All posts by carldavidson
April 4 at the Courthouse: Worker’s Rights Vigil
‘Third Way’ Dems and the Road to Perdition
Why Any Deal to Cut Social Security,
Medicare or Medicaid Would be
a Moral, Economic and Political Disaster
By Robert Creamer
Huffington Post, March 28, 2011
Friday, the Democratic group Third Way published a memo arguing that Democrats should support "entitlement reform" — by which they mean cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I don’t doubt the sincerity or intentions of their proposal, but I believe that if Democrats took their advice it would result in a moral, economic and political disaster.
Here’s why:
The immorality of "entitlement reform." The very idea that seniors on Social Security — whose average income is $18,000 a year — should be asked to tighten their belts while the Federal Government still gives huge tax breaks to millionaires and subsidies to oil companies is just plain wrong.
The principle voices for "entitlement reform" are the multi-millionaires from Wall Street who argue that we need to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of a bargain to reduce the long-term federal deficit and give the "markets" confidence. Never mind that Social Security in particular does not contribute anything to the deficit and has in fact generated a $2.6 trillion surplus that was paid for by workers and employers through Social Security taxes. Never mind that the Wall Street gang clamoring for "entitlement reform" demanded extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for the oil companies, tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas and an end to the estate tax that only affects the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires.
Jobs not War: Kucinich Opposes Obama on Libya
Video: PDA in Madison – We Need Strong Organization Now More Than Ever, Time to Join Up!
From the Front Lines: Laura Flanders, Jim Hightower, and Dennis Kucinich Urge You to Support and Join PDA!
Kucinich as Firebrand in Madison: Economic Democracy is the Ground of Political Democracy!
Union-Busting: ‘An Attack on All Working People’
Steelworkers Denounce Wisconsin GOP Bill
Pittsburgh, March 11, 2011 – This statement was released this morning by the United Steelworkers (USW) on actions taken last evening by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican Senators.
In a clear violation of Wisconsin’s open meeting law, Wisconsin conservative senators yesterday voted without a quorum to strip the state’s public sector workers – teachers, nurses, and librarians – of collective bargaining rights that the people of Wisconsin granted them a half century ago.
United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard said this attack on the rights of Wisconsin’s public sector workers is an attack on all working people. “Although Wisconsin law requires a quorum when Senators vote to spend the people’s money, these conservatives exploited a loophole to vote without a quorum on legislation to steal workers’ rights. This is not democracy,” Gerard said.
“As illustrated by the surging crowd of protesters who filled the capitol building in Wisconsin after the undemocratic sneak-vote Wednesday, workers everywhere, whether public sector or private sector, union or unrepresented, will unite to win back their rights with their feet at protests and their votes at ballot boxes,” said Gerard, who leads North America’s largest industrial union, with 850,000 members, including steelworkers, paper workers, oil workers, rubber workers and public sector workers in the U.S. and Canada.
The conservative attack on workers in Wisconsin is far from isolated, Gerard said: “This is a nation-wide campaign by billionaires and country-club conservatives, to terminate workers’ rights, giving unfettered power to corporations.” So far in Wisconsin, conservatives have granted only government workers the right to freeload – the ability to benefit from collective bargaining without paying union dues. In nine other states, from Maine to Missouri, conservatives are pushing right to freeload legislation to cripple all unions.
“All this legislation is an attack on the middle class, which blossomed in this country as a result of collective bargaining victories during the middle of the last century. Middle class workers, whether Republican or Democrat, know they must repel this assault on their right to collectively bargain or be reduced to insecurity and poverty,” Gerard said.
The Right is Dangerous to Women’s Health
Dueling Rallies on Women’s Health
and Abortion at Altmire’s Office
By J.D. Prose
Beaver County Timesonline.com
ALIQUIPPA – Hopewell Township resident Danielle Houston was 22 and uninsured when she went to Planned Parenthood to take a pregnancy test.
The test was positive, Houston got health insurance and eventually had a son, and she’s grateful for the assistance she received from Planned Parenthood. "I felt that they weren’t judgmental," she said Tuesday in the parking lot of U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire’s Aliquippa district office.
Now, Houston is again without health insurance and she’s returned to Planned Parenthood for help. "It’s the only place I can get affordable checkups and birth control," she said.
March 8: Women’s Day Is About Equality and Autonomy
On Women’s Day, GOP Attacks Women
By Leo Gerard
USW International President
Beaver County Blue via Huffington Post
Not like Valentine’s Day, which is about love and chocolate, or Mother’s Day, which is about sentimentality and breakfast in bed, International Women’s Day is about equality and autonomy.
