Economy, Environment

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

Leave a comment

‘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

Leave a comment

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

Leave a comment

[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 →

elections

Vets Call On Obama To Fire Alan Simpson

1 Comment

Plan to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Veterans Benefits after Election

by Ryan Grim

ryan@huffingtonpost.com

A major veterans organization called on President Obama to remove Alan Simpson from the deficit commission for questioning why veterans are not “helping us to save the country” by foregoing health care benefits promised in return for their military service.

On Tuesday, Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming and currently the co-chair of a deficit commission looking into spending cuts, decried “the irony that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess.”

Simpson wants to cut the national debt by slashing benefits for veterans. VoteVets.org, which represents 50,000 veterans and family members, has had enough. The group’s chairman, Jon Soltz, said that veterans had been concerned by comments Simpson made disparaging Social Security, calling it “a milk cow with 310 million tits!” and suggesting that military pay be frozen.

The “final straw,” writes Soltz, was Simpson calling for veterans’ benefits to be cut.

Continue reading Vets Call On Obama To Fire Alan Simpson →

elections

Union Solidarity forces South Africa government back to negotiating table

Leave a comment

S.African unions in talks to end 15-day walkout

(AFP) – 8 hours ago

JOHANNESBURG — Striking South African public sector unions were locked in talks Wednesday over a fresh wage offer to urgently end a 15-day-walkout, though some had already rejected it, officials said.

Unions were to report back to members on the improved offer put on the table after President Jacob Zuma ordered his ministers to negotiate a solution to the stoppage that has paralysed schools and hospitals.

“I know for a fact that some of the unions have rejected the offer, that they will not sign at all,” said Chris Klopper, chairman of the Independent Labour Caucus, one of the labour umbrellas representing 1.3 million workers.

The government and unions were to meet again later Wednesday to discuss a way forward, but one of the biggest striking unions said it has refused the latest proposal.

“We have rejected the offer,” said Sizwe Pamla, spokesman for the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu), which has 244,000 members.

Continue reading Union Solidarity forces South Africa government back to negotiating table →

elections

Japan’s Lost Decades 1990-2010: The U.S. Sequel 2008-???

2 Comments

An Update on the US Economic Crisis

by Randy Shannon

Treasurer, PA 4th CD Chapter of Progressive Democrats of America

Rampant speculation, asset bubbles and corruption led to a crash of the Japanese economy in 1990. Like the U.S. government today, the government of Japan was controlled by the banks. The government of Japan liquidated the savings of the people of Japan, most of which were in Postal Savings accounts, to bail out the crooked banks. This bailout wrecked the economy and took ten years to overcome. The economy of Japan is still struggling at a very low growth rate.

The U.S. government bailed out the crooked banks with $13 trillion of debt that obligates future generations to a long term economic recession. The bankers oppose any measures that would require the U.S. government to increase its debt beyond the debt already incurred to rescue themselves.

Thus stimulus spending to get production and employment going is opposed or gutted with tax cuts. Businesses with debt that they are able to service are seeing their debt called by the banks, forcing the businesses into bankruptcy.  Infrastructure projects are not funded or underfunded while millions of construction workers are idle. Over 840 small and community banks are official “problem banks” facing foreclosure, not rescue. The Republican and Blue Dog Democrat neo-liberal majority is reluctant to extend unemployment benefits.

Continue reading Japan’s Lost Decades 1990-2010: The U.S. Sequel 2008-??? →

Economy, social security

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

Leave a comment

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 →

elections

Detroit Mass March for Jobs with UAW and Jesse Jackson

Leave a comment

detnews.com

UAW’s Bob King, Jesse Jackson lead Detroit

Aug. 28 March for Jobs, Peace and Justice

August 28, 2010
http://detnews.com/article/20100828/METRO/8280383


SANTIAGO ESPARZA
The Detroit News

Detroit — The chants of thousands of people demanding jobs filled the air downtown as UAW President Bob King and the Rev. Jesse Jackson led the crowd to Grand Circus Park.

The UAW and Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition announced the Rebuild America: Jobs Justice Peace kickoff today at the downtown park.

Jackson said the focus of the initiative is to ensure policy makers put people first when making decisions. The initiative calls for a moratorium on home foreclosures, a push for job creation and for ending armed conflicts overseas.

“Detroit and Michigan are ground zero of the urban crisis,” Jackson said. “It’s time to enact real change for working families and all America.”

About 30 percent of Detroit is unemployed, Jackson said. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., also said Detroit was chosen as the kickoff site for the campaign because it is at the heart of the nation’s economic fight.

Continue reading Detroit Mass March for Jobs with UAW and Jesse Jackson →