Thank you Gov. John Kasich and your fellow Ohio Republicans for passing the union busting Senate Bill 5.
In the same way that you only stop a schoolyard bully by standing up to him, people have realized that they must fight back. Getting the 231,149 signatures for a referendum to overturn SB 5 will be an uphill battle, but it's better to go down fighting than let them take our lunch money forever.
We've been beaten down for a long time. Most Americans are apathetic and brainwashed into believing that government is always inept and a bogeyman rather than people like our postal workers, police soldiers and teachers. The idea that both political parties are corrupt and the power of corporations and the superrich trumps one person, one vote, has been too long used as an excuse to do nothing.
Juggling work and family responsibilites and struggling to make end's meet, it's understandable that most people don't know the minitiaue of politics nor should they be expected to. But the average American's political ignorance is stunning.
While most can rattle off the latest dirt about Hollywood celebrity train wrecks or sports trivia, less than a third know that a member of the House of Representatives serves two years and a US senator serves six years. About half of Americans think foreign aid is a major part of the federal budget rather than 1 percent of it.
During the impeachment of Bill Clinton, only 11 percent could identify the Supreme Court chief justice, as authors and political science proferssors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson documented in their book on how Republicans have dominated politics in the last 30 years. http://www.amazon.com/Off-Center-Republican-Revolution-Democracy/dp/0300108702
The pols, powerbrokers and pundits count on our ignorance and apathy. The idea that government is always bad and tax cuts are always good has been ingrained in our culture since the presidency of St. Reagan in 1981.
And our worship of celebrity and entertaiment has intensified just like the gap between the rich and poor. It would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. President Obama's Monday speech justifying taking us to war with Libya was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. to avoid interrupting Dancing With the Stars.
Apathy and ignorance also make us more gullible. That makes it easier to frame the debate. Instead of questioning whether the government should be making cuts after the worst recession since the Great Depression, the debate is over how much to cut.
Most of us nod are heads in agreement when politicians, including President Obama - AKA The Great Capitulator - tell us we need to tighten our belts and run the federal government like a household. As if households print money like the federal government and as if families don't do deficit spending in the form of bank, car and college loans, credit card purchases and second mortgages.
Despite the number of Americans living below the poverty line surging to 44 million http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/us/17poverty.html the poor are almost never mentioned by politicians of either party. Attacks on the poor and middle class are camouflaged as fiscal austerity. And austerity is seen as virtuous even though deficit spending in the form of economic stimulus would create jobs, improve the infrastructure and increase tax revenue reducing deficits in the long term.
But Kasich and his fellow Republicans around Ohio and the nation overreached with their union busting. They counted on the tried and true split and divide tactics of class envy to pit neighbor against neighbor. But even if you don't know the Inside Baseball of economics, you know Wall Street banksters caused the Great Recession, not overpaying librarians and teachers.
And while just 11.9 percent of Americans are unionized, most know somebody who is in one or was in one. We may not be taught much in school about how unions fought for child labor laws and the 40-hour work week, but we know that our firefighters, police and school bus drivers aren't living large.
And that Wall Streeters get bailed out while we get sold out. Some of us are realizing that complaining that we're getting scewed while being content to spend our leisure time in front of a computer or television isn't enough.
As a reporter, I've had to temper my political beliefs and full rights as a citizen to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of them. But one of the few benefits of being an unemployed journalist is being freed from those constraints.
Now I can do the small things we all can do that addied up together make a difference: networking, attending protests,writing letters to lawmakers and lobbying them in person when possible. Gathering petition signatures. Writing letters to the editor.
Individually, we are powerless to stop SB 5 and the transformation of our democracy to an oligarchy. But collectively we have power.
And not just to overturn SB 5. We need to fight for a living wage and equitable taxation like Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky's proposed Fairness in Taxation Act which would raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires. http://schakowsky.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2877&catid=22
We need to educate, agitate and organize. Not with the know-nothing, us-against-them mentality of the Tea Party, but with compassion as well as passion. Waging a principled fight based on common values.
People before profits. Social welfare rather than corporate welfare. Foreign policy committed to leading by example, not at the barrel of a gun.
The idea that we're all in it together. Even the richest 1 percent who control some 23.5 percent of the wealth and must be made to pay their fair share of taxes before the politicians they've bought can talk about "shared sacrifice."
So thank you Gov. Kasich. For making us realize that we're down, but we're not out.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Political Pressure
Sometimes politicians do the right thing and pushing them in the right direction helps.
Erie County commissioners passage of a resolution Monday opposing Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5 is an example of effective political pressure from citizens. Sure, the resolution is symbolic and SB 5 will probably pass in the House of Representatives this week. And there was some political calculation in the vote.
Commissioners Thomas Ferrell, Bill Monaghan and Patrick Shenigo - all Democrats - were certainly aware they would've taken more heat from their constituents who are union members than from Republican Gov. John Kasich. Nonetheless, they deserve credit.
The resolution undercuts the primary premise of SB 5: that local leaders need a law outlawing strikes and severely restricting collective bargaining because the bargaining playing field isn't level and unions don't negotiate in good faith.
"Erie County has maintained sound labor relations and has found that, even when we disagree, we have shown that we can work toward common goals respectfully and professionally," the resolution reads in part. "Even during the worst economic times since the Great Depression, Erie County public employees worked with their commissioners and supervisors to maintain (the) highest quality services with minimal staff disruptions."
Besides paving the way for privtization and accelerating the race to the bottom, SB 5 could disenfranchise voters in a political power grab masquerading as fiscal discipline. By declaring an "economic crisis" Kasich could appoint emergency financial managers and strip local elected officials of their power.
I personally witnessed this last year while a reporter covering the city of Benton Harbor, an impoverished town of about 10,000 in southwestern Michigan. Among the first moves the Benton Harbor EFM made was to propose eliminating the already understaffed Benton Harbor Fire Department.
In fairness, Benton Harbor local leaders had mismanged money for years, but new Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder this month got a law passed that could make financial takeovers the rule, not the exception http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/michigan-governor-signs-emergency-managers-bill/c87e78330ebf4bb6a2b631b088395ff1
Ferrell worries about SB 5 causing state financial takeovers in Ohio.
"It doesn't even state who declares the economic crisis," Ferrell said. "We feel the county commissioners are the ones that (should) state what an economic crisis is. Not someone from the state of Ohio, not the Erie County auditor. Because, basically, we control all the budgets. We vote on the budgets."
The commissioners also recognized that while they might make short-term gains at the bargaining table, the long-term effect would be less tax revenue. Exorbitant increases in benefits is essentially a wage cut meaning workers have less to spend.
That means less sales tax revenue which is already down in Erie County and around the nation. This thanks to the Great Recession which was caused by tax cuts, tax caps and financial deregulation which Kasich voted for while a congressman.
The approximately $8 billion shortfall in Ohio that Kasich has used as cover to bust public unions and privatize public jobs and the shortfalls other Republican governors are manipulating, weren't caused by overly generous wages and benefits. While healthcare benefit premiums had double digit increases in the past decade, last year total benefit increases were 0.6 percent for local and and state government workers. Total compensation rose just 1.8 percent for local and state government workers compared to 2.1 percent for private sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm That's down from 2.3 percent in total compensation in 2009.
Rather than regressive measures like SB 5, local politicians like the commissioners need real tools to dig out of the financial hole caused through no fault of their own. Economist Jack Rasmus makes several good recommendations http://ko-kr.connect.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=170570316324343
I detailed some of them to commissioners during the public speaking portion of Monday's commission meeting and in a Monday letter sent to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. The proposals include reintroducing the Build America Bonds subsidy to reduce municipal bond borrowing costs. A bank tax would pay for it.
The Federal Reserve Bank - which had no problem lending trillions to the big banks which crashed the economy - should provide $500 billion in bridge loans over the next two years to state and local governments with pension fund gaps below 85 percent. The Pension Fund Act of 2006 should be amended to prohibit investments in hedge funds and other risky speculative deals like financial derivatives.