The first commemoration occurred on March 19, 1911, a time when most governments in the world, including the U.S. and Canada, barred women from voting and most employers refused to hire women, ghettoizing them in sweatshops.
Six days after that first international call to action for women, flames engulfed such a sweatshop, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, killing 146 workers, the vast majority of them young women aged 16 to 25, some of whom jumped to their deaths from the 9th floor rather than burn.
Women can vote now. They can hold most jobs, though not all, including combat positions in the U.S. military. And their pay is only 75 percent of men’s. So the struggle for equality and autonomy is not over. Yet the GOP is intent on setting women back. If the Republican governors across the country succeed in confiscating collective bargaining rights from public sector workers, women will be hurt most. Continue reading March 8: Women’s Day Is About Equality and Autonomy
The Short Course on the Marcellus Shale – But There’s Much More to Come
A Huge Fracking Mess
New York Times investigation uncovers lax regulations, radioactivity and serious concerns about water contamination.
By Andrew Schenkel
Beaver County Blue via MNN.Com Bloggers
Mon, Feb 28 2011
Fracking concerns FRACKED UP: A recent expose by the New York Times reveals all sorts of problems with the process for extracting natural gas. (Photo: ltmayers/Flickr)
The New York Times and reporter Ian Urbina dropped a serious bomb on the fracking industry over the weekend with the first installment of a series of reports entitled Drilling Down.
Urbina’s story is the first must-read of the year when it comes to energy and environmental reporting. It reveals all sorts of damning nuggets about fracking in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Colorado. I think anyone who cares about energy production should take a look. Here are a few highlights or, in this case, lowlights:
1. Radioactive material found in water
Wastewater is a major part of the fracking process. Millions of gallons of toxic water mixtures are necessary for the extraction of natural gas, and once the gas is extracted something has to be done with all that waste. The problem, according to the Times, is that the wastewater has been frequently found to contain amounts of radiation hundreds and sometimes thousands of times higher than what the federal government allows. This radioactive wastewater may be getting into drinking water because it is often hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and “discharged into rivers that supply drinking water.” That’s not good, even if you are a fan of the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons.
2. The EPA hasn’t done much
For everyone in Congress who has been clamoring to reduce the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Urbina piece reveals that the agency has been relatively powerless when it comes to fracking. The story alludes to several documents and interviews that “alarmed” EPA scientists, but were never made public. These findings included the revelation that many sewage treatment plants simply couldn’t remove the contaminants from the toxic fracking fluids. Perhaps even more damning is that scientists and consultants with the EPA have known about the radioactive problem since 2006 and have apparently not made much of an effort to call for testing for radioactivity. (The fracking boom began in 2008.) That’s not good, even if you are a fan of water that glows in the dark.
3. Concerns out West
Most of the Urbina story focused on Pennsylvania, which was described as “ground zero” for the fracking industry. While this is certainly true, the story did make some interesting and scary connections to the heavily fracked states of Colorado and Wyoming. As someone who has spent a few years in both states, I wasn’t surprised. But I was still disappointed to read, “In a sparsely populated Sublette County in Wyoming, which has some of the highest concentrations of wells, vapors reacting to sunlight have contributed to levels of ozone higher than those recorded in Houston and Los Angeles.” From my few trips to Sublette County, I can tell you that there isn’t much that it has in common with Los Angeles or Houston. The ozone connection is not a good one to make, even if you are a fan of awesome sunburns.
4. The natural gas industry doesn’t seem to care
While it’s easy to point to flaws in the regulatory process and within the EPA, let’s not ignore the industry that is doing this. I couldn’t help but notice that throughout the NY Times story, it seemed the industry not only knew about these serious concerns but kept operating despite them. An industry study going back to 1990 stated that “’using conservative assumptions,’ radium in drilling wastewater dumped off the Louisiana coast posed ‘potentially significant risks’ of cancer for people who eat fish from those waters regularly." This is of concern because radium may not just be getting into water in places like Pennsylvania, but also the food chain, as livestock is likely to ingest radium. Therefore anyone who eats that livestock may be exposed to the carcinogen. There are also several other instances of information that the industry was privy to in this report, followed by explanations of how they are not concerned. Perhaps most concerning of all is this statement that reveals how much regulators are depending on the very industry they are regulating for information. “’If we’re too hard on them,’ the inspector added, ‘the companies might just stop reporting their mistakes.’”
So there you have it — a few lowlights from a very depressing article. However, perhaps this is the beginning of getting energy right. You have to know what’s wrong before you can fix it. There’s certainly a lot wrong, but with accountability and transparency perhaps we can get it right. That’s a start.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 