Community, Environment, Green Energy

More Worries and Battles, Our Air as well as Our Water

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Three of Dirtiest Coal-Fired Plants

in Western Pa., one in Beaver County

By Don Hopey
Beaver County Blue via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Dec 8, 2011 – Three of the 10 dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the nation are located in Western Pennsylvania, according to a new report that also ranks the state first overall in emissions of toxic air pollutants like arsenic, chromium, hydrochloric acid, lead and mercury.

The report was issued Wednesday by the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice and the Sierra Club, and was based on the self-reported industry emissions in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 Toxics Release Inventory.

The report ranked Genon’s Shawville Power Plant in Clearfield County third dirtiest in the nation, followed by EME’s Homer City Power Plant in Indiana County (seventh) and FirstEnergy’s Bruce Mansfield Power Plant in Beaver County (ninth).

States ranking behind Pennsylvania for worst overall power plant emissions are, in order, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas. Pennsylvania is downwind from all but Texas.

Pennsylvania leads the nation in emissions of lead and arsenic, and has increased its arsenic emissions over the last decade, from 15,861 pounds in 2001 to 17,666 pounds in 2010.

The EPA proposed the first national standards to control toxic pollution from power plants — mainly mercury, fine particles, heavy metals and acid gases — in March 2011 but delayed promulgating them in September. The EPA is poised to adopt them later this month.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11342/1195455-455.stm#ixzz1fwvaLPQg

African-Americans, Economy, Poverty

Recession Hitting Local African-Americans Hard

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Housing equity has plummeted, taking families’ wealth with it

By Mark Roth
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Dec 5, 2011 – Joyce Davis began to see the change in Penn Hills after the recession hit.

Ms. Davis is executive director of the Lincoln Park Community Center, which runs a food pantry that serves about 150 families each month. About 90 percent of them are African-American.

Before the latest economic slump, said Ms. Davis, who is also head of the Penn Hills NAACP chapter, the pantry served only 90 to 100 families each month, and the main customers were elderly people and single mothers.

But in the last few years, she has seen more and more men who have either lost their jobs or can’t find work.

"They basically don’t have enough money to really take care of the needs of their families," she said. "I have had people come who have actually cried because they said ‘Before, I was making donations to the pantry, and now I need help from it.’ "

It doesn’t surprise her.

Continue reading Recession Hitting Local African-Americans Hard →

Steelworkers, trade unions, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

Do They Really Want ‘Specific Demands’ from the Occupiers?

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By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin’ On

I’m getting fed up with pompous pundits lecturing the ‘Occupy!’ movement for not having a set of specific demands.

A case in point: New York Time financial columnist Joe Nocera quoted at length in a story by Phoebe Mitchell in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on Nov 29.  He was speaking at the Amherst Political Union, a debate club at UMass Amherst.

Nocera starts off with the now usual tipping of the hat to the protestors:

“Nocera believes the anger caused by income inequality, a divisive issue across the country in this prolonged economic downturn, is the fuel for both popular uprisings. ‘If we lived in a country that had a growing economy and where the middle class felt that they could make a good living and had a chance for advancement and a decent life, there would be no tea party or Occupy Wall Street,’ he said.”

But we don’t live in such times, and the more interesting story is that OWS and its trade union allies are displacing the Tea Party, and energizing the progressive grassroots. Nocera, however, makes OWS the target.

“He believes that for the Occupy Movement to be successful, it must frame clear demands that outline a plan for creating jobs and refashioning Wall Street to benefit the entire country and not just a select few wealthy investors. Without a solid plan for moving forward, he said, the Occupy protestors will be continued to be viewed by Wall Street supporters as little more than “a gnat that needs to be flicked from its shoulder blades.”

A ‘gnat’ indeed. In due time, a progressive majority may well come to view our dubious ‘Masters of the Universe’ on Wall St as bothersome gnats to be flicked away.

But to get to the main point, Nocero knows perfectly well that there is any number of short, sweet and to the point sets of demands aimed at Wall Street finance capital and the Congress it works to keep under its thumb. Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO has been hammering away at his six-point jobs program—one point of which is a financial transaction tax of Wall Street as a source of massive new revenues to fund the other five.

The United Steel Worker’s Leo Gerard has been tireless for years working for a new clean energy and green manufacturing industrial policy that could create millions of new jobs and get us out of the crisis in a progressive way.

So what happens when these demands are put forward? With our Wall Street lobbyists working behind the scene, the best politicians money can buy declare them ‘off the table.’ Nocera and others of like mind in punditocracy put the cart before the horse. OWS arose as a result of a long train of abuses, year after year of sensible, rational, progressive demands and programs swept off of Congress’s agenda like so many bread crumbs from a dining table. Not even brought to a vote. OWS and a lot of other people are fed up with being dismissed.

The pundits should watch what they wish for. The demands and packages of structural reforms will be back, much sharper and clearer, and with the ante upped by hundreds of thousands in the streets, as well as millions turning out for the polls. In fact, the solutions have always been there for anyone with ears to hear. We’ll see if our voices are loud enough to crack the ceiling at the top, and let some light shine through.

Community, Economy, Poverty, safety net, unemployment

Jobs Campaign: Why Workers Need Solidarity Across All Income Levels

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North Hills Food Pantry

Wider Poverty Has Taken Root in Pittsburgh Area Suburbs

By Rachel Weaver and Jill King Greenwood
Beaver County Blue via PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW

Nov 27, 2011 – Five years ago, Deidra and David Vaughn were proud, new owners of a $119,000 two-story, five-bedroom Shaler home, complete with a swimming pool.

He made about $30,000 as a social worker for nonprofits, and she collected Social Security medical disability benefits. They weren’t rich, but with three children at home, they got by — until he lost his job not long after they became homeowners.

As David Vaughn, 38, tried for years to find work in his field, the family struggled to save their home from foreclosure. They finally found a buyer for it in September. Now, they rent from her sister.

"We’re looking to see how we can get things back to normal," Deidra Vaughn, 31, said last week as she stocked up on groceries at the North Hills Community Outreach food pantry. "I’d like to see my husband back in his field, hopefully, when the economy gets better. Every day is a struggle."

Poverty — which federal guidelines define as having income of $26,170 or less annually for a family of five — once was widely associated with inner-city communities, but during the nation’s economic downturn, it infiltrated more middle-class neighborhoods. A Brookings Institution analysis of census data showed that from 2000 to 2010, the number of poor individuals in suburbs grew 53 percent, compared with 23 percent in cities.

In Western Pennsylvania, Beaver, Lawrence and Fayette counties experienced the highest increases in poverty rates, census data show.

Continue reading Jobs Campaign: Why Workers Need Solidarity Across All Income Levels →

Infrastructure, Steelworkers, trade unions, Wall Street, Youth and students

Labor & ‘Occupy Pittsburgh’ Join Together in Nationwide ‘Bridge’ Actions

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…Joining hands to demand taxes on Wall Street to create jobs repairing bridges and other infrastructure

The Greenfield Bridge is in such bad repair that it has catch pans under it to capture falling debris. As several hundred protestors surged across the bridge – including construction workers bearing tools and equipment – a large "Good Jobs Now" banner was displayed for drivers on Interstate 376.

Banks, labor, Steelworkers, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

Banksters: You Made the Mess? Pay Up!

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Crash Tax: Wall Street Reparations

By Leo W Gerard
International President, United Steel Workers
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

Nov 14, 2011 – Wall Street waged war on the American economy and middle class with its reckless gambling.

It wasn’t Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that crashed the economy. It wasn’t the federal government. It wasn’t hapless homeowners who were sold mortgages they couldn’t afford. It was Wall Street financiers that aggressively sought and bought mortgages to package and sell as derivatives, which the banks could wager on.

Americans bailed out Wall Street, handing it a Marshall Plan for reconstruction after its bad bets blew up the world economy. Now, three years later, happy days are here again for the Wall Street banksters. They’re hauling in big profits and paying outrageous bonuses. But the American middle class continues to suffer high unemployment, record foreclosures and rising poverty.

So it’s time for Wall Street to pay reparations. It’s time for a crash tax, a tiny sales tax on Wall Street transactions, the revenues from which would pay for Main Street restoration. It’s time for the 1 percent to repay the 99 percent, for Wall Street to share in the sacrifices necessitated by its rogue behavior.

Continue reading Banksters: You Made the Mess? Pay Up! →

elections

IBEW Convention Endorses “Universal Single Payer Health Care”

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IBEW International Convention Endorses Single Payer

The 38th convention of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(IBEW) has endorsed single payer health as a solution to the nation’s
health care crisis.

The 3,000 delegates who attended the IBEW convention called upon “…our
international officers (to) do everything in their power and authority to
work with other groups and elected officials to build support and action
for universal single payer health insurance….”

The IBEW represents over 725,000 members in the United States and Canada
and is one of the largest building trades unions affiliated with the
AFL-CIO.  The September 2011 convention was held in Vancouver, Canada.

Continue reading IBEW Convention Endorses “Universal Single Payer Health Care” →

Community, Economy, Organizing, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

OWS in Allentown, Youngstown, Toledo

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Occupying the Rust Belt: In Three Deindustrialized Cities,

Protesters Find Friendly Cops, Determination and Despair

Americans here are beaten down. But in occupations around the country they have found a space where they can speak of their struggles, burdens and aspirations.

Photo: Youngstown occupier

By Arun Gupta
Beaver County Blue via Alternet.org

Oct 25, 2011 – The surefire method to find occupations in small cities is to head for the center of town. After leaving Philadelphia on our Occupy America tour, we drive an hour north to Allentown. Pennsylvania’s third-largest city at 118,000 residents, Allentown has been weathered by years of deindustrialization in the steel, cement and textile industries that once made it an economic powerhouse.

Along MacArthur Boulevard, one of Allentown’s main drags, tidy but weary brick row homes line outlying neighborhoods. Close to Center Square, site of the requisite Civil War monument, the neighborhoods are heavily Latino and buildings exhibit signs of disrepair.

Occupy Allentown has taken up residence in Center Square, inhabiting one of the four red-brick plazas on each corner. There are a handful of tents, a well-supplied kitchen pavilion and an information desk. A large blue and gray nylon tent, which 12 people crammed into the first night of the occupation, has laundry hanging off a clothesline in back and a cardboard sign on the front that reads “Zuccotti Arms,” in reference to the original Wall Street occupation.

We’ve come in search of Adam Santo, said to be the local leader of a leaderless movement. A handsome, boxy-glassed youth a few years out of college, Santo says he knew about the planning for Occupy Wall Street prior to Sept. 17.

“I wanted to go to New York, but I’ve been unemployed and finances were tight, so I thought wouldn’t it be cool to have an occupation in the Lehigh Valley,” where Allentown is nestled. Eight months earlier he and three co-workers were laid off from their jobs at a local bank because of a “lack of work.”

Continue reading OWS in Allentown, Youngstown, Toledo →