And to prevent corporations from pitting communities against one another, I asked Brown to sponsor legislation with three-year tax penalties to companies who relocate for lower taxes with the penalty being the equivalent of the tax difference. Corporate welfare extorted from communities to entice companies in or keep them from moving out is robbing cities and states of revenue for essential services and improving their crumbling infrastructure.
There's some truth to the old saying that, "we get the government we deserve." But because of the enormous financial clout that corporations have over politicians, one person, one vote, doesn't have the power that it should.
But we can influence politicians by involvement rather than using the convenient excuse that they're all corrupt to do nothing. Assuming SB 5 passes, we'll have 90 days to gather 231,149 signatures in 44 Ohio counties to get an initiative on the ballot in November to overturn SB 5.
What happened Monday with the Erie County commissioners shows it can be done. It's the first step in a long journey.
Erie County commissioners passage of a resolution Monday opposing Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5 is an example of effective political pressure from citizens. Sure, the resolution is symbolic and SB 5 will probably pass in the House of Representatives this week. And there was some political calculation in the vote.
Commissioners Thomas Ferrell, Bill Monaghan and Patrick Shenigo - all Democrats - were certainly aware they would've taken more heat from their constituents who are union members than from Republican Gov. John Kasich. Nonetheless, they deserve credit.
The resolution undercuts the primary premise of SB 5: that local leaders need a law outlawing strikes and severely restricting collective bargaining because the bargaining playing field isn't level and unions don't negotiate in good faith.
"Erie County has maintained sound labor relations and has found that, even when we disagree, we have shown that we can work toward common goals respectfully and professionally," the resolution reads in part. "Even during the worst economic times since the Great Depression, Erie County public employees worked with their commissioners and supervisors to maintain (the) highest quality services with minimal staff disruptions."
Besides paving the way for privtization and accelerating the race to the bottom, SB 5 could disenfranchise voters in a political power grab masquerading as fiscal discipline. By declaring an "economic crisis" Kasich could appoint emergency financial managers and strip local elected officials of their power.
I personally witnessed this last year while a reporter covering the city of Benton Harbor, an impoverished town of about 10,000 in southwestern Michigan. Among the first moves the Benton Harbor EFM made was to propose eliminating the already understaffed Benton Harbor Fire Department.
In fairness, Benton Harbor local leaders had mismanged money for years, but new Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder this month got a law passed that could make financial takeovers the rule, not the exception http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/michigan-governor-signs-emergency-managers-bill/c87e78330ebf4bb6a2b631b088395ff1
Ferrell worries about SB 5 causing state financial takeovers in Ohio.
"It doesn't even state who declares the economic crisis," Ferrell said. "We feel the county commissioners are the ones that (should) state what an economic crisis is. Not someone from the state of Ohio, not the Erie County auditor. Because, basically, we control all the budgets. We vote on the budgets."
The commissioners also recognized that while they might make short-term gains at the bargaining table, the long-term effect would be less tax revenue. Exorbitant increases in benefits is essentially a wage cut meaning workers have less to spend.
That means less sales tax revenue which is already down in Erie County and around the nation. This thanks to the Great Recession which was caused by tax cuts, tax caps and financial deregulation which Kasich voted for while a congressman.
The approximately $8 billion shortfall in Ohio that Kasich has used as cover to bust public unions and privatize public jobs and the shortfalls other Republican governors are manipulating, weren't caused by overly generous wages and benefits. While healthcare benefit premiums had double digit increases in the past decade, last year total benefit increases were 0.6 percent for local and and state government workers. Total compensation rose just 1.8 percent for local and state government workers compared to 2.1 percent for private sector workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/news.release/eci.nr0.htm That's down from 2.3 percent in total compensation in 2009.
Rather than regressive measures like SB 5, local politicians like the commissioners need real tools to dig out of the financial hole caused through no fault of their own. Economist Jack Rasmus makes several good recommendations http://ko-kr.connect.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=170570316324343
I detailed some of them to commissioners during the public speaking portion of Monday's commission meeting and in a Monday letter sent to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. The proposals include reintroducing the Build America Bonds subsidy to reduce municipal bond borrowing costs. A bank tax would pay for it.
The Federal Reserve Bank - which had no problem lending trillions to the big banks which crashed the economy - should provide $500 billion in bridge loans over the next two years to state and local governments with pension fund gaps below 85 percent. The Pension Fund Act of 2006 should be amended to prohibit investments in hedge funds and other risky speculative deals like financial derivatives.
And to prevent corporations from pitting communities against one another, I asked Brown to sponsor legislation with three-year tax penalties to companies who relocate for lower taxes with the penalty being the equivalent of the tax difference. Corporate welfare extorted from communities to entice companies in or keep them from moving out is robbing cities and states of revenue for essential services and improving their crumbling infrastructure.
There's some truth to the old saying that, "we get the government we deserve." But because of the enormous financial clout that corporations have over politicians, one person, one vote, doesn't have the power that it should.
But we can influence politicians by involvement rather than using the convenient excuse that they're all corrupt to do nothing. Assuming SB 5 passes, we'll have 90 days to gather 231,149 signatures in 44 Ohio counties to get an initiative on the ballot in November to overturn SB 5.
What happened Monday with the Erie County commissioners shows it can be done. It's the first step in a long journey.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Showing Solidarity
Symbolism won't stop the Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5 from passage, but it could help overturn it in a statewide referendum. Convincing local lawmakers like members of the Erie County Commission to pass a resolution opposing SB 5 matters because one of the main premises of the bill is that local politicians like the commissioners don't have a level negotiating playing field with public unions and need more power.
By approving an anti-SB 5 resolution the commissioners will be saying that unions bargain in good faith and they don't want a bill that would criminalize strikes and restrict collective bargaining for issues such as healthcare, pensions, privatization and workforce levels.That passage of SB 5 will lead to wage and benefit cuts and privatization that would have a tidal wave effect on their county sharply reducing already falling income, property and sales tax revenues.
"People have died for their right to withold their labor," Robert Warner, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades president, told the commissioners at their Thursday meeting. "Don't sit on the fence fellas."
SB 5 proponents will always cherrypick to find cases where unions defended an incompetent or corrupt worker who deserved to be fired or incidents of union members receiving overly generous benefits. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The majority of public unions have been making concessions for years as have their private sector counterparts.
As liberal economist Jack Rasmus writes quoting US Department of Labor statistics, total health benefit increases for local and state government workers rose just 0.6 percent in the last year while health care premiums had double digit rate increases between 1997 and 2007. http://ko-kr.connect.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=170570316324343
Pension contributions make up just 2.9 percent of state spending, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators with The Center for Retirment Research putting the figure at 3.8 percent. And pension underfunding is not due to overly generous pensions, but the Wall Street piracy that triggered the Great Recession. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/06/109649/why-employee-pensions-arent-bankrupting.html
"This is ridiculous. We have 28 years of good collective bargaining," said Mark Horton, Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, secretary/treasurer. "We have no bankruptcies because our employees have made the concessions they need to make."
Commissioner Bill Monaghan, a former Teamster who seems to favor the resolution, said none of the local municipal commissions in Erie County favor the resolution. They're probably afraid of offending Republican Gov. John Kasich and feel they have nothing to gain from passing a resolution that could make it harder for their communities to recieve state money or services.
But as local pols need to show which side they're on. Kasich or their constituents who elected them. Political courage is often an oxymoron, but now is the time for local politicians to show some.
"When folks get elected they're expected to be leaders, not followers," said Joe Thayer, North Central Ohio Buildings Trades executive board member. "This isn't a union, non-union issue. It's a standard of living issue."
The commissioners are expected to vote on the resolution at their Monday meeting. Hopefully they'll show solidarity and set a standard for other local leaders.
