…so they’re going to make sure that if you get $1 over your allotted meager unemployment check, they’re going to freeze your bank account. Holy crap, I think Walker is the anti-Christ….by that I mean doing the opposite of what Christ would do…you know, Loaves and fishes….Walker would tell them to get a freaking job and stop expecting free handouts.
I’m bopping around the web this morning reading up on Detroit….I just can’t get the dumping of petroleum coke out of my mind.
Whatever happens to Detroit happens to all of us….
Here’s a piece up on a refinery fire…by Marathon…where the residents were not even told what was going on. It is just unconscionable that these folks were not told what was going on and that some were evacuated but others across the street were not.
This piece spouts the pro-corporate view that anything that supports the environment is bad for business. Tell me, what good is business if so many are sick or even dead because of toxic overload? Who will be left to buy your product?
From the article:
The document claims city planners fail to take into consideration that Metro Detroit’s poor and minority neighborhoods are already deluged with excessive pollution and contaminated industrial, commercial, and hazardous waste sites.
~~~~~~~~
Claims of “environmental injustice” (and environmental racism) are little more than catch phrases used by green activists to draw attention to the purportedly disproportionate negative effects of pollution in poor and minority communities. The accusation is that federal, state, and local governments have conspired to permit more pollution in impoverished black communities than in affluent ones.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He goes on to say that there are the same health problems in more affluent neighborhoods. He thinks the problem is their lifestyle rather than the toxic environment. I think that’s too simplistic as it doesn’t take in the whole picture. It is known that mercury damages a person’s DNA. So…if the parents of affluent African Americans were poor and lived in these more toxic areas, being exposed to lead and mercury and arsenic, their DNA will be affected and pass that on to their children. It gets worse with each generation. Also, toxins do not stay in a particular geographical area, although it will be more concentrated in that area, it will drift, and also cause health issues (on a lesser scale) to those in affluent neighborhoods.
As far as environmental racism…it is a well known occurrence. Probably should be better categorized as environmental “poor-ism” because it’s done towards the poor. I say this with the thought in mind that it does not follow blacks whom have moved into more affluent neighborhoods. Perhaps one can say that it is because whites also share that neighborhood. Well….I guess you could say that, BUT then whites also share the poor neighborhoods with blacks….which leads me to conclude that it is against the poor rather than exclusively against blacks.
The last line about the gov’t allowing the poor to bear the brunt of toxins ignores the above~~you don’t see the petroleum coke being dumped on the Koch’s front lawn, do you? When that happens, you can tell me that gov’t officials have not discriminated against the poor.
I notice that the author was once a commissioner….so I am left to wonder whether he, in his official capacity, willfully went along with poisoning the poor and is now trying to justify it?
On to the financial woes of Detroit, I found some interesting articles.
This one details the bad news. Note that they’re going after unions. HUGE RED FLAG that Disaster Capitalism and ALEC are in the midst. (related to this is a strike by fast food workers to form unions.)
This article on Slate paints a different picture of the stuff going on behind the scenes. Note the link to the NY Times’ article on Dan Gilbert trying to make a fortune rebuilding the city…
The article talks about the cityscape with abandoned houses, empty spaces after demolition of houses, and the population dwindling from 2 million down to 700,000. When reading that Gilbert’s solution is to bring business in, to spur people walking the streets (shoppers)…and it strikes me that there is so much opportunity here….but it feels like trying to fix the problem with the same old, same old…
With all the demolished houses…what about the urban farmer? I know that would be difficult if the ground were polluted, as Detroit seems to be the dumping ground, but if the soil were not toxic, why not encourage that? It would help those in the inner cities to feed themselves as well as sell produce to earn income.
Why not encourage planting of trees to help the air quality? As I blogged before, we need to include nature into our plans and stop ignoring the impact we have on nature and the colossal impact nature has on us.
It also ignores the devastating impact that Big Box stores have had on our local economies. Walmart moves in….independent small businesses die…and entire downtowns are destroyed…not only do the businesses die, but our feeling of connectedness dies with them…
Henry Ettinger was a “Monuments Men” who helped rescue stolen art work by the Nazis and spoke of his experience recently.
The article mentions that Hitler was into natural art and resented the turn towards impressionism and interpretative art, and instead of accepting that, he decided to destroy the art. But that sentence doesn’t make sense, because they put the art into the mines to preserve them and protect them from bombs instead of outright destroying them. Yeah, I know that some could be sold on the black market to raise money for the war….but they also had an “exhibition” of the artworks, which also makes no sense–why put them on display at all if they were disgusting to Hitler? Why go to all of the trouble to transport them through a tour in Germany and Austria?
