All posts by carldavidson

antiwar, trade unions, unemployment

Huge Attendance at Rally in DC for Jobs, Justice, Education and Peace

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‘One Nation’ March Shows the Tough Fight

Ahead for the Emerging Progressive Majority

By Carl Davidson

Beaver County Blue

If you wanted to know what a dynamic and emerging progressive majority of Americans looked like, the place to be was the National Mall at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on the beautiful and sunny Saturday afternoon of Oct. 2, 2010.

It was a sight to behold. Pulled together by the ‘One Nation Working Together’ coalition of some 400 groups, an estimated 175,000 people filled the area. They were the country’s trade unions, civil rights, women’s rights, and community organizations, peace and justice groups, and many more. The focus was jobs, justice and education, with sizable contingents against the wars as well.

“I hope they look at the mall today,” stated the Rev. Al Sharpton from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, referring to the GOP and the Tea Party right, “because this is what America looks like, not just one color or one gender.”

A rainbow of nationalities, men and women, young and old, and with a solid core from all sectors of the working class filled the area. The crowd’s mood was upbeat and militant, and they let it be known with a range of voices, from old-fashioned liberals to the socialist left, that they were fed up with the right wing assaults from Tea Party, the GOP neoliberals and the Blue Dog Democrats going along with them.

“This gathering is a wakeup call for the American people,” declared Harry Belafonte, in one of the strongest and most critical speeches of the day. “”Do we really believe that sending 100,000 troops to kill innocent men and women in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes any sense?” he continued, clearly and sharply criticizing Obama’s concession to the war machine. The actor-singer went on to attack the “crippling poison of racism” and “the undermining of the Constitution and the systematic attack on our most inalienable rights….At the heart of this danger is the Tea Party which is coming close to achieving its villainous ends. On November 2, in the millions, we must overburden our voting booths, and vote against those who would have us become a totalitarian state.”

Continue reading Huge Attendance at Rally in DC for Jobs, Justice, Education and Peace →

Economy, unemployment

The Unemployed Are Beginning to Get Organized

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Can The Jobless Become A Political Force?

 

From Huffington Post

Sept 22, 2010

Labor activists are hoping the nation’s nearly 15 million unemployed can be a political force in the upcoming midterm elections.

“We’re convinced that the jobless, the unemployed, are the swing vote of the 2010 midterms and if they know who their tormentors are, they will swing really hard left,” said Rick Sloan in an interview with HuffPost. To that end, Sloan, who is a spokesman for the International Association of Machinists, started a “Union of Unemployed” with a website that he says gets 35,000 visitors a month. He created a web ad and is organizing a pre-rally for unemployed folks before the One Nation Working Together rally on Oct. 2.

“These folks are registered and, for a great number of them they were the surge voters of 2008,” he said. “They were younger, they were black, they were Latino, they were blue-collar without high school, and they were college educated. That’s what the demographics of the Obama surge vote looked like. And they have suffered disproportionately in this recession.”

Continue reading The Unemployed Are Beginning to Get Organized →

antiwar, Community, health care, unemployment

Beaver County’s Big Knob Fair Meets the Peace and Jobs Movement

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Lessons Learned at the

Big Knob Grange Fair

 

By Randy Shannon and Carl Davidson

Beaver County Blue

The Big Knob Grange Fair, held Aug. 30 through Sept. 4 up in the lovely rolling hills above Rochester, PA, a distressed mill town at the confluence of the Beaver and Ohio rivers, is a “big doin’s’ in Beaver County, and has been for 70 years or so.

It features blue grass and country rock bands, tractor and truck ‘pulls,’ a demolition derby, dozens of rides for kids, booths for local politicians, hunting clubs, garden clubs, home improvement vendors, and local artisans. The Grange members serve delicious home-cooked food, display prize-winning livestock, fowl, and garden produce. The oldest and the latest in farm equipment are also on display. In recent years, the Fair draws from 30,000 to 40,000 semi-rural farmers and blue-collar workers with their families, and a horde of young people, and this year, with glorious weather, was no different.

This year the Fair had a new feature co-sponsored by Beaver County Peace Links and the 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America. Near the middle of the big striped circus tent was a table with a large banner hanging behind it: ‘War Is Making You Poor!’ Many of the hundreds of passersby on any one of the five days stopped and did a double take. Some ambled on, but a good number stayed to chat and see what it was all about.

“We were there every day from 4pm until 10pm,” said Randy Shannon, treasurer of the 4th CD Progressive Democrats of America. “People start flowing in after work. In addition to our banner, there was a giant 4ft x 5ft poster showing that Beaver County taxpayers have shelled out $54 million per year for the last ten years for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is almost the same amount as the county’s annual general fund tax collections.”