By approving an anti-SB 5 resolution the commissioners will be saying that unions bargain in good faith and they don't want a bill that would criminalize strikes and restrict collective bargaining for issues such as healthcare, pensions, privatization and workforce levels.That passage of SB 5 will lead to wage and benefit cuts and privatization that would have a tidal wave effect on their county sharply reducing already falling income, property and sales tax revenues.
"People have died for their right to withold their labor," Robert Warner, International Union of Painters and Allied Trades president, told the commissioners at their Thursday meeting. "Don't sit on the fence fellas."
SB 5 proponents will always cherrypick to find cases where unions defended an incompetent or corrupt worker who deserved to be fired or incidents of union members receiving overly generous benefits. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. The majority of public unions have been making concessions for years as have their private sector counterparts.
As liberal economist Jack Rasmus writes quoting US Department of Labor statistics, total health benefit increases for local and state government workers rose just 0.6 percent in the last year while health care premiums had double digit rate increases between 1997 and 2007. http://ko-kr.connect.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=170570316324343
Pension contributions make up just 2.9 percent of state spending, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators with The Center for Retirment Research putting the figure at 3.8 percent. And pension underfunding is not due to overly generous pensions, but the Wall Street piracy that triggered the Great Recession. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/06/109649/why-employee-pensions-arent-bankrupting.html
"This is ridiculous. We have 28 years of good collective bargaining," said Mark Horton, Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, secretary/treasurer. "We have no bankruptcies because our employees have made the concessions they need to make."
Commissioner Bill Monaghan, a former Teamster who seems to favor the resolution, said none of the local municipal commissions in Erie County favor the resolution. They're probably afraid of offending Republican Gov. John Kasich and feel they have nothing to gain from passing a resolution that could make it harder for their communities to recieve state money or services.
But as local pols need to show which side they're on. Kasich or their constituents who elected them. Political courage is often an oxymoron, but now is the time for local politicians to show some.
"When folks get elected they're expected to be leaders, not followers," said Joe Thayer, North Central Ohio Buildings Trades executive board member. "This isn't a union, non-union issue. It's a standard of living issue."
The commissioners are expected to vote on the resolution at their Monday meeting. Hopefully they'll show solidarity and set a standard for other local leaders.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Community Police
Hundreds of us turned out Sunday night for a candlelight vigil in Sandusky, Ohio in tribute to slain Sandusky police Officer Andy Dunn and his family, but Chanel Harper was one of the few in the crowd who could really understand what the Dunn family was feeling. Like Dunn, Harper, brother, Calvin Harper Jr., was murdered.
While the circumstances were different, Harper's death was drug related, while Dunn's was in the line of duty, all lives have value and nobody deserves to be murdered, something Chanel Harper understands.
"I feel so bad for them," Harper said about Dunn's family, which includes Officer Matt Dunn who spoke to the crowd.
Like most of us in the crowd, Chanel Harper saw a family hurting over their son being fatally shot in the line of duty, not race. But because Dunn was white and shooting suspect Kevin Randleman was black there been some racial animosity over the shooting in Sandusky, a mostly white city northwestern Ohio city of about 25,000 by Lake Erie. Harper, one of dozens of black people who attended the vigil, said she got some dirty looks.
Officer Matt Dunn also picked up on it. In emotional and eloquent comments, Dunn told the crowd his son's killing wasn't about race and that it should make the community come together, not divide it.
But the circumstances help fuel misperceptions and distory reality. While have been a lot more shootings in the last couple years than when I covered crime for the Sandusky Register in 2005-06, Sandusky is not a violent community.
Dunn was the first police officer killed in the line of duty in a century in Sandusky and while there have been a series of high profile killings of police officers nationwide of late, overall they are rare. Any homicide is one too many, but in a nation of 310 million, just 48 police officers were murdered in 2009 http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2009/feloniouslykilled.html
And while you would never guess it from watching T.V. where every other show is about glamorous cops tracking serial killers and solving homicides, violent crime in America has been at record lows in recent years. http://romenewswire.com/2010/05/25/fbi-violent-crime-rate-in-the-u-s-drops-for-third-year-in-a-row/
Randleman, 50, was a career criminal who fatally shot a man in a 1990 bar fight, but was found not guilty of murder and involuntary manslaughter. Obviously, if he's found guilty of killing Dunn, he should face a minimum of life imprisonment. But there's no reason to rush to judgement.
While circumstantial evidence indicates Randleman's guilt, the Register wrongly convicted him in print in a news story and editorial by saying that Randleman fatally shot Dunn rather than attributing the statements to police, which is standard journalistic practice. The Register editorial by Managing Editor Matt Westerhold (full disclosure: Westerhold was briefly my boss before I left the Register to take another job) wrote that the criminal justice has a "revolving door" that contributed to the circumstances that led to the shooting.
That implies that our justice system is lenient. The reality is that the US, with some 2.3 million people imprisoned, leads the world in incarcerating it's own citizens despite recent declines in state prison populations. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/Prison_Count_2010.pdf?n=880
Prison overcrowding, due to stiffer sentencing and increased drug laws ballooned the prison population from about 450,000 in 1980 to the current 2.3 million. If we legalized drugs, there would be more room in prison for violent criminals like Randleman. And more money for mental health treatment that might have helped Randleman who reportedly is borderline mentally retarded.
But don't count on the Register, or law enforcement officials, who rely on money from drug seizures for a percentage of their budgets, to call for an end to the drug prohibition which fuels the violence in our communities. It's also a political third rail for politicians who can't even agree on legalizing marijuana for adults which would help decrease budget deficits by taxing sales of it.
With tension over the Dunn killing what we need is full disclosure. As Supreme Court justice William Brandeis said, "Sunlight is always the best disinfectant."
However, police are refusing to provide the Register with the video of the shooting from Dunn's police cruiser in an apparent violation of Ohio Freedom of Information laws. The Register has a right to the video, but it is being hypocritical by saying if it obtains the video it will not post the video online for the public because it's too gruesome. So the Register has a right to see the video, but the public doesn't? If people find it too gruesome, they shouldn't view it, but the video is public property and people should have the right to view it.
Sad, when a newspaper, which is supposed to fight government censorship engages in self-censorship because it fears losing advertising and reader subscriptions. This will also contribute to conspiracy theories that Dunn acted improperly when he attempted to question Randleman who was riding his bicycle at 3 a.m.
Unlike some police officers who don't live in the communities they serve and act more like occupiers than partners with residents, Dunn, a 30-year-old husband and father of two sons, lived in Sandusky and grew up there.
Dunn had a good record in his three years as a Sandusky police officer and friends and family say he cared about his community and wanted to protect it. We should try to live up to those same ideals not tarnish them with censorship and racism. As Matt Dunn said, let's use this tragedy to come together as a community.
While the circumstances were different, Harper's death was drug related, while Dunn's was in the line of duty, all lives have value and nobody deserves to be murdered, something Chanel Harper understands.
"I feel so bad for them," Harper said about Dunn's family, which includes Officer Matt Dunn who spoke to the crowd.
Like most of us in the crowd, Chanel Harper saw a family hurting over their son being fatally shot in the line of duty, not race. But because Dunn was white and shooting suspect Kevin Randleman was black there been some racial animosity over the shooting in Sandusky, a mostly white city northwestern Ohio city of about 25,000 by Lake Erie. Harper, one of dozens of black people who attended the vigil, said she got some dirty looks.
Officer Matt Dunn also picked up on it. In emotional and eloquent comments, Dunn told the crowd his son's killing wasn't about race and that it should make the community come together, not divide it.
But the circumstances help fuel misperceptions and distory reality. While have been a lot more shootings in the last couple years than when I covered crime for the Sandusky Register in 2005-06, Sandusky is not a violent community.
