‘We Shall All Be Free!’
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Toxic Spill in Tioga County: A Note to Rep. Jim Christiana, Who Argues That It Never Happens
PA ‘Fracking’ Blowout Spews Marcellus Shale Fluid onto State Forest Lands
Talisman Energy may face heavy penalties
Photo: Typical PA Gas Drilling Site
By G. Jeffrey Aaron
Jan25, 2011- Talisman Energy has resumed its Marcellus drilling operations in Pennsylvania, a week after one of the company’s gas wells experienced a blowout that caused an uncontrolled discharge of sand and fracking fluids onto state forest lands in Tioga County.
As a result of the incident, Talisman shut down all of its hydraulic fracturing operations in North America while it conducted an internal investigation into the cause of the Jan. 17 blowout. Those operations have since resumed, with Talisman’s Pennsylvania drilling program being the last to be brought back online.
Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has requested Talisman provide answers to nine questions related to the blowout as part of its investigation into the incident. The investigation could result in civil penalties levied against Talisman.
The well where the blowout occurred is on Pennsylvania State Forest lands in Ward Township, about nine miles southeast of Mansfield.
Power of Egypt’s Workers Moves To Center Stage
Egyptian Workers Hold Key to Uprising, New Union Association Issues Call for General Strike
By: Jeff Kaye
Beaver County Blue via Fire Dog Lake
While much analysis has focused on the youth-social network driven aspects of the recent uprising in Egypt, or on diplomatic and political maneuvers that thus far have left President Mubarak in office, and given even more power to the state repressive apparatus through the appointment of Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to the Vice Presidency, it is the Egyptian working class that holds the future of its country in its hands.
While the organized workers movement saw its unions gutted by state privatization and the gutting of union independence though the hated Law No. 100, which guaranteed that union representation would be strongly controlled by the state, recent events, particularly in strategic Suez, have shown that when the social weight of the workers is thrown into the balance, even all the machinations of Hillary Clinton’s State Department will not be able to patch together Mubarak’s state apparatus. The question then will be, what will follow it?
Continue reading Power of Egypt’s Workers Moves To Center Stage
Why Not Public Banks of Our Own? The North Dakota Model
Washington State Joins the Movement for Public Banking
The legislature will consider whether to move its funds from Bank of America to a publicly owned bank that would keep the state’s money working locally.
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Strawberries at a farmer’s market in Yakima, WA. The state’s proposed creation of a Washington Investment Trust would help support the local economy. Photo by Jay Cox.
By Ellen Brown
Beaver County Blue via Yes! Magazine
Jan. 24, 2011 – Bills were introduced on January 18 in both the House and Senate of the Washington State Legislature that add Washington to the growing number of states now actively moving to create public banking facilities.
The bills, House Bill 1320 and Senate Bill 5238, propose creation of a Washington Investment Trust (WIT) to “promote agriculture, education, community development, economic development, housing, and industry” by using “the resources of the people of Washington State within the state.”
Currently, all the state’s funds are deposited with Bank of America. HB 1320 proposes that, in the future, “all state funds be deposited in the Washington Investment Trust and be guaranteed by the state and used to promote the common good and public benefit of all the people and their businesses within [the] state.”
Continue reading Why Not Public Banks of Our Own? The North Dakota Model
Solidarity with the Workers and Youth of Egypt!
What Happens When people are Denied Jobs, Denied Democracy and Denied Hope for 30 years…
PA Progressives Plan for New Battles
Pennsylvania Progressive Summit 2011:
Rebuilding Alliances, Shaping New Messages
Keynote speakers, Leo Gerard and Jess Jackson
By Carl Davidson
Nearly 500 progressive and liberal organizers gathered at Pittsburgh’s Sheraton Station Square over the sunny but bitterly cold weekend of Jan. 22-23 to drawn out the lessons of their setbacks in the 2010 elections and shape a new course for the future.
Under the theme of ‘Taking Pennsylvania Forward,’ the two-day meeting was mainly pulled together by four ‘Organizing Sponsors’—Keystone Progress, a popular online communications hub for the state; SEIU, representing some 100,000 PA workers; the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition between the United Steelworkers and advocates for new manufacturing enterprises; and Democracy for America, the outgrowth of the Howard Dean campaign in the Democratic Party.
A large number of unions other than the USW and SEIU also took part, as well as many local political, civil rights, women’s rights, youth and environmental groups from around the state. Beaver County was represented by a delegation from the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America.
Aliquippa’s Harsh Realities Featured in Story of the Hope and Vision of its Athletes
Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis visiting his hometown, Aliquippa, Pa.
The Heart Of Football Beats In Aliquippa
Over five decades of economic decline and racial conflict, a Western Pennsylvania mill town has found unity and hope on the football field
By S.L. Price
Sports llustrated’s ‘Vault’
Jan 31, 2011 Issue – The fear came for Willie Walker that November. He was not expecting it. Evening had dropped early and hard, as it does in Western Pennsylvania in the fall, but these were streets he had known forever. Hours had passed since the 2004 regional championship game had ended down in Pittsburgh; the adrenaline and bravado on the ride home had long since burned off, replaced by grief, then mere regret. They had lost. The Aliquippa High football team, for all its history of success, had been beaten. Now, in the backseat, Walker felt a numbness settling in. Losing happens. You move on. You start thinking about what’s next.