Carl Davidson explained his contribution: “We set up an internet connection with a cell phone. With a monitor and a laptop I showed some antiwar videos picked by Beaver County Peace Links, including a looping video of an apple pie being divided like the US budget. The military got half the pie.”

Todd and Emily Davis made a unique contribution to the table. Todd, a Methodist pastor, is the chairperson of Peace Links. They labeled 10 jars with the main categories of the federal budget. They were arrayed in front of a small backdrop that read: ‘Take the penny poll: how would YOU spend your tax dollars.’

Continue reading Beaver County’s Big Knob Fair Meets the Peace and Jobs Movement →

Economy, Environment

The Truth Is Coming Out On the Need to Regulate Gas Drilling

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‘Gasland’ Film Sweeping Pennsylvania

‘A force to be reckoned with’

 

Sunday, September 05, 2010

News from Cumberland, Harrisburg, York

The movie “Gasland” — about the environmental hazards of drilling and “fracking” shale for natural gas — has become a national sensation.

The documentary has aired repeatedly on HBO in recent months. Critics, including some Pennsylvania government officials, say it’s a piece of propaganda riddled with inaccuracies. Fans say it opened their eyes to what really happens when drillers come to town.

Either way, it has become a force to be reckoned with in the ongoing political debate over Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. The film will be shown outdoors Tuesday in Reservoir Park.

Director Josh Fox is a native of Wayne County, and much of the film focuses on Pennsylvania problems and policies. In an interview last week, Fox spoke about the film’s impact.

Continue reading The Truth Is Coming Out On the Need to Regulate Gas Drilling →

antiwar, Economy

We Need Jobs, Not War – For Real

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Obama on Iraq’s ‘Ending’:

A Speech for Endless War

September 6, 2010

By Norman Solomon

Beaver County Peace Links via Z-Net 

On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war.

Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Iraq.” The first sentence of the coverage described the speech as saying “that it is now time to turn to pressing problems at home.” The story went on to assert that Obama “used the moment to emphasize that he sees his primary job as addressing the weak economy and other domestic issues — and to make clear that he intends to begin disengaging from the war in Afghanistan next summer.”

But the speech gave no real indication of a shift in priorities from making war to creating jobs. And the oratory “made clear” only the repetition of vague vows to “begin” disengaging from the Afghanistan war next summer. In fact, top administration officials have been signaling that only token military withdrawals are apt to occur in mid-2011, and Obama said nothing to the contrary.

While now trumpeting the nobility of an Iraq war effort that he’d initially disparaged as “dumb,” Barack Obama is polishing a halo over the Afghanistan war, which he touts as very smart. In the process, the Oval Office speech declared that every U.S. war — no matter how mendacious or horrific — is worthy of veneration.

Continue reading We Need Jobs, Not War – For Real →

Banks, Right Wing

Tea Party: Pawns in the Bankster Game

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[Note from Editor: With the caveat that people vote BOTH on facts and emotions, this is a fairly good analysis on the topic]

5 Ways the Tea Party Agenda

Screws Tea Party Supporters

By Adele M. Stan
AlterNet,September 4, 2010
If people could be counted on to vote in their own best interests, there would be no Tea Party movement, for if the economic agenda embraced by Tea Partiers — a vastly pro-corporation, government-killing plan — Tea Partiers would find themselves among the people most hurt by it.

To hear Tea Party activists tell it, they seek to save future generations from the crushing demands of big government. Yet the agenda they advocate, dictated by the big-money players behind the muscular interest groups that keep the movement growing, will likely render the Tea Partiers themselves the economically squeezed subjects of a corporate state, one in which the elderly will be left to scrounge for crumbs, small businesses will be crushed by lack of capital, and their own ground-level online organizing supplanted by the networks built by giant, corporate-funded astroturf groups.

As George Lakoff and Drew Westen remind us, people don’t vote on the facts: they vote on emotion, according to Westen, and their notion of morality, according to Lakoff. The resentment of Tea Partiers toward liberals, East Coast elites, the poor and people who don’t look like them has been effectively marshaled in service of a “free market” ideology cleverly packaged as “freedom.” Never mind that free markets are anything but free for ordinary people. The packaging strikes the necessary emotional and moral chords: Free markets = freedom = liberty = endowed by the Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence by the founders. It’s the perfect exploitation of the worldview of conservative middle-class white people — all in the service of enriching the super-rich at the expense of their unwitting, patriotic ground troops.

Continue reading Tea Party: Pawns in the Bankster Game →

Economy, social security

Message to Altmire: Cutting Social Security Is Both Dishonest and Whacko

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Simpson’s ‘Tits’ Are the Least of It

 

By Robert Kuttner

Beaver County Blue via The American Prospect

When you think about it, Alan (“Tits”) Simpson is the ideal jester to deflect attention from the bigger joke — the fiscal reform commission itself. The problem is less Simpson’s dopey comments and more the idiocy of the rest of the commission.