In addition to the Monuments Men, Ettinger’s family history is also very intriguing. As the story goes, his family lived in Germany before being forced out by the Nazis in 1938. The part that leaps out at me was this simple passage:
“My family dated back 600 years in Germany,” Ettlinger said. “My father had an elegant women’s fashion store, with 40 employees. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, it was immediately boycotted.”
The Nazis, said Ettlinger, didn’t immediately start killing the Jews. Instead they made it impossible for them to make a living.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Am I entirely too cynical or conspiracy theorist to look at how our jobs have been shipped overseas and the ones left are poverty-level wages, making it impossible to put any money away for savings/retirement/vacations/emergencies….and that the union jobs are being replaced with low wage workers…? Yeah, I suppose it is too conspiracy theorist…but the effect is still the same–making it impossible to earn a living…
The suicide rate has skyrocketed for one particular age group: the over 50 crowd….the Boomers…
Susie Madrak has a post up on it here.
From the comments, which are really sobering:
dogjudge • 3 hours ago
~~~~~~~~~~
The comments are heartbreaking. And very telling. There’s a lot of pain out there….and not a lot of hope that things will get better.
Are you listening, members of Congress? President Obama?
….probably can’t hear over the loud voices of lobbyists and campaign donors….
Firedoglake has this up on the *cough* research of Rogoff and Reinhart.
From one of the commenters, letsgetitdone at 16:
I think, finally, that the RR study is an example of the corruption of social science in modern times. I believe that one can show that the study was not just guilty of calculation errors and errors of omission, but that these must be seen as part of a pattern of systematic bias that permeated their whole process of inquiry beginning with their selection of the problem, moving through every decision point in implementing the study, and ending with their evaluation of their evidence and their writing of the result. They made no attempt to do a scientific study maximizing fair comparison of alternative theories having policy relevance, but instead prepared what was essentially a legal brief supporting austerity policies and the Pete Peterson line. The social costs of what they did are strewn all over the globe. See this recent post at DailyKos.
~~~~~~~~
This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.~~~~~~~~~~
PR Watch has a report up on the growing gaps between CEO pay and worker pay: http://www.prwatch.org/NODE/12060
This is just wrong. They’re closing factories and moving them overseas because, as they claim, American workers want too much –safe work conditions and a living wage…
…while CEO’s are making astounding salaries…
I have no words.
They seriously want us to think that Paul Krugman is as extreme as LaPierre? As he states: How many times does he have to be right and the others wrong?
Along these lines are the discussions on raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation.
From the NY Times.
I’m hearing over and over from the conservatives that we can’t raise the minimum wage because it will mean there will be massive layoffs, hours cut, blah, blah blah. People can.not.live. on minimum wage! They cannot meet even their basic needs. But that doesn’t seem to bother these people…all that matters is that the profits keep rolling in.
And, as always, they make exceptions for “their” folks–some of them need a pay increase, but entry-level folks, well, they’re just SOL.
This is an old piece, but bears repeating. It’s always amazing to me that members of Congress tell the American public that we cannot afford to raise the minimum wage, while stating that they cannot afford to live on the measily $100k that they earn under false pretenses.
Here’s an updated version. Note how they have increased their wages by $20,000 in a short time period. The raises alone cost the American public $2 million!
The latest here.
And yet these people will browbeat the American public for holding out their hands and asking for the same treatment–wage increases to a point that they could actually afford to live more than just week to week.
Finally, the perks that we thought were gone…well, not so much…
Our local station, at wane.com, had a slam piece on the poor this week (I was just on their website, and there is nothing up for me to reference). They were running promo ads all last week…and I was dreading what was to come, but I held out hope that the promos were just to draw people in, but the story would present both sides of the issue without judgment.
Ha.
Adam Widener, the reporter, is probably patting himself on the back for the “outstanding” piece of *cough* reporting he did.
Okay, I’ll start from the beginning segment:
Widener doesn’t present himself as a reporter, rather, he walks up with hot cocoa and a fast food bag to these folks who are standing on street corners holding up signs: at shopping malls: “Disabled, need money” or something like “unemployed” or other messages. He gets information out of them without telling them he’s a reporter and there is a concealed camera taping the whole conversation.