Dunn was the first police officer killed in the line of duty in a century in Sandusky and while there have been a series of high profile killings of police officers nationwide of late, overall they are rare. Any homicide is one too many, but in a nation of 310 million, just 48 police officers were murdered in 2009 http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/killed/2009/feloniouslykilled.html
And while you would never guess it from watching T.V. where every other show is about glamorous cops tracking serial killers and solving homicides, violent crime in America has been at record lows in recent years. http://romenewswire.com/2010/05/25/fbi-violent-crime-rate-in-the-u-s-drops-for-third-year-in-a-row/
Randleman, 50, was a career criminal who fatally shot a man in a 1990 bar fight, but was found not guilty of murder and involuntary manslaughter. Obviously, if he's found guilty of killing Dunn, he should face a minimum of life imprisonment. But there's no reason to rush to judgement.
While circumstantial evidence indicates Randleman's guilt, the Register wrongly convicted him in print in a news story and editorial by saying that Randleman fatally shot Dunn rather than attributing the statements to police, which is standard journalistic practice. The Register editorial by Managing Editor Matt Westerhold (full disclosure: Westerhold was briefly my boss before I left the Register to take another job) wrote that the criminal justice has a "revolving door" that contributed to the circumstances that led to the shooting.
That implies that our justice system is lenient. The reality is that the US, with some 2.3 million people imprisoned, leads the world in incarcerating it's own citizens despite recent declines in state prison populations. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/uploadedFiles/Prison_Count_2010.pdf?n=880
Prison overcrowding, due to stiffer sentencing and increased drug laws ballooned the prison population from about 450,000 in 1980 to the current 2.3 million. If we legalized drugs, there would be more room in prison for violent criminals like Randleman. And more money for mental health treatment that might have helped Randleman who reportedly is borderline mentally retarded.
But don't count on the Register, or law enforcement officials, who rely on money from drug seizures for a percentage of their budgets, to call for an end to the drug prohibition which fuels the violence in our communities. It's also a political third rail for politicians who can't even agree on legalizing marijuana for adults which would help decrease budget deficits by taxing sales of it.
With tension over the Dunn killing what we need is full disclosure. As Supreme Court justice William Brandeis said, "Sunlight is always the best disinfectant."
However, police are refusing to provide the Register with the video of the shooting from Dunn's police cruiser in an apparent violation of Ohio Freedom of Information laws. The Register has a right to the video, but it is being hypocritical by saying if it obtains the video it will not post the video online for the public because it's too gruesome. So the Register has a right to see the video, but the public doesn't? If people find it too gruesome, they shouldn't view it, but the video is public property and people should have the right to view it.
Sad, when a newspaper, which is supposed to fight government censorship engages in self-censorship because it fears losing advertising and reader subscriptions. This will also contribute to conspiracy theories that Dunn acted improperly when he attempted to question Randleman who was riding his bicycle at 3 a.m.
Unlike some police officers who don't live in the communities they serve and act more like occupiers than partners with residents, Dunn, a 30-year-old husband and father of two sons, lived in Sandusky and grew up there.
Dunn had a good record in his three years as a Sandusky police officer and friends and family say he cared about his community and wanted to protect it. We should try to live up to those same ideals not tarnish them with censorship and racism. As Matt Dunn said, let's use this tragedy to come together as a community.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
In It Together
Facing the privatization of Akron, Ohio's sewer system and the potential loss of their jobs, Akron public workers in 2008 used the slogan Save Our Sewers and focused on potential water contamination in their successful campaign to defeat the plan.
The focus of the campaign was not on saving their jobs, but what privatization would mean for the entire community. The idea being that we're all in it together.
The Akron effort was cited this Saturday in Bellevue at a workshop held by organizers from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees who are battling Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. The bill would criminalize strikes and drastically reduce collective bargaining rights of public sector unions including the right to negotiate about the kind of privatization the Akron workers fought.
"Our message has got to be, 'Save our community,'" George Embleton, an AFSCME field education coordinator from Boston, told the audience of about 30 public and private union members. "We are now in a fight back mode."
AFSCME organizers recognize that while there is sympathy for public workers given the heavy-handed tactics being used against them in Ohio and around the nation, there is also resentment. Many non-union workers are unsympathetic after years of wage stagnation and givebacks on healthcare and other benefits.
Just 11.9 percent of American workers are unionized and just 6.9 percent in the private sector.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Most workers under 30 have never been in a union. As a journalist, I remember a 20-something co-worker at a Connecticut newspaper asking me, "What's a scab?" when we were discussing a strike at a local business.
Pensions have become a thing of the past for most workers. They're lucky if they can get 401 (k) plans which are subject to the Wall Street rollercoaster and have never lived up to the promises made when they were introduced as replacements for pensions some 30 years ago.
"You brothers and sisters in the private sector have been feeling this for 20 years," Embleton said. "Right now there are 27 states where right to work laws or anti-labor laws are being proposed. I don't like to hear about conspiracies, but it sure sounds like a conspiracy."
Republican governors like Ohio's John Kasich, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and New Jersey's Chris Christie have used budget deficits their party helped create with tax cuts and tax caps as an excuse to eviscerate unions. AFSCME, the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association are the among the top 10 donors to politicians and nearly all of their money goes to Democrats.
Busting unions would eliminate the last counterweight to corporations and the Republicans who do their bidding. "We're in the way," Embleton said.
Of course Democrats, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, to Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer also shill for corporations and Wall Street, but not to the extreme degree of Republicans. And Democrats like the Indiana and Wisconsion state senators who left their states to prevent passage of union busting bills, have shown the spine that national Democrats like Obama lack.
Embleton and Dan Ford, an AFSCME political coordinator from Toledo, are helping organize a petition drive for a ballot initiative to defeat SB 5 which narrowly passed in the Ohio State Senate and is expected to pass soon in the House of Representatives where Republicans have a majority. Ford said he's confident SB 5 opponents can get the approximatel 260,000 signatures - 6 percent of the votes cast in the 2010 election -necessary for the ballot initiative. The signatures must come from at least 3 percent of voters in 44 of Ohio's 88 counties, Ford said.
Getting a ballot initiative and overturning SB 5 will require improving communication with an often apathetic and easily swayed public. It will mean breaking down stereotypes of corrupt union leaders and lazy, overpaid union workers. The kind of stereotypes reactionaries have sucessfully used to split and divide the public in the past.
It can be a tough sell. How do you convince someone that their tax dollars should help pay for decent healthcare for public workers when that person doesn't have a pension or decent healthcare? "The answer is you should have it too," Embleton said.
The emphasis should be on increasing wages and benefits for all workers, not decreasing them for the few workers who have decent wages and benefits. We need to stress that union wages help improve wages for non-union workers in the same way the minimum wage helps raise wages for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats.
We need to stress that that public workers aren't overpaid. They actually earn slightly less in total compensation than their private sector counterparts. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/debunking_the_myth_of_the_overcompensated_public_employee
And most important, we must debunk the myth that government is always bad or incompetent. Embleton analogized it to an iceberg with the public only seeing what's above the water. That most people don't comprehend that government is bridges, roads and street lights. And that government is people: cops, firefighters, nurses, postal workers, soldiers and teachers.
Mock coupons were handed out to give to local business people to show how much public workers spend in the community and the ripple effect slashing their wages and benefits will have on the local economy. The audience was urged to write anti-SB 5 letters to local politicians and local newspapers.
Defeating SB 5 will be an uphill battle. As Embleton noted, Washington D.C. lobbyists like Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who bragged about drowning government like a baby in a bathtub http://www.1-love-quotes.com/quote/925045about meet with politicians each day to push for dismantling government and unions.
"We're sitting in front of our 50-inch T.V. enjoying the game while they're eating our lunch," Embleton said.
Despite the odds, the audience left energized. If it takes going door to door for signatures, talking to our neighbors, writing letters to the editor or facing off with politicans, we'll do it. If we go down, we go down fighting.We're all in it together.