Given what is happening to the real economy in the real world, the prospect of a double-dip recession and the prospect of a lost decade of high unemployment, the idea that the bigger menace is Social Security is just whacko. Let’s recall that Social Security is in surplus until 2037!

Yet the idea that the road to recovery leads though cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and other social outlays that are keeping the depression from worsening, if anything, is gaining traction among opinion elites.

Continue reading Message to Altmire: Cutting Social Security Is Both Dishonest and Whacko →

Economy, labor, Right Wing

Grab the Pitchforks, It’s the Workers and the Unemployed vs. Glen Beck, the GOP and the Banksters

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USW Pres. Leo Gerard

Jobless Organize to Remove

Republican Royalists From Their Jobs

By Leo Gerard
President, United Steel Workers

Aug. 25, 201 – Glenn Beck made it official on Fox News last week: He’s seeking the office of 21st Century Marie Antoinette.

The queen of France, beheaded during the revolution, attained infamy for insensitivity toward hungry peasants. Glenn Beck, the Fox talk show host, achieved celebrity for his callousness toward unemployed Americans.

Beck leads a pack of royalist Republicans who have spent the summer mocking, vilifying and denigrating the nation’s 14.5 million unemployed workers. It is the moneyed class smacking down the working class in an attempt to disempower and disenfranchise them. Dispirited workers are less likely to vote – which could give Beck and his gang of royalist Republicans control of Congress.

The unemployed, like France’s 18th Century peasants, are fighting back, however. The Union of the Unemployed and Working America are organizing the jobless to vote this fall and to demand help from lawmakers. They’re not out to behead Beck and the royalist Republicans, just dethrone them.

Continue reading Grab the Pitchforks, It’s the Workers and the Unemployed vs. Glen Beck, the GOP and the Banksters →

Economy, Environment, labor

UAW Joins with Steelworkers on Green Jobs Bus Tour, Arrives in Pittsburgh Aug. 30

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Auto Union Joins Labor,

Green Groups on Climate Bill Push

By Ben Geman

Beaver County Blue via TheHill.com

08/23/10 – The United Auto Workers is the latest union to join the BlueGreen Alliance, which unites labor and environmental groups pushing for greenhouse gas limits and other policies to create “green” jobs.
The UAW — also known as the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — claims to have more than 390,000 active members.

“UAW members produce best-in-class cars and trucks, key vehicle components, and top quality heavy-duty trucks, and we know that we can rebuild the American auto industry by building cleaner, more efficient vehicles — and developing the technologies that will get us there,” UAW President Bob King said in a statement Monday about joining the BlueGreen Alliance.

“We have enormous opportunities to revitalize this industry, and the American economy, by embracing the clean energy economy of the future,” he said.

Continue reading UAW Joins with Steelworkers on Green Jobs Bus Tour, Arrives in Pittsburgh Aug. 30 →

Economy, labor, Right Wing

Unemployment Problem Solved Dept: Tea Party Candidate Wants to Bring Back ‘The Poor House’ and Expand Prison Jobs

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Oliver Twist Asks for ‘More’

Tea Party Candidate Says Move The Poor To Prison

From The Raw Story and the AP

via Beaver County Blue

[ Note from John Leonard: When I was growing up for many years, Pleasant Drive in Potter Twp. Beaver Co.  Pa was  called Poorhouse Run Road because the Poorhouse was located on what is now the property of Horse Head Industries.   Looks like some Republicans want to resurrect some bad parts of history.  Their families should be the first to enter into the new ideas they seek. ]

If elected governor of New York, Tea Party Republican Carl Paladino wouldn’t criminalize being poor, per se.  That would be unconstitional.  He’d just rather see them “voluntarily” move into state prisons where they could work on improving, among other things, their “personal hygiene”.

Paladino is competing for the Republican nomination with former U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio.  The primary is Sept. 14th and Paladino has campaigned hard to the right of Lazio.  He’s routinely argued that New York’s social services encourage illegal immigrants and the poor to come to live in New York. 

According to Paladino his poor-to-prison plan is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that paid young unemployed men during the Great Depression to plant trees, build roads and develop parks.  Paladino’s program would be open to long-term welfare recipients and to people who had lost their jobs during the recession. 
Paladino is proposing to consolidate prison facilities and using the vacant ones into dormitory style housing where they could work for the state in some military or public works capacity in exchange for a receipt of benefits.

Continue reading Unemployment Problem Solved Dept: Tea Party Candidate Wants to Bring Back ‘The Poor House’ and Expand Prison Jobs →