Walker was a senior. Just seven months until graduation, and he’d be able to say it: He had survived. The town hadn’t killed, hadn’t crippled, hadn’t defeated him, though God knows it had tried. His life had been a cliché of criminal pathology: father long dead, mother struggling with crack addiction, days of hunger, corners promising casual violence. Aliquippa’s streets are, as one of Walker’s coaches put it, "a spiderweb" capable of ensnaring the most innocent, and though Walker never lost sight of his prize—college somewhere, anywhere—he was hardly innocent. No, for a time he had leaped into the web, daring it to grab hold.
Take the Rag Away From Your Face Dept: Triggers Today Are Being Pulled by the Right
Right-Wing Terrorism:
Murders Grow on the Far Right
Four Decades After
Martin Luther King Jr.
By Stephan Salisbury
Progressive America Rising via Tomdispatch.com
Jan. 16, 2011
The landscape of America is littered with bodies.
They’ve been gunned down in Tucson, shot to death at the Pentagon, and blown away at the Holocaust Museum, as well as in Wichita, Knoxville, Pittsburgh, Brockton, and Okaloosa County, Florida.
Total body count for these incidents: 19 dead, 26 wounded.
Not much, you might say, when taken in the context of about 30,000 gun-related deaths annually nationwide. As it happens, though, these murders over the past couple of years have some common threads. All involved white gunmen with ties to racist or right-wing groups or who harbored deep suspicions of “the government.” Many involved the killing of police officers.
In Pittsburgh, three police officers were shot and killed, while two were wounded in an April 2009 gun battle with Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist fearful that President Obama planned to curtail his gun rights. In Okaloosa County, Florida, two officers were slain in April 2009 in an altercation with Joshua Cartwright, whose abused wife told the police that her husband “believed that the U.S. Government was conspiring against him” and that he was “severely disturbed that Barack Obama had been elected President.”
Continue reading Take the Rag Away From Your Face Dept: Triggers Today Are Being Pulled by the Right
Getting Behind HR 5204, the Conyers ‘Jobs for All’ Bill
Legislation for Our Time:
The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act
Join PDA’s Economic and Social Justice Issue Organizing Team (IOT) to Campaign for It; Learn More Here.
By Bill Barclay
Beaver County Blue via ChicagoDSA.org.
Jan. 15, 2011
In May 2010, Rep John Conyers introduced a bill entitled "The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act." The bill was little noticed at the time but, today, after another 7 months of dismal jobs reports—we have actually lost ground during 2010, creating fewer jobs than the growth of the labor force—there is renewed interest in this legislation by a range of progressive groups.
The DSA NPC has made mobilization around the Act a national priority; Progressive Democrats of America is developing a similar effort, as are both the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and the National Jobs for All Coalition . What follows is a summary of the major elements of the Act and why it is one that anyone concerned about the economy should support.
The 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act includes (i) funding for jobs; (ii) allocation of monies raised by the funding mechanism; (iii) job creation targets (who and what types of jobs); (iv) mechanisms for implementing the Act; and (v) a definition of the economic situations under which the Act would come into effect. I will take these topics one at a time. I will also briefly suggest what a political mobilization effort around the Act could look like.
Continue reading Getting Behind HR 5204, the Conyers ‘Jobs for All’ Bill
Violence in Politics: Right Wing Tries to Hide from Its Own Demagogy
Rights Come with Responsibilities:
The Right Shirks Theirs
Leo W. Gerard
International President, United Steelworkers
Beaver County Blue via Huffington Post
Five years ago, a 47-year-old Missouri woman began a duplicitous on-line courtship through MySpace with a 13-year-old neighbor who once had been friends with the woman’s daughter.
The adult, Lori Drew, flirted with the 13-year-old, Megan Meier, through the guise of a fictitious, 16-year-old character named Josh Evans. Suddenly, “Josh” broke up with Miss Meier, writing to her, “the world would be a better place without you.” Just hours later, Miss Meier hung herself in her bedroom.
Words have consequences.
Drew wasn’t charged with the child’s death. In fact, a judge reversed her conviction on computer fraud charges, saying the law was intended to deal with hacking, not murder. But for most Americans, there is something deeply disturbing, something morally, if not criminally, wrong with deliberate torment, with predatory viciousness. Drew eluded accountability the same way conservatives are seeking to evade culpability after their irresponsible speech may have provoked the delusional to violence.
It’s hard to draw a line directly from Drew’s cruel words to the noose around Miss Meier’s neck. Similarly, it’s difficult to directly link violent political rhetoric like Sarah Palin’s illustration showing gun sight cross hairs on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Arizona district to the shattering of Giffords’ office door after her vote for health insurance reform last March or Jared L. Loughner’s shooting spree last weekend that left six dead and Giffords and 13 others wounded.
What is clear, however, is that vile and threatening communication that becomes so repetitive that it’s routine has the effect of sanctioning an atmosphere of violence.
Continue reading Violence in Politics: Right Wing Tries to Hide from Its Own Demagogy
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 