The focus of the campaign was not on saving their jobs, but what privatization would mean for the entire community. The idea being that we're all in it together.
The Akron effort was cited this Saturday in Bellevue at a workshop held by organizers from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees who are battling Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. The bill would criminalize strikes and drastically reduce collective bargaining rights of public sector unions including the right to negotiate about the kind of privatization the Akron workers fought.
"Our message has got to be, 'Save our community,'" George Embleton, an AFSCME field education coordinator from Boston, told the audience of about 30 public and private union members. "We are now in a fight back mode."
AFSCME organizers recognize that while there is sympathy for public workers given the heavy-handed tactics being used against them in Ohio and around the nation, there is also resentment. Many non-union workers are unsympathetic after years of wage stagnation and givebacks on healthcare and other benefits.
Just 11.9 percent of American workers are unionized and just 6.9 percent in the private sector.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Most workers under 30 have never been in a union. As a journalist, I remember a 20-something co-worker at a Connecticut newspaper asking me, "What's a scab?" when we were discussing a strike at a local business.
Pensions have become a thing of the past for most workers. They're lucky if they can get 401 (k) plans which are subject to the Wall Street rollercoaster and have never lived up to the promises made when they were introduced as replacements for pensions some 30 years ago.
"You brothers and sisters in the private sector have been feeling this for 20 years," Embleton said. "Right now there are 27 states where right to work laws or anti-labor laws are being proposed. I don't like to hear about conspiracies, but it sure sounds like a conspiracy."
Republican governors like Ohio's John Kasich, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and New Jersey's Chris Christie have used budget deficits their party helped create with tax cuts and tax caps as an excuse to eviscerate unions. AFSCME, the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association are the among the top 10 donors to politicians and nearly all of their money goes to Democrats.
Busting unions would eliminate the last counterweight to corporations and the Republicans who do their bidding. "We're in the way," Embleton said.
Of course Democrats, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, to Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer also shill for corporations and Wall Street, but not to the extreme degree of Republicans. And Democrats like the Indiana and Wisconsion state senators who left their states to prevent passage of union busting bills, have shown the spine that national Democrats like Obama lack.
Embleton and Dan Ford, an AFSCME political coordinator from Toledo, are helping organize a petition drive for a ballot initiative to defeat SB 5 which narrowly passed in the Ohio State Senate and is expected to pass soon in the House of Representatives where Republicans have a majority. Ford said he's confident SB 5 opponents can get the approximatel 260,000 signatures - 6 percent of the votes cast in the 2010 election -necessary for the ballot initiative. The signatures must come from at least 3 percent of voters in 44 of Ohio's 88 counties, Ford said.
Getting a ballot initiative and overturning SB 5 will require improving communication with an often apathetic and easily swayed public. It will mean breaking down stereotypes of corrupt union leaders and lazy, overpaid union workers. The kind of stereotypes reactionaries have sucessfully used to split and divide the public in the past.
It can be a tough sell. How do you convince someone that their tax dollars should help pay for decent healthcare for public workers when that person doesn't have a pension or decent healthcare? "The answer is you should have it too," Embleton said.
The emphasis should be on increasing wages and benefits for all workers, not decreasing them for the few workers who have decent wages and benefits. We need to stress that union wages help improve wages for non-union workers in the same way the minimum wage helps raise wages for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats.
We need to stress that that public workers aren't overpaid. They actually earn slightly less in total compensation than their private sector counterparts. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/debunking_the_myth_of_the_overcompensated_public_employee
And most important, we must debunk the myth that government is always bad or incompetent. Embleton analogized it to an iceberg with the public only seeing what's above the water. That most people don't comprehend that government is bridges, roads and street lights. And that government is people: cops, firefighters, nurses, postal workers, soldiers and teachers.
Mock coupons were handed out to give to local business people to show how much public workers spend in the community and the ripple effect slashing their wages and benefits will have on the local economy. The audience was urged to write anti-SB 5 letters to local politicians and local newspapers.
Defeating SB 5 will be an uphill battle. As Embleton noted, Washington D.C. lobbyists like Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who bragged about drowning government like a baby in a bathtub http://www.1-love-quotes.com/quote/925045about meet with politicians each day to push for dismantling government and unions.
"We're sitting in front of our 50-inch T.V. enjoying the game while they're eating our lunch," Embleton said.
Despite the odds, the audience left energized. If it takes going door to door for signatures, talking to our neighbors, writing letters to the editor or facing off with politicans, we'll do it. If we go down, we go down fighting.We're all in it together.
Friday, March 18, 2011
The Sleeping Giant
I'm getting screwed so you should too.
That's the split and divide mentality backers of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio and similar union busting measures around the nation are counting on. Since most Americans bosses decide their workers pay and benefits and just 11.9 percent of workers are unionized, why should non-union workers care if unionized public workers lose their voice?
It's the taxpayers versus those greedy union workers as if the union workers aren't taxpayers and they're really living large on the modest pay and benefits most receive. The truth is public workers are actually under compensated compared to their private sector counterparts.
Public workers average $49, 072 in wages compared to $55,132 for comparable private sector workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For total compensation, public workers make $69,108 compared to $71,109 for comparable private sector workers. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/debunking_the_myth_of_the_overcompensated_public_employee
But this is in an America where there are five unemployed workers for every job. Where wages have stagnated for a decade. Where food and gas prices are skyrocketing and pensions are a quaint thing of the past for many workers.
So the idea of public workers making decent wages and benefits is resented by some. Throw in the lie that public unions are busting local and state budgets - the reality is deficits are due to corporate welfare, tax cuts for the rich and The Great Recession, not government overspending - and you have a recipe for class resentment.
Not the deserved resentment of the 90 percent of American households earning an average of $31,244 and wondering why the richest 1 percent who average $1,137 milllion just got a tax cut. Or those who resent Wall Street profits increasing 720 percent while unemployment goes up 102 percent and American's home equity decreases 35 percent. Or those bothered by the average CEO earning 185 times more than their workers. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph#
No, the kind of class resentment politcal leaders - many of whom get to vote themselves pay raises - are counting on is the kind of resentment that pits neighbor against neighbor. The kind of illogical and unproductive belief that if I'm suffering and your not that we both must suffer. Instead of believing that rather than resenting one another we need to work together to prosper.
When people are hurting as badly as they are, it must have seemed like a winning strategy to pit them against each other and the Republican midterm landslide set the table. But not everybody is buying it.
After 30 years of tax cuts for the superrich and corporations that shipped jobs over the border and overseas while making record profits, people who normally suffered in silence are speaking out. I heard their voices Saturday at a town meeting in Norwalk, Ohio hosted by Republican State Rep. Terry Boose, a supporter of SB 5.
I give Boose credit for standing on a stage and taking the heat from some 200 angry workers for over two hours. But his disingenuous rhetoric didn't help matters.
Boose said, "there's nothing in the the bill that says it will cut anybody's wages" and SB 5 " was not set up to bash unions." That was like urinating down the backs of the audience and telling them it was spring rain.
SB 5 says "health care benefits, pension pick-ups, privatization of services, workforce levels and other provisions" are not subject to collective bargaining. It criminalizes the right to strike and lets local governments decide on union contracts rather than neutral mediators in binding arbitration.
"Collective bargaining will become collective begging," Sandusky firefighter Adam Butler told Boose who said it would be a conflict of interest for teachers to be elected to schoolboards. Yet Boose saw no conflict with school boards deciding whether to choose a union's best contract offer or the school board's best offer.
And if teachers lose seniority rights and are at the mercy of school boards for merit pay, "It's going to come down to 'isims," Norwalk resident Bill Foltz told me. "Nepotism and favoritism."
With Republican Gov. John Kasich this week announcing a budget that cuts state funding to local governments by 25 percent, local and state workers will soon be asked to make major concessions and privatization of their jobs is likely on the horizon with Kasich already planning to privatize five Ohio prisons.
