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Category Archives: Community
‘We Are One—And Ready to Fight Back!’
Beaver County Union and Community Activists
Hold April 4th Solidarity Rally at Courthouse
By Carl Davidson and Tina Shannon
Beaver County Blue
Even though thunderstorms and downpours had swept through Beaver County all afternoon, close to 200 concerned citizens showed up for a candlelight vigil in front of the Beaver County Courthouse on Monday evening.
"Are you fired up?" shouted Roni Hamiel of SEIU Local 668 headquarters in Harrisburg, "Are you sick of this mess? The rich are getting richer and we’re struggling every day, barely getting by. We want fairness, we want our bargaining rights, and we want a decent future."
Photo: Commissioner Joe Spanik at Vigil
Local members of SEIU 668 spearheaded the vigil, with others joining in to organize a broadly supported event. Throughout PA, events scheduled around the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination were organized by CLEAR (Coalition for Labor Engagement and Accountable Revenues). CLEAR is a coalition of public and private sector unions involved in protecting labor rights and public services from impending budget cuts.
"We are standing beside you in solidarity," said Willie Sallis, president of the Beaver County NAACP, from the podium. "Not behind you, but beside you. We are partners in this struggle."
Fighting for Our Future & Honoring Martin Luther King With Solidarity
April 4 ‘We Are One’ Events:
Uniting Labor and Community
For an Upsurge in Class War
By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
Working-class solidarity actions involving thousands of workers were among the lead news items in the headlines in nearly 1200 cities and town around the country over the April 4 weekend. The Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Eastern Ohio ‘rust belt’ region was no exception.
The occasion commemorated the anniversary of the April 4, 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his effort to help striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee win union recognition. The entire U.S. labor movement seized the time to organize public protest against the outrageous rightwing attacks on worker rights in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. The AFL-CIO knows full well that more attacks are coming, and its ‘We Are One’ campaign for the day was a grassroots dress rehearsal and consciousness-raising effort to prepare both its troops and its community-based allies for more battles to come.
“We are one! We are one!’ and ‘What’s Disgusting? Union busting!’ were among the chants echoing off the concrete and glass walls of downtown Pittsburgh. Somewhere between 500 and 1000 marchers waved V-signs at passersby in cars and buses–but more often than in a long time, one saw a sea of the more militant clenched fist salutes as well. As usual, different contingents of workers wore their color coded T-Shirts for the day-camouflage for the UMWA, dark blue for the Steelworkers, red for Unite Here! hotel workers, and purple for SEIU service workers.
USW President Leo Gerard fired people up at the first stop, the Equitable Gas headquarters. “These rich bastards aren’t paying any taxes and sending the bills to us and giving themselves record-breaking bonuses. If tax cuts created jobs, Bush would have left office with full employment. The speculators gamble with our money and want us to cover their losses. Well, when they come around again, they can kiss my ass.”
The crowd loved it. “What do you think, why are you here?” I asked Pamela Maclin, a woman worker standing near Leo, “We fought and died for our union rights, our civil rights. We’re taking a stand; they’re not going to take them away.”
Continue reading Fighting for Our Future & Honoring Martin Luther King With Solidarity
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.
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
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
Slide Show on How ‘Fracking’ Pollutes the Beaver River, Endangering Our Water
Foam on the Beaver River indicating pollutants. To start slide show, click HERE
Beaver County Solidarity in Hard Times
Hot soup in Aliquippa
Growing Demand in Western PA’s
Food Pantries and Soup Kitchens
By Patti Conley
Beaver County Times
Dec. 11, 2010 – Seven days a week, anyone who is hungry can sit down at a soup kitchen somewhere in Beaver County. No questions asked.
A community schedule of meals, available online at http://www.bccan.org., lists the times when the 15 meals are available in churches from Beaver Falls to Aliquippa.
Such soup kitchens became a staple in the region 25 years ago when the steel industry stopped nourishing the area’s economy. Since then, soup kitchens and food pantries have filled food gaps for the chronically poor who are without jobs, benefits and money, and for those whose Social Security, disability and welfare benefits don’t stretch through the end of each month.
That was until recent months, when soup kitchen and food pantry staff said they began to see new faces at their tables and new names on food pantry applications, which are governed by income guidelines.
The nation’s rocky economy has delivered a direct blow to some middle-class Joes and Janes here in the Beaver Valley. An increase in local food pantry recipients brings home that point.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 