Community, Infrastructure, trade unions, Youth and students

Occupy Pittsburgh and Transit Union Join Forces vs. Cuts

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Protesters Demand More Public Transit Funding

By Noah Brode
Essential Public Radio

April 4, 2012 – Several dozen protesters gathered outside the City-County Building in downtown Pittsburgh Wednesday to decry proposed public transit cuts.

Occupy Pittsburgh and the local Amalgamated Transit Union teamed up to demand that the state provide more funding to the Port Authority of Allegheny County. PAT is facing a $64 million budget deficit, and plans for a 35% service cut to take effect this September.

ATU Local 85 President Patrick McMahon said Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett must take action to fund public transit.

“After the public hearings for the next round of service cuts, our governor made some comments about our contract, and he was going to ‘wait and see’ what happens before he does anything with transit,” said McMahon. “We should not be waiting to see. I wrote a letter to him asking him to get involved.”

Continue reading Occupy Pittsburgh and Transit Union Join Forces vs. Cuts →

Afghanistan, antiwar, Militarism

Where Can We Find a Congressman to Speak for the Antiwar Majority?

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CNN Poll: Afghan War Support Hits New Low

Beaver County Peace Links via CNN Political Unit

(CNN, April 2) – Support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low with the majority of Americans saying the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan before the 2014 deadline set by the Obama administration, according to a new poll.

The CNN/ORC International survey released Friday indicated only 25% of Americans favored the war in the Asian country. A majority of Republicans voiced opposition to it, for the first time since the war began in 2001.

Just 37% of the general public said things are going well for the U.S. in Afghanistan, while only 34% said America is winning the war. The approval likely contributed to the 55% of those surveyed who said the U.S. should remove all of its troops from the country before 2014.

Twenty-two percent expressed support for the 2014 timetable and an additional 22% said the U.S. should keep some troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Leaders at the Pentagon have recently responded to low poll numbers by stressing the importance of fighting the war on the ground.

Continue reading Where Can We Find a Congressman to Speak for the Antiwar Majority? →

elections

Area Municipalities Sue State to Overturn Zoning Gift to Gas Drillers

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Homes burned by 1000 foot wall of fire from gas line explosion in San Bruno, CA

by Randy Shannon

March 30, 2012

Led by Robinson Township, numerous municipalities, officials, and individuals have filed suit in the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania for a Declaratory Judgment against Act 13 of 2012.

Passed with overwhelming Republican support and signed by Governor Corbett, the law was written by the gas drilling industry. The premise of the law is that the right of corporations to fully exploit all of the gas deposit in the Marcellus shale takes precedent over the lives, property, communities, and other business interests in Pennsylvania.

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elections

Labor-Civil Rights-Voting Rights Candlelight Vigil April 4th

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by Randy Shannon

March 29, 2012

A candlelight vigil will be held at 7pm at the Beaver County Courthouse on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The vigil will focus on the new Pennsylvania Law that restricts access to the polls and is expected to disenfranchise over 200,000 Pennsylvania voters. The law is an attack on the democratic right to vote under the pretext that voter fraud is taking place. There have been no cases of voter fraud brought in PA. Republican lawmakers approved the law over Democratic opposition.

The vigil is sponsored by the Beaver-Lawrence AFL-CIO, SEIU Local 668, USW, and Beaver County NAACP. Speakers will include representatives of local labor unions, civil rights, and community groups, as well as local political leaders.

The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to ask for an injunction to prevent the law from influencing the 2012 election. Most voters who will be denied the ballot usually vote for Democratic candidates.  An ACLU spokesperson will address the vigil.

A limited supply of candles will be available at the vigil.

health care, Manufacturing, Steelworkers, trade unions

Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care

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Ten Steelworkers, Five Justices, and the Commerce Clause

By Amy Davidson
The New Yorker

If there had been Twitter, instead of news tickers, in February, 1937, reporters and other observers would have been using it to follow the arguments before the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

It was the central case of five, argued in one extraordinary round, which challenged the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.

The J. & L. dispute involved ten steelworkers who had been fired from the company’s Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, mills for trying to organize a union. As with this week’s hearings on the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, those deliberations were being watched with an anxiety that extended well beyond any concern for the protagonists in the suit, or even the law in question, to an entire vision of government.

Jones & Laughlin and its companion cases involved the Commerce Clause, the constitutional conductor for a whole orchestra of New Deal programs and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s more urgent efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression. (It gives Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”) The post-1937 conception of the Commerce clause has, as Jeffrey Toobin noted yesterday, become an assumed part of any number of government efforts today; it is the defense for challenges to the individual mandate but also to other aspects of the A.C.A., like provisions protecting people with preëxisting conditions.

Continue reading Aliquippa’s 1937 J&L Workers Come Up In Supreme Court Wrangling Once Again—This Time Over Health Care →

elections

Budget For Wall Street vs Budget For Main Street

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John Nichols

A Budget For Wall Street Versus A Budget For Main Street

John Nichols on March 28, 2012 – 11:27 AM ET

The U.S. House of Represenatives will weigh in Thursday on the direction the country should take regarding budget priorities.

At the most interesting ends of the debate, the choice will be stark: A Budget for Wall Street versus a Budget for All.

Most Americans know that House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is presenting the former option. The Wisconsin Republican has a history of crafting budgets that deliver for Wall Street. And he makes no great apology for that.

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elections

Trumka Calls on Pa. Unions to Support Obama

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AFL-CIO Pres. Rich Trumka addresses PA AFL-CIO Convention

Trumka calls on Pa. unions to support Obama

March 27, 2012|Jane M. Von Bergen INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

While acknowledging the “ups and downs we’ve had over the past three years,” the national head of the U.S. labor movement called on Pennsylvania union members Tuesday to mobilize to keep President Obama in office.

“President Obama stands on our side,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told hundreds of AFL-CIO union delegates gathered at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown in Philadelphia at the start of the Pennsylvania Federation of the AFL-CIO’s three-day convention.

Much of the convention will consist of union administrative business, heavily underscored with politics. But on Thursday, the AFL-CIO will also unveil a new effort to connect start-up companies with union workers before sending delegates to attend a noon rally in support of a drive to unionize 3,000 security guards working in Philadelphia’s office towers and major institutions including the University of Pennsylvania.

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elections

Judge Upholds Forest Service Protection of Water in Allegheny National Forest

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Erie federal judge rejects oil and gas industry motion

A Forest Service ban that keeps Marcellus shale drillers from using surface or groundwater from the Allegheny National Forest stands after a federal judge refused to overturn it.

In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Sean McLaughlin said a long-running, three-sided dispute involving the oil and gas industry, the federal agency and environmental groups has not addressed water rights.

Specifically, the judge said his 2009 preliminary injunction ordering the Forest Service to resume processing drilling proposals in the forest and an earlier 1980 federal court decision confirmed only that, under Pennsylvania law, the federal government and other surface property owners can`t block mineral owners` access to the minerals. The decisions don`t address water rights.

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2012 Election, African-Americans, Racism, Right Wing, Violence

Tragedies, Crimes and Trayvon Martin

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How Newt Played the ‘Race Card’ Against Obama’s Decency

By Carl Davidson
United Steel Workers Blog

Every so often an outrage happens that lights up the sky, like when lighting strikes at night, and all of a sudden everything previously hidden in darkness and shadow stands out in sharp, bright relief.

The murder of Trayvon Martin was such an event, even though it took a while for the rolling thunder of its full impact to spread across the country. Slowly at first, and then in greater leaps, the news media, after being nudged, picked it up.

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elections

April 4th Vigil at Beaver Courthouse by AFL-CIO & NAACP

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CANDLELIGHT VIGIL FOR

WORKERS’ RIGHTS AND FOR

HUMAN RIGHTS

VOICE YOUR OPPOSITION TO THE VOTER SUPPRESSION LAW

April 4, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Beaver County Courthouse

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.,

January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968

Sponsored by: Beaver-Lawrence Central Labor Council, SEIU Local 668, Beaver County NAACP

Endorsed by: 12th CD Chapter Progressive Democrats of America