So technically Boose is right that SB 5 probably won't cut union salaries. But if contributions for benefits and pensions are drastically hiked it's effectively a pay cut like what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is forcing Wisconsin state workers to do after handing out $137 million in corporate tax cuts.
Boose said SB 5 was necesary due to "new economic realities" but they don't include making the rich and corporations pay their fair share. Unlike some in the audience, I told Boose I didn't want to see him or other legislators take a pay cut anymore than I wanted to see union workers take one. But when I asked him whether he would support raising taxes on Ohioans earning $250,000 or more, or reinstituting Ohio's corporate income tax or creating a windfall profits tax for Ohio's wealthiest corporations, Boose cut me off.
Boose said he wasn't in favor of raising taxes and that corporations pay taxes. I reminded him that Exxon-Mobil paid no federal income taxes in 2009 despite earning a record $45 billion in profits http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-tax/
But while Boose wasn't in favor of raising taxes he said he supports taxpayers footing the bill for school vouchers which could be used to send students to parochial or charter schools. Charter schools usually aren't unionized and can cherry pick the best students while not having to provide English as a Second Language or special education classes. Despite the advantage, charter schools perform no better than public schools http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0629/Study-On-average-charter-schools-do-no-better-than-public-schools
Boose, who admitted SB 5 wouldn't solve Ohio's $8 billion projected shortfall, said it would provide more transparency. But he also said he would consider privatization - although not of Ohio roads - which would eliminate transparency since private companies records aren't public information.
The Republican playbook is to restrict government's ability to raise revenue with tax caps and tax cuts, then use the deficits their policies created as an excuse to dismantle government. But the audience wasn't falling for the "we're broke and we all need to tighten our belts" through "shared sacrifice" argument.
"I would've hoped Wall Street would not run this country into the ground, but they did!" teacher Vince Marsala told Boose. "The system is not broke. This will break it. I'm a father of three children and if you ruin their education it's on you, not me."
Of course none of the emotional pleas will sway Boose and with SB 5 passed in the State Senate and the Republicans holding a majority in the House of Representatives, SB 5 will likely become law soon. But a ballot initiative could overturn it.
And SB 5 and other union busting legislation have been a long overdue wakeup call to working people who are realizing we're not powerless and their is strength in numbers. So Boose got one thank-you from the audience.
"Gutting unions, that's what's going on in the state of Ohio," David J. Childers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1194 president, told Boose. "Thanks you for waking up the sleeping giant."
That's the split and divide mentality backers of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio and similar union busting measures around the nation are counting on. Since most Americans bosses decide their workers pay and benefits and just 11.9 percent of workers are unionized, why should non-union workers care if unionized public workers lose their voice?
It's the taxpayers versus those greedy union workers as if the union workers aren't taxpayers and they're really living large on the modest pay and benefits most receive. The truth is public workers are actually under compensated compared to their private sector counterparts.
Public workers average $49, 072 in wages compared to $55,132 for comparable private sector workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For total compensation, public workers make $69,108 compared to $71,109 for comparable private sector workers. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/debunking_the_myth_of_the_overcompensated_public_employee
But this is in an America where there are five unemployed workers for every job. Where wages have stagnated for a decade. Where food and gas prices are skyrocketing and pensions are a quaint thing of the past for many workers.
So the idea of public workers making decent wages and benefits is resented by some. Throw in the lie that public unions are busting local and state budgets - the reality is deficits are due to corporate welfare, tax cuts for the rich and The Great Recession, not government overspending - and you have a recipe for class resentment.
Not the deserved resentment of the 90 percent of American households earning an average of $31,244 and wondering why the richest 1 percent who average $1,137 milllion just got a tax cut. Or those who resent Wall Street profits increasing 720 percent while unemployment goes up 102 percent and American's home equity decreases 35 percent. Or those bothered by the average CEO earning 185 times more than their workers. http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph#
No, the kind of class resentment politcal leaders - many of whom get to vote themselves pay raises - are counting on is the kind of resentment that pits neighbor against neighbor. The kind of illogical and unproductive belief that if I'm suffering and your not that we both must suffer. Instead of believing that rather than resenting one another we need to work together to prosper.
When people are hurting as badly as they are, it must have seemed like a winning strategy to pit them against each other and the Republican midterm landslide set the table. But not everybody is buying it.
After 30 years of tax cuts for the superrich and corporations that shipped jobs over the border and overseas while making record profits, people who normally suffered in silence are speaking out. I heard their voices Saturday at a town meeting in Norwalk, Ohio hosted by Republican State Rep. Terry Boose, a supporter of SB 5.
I give Boose credit for standing on a stage and taking the heat from some 200 angry workers for over two hours. But his disingenuous rhetoric didn't help matters.
Boose said, "there's nothing in the the bill that says it will cut anybody's wages" and SB 5 " was not set up to bash unions." That was like urinating down the backs of the audience and telling them it was spring rain.
SB 5 says "health care benefits, pension pick-ups, privatization of services, workforce levels and other provisions" are not subject to collective bargaining. It criminalizes the right to strike and lets local governments decide on union contracts rather than neutral mediators in binding arbitration.
"Collective bargaining will become collective begging," Sandusky firefighter Adam Butler told Boose who said it would be a conflict of interest for teachers to be elected to schoolboards. Yet Boose saw no conflict with school boards deciding whether to choose a union's best contract offer or the school board's best offer.
And if teachers lose seniority rights and are at the mercy of school boards for merit pay, "It's going to come down to 'isims," Norwalk resident Bill Foltz told me. "Nepotism and favoritism."
With Republican Gov. John Kasich this week announcing a budget that cuts state funding to local governments by 25 percent, local and state workers will soon be asked to make major concessions and privatization of their jobs is likely on the horizon with Kasich already planning to privatize five Ohio prisons.
So technically Boose is right that SB 5 probably won't cut union salaries. But if contributions for benefits and pensions are drastically hiked it's effectively a pay cut like what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is forcing Wisconsin state workers to do after handing out $137 million in corporate tax cuts.
Boose said SB 5 was necesary due to "new economic realities" but they don't include making the rich and corporations pay their fair share. Unlike some in the audience, I told Boose I didn't want to see him or other legislators take a pay cut anymore than I wanted to see union workers take one. But when I asked him whether he would support raising taxes on Ohioans earning $250,000 or more, or reinstituting Ohio's corporate income tax or creating a windfall profits tax for Ohio's wealthiest corporations, Boose cut me off.
Boose said he wasn't in favor of raising taxes and that corporations pay taxes. I reminded him that Exxon-Mobil paid no federal income taxes in 2009 despite earning a record $45 billion in profits http://thinkprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-tax/
But while Boose wasn't in favor of raising taxes he said he supports taxpayers footing the bill for school vouchers which could be used to send students to parochial or charter schools. Charter schools usually aren't unionized and can cherry pick the best students while not having to provide English as a Second Language or special education classes. Despite the advantage, charter schools perform no better than public schools http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0629/Study-On-average-charter-schools-do-no-better-than-public-schools
Boose, who admitted SB 5 wouldn't solve Ohio's $8 billion projected shortfall, said it would provide more transparency. But he also said he would consider privatization - although not of Ohio roads - which would eliminate transparency since private companies records aren't public information.
The Republican playbook is to restrict government's ability to raise revenue with tax caps and tax cuts, then use the deficits their policies created as an excuse to dismantle government. But the audience wasn't falling for the "we're broke and we all need to tighten our belts" through "shared sacrifice" argument.
"I would've hoped Wall Street would not run this country into the ground, but they did!" teacher Vince Marsala told Boose. "The system is not broke. This will break it. I'm a father of three children and if you ruin their education it's on you, not me."