Next, he asks them about how much they make in a day, why they’re begging for money, etc. He also follows them to their homes without their knowledge or consent.
One man claims to be disabled and walks with something of a limp. He stands out in the rain begging for money from strangers. Widener follows him as he walks home: three miles and he walks without a limp as he’s going to his home. Widener finally identifies himself and asks about the disability and about how many beggers are scamming. The guy is probably the worst example of those folks–he probably isn’t disabled, and then he characterizes the others as being fakes, with only 5% of people begging being legitimate. He is the poster child for the repub party, who *love* to point to people like him as a reason not to give to anyone.
Which is what Widener does in his *cough* reporting…even though the other folks he interviews have legitimate reasons for begging: one guy is unemployed and trying to hold onto his house; another is also unemployed (probably 60 years old) and also in need of money. He does interview a man who works in a convenience store that one of them frequents and the man says in a sarcastic tone, “He always has wads of cash…I’m going to quit my job and start begging on the corner.” (Widener states during the piece that the most they make is $50 a day…this is while standing for at least three hours and sometimes eight hours in the cold and rain.)
Widener goes to the local Christian Rescue Mission, to one of the coordinators, who—even though she did not meet these people—was quick to judge them and say that beggers use the money for drugs or alcohol. And to drive the point home, Widener interviews a man staying at the Mission who used to beg and use the money for drugs and also automatically assumes these folks are using the money for things other than food or shelter or other basic needs. Widener repeats many times that these folks are using the money for cigarettes.
The Mission coordinator stated that people should not give money to these folks for the above reasons.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who claim to be rescuing people in Jesus’ name are mean, judgmental and punitive.–which goes against what Jesus taught.
It also never ceases to amaze me how shortsighted folks are—the poor need cash for toilet paper, shampoo, bath soap, dish detergent, trash bags, laundry soap, and even money for the laundry because, and I know this is hard for repubs to believe, but these items are not covered on food stamps. And even if it did, people still wouldn’t be able to afford them and pay for food on the amount given per month. (For me, I wash most of my clothes in a bucket in the bathtub to save money–it’s economical and I’ve gotten it down to a science where I do a pretty darn good job.)
But our friend Widener isn’t done yet….
Next he goes to the FW police and talks with the public relations director, who informs him that unless a property owner calls her, the police generally do nothing about it.
Widener can’t get over that.
He goes to a city councilman, Tom Didier, who bless his heart, actually shows compassion and says that there was a law on the books that made begging illegal, but they dissolved the law in 2010.
Widener brought up that another town (forget which one he said) had made it so that a person would have to register in order to beg.
Widener was aghast that Didier laughed when this was told to him.
This story is evil in that it actually twists things around so someone feels self-righteous about not helping the poor–they’re “helping” this person by not contributing to their drug or alcohol problem.
Even alcoholics and druggies need to be warm and safe and dry with food on the table.
This story fell soooo far short of the depth that this story requires. Why did these people beg? What circumstances in their life brought them to this place? Were they working in a job that didn’t pay enough so they could have something to fall back on when hard times hit? Did they have health issues that contributed to job loss? How can we help, besides the immediate cash?
PR Watch.org has this up on the gerrymandering in Wisconsin.
From the article:
In early February of 2012, GOP legislators released multiple documents, but continued to keep around 84 emails confidential. The three judges — two of them appointed by Republican presidents — again criticized the Republican legislators for “an all but shameful attempt” to keep documents secret, writing: “Without a doubt, the Legislature made a conscious choice to involve private lawyers in what gives every appearance of an attempt — albeit poorly disguised — to cloak the private machinations of Wisconsin’s Republican legislators in the shroud of attorney-client privilege.”
And…incredibly:
According to the documents that were released, Republican legislators signed a pledge of secrecy during the redistricting process and were told to ignore what GOP leaders said publicly about the new election maps.
~~~~~~~~
What is this, high school or college where you make secret pledges? Seriously?? Does this mean they get double secret probation?
Note that some emails obtained by Center for Media and Democracy were not released to the lawyers challenging the maps. Just incredible!
I think this is why Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the tea partiers are so baffled that they lost the election….how could they lose when they’ve worked so hard against the democratic process??
~~~~~~~
More on ALEC sponsors here.
~~~~~~~
And, lastly, ALEC and the electoral college here. They just can’t figure out enough ways to demolish the democratic process….
Link here. I gotta run…
Eagle 
You must be logged in to post a comment.