All posts by carldavidson

Environment, Fracking, Marcellus Shale

Environmentalists Call for Ban on Fracking in Ohio After Earthquakes

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Photo: Environmental groups are calling for a ban on fracking in Ohio after a series of small earthquakes erupted near an active fracking site last week.

By Mike Ludwig
Beaver County Blue via Truthout

March 18, 2014 – Ohio regulators ordered the Texas-based firm Hilcorp Energy to shut down its fracking operations in rural northeastern Ohio after five temblors ranging from 2.1 to 3.0 in magnitude were recorded March 10 and March 11 in the area. The US Geological Survey reported that the epicenter of the first and largest quake was directly below a landfill where Hilcorp was fracking. Local residents felt the quakes but did not report any serious damage.

Officials with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), which regulates oil and gas production in the state, said initial data indicated that the earthquakes were not related to drilling wastewater injection wells, which have been linked to small earthquakes in Ohio, Oklahoma and other states. If investigators link the quakes to Hilcorp’s production operations, it would be the first time that the fracking process has directly caused documented earthquakes in Ohio, if not the entire United States.

Fracking involves forcing millions of gallons of water and chemicals into underground wells to break up rock and release oil and natural gas. Wastewater that returns to the surface during the operation often is disposed of in underground injection wells. Ohio has become a popular destination for the waste, and more than 180 injection wells store waste across the state.

Continue reading Environmentalists Call for Ban on Fracking in Ohio After Earthquakes →

Community, Cooperatives, Economy, Organizing

‘New Economy’ Events in Pittsburgh, March 21-22

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We Need a New Economy

East End Food Coop is one small piece of the ‘new economy’

By Molly Rush
Post-Gazette Op-Ed

March 17, 2014 – More and more people have come to distrust our economic system. Low wages, job insecurity, underemployment and loss of pensions stress the social fabric. Compounding the effects on our communities is a growing distrust of a political system driven by the power of major financial donors to candidates and officeholders.

The billionaire Koch brothers, for instance, not only have a war chest of $400 million for targeted campaign contributions, but they also manipulate public discourse by underwriting so-called think tanks that justify legislation benefiting Koch investments in extractive industries, petrochemicals and poisonous pesticides.

The Koch brothers are just one powerful vested interest bent on confusing the public about complex political and social challenges. Add the power of banks and mega-corporations to stack the deck against small businesses and families, and you have a collision between the public good and an unsustainable economy. It is no wonder that so many people feel overwhelmed and discouraged.

“What Is to Be Done?”

That is the title of a book by political economist Gar Alperovitz. He is behind what is being called the New Economy, which is taking root around the United States and right here in Western Pennsylvania.

The idea is to develop an economy that gives people a decent livelihood in a thriving community. We already have the makings of a new economy here in Western Pennsylvania due to some creative initiatives now underway.

Continue reading ‘New Economy’ Events in Pittsburgh, March 21-22 →

Green Jobs, Infrastructure, labor, Obama

A Few Green Jobs Coming Our Way? Push The Budget Through…

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Obama proposal sets aside more funds for Mon River, Olmsted lock projects

20140305Locks1 Overlooking the landside lock, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and barge industry executives walk atop the Charleroi Lock and Dam during a tour of the Locks and Dams 2, 3, and 4 of the lower Monongahela River in June 2012.

Overlooking the landside lock, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and barge industry executives walk atop the Charleroi Lock and Dam during a tour of the Locks and Dams 2, 3, and 4 of the lower Monongahela River in June 2012.

By Len Bolselovic

Beaver County Blue via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

March 4, 2014 – President Barack Obama’s proposed fiscal 2015 budget includes $9 million for continuing long-delayed work on a vital lock and dam project on the Monongahela River, more than four times the funding it received in the current fiscal year.

The White House budget proposal also includes $160 million for continuing construction at an Ohio River infrastructure project plagued by massive cost overruns. Paying for that project, located about 600 miles down the Ohio from Pittsburgh at Olmsted, Ill., has prevented the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from providing additional funding for the Mon River work and other projects.

The barge industry and the federal government evenly split the cost of major lock and dam construction projects overseen by the Corps. The industry’s share is generated by a tax barge operators pay on the diesel fuel they use.

But river industry officials have complained about covering cost overruns at Olmsted, where the price tag has ballooned from $775 million when Congress authorized the project in 1988 to $3.1 billion.

More than half of the 200-plus locks and associated dams overseen by the Corps were built more than 50 years ago, which is how long they were expected to last.

Continue reading A Few Green Jobs Coming Our Way? Push The Budget Through… →

Austerity, Banks, Infrastructure

Overthrow the Speculators

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Why the Progressive Majority Needs a Common Front vs. Finance Capital, War and the Far Right

By Chris Hedges
Beaver County Blue via Common Dreams   

Dec 20, 2013 – Money, as Karl Marx lamented, plays the largest part in determining the course of history. Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed.

Today’s speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage. They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged.

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

Continue reading Overthrow the Speculators →

Austerity, trade unions

FirstEnergy Locks Out Utility Workers in PA

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Utility Workers in Altoona, PA

From IndustriALL

FirstEnergy Corp. – one of the largest electric power corporations in the United States – locked out 150 members of the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) in the early morning hours of November 25, three days before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

IndustriALL Global Union and Public Services International (PSI) are responding to this employer aggression against joint affiliate UWUA. Sign the IndustriALL-PSI-LabourStart campaign here and write your protest message to FirstEnergy CEO Tony Alexander.

(http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2070)

Management locked out utility workers at its Penelec subsidiary in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania in order to extract huge concessions in workers’ retirement and healthcare benefits and working conditions, as well as to impose cutbacks in service standards for consumers.

FirstEnergy is demanding similar concessions from over 1,100 additional UWUA members at three other utility companies owned by the corporate giant throughout the U.S. states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia.

According to the UWUA, the lockout of Penelec workers is part of a larger scheme by top FirstEnergy executives to roll back social benefits and working conditions for employees throughout the company, even as the corporation seeks to cut back on consumer services.  The locked out UWUA members are therefore on the frontlines of the union’s efforts to end the ongoing corporate assault against living standards for U.S. utility workers.

The UWUA has appealed for trade unions to condemn FirstEnergy’s anti-worker conduct by protesting directly to FirstEnergy CEO Tony Alexander and Senior Vice President Lynn Cavalier.

Please demand that these FirstEnergy executives immediately end the lockout of utility workers in Pennsylvania, and for the company to return to the bargaining table to negotiate in good faith for fair agreements for union workers at all FirstEnergy locations.

Economy, fair trade

TPP Trade Deal Puts U.S. Workers’ Rights and Jobs at Risk

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A dangerous deal for labor, the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, gained a key endorsement from the NYTimes on the eve of VP Biden’s trip to China. Ed Schultz and Leo Gerard discuss the effect.

"A US-led trade deal is currently being negotiated that could increase the price of prescription drugs, weaken financial regulations and even allow partner countries to challenge American laws. But few know its substance."

fair trade, Manufacturing, unemployment

The Top Secret Trade Deal You Need to Know About

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Nov 1, 2013 – Secrets… The innocent lives lost in drone wars and the trade deal Washington and big business are trying to hide. From Bill Moyers’ show, ‘Moyers% Company’

Austerity, Organizing, trade unions, Youth and students

How Billionaire Businesses Expect the Public to Subsidize Their Low Wages and Opposition to Unions

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McDonald’s Tells Worker She Should Sign Up For Food Stamps

By Emily Cohn
Progressive America Rising via Huffington Post

McDonald’s workers struggling to get by on poverty wages should apply for food stamps and Medicaid.

That’s the advice one activist McDonald’s worker received when she called the company’s "McResource Line," a service provided to McDonald’s workers who need help with issues like child and health care.

"You can ask about things like food pantries. Are you on SNAP? SNAP is Supplemental Nutritional Assistance [Program] — food stamps … You would most likely be eligible for SNAP benefits," a McResource representative told 27-year-old Nancy Salgado, who works at a Chicago McDonald’s. "Did you try and get on Medicaid? Medicaid is a federal program. It’s health coverage for low income or no income adults — and children."

Salgado is one of many fast-food workers who have walked off the job in recent months to protest the industry’s low wages, part of a nationwide movement aiming to raise pay to $15 an hour. She has worked at McDonald’s for 10 years, and earns $8.25 an hour in her current job as a cashier. Earlier this month, Salgado was detained after pressing McDonald’s President Jeff Stratton for higher wages.

"Do you think this is fair that I have to be making $8.25 when I’ve been working at McDonald’s for 10 years?" Salgado said during the confrontation.

The audio of Salgado’s call to the McResource Line was posted Thursday on YouTube by advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK. In the call, the McResource representative points the worker towards government assistance when she explains she needs help.

The YouTube version of the call is edited, but Low Pay Is Not OK provided a fuller recording to The Huffington Post. In the longer version of the audio, the McResource representative tells Salgado that because she’s employed by a McDonald’s franchise, which does not pay for the McResource service, she is not eligible for consultation. Still, the representative goes on to offer advice, including recommending that Salgado reach out to resources like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

McDonald’s pointed out to The Huffington Post that the audio is clearly edited. “This video is not an accurate portrayal of the resource line as this is very obviously an edited video," Lisa McComb, McDonald’s’ director of U.S. media relations, told The Huffington Post.

"The McResource line is intended to be a free, confidential service to help employees and their families get answers to a variety of questions or provide resources on a variety of topics including housing, child care, transportation, grief, elder care, education and more," McComb said.

A flier for the McResource line that hung a break room at a McDonald’s restaurant, according to a representative from the advocacy group, Low Pay Is Not OK.

"It made me mad [that I couldn’t get help from the McResource line] because I thought that all the McDonald’s employees qualified for it," Salgado said in a phone call with HuffPost Thursday. McDonald’s did not clarify what percentage of its workers do qualify for its consultation services.

More than half of fast-food workers rely on public assistance, a reality that costs taxpayers more than $7 billion a year, according to an estimate from the National Employment Law Project published last week. McDonald’s low wages cost taxpayers about $1.2 billion annually, the study found.

McDonald’s announced on Monday that it earned $1.5 billion in profits in the third quarter, which is a 5-percent jump over last year.

In an emailed statement, McComb defended McDonald’s wages.

"McDonald’s and our independent franchisees provide jobs in every state to hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Those jobs range from entry-level part-time to full-time, from minimum wage to salaried positions, and we offer everyone the same opportunity for advancement,” she wrote.

"We’re working for one of the richest employers," Salgado said. Their response to her inquiry, she added, shows that they admit they don’t pay their workers enough to get by.

Community, mass transit, Pittsburgh

The Class and Racial Politics of Bus Stops in Downtown Pittsburgh

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Moving buses from the heart of Downtown Pittsburgh raises concerns

By Jon Schmitz

Beaver County Blue via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Oct 9, 2013 – A group that advocates for public transit riders has raised questions about a proposal to remove buses from the center of Downtown Pittsburgh, saying it puts the interests of a few businesses ahead of "the greater good of the entire community."

The group, Pittsburghers for Public Transit, also is demanding public involvement in any plan to reroute buses, community organizer Helen Gerhardt said Tuesday. "We’re going to make sure that we are very vocal and very involved every step of the way," she said.

The group is concerned about a proposal embraced by Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and the likely next mayor of Pittsburgh, city Councilman Bill Peduto, to create a bus-free zone in the center of the Golden Triangle. Bus routes would be moved out toward the fringes of Downtown.

Mr. Peduto said he envisions a circular route pattern using wider streets toward the edges of Downtown rather than having buses coming from four different directions and turning around in the middle of town.

Mr. Fitzgerald reiterated Tuesday that planning for such a change is in its very early stages.

"There are some discussions about how to put a plan together but there is no plan," he said. "There will be public participation, absolutely. I think people are getting the wrong idea that this is going to happen imminently and they’ll have no input."

Pittsburghers for Public Transit, which says it has nearly 6,000 supporters who have signed up for email and phone alerts about transit issues, said in an email that "precedence should not be given to the few businesses that have called for removal of bus stops in front of their establishments, when the greater good of the entire community should be our first public priority."

Continue reading The Class and Racial Politics of Bus Stops in Downtown Pittsburgh →