Of course none of the emotional pleas will sway Boose and with SB 5 passed in the State Senate and the Republicans holding a majority in the House of Representatives, SB 5 will likely become law soon. But a ballot initiative could overturn it.
And SB 5 and other union busting legislation have been a long overdue wakeup call to working people who are realizing we're not powerless and their is strength in numbers. So Boose got one thank-you from the audience.
"Gutting unions, that's what's going on in the state of Ohio," David J. Childers, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1194 president, told Boose. "Thanks you for waking up the sleeping giant."
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Shut 'em Down
The doomed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan reminds me of my last time in a nuclear power plant where a plant spokesman in southwestern Michigan said a meltdown could never happen, even in an earthquake. What happened after the dog and pony show Palisades Power Plant spokesman Mark Savage gave me last year confirmed my fears that nuclear power plant operators can't be trusted.
I was writing for The Herald-Palladium, a small daily newspaper in St. Joseph, Mich. about how efforts by the nuclear power industry to build a new generation of plants might affect the two power plants in the paper's circulation area. A week after the tour, I called an anti-nuclear activist who mentioned Palisades had an unplanned shutdown due to water leaking from a faulty control rod.
The shutdown occurred about an hour after my tour, but Savage never mentioned it to me despite numerous questions I had asked him about the history of leaks of radioactive tritium - a form of hydrogen and nuclear byproduct - and other problems at the plant. Palisades is owned by Entergy, a corporation with a troubling track record of running nuclear plants including the Vermont Yankee plant shutdown last year due to radioactive water leaks http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/11/vermont_yankee_nuclear_plant_s.html
As I told my editors after the incident, if Savage couldn't be trusted to notify me about a relatively minor problem at the plant on the day I was touring it, how could we trust him to notify us about something serious?
With the newsrooms shrinking as the newspaper industry goes extinct there aren't a lot of reporters to do investigative reporting especially at smaller papers like the H-P. That leaves journalists and the public at the mercy of the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which, like most federal regulatory agencies, is more a lapdog than a watchdog.
The Union of Concerned Scientists documented 47 incidents between 1979 and 2008 where the NRC failed to address safety problems that forced shutdowns http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
Before he became president and a proponent of nuclear power, Sen. Barack Obama noted that the NRC is funded by nuclear industry fees and called it "moribund" and "captive of the industries it regulates." http://www.thenation.com/article/zombie-nuke-plants
The comments were prompted by tritium leaks from an Illinois plant owned by Exelon, whom Obama's presidential campaign later took donations from. President Obama has proposed $36 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans to build up to 20 new nuclear plants. Like my former congressman in southwest Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton, Obama sees no conflict of interest in accepting money from an industry he supports despite their troubling track record.
Upton, whose district includes Palisades, supports recycling nuclear fuel to help keep old plants like Palisades running. The top contributor to Upton's re-election campaign in the last election cycle was Energy Solutions, a Utah-based nuclear recycling company which donated $38,000 through its political action committee.
What goes on in Michigan with nuclear power happens all around the country. I grew up and spent most of my early reporting career in Connecticut, home of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Connecticut near Long Island Sound, a plant with a history of problems. I remember in 1997 touring the three-reactor plant with then-Gov. John Rowland who emerged from the tour saying safety concerns had been exaggerated. Shortly thereafter, the NRC temporarily closed the plant after finding management ignored the safety concerns raised by workers http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E5DF1239F937A15756C0A96E958260&pagewanted=all
In the event of a meltdown of all three reactors, an NRC-commissioned study estimated some 54,000 radiation exposure deaths within a year and 89,000 eventual cancer deaths. Even the conservative Rowland, who would later go to jail for accepting gifts unrelated to Millstone, admitted Millstone officials lied to him. In a 2007 complaint, anti-nuclear activists alleged radiation emissions from Millstone had caused high rates of cancer among area children http://www.mothballmillstone.org/news2007d.html
I now live in northwestern Ohio about an hour away from the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station located outside Toledo. In 2002, the plant came within a third of an inch of melting down due to a "pineapple-sized" hole to the reactor caused by acid corrosion. Two employees and a contractor were accused of falsifying safety reports, but there are accusations, that plant owner First Energy scapegoated one of the indicted employees to coverup their own profit-motivated transgressions http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
With catostrophic climate change on the horizon due to fossil fuels like coal and oil, it's natural for people to look to nuclear power as an alternative, but what's happening in Japan shows it's an accident waiting to happen. Industry backers will always insist that there are safeguards in place for worst case scenarios while cutting corners to make more money. In the wake of Japan's earthquake and tsunami and subsequent partial meltdown at at least one of the four troubled plants, American nuclear power supporters are circling the wagons http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/science/earth/14politics.html?hp
They offer false choices that dodge the need for American sacrifice. We need to drastically conserve energy - the US has about 2 percent of the world oil reserves, but uses a quarter of all oil - and focus on solar and wind energy and natural gas when it can be drilled safely. We should be investing in mass transit and high speed rail and electric cars, not driving sport utility vehicles and complaning about high gas prices.
Existing nuclear plants should be phased out when their licenses expire. New nuclear plants cost up to $12 billion to build.
The financial cost of building a new generation of plants is colossal. So is the danger.
I was writing for The Herald-Palladium, a small daily newspaper in St. Joseph, Mich. about how efforts by the nuclear power industry to build a new generation of plants might affect the two power plants in the paper's circulation area. A week after the tour, I called an anti-nuclear activist who mentioned Palisades had an unplanned shutdown due to water leaking from a faulty control rod.
The shutdown occurred about an hour after my tour, but Savage never mentioned it to me despite numerous questions I had asked him about the history of leaks of radioactive tritium - a form of hydrogen and nuclear byproduct - and other problems at the plant. Palisades is owned by Entergy, a corporation with a troubling track record of running nuclear plants including the Vermont Yankee plant shutdown last year due to radioactive water leaks http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/11/vermont_yankee_nuclear_plant_s.html
As I told my editors after the incident, if Savage couldn't be trusted to notify me about a relatively minor problem at the plant on the day I was touring it, how could we trust him to notify us about something serious?
With the newsrooms shrinking as the newspaper industry goes extinct there aren't a lot of reporters to do investigative reporting especially at smaller papers like the H-P. That leaves journalists and the public at the mercy of the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which, like most federal regulatory agencies, is more a lapdog than a watchdog.
The Union of Concerned Scientists documented 47 incidents between 1979 and 2008 where the NRC failed to address safety problems that forced shutdowns http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
Before he became president and a proponent of nuclear power, Sen. Barack Obama noted that the NRC is funded by nuclear industry fees and called it "moribund" and "captive of the industries it regulates." http://www.thenation.com/article/zombie-nuke-plants
The comments were prompted by tritium leaks from an Illinois plant owned by Exelon, whom Obama's presidential campaign later took donations from. President Obama has proposed $36 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans to build up to 20 new nuclear plants. Like my former congressman in southwest Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton, Obama sees no conflict of interest in accepting money from an industry he supports despite their troubling track record.
Upton, whose district includes Palisades, supports recycling nuclear fuel to help keep old plants like Palisades running. The top contributor to Upton's re-election campaign in the last election cycle was Energy Solutions, a Utah-based nuclear recycling company which donated $38,000 through its political action committee.
What goes on in Michigan with nuclear power happens all around the country. I grew up and spent most of my early reporting career in Connecticut, home of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Connecticut near Long Island Sound, a plant with a history of problems. I remember in 1997 touring the three-reactor plant with then-Gov. John Rowland who emerged from the tour saying safety concerns had been exaggerated. Shortly thereafter, the NRC temporarily closed the plant after finding management ignored the safety concerns raised by workers http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400E5DF1239F937A15756C0A96E958260&pagewanted=all
In the event of a meltdown of all three reactors, an NRC-commissioned study estimated some 54,000 radiation exposure deaths within a year and 89,000 eventual cancer deaths. Even the conservative Rowland, who would later go to jail for accepting gifts unrelated to Millstone, admitted Millstone officials lied to him. In a 2007 complaint, anti-nuclear activists alleged radiation emissions from Millstone had caused high rates of cancer among area children http://www.mothballmillstone.org/news2007d.html
I now live in northwestern Ohio about an hour away from the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Station located outside Toledo. In 2002, the plant came within a third of an inch of melting down due to a "pineapple-sized" hole to the reactor caused by acid corrosion. Two employees and a contractor were accused of falsifying safety reports, but there are accusations, that plant owner First Energy scapegoated one of the indicted employees to coverup their own profit-motivated transgressions http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/04/how-we-almost-blew-ohio#
With catostrophic climate change on the horizon due to fossil fuels like coal and oil, it's natural for people to look to nuclear power as an alternative, but what's happening in Japan shows it's an accident waiting to happen. Industry backers will always insist that there are safeguards in place for worst case scenarios while cutting corners to make more money. In the wake of Japan's earthquake and tsunami and subsequent partial meltdown at at least one of the four troubled plants, American nuclear power supporters are circling the wagons http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/science/earth/14politics.html?hp
They offer false choices that dodge the need for American sacrifice. We need to drastically conserve energy - the US has about 2 percent of the world oil reserves, but uses a quarter of all oil - and focus on solar and wind energy and natural gas when it can be drilled safely. We should be investing in mass transit and high speed rail and electric cars, not driving sport utility vehicles and complaning about high gas prices.
Existing nuclear plants should be phased out when their licenses expire. New nuclear plants cost up to $12 billion to build.
The financial cost of building a new generation of plants is colossal. So is the danger.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Kasich's Warped Record
Shortly after I first moved to Ohio in 2005 in the midst of the first Bush II recession, I remember hearing then Gov. Robert Taft brag during his State of the State speech about shedding state workers. As if putting people on the unemployment line in a recession was a good idea or that residents didn't need the services those state employees provided.
I'm reminded of that willfull ignorance when I read new Gov. John Kasich's State of the State speech delivered Tuesday. If you didn't know about Kasich's record as a Republican nine-term congressman and Lehman Brothers executive, it would be a lot easier to take the concens he expressed about Ohio's joblessness, homlessness and poverty seriously.
Kasich in 1999 voted to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act (http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=8065&can_id=27017) the FDR-inspired 1933 law designed to prevent another Great Depression by preventing the merger of commercial and savings banks with investment banks. The kind of law that would've prevented the bankruptcy of Lehman and the ensuing Great Recession http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/taste-glass-steagall-lash-lehman# Of course, Kasich had a soft landing departing Lehman with a $432,000 golden parachute while Ohio's pension fund took a nearly $500,000 hit thanks to Lehman's financial shennanigans http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2010-election-wall-street-factor-ohio-governors-race/story?id=10586618
The Great Recession drastically decreased federal revenue for states like Ohio and increased personal bankrupticies, but Kasich also voted to make it harder for working people to declare bankruptcy, http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=7939&can_id=27017 The kind of people who don't get billions in taxpayer bailouts and interest free loans from the Federal Reserve like Kasich's Wall Street buddies.
And in 1998 Kasich voted to make life easier for millionaires and strip the treasury of more revenue by raising the exemption for estate taxes to $1 million http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=8257&can_id=27017
In his speech, Kasich lamented the loss of jobs and population in Ohio and talked about bringing Bill Clinton into the state. Perfect, the criminals returning to the crime scene. In addition to supporting the overturning of Glass-Steagall, Clinton supported North American Free Trade Act and China's admission to the World Trade Organization both of which Rep. Kasich voted for.
The NAFTA vote paved the way for corporations to exploit cheap labor and non-existent environmental and labor laws in Mexico costing the US some 1 million jobs by 2006 including nearly 50,000 in Ohio http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp173/ Between China's admission to the WTO in 2001 and 2008, about 2.4 million US jobs were lost or displaced including nearly 92,000 in Ohio http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp173/
Kasich said Ohio isn't just "under seige" from China and India, but neighboring states like Indiana who he accused of pirating jobs by offering tax breaks, forgetting that Ohio ended all corporate taxes in 2005.
"The higher our costs are, the more opportunity another state has to come in here and offer a better deal," Kasich said. "That's why we can't raise taxes."
The truth is companies relocate primarily because of the things that the tax cuts Kasich advocates are destroying: a solid infrastructure, good schools and an educated workforce. The corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks is just the cherry on a sundae. However, companies have sucessfully been pitting states like Ohio against one another in a race to to give out the most tax breaks for decades and taxpayers are the ones who end up getting burned http://www.greatamericanjobsscam.com/pages/book.html
Just as Kasich thinks the only way to draw in businesses to Ohio is to bribe them he thinks that's the only way to keep Ohioans from moving out of the state. You're not leaving because you lost your job, it's because of those pesky estate taxes. The reailty is estate taxes affect only a fraction of Ohioans, those with estates worth at least $338,333. http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/ohio-news/gop-effort-to-repeal-ohio-estate-tax-raises-debate-1067554.html The $55 million in revenue is minimal in the context of Ohio's approximately $120 billion budget and affects only one in 14 Ohio estates, but that's what's killing the state, according to Kasich.
Kasich also wants to save money by having your elderly parents to stay at home with you rather than go to a nursing home implying that children put their parents in nursing homes because they don't love them, not because they can't take care of elderly people with serious medical conditions or Alzheimer's disease.
"We need to think outside the box on Medicaid," said Kasich whose party wants to overturn healthcare reform which would increase the deficit by $230 billion http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/06/cbo-health-care-repeal-deficit_n_805192.html and deny coverage to between 111,000 and 282,000 in our congressional district including between 8,000 and 35,000 children http://docs.house.gov/energycommerce/health_2011/OH9.Kaptur.pdf
Kasich also spoke of giving parents more choice in schools, code for busting teachers unions as part of the union busting Senate Bill 5 and making taxpayers pay for vouchers for charter schools. Unlike public schools, charters can cherry pick top students and don't have to provide English as a Second Language classes and special education.
Kasich also said Ohio needs to enter the "international uranium market." Perhaps we can sell some uranium to Japan so they can build new nuclear power plants as if they don't have enough problems with the old ones since the earthquake.
And Kasich said we need to make more ethanol which costs more to produce than the gas savings and increases pollution, erosion and world food shortages http://motherjones.com/environment/2007/10/ethanol-effect-when-alternative-fuels-go-bad#
Kasich who previously warned we need to "get on the bus or get run over by it" said that we're all Ohioans and we'll, "climb the mountain and make Ohio great." The reality is Kasich's split-and-divide policies will drive us off a cliff.
I'm reminded of that willfull ignorance when I read new Gov. John Kasich's State of the State speech delivered Tuesday. If you didn't know about Kasich's record as a Republican nine-term congressman and Lehman Brothers executive, it would be a lot easier to take the concens he expressed about Ohio's joblessness, homlessness and poverty seriously.
Kasich in 1999 voted to overturn the Glass-Steagall Act (http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=8065&can_id=27017) the FDR-inspired 1933 law designed to prevent another Great Depression by preventing the merger of commercial and savings banks with investment banks. The kind of law that would've prevented the bankruptcy of Lehman and the ensuing Great Recession http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/taste-glass-steagall-lash-lehman# Of course, Kasich had a soft landing departing Lehman with a $432,000 golden parachute while Ohio's pension fund took a nearly $500,000 hit thanks to Lehman's financial shennanigans http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2010-election-wall-street-factor-ohio-governors-race/story?id=10586618
The Great Recession drastically decreased federal revenue for states like Ohio and increased personal bankrupticies, but Kasich also voted to make it harder for working people to declare bankruptcy, http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=7939&can_id=27017 The kind of people who don't get billions in taxpayer bailouts and interest free loans from