out a few waves to splash about in, but for now...
Valerie, out and under...
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Wastewater Recycling from NYT Part II
The tracking system that was put in place requires monthly or yearly reports to the state from well operators indicating where their waste was taken, but offers no way for the state to guarantee that the waste actually reached the disposal sites.
The challenges of tracking all of the industry’s drilling waste and disposing of it will not go away soon. At least 50,000 new Marcellus wells are supposed to be drilled in Pennsylvania over the next two decades, up from about 6,400 permitted now.
Wells also create waste that is not captured by recycling, because operators typically recycle only for the first several months after a well begins producing gas.
Though the amount of wastewater decreases over time, the wells can continue to ooze for decades after they have been hydrofracked. There are regulations, however, that govern how gas wells are plugged and abandoned.
“This is important because as the well ages, the fluids that come up from it become more toxic, and the state or companies are even less likely to be tracking it,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a drilling expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell.
State regulators predict that the heaviest burdens are still to come.
“The waste that flows back slowly and continuously over the 20- to 30-year life of each gas well could produce 27 tons of salt per year,” Pennsylvania officials wrote in new rules adopted last August about salt levels in drilling wastewater being sent through sewage treatment plants. “Multiply this amount by tens of thousands of Marcellus gas wells,” they said, and the potential pollution effects are “tremendous.”
In an interview on Sunday, John Hanger, who in January stepped down as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed to these rules as some of the strongest in the country and cited other accomplishments during his term, including increasing inspections of drilling industry trucks, more than doubling his department’s natural-gas staff and improving well design requirements.
The natural-gas industry uses a number of methods to recycle drilling waste.
Some drillers have used recycling equipment at the well site or trucked the water to a dedicated recycling facility. The wastewater is filtered, evaporated and then distilled, to be used again at the well. Other companies add fresh water to the wastewater, to dilute the salts and other contaminants, before pumping it back in the ground for more hydrofracking.
Any sludge that settles from these various processes is taken to landfills, which in Pennsylvania are equipped with radiation monitors, or is sent to injection disposal wells.
But drilling experts say that virtually all forms of recycling still result in liquid waste that can be more toxic than it was after the first use.
“The wastewater that comes up from the well will likely increase to some degree in many contaminants such as salts and possibly radium and other radionuclides with each new fracking, but the data is very limited on this issue so not much is known,” said Radisav Vidic, an environmental engineering professor and drilling expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “There needs to be more data on this.”
Industry officials said there was no reason for concern about radioactivity levels in wastewater.
“All of our reports indicate that this industry operates within the same standards set forth and observed by all water consumers in Pennsylvania,” said Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman from Range Resources-Appalachia, a part of the Range Resources natural-gas company.
Some energy companies have found more profitable options for getting rid of their drilling wastewater.
In West Virginia, for example, environmental regulators and highway officials last year announced plans for the state to start paying around five cents per gallon for gas drilling wastewater known as brine, which tends to be extremely salty, to melt ice on roads.
They planned to buy about 1.2 million gallons of the wastewater at more than 120 sites around the state and to buy more as needed.
West Virginia’s water and waste management director, Scott Mandirola, has said that he recognized that some Marcellus waste may have radioactive contaminants and that some of the waste could find its way to the state’s waters.
But he added that it would be highly diluted by rain or snow and that de-icing the roads was important. State officials also said that only wastewater from shallow wells would be used, thereby reducing levels of radioactivity.
Pennsylvania also allows salty brine produced from the wastewater to be spread on roads for dust suppression or de-icing.
More than 155,000 gallons of this wastewater was sent by a drilling company called Ultra Resources to nine towns for dust suppression in 2009, state records show. The water came from two gas wells in Tioga County and contained radium at almost 700 times the levels allowed in drinking water.
“I was told nothing about frack water or any gas-well brines or anything else,” said Deborah Kotulka, the secretary of Richmond Township, in Tioga County, whose name appears on the state record. Her township received 101,640 gallons of the water from wells with high radioactivity, those records show.
As gas producers have tried to find new ways to get rid of their waste, they have sought reassurances from state and federal regulators that the industry’s exemptions from federal laws on hazardous waste were broad enough to protect them.
In late 2009, for example, officials from an industry trade group, the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, wrote to regulators to confirm that drilling waste, regardless of how it was handled, would remain exempt from the federal law governing hazardous materials. The association said it was asking in case companies sought to distill the waste into salts for de-icing roads.
“The query has monumental significance,” Steve Rhoads, then the president of the association, wrote in a September 2009 e-mail to state regulators explaining his members’ concerns about any attempt by federal officials to categorize drilling waste as hazardous material. The correspondence was obtained through open-records requests filed with the state.
If drillers were to lose the exemption from federal law that allowed their waste not to be considered hazardous, they would probably be forced, at great expense, to start more rigorously testing the waste for toxicity.
They might also have to do what most other industries do: ship any sludge or salts that are high in radioactivity to Idaho or Washington State, where there are some of the only landfills in the country permitted to accept such waste.
Instead, federal regulators informed the industry that their exemption remained intact, a decision that association officials quickly passed on to their members. State regulators declined to comment on the exchange because it concerns a federal, not state, exemption. Federal officials said the salts were regulated by the states.
“In short,” Mr. Rhoads wrote his members, the Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the exemption “remains in effect once the waste is generated, regardless of how the waste is treated or managed.”
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