Reclaim Reform (Ken Previti) has this up on the Chicago Teachers Union’s new IPO….the solution isn’t with those wearing Democrat or Republican Masks whom are in reality corporate employees…but with us.
God bless Karen Lewis and the CTU.
Category Archives: bankers finance
More on Fukushima **edited
The comments on the last blog have some good links:
Nearly a third of all babies born after 3/11/11 are more likely to have thyroid issues. If you recall, radiation interferes with the thyroid. A good page here on what happens to the body.
More here.
Another link to a comments page about nuclear fallout and its affects on those in the military:
Understanding the gravity of NAFTA
Idle No More has a post up on the far-reaching effects of NAFTA. This is especially important because now we have NAFTA on steroids with TPP being fast-tracked through Congress.
Here’s an update on Blackfire.
More here.
From the article:
Though officials did meet with NGOs opposed to the mine, they accepted Blackfire’s take that protestors were out to squeeze money from the firm, says MiningWatch’s analysis of the emails.
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Of course….because the mining company execs see everything in $$, they think everyone *else* thinks as they do. It is inconceivable to them that there are people who value the environment, their health, their children’s health, the Earth, etc.
Note how the company was unable to substantiate claims against Abarca. It appears he was thrown in jail under false claims.
NAFTA, and I fear TPP, are all about taking power and control away from the local people. It means losing their autonomy to decide what happens in their communities, as the mega million dollar lawsuit illustrates.
These trade agreements are not supportive of the democratic process, rather a dictatorial process. How is this representation of taxpayers?
Huffington, Gates, join forces
In what could be called the Billionaires’ News Service, Ariana Huffington and Bill Gates, amongst other billionaires, want to control even more of the media message….er, I mean, news…
…and this, my friends, is why we need the Fairness Doctrine. This is why we need a break up of the monopoly of the press and media by the 1%–they already have their voices heard, over and over. They were able to sell the Iraq War through their monopoly of the news outlets–radio, paper, TV–as we saw in the previous blog on Iraq Veterans against the War. It was scripted without so much as one critical media reporter…oh, wait, Phil Donahue was critical…and he was fired. The more that media is concentrated, the less independent voices are heard. If we had the media we had in the 60s and 70s, there would have been more investigating of WMD’s, and less cheerleading by the talking heads.
The Guardian link, has a little more detail. Keep in mind that the Guardian has also joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation… further concentrating Gates’ media messaging…
A side note~~A commenter on the commondreams site has this link up**. Wow. If this is true, it opens up yet another can of worms of falsifying evidence to get us into yet another war….
And the questions begin: Why did Scahill and Jones refuse to share a stage with Mother Marian? If Scahill is as good as investigative reporter that he is reported to be, then why would he not investigate the accusations against Mother Marian? Why did he not seek her out to get her side of the story? This is all just mindboggling.
**also note that the author writes articles published in Huffington Post.
Gov. Pence wants to give $1 billion to businesses
…in the form of a tax break…by eliminating property taxes for businesses.
From the article:
An analysis by the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency determined that if the tax were eliminated, schools and cities in Lake County would lose $74.2 million, Porter County $14 million and LaPorte County $7.2 million. That’s about the same annual impact as property tax caps, which have decimated government services in all three counties.
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I can smell ALEC all over this push to eliminate taxes for the wealthiest while putting more of the burden on the middle class and poor, if they try to make it up through sales tax.
And then there’s the continued assault on Glenda Ritz’ authority as a duly elected official who got more votes than Pence. (Indeed, they were practically begging people to attend his inauguration. A website reported that 1500 people attended his inauguration….I’m betting that 1,000 were homeless people given $20 to be there. Or perhaps state workers threatened with their jobs if they didn’t attend. /snark) I also tried to access the site that lists Pence’s contributors for his inauguration day–the website was listed as suspicious! Nope, not going to risk that.
Anyway, here we are still under the death grip of the Koch brothers and neocon toadies….
Slave Labor to fight fires
So now the prison system is using prisoners to fight wildfires…for $1 an hour, and that’s if they’re lucky. Others have received only 50 cents an hour. This is just wrong on so many levels.
And, as someone noted in the comments, it fits right in with for-profit schools, for-profit security state, for-profit healthcare, etc., with forcing people to work for slave wages, so the 1% can make even more profits. Disgusting.
This is what was happening with the mental health system before reform–they were forcing folks to work without pay. While I do think that having something to do and learning a trade is valuable, it must be fair and paid with decent wages.
No More
Jeff Nguyen has a blog up featuring Eddie Vedder’s song “No More”.
God bless Phil Donahue— still fighting the good fight. I grew up watching Donahue and he opened my world. He talked about subjects that were taboo. He asked intelligent questions. I loved the “live” aspect of his shows where callers could call in to add to the story.
It was a sad day when his show was no more. And even sadder that he was fired from MSNBC for speaking out against the Iraq war.
Vanishing New York
New York Observer has a link to this, among other stories:
Vanishing New York. All the businesses that closed under Michael Bloomberg.
If you look only at this list and add up all the years in business represented, we lost approximately 6,926 years of New York City history in only a dozen years. And we know the real number is much higher than that.
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Pretty sad, eh? A hardware store in business for 100 years! A bakery in business for 89 years! A restaurant in business for 48 years! A records store in business for 60 years! A hotel in business for 127 years! A book store 86 years!
…and Shea Stadium destroyed.
That is a lot of history. Think of all the people that passed through the doors…in their youth, in their adulthood, with their children, grandchildren…seeing familiar faces and catching up with each other’s lives.
Our culture is being destroyed before our eyes–everything that makes us connect with one another. One of the things I loved about Fort Wayne is that somehow it’s managed to hold onto some of that culture–it’s known as the city of restaurants and churches….for good reason. They still have many independent restaurants…not McRestaurants. The downtown is walkable–pleasant—with many independent stores.
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Other stories the Observer posted: Starchitects and the luxury apartment boom in NY, related to the previous story–
Don’t get me wrong, I love architecture. I love the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. But if it comes a the expense of neighborhoods, then, no, I can’t go along with that.
People deserve to have decent housing at rents they can afford. Small business should be afforded the same. Something needs to be done so that if a luxury building is built, those around it are not made to suffer by enormous rent increases.
Education News and the postal service
Raginghorseblog has a good riddance message to “if-you’re-poor-blame-God” Mayor Bloomberg.
Mercedes Schneider has a post up here on New Years and here on AFT Myths–really good blog on the myths and debunking them with pointed questions.
As I thought about the profiteers circling around public education, the postal service popped into my head. They actually made a profit last year, but you wouldn’t know it by theBush Administration’s demanding they pay into retirement funds for people not even born yet…
…it suddenly occurred to me that not only are the profiteers going after public education and other social programs, the postal service is also a target for a couple of reasons: a) strong union–gotta break those unions; and b) public service efficiently run but could be run more *cough* efficiently. Or, in other words ::damn, look at the golden opportunity to make some bucks while delivering crappy service…:: and, finally, c) postal workers make pretty good money….so they gotta get rid of them!
See…they can’t portray the postal carriers like teachers and say that they are not doing their job because, well, the mail gets delivered in a reasonable time with good rates through wind and rain and dark of night. They had to come up with some other way to bankrupt them and make it look like it was their fault, see? Hence, we have the nonsense of paying for people that aren’t even born….making it look like they can’t make a profit or be self-sufficient…then the neocons/neolibs cry foul and trot out the overused sob story that the postal service is costing taxpayers money! Not exactly. They are funded by Congress for $100 million to deliver service to the blind and Americans overseas. Otherwise, they are funded by stamps and other services the public pays for.
Even more astounding is that the postal service made a profit in this economy. Now that’s impressive!
Duncan interferes with NY school chancellor choice
Fred Klonksy links to a report by Valerie Strauss about talk that Arne Duncan has influenced the choice of NY chancellor. Unethical. Arrogant. Micro-manager= Duncan.
Eagle 
Pass the word–perhaps this will help someone affected and not knowing where to go for help.
~~A side story on the chemical spill in West Virginia…criminy, if this isn’t nature slapping us in the face, warning us that we’re inept in dealing with this stuff, I don’t know what is…nature can only endure so much.
The attitude that the river will “take care of it” is utter bullshit. It’s just going to go somewhere else and cause health issues for the unfortunate ones.
Meanwhile, the Koch brothers have a pile of petcoke right next to the river in Detroit…**edited: I stand corrected. It has been removed….but the report fails to tell us where the pile was moved to..? Wanna bet it was to some poor neighborhood?
Stupid, stupid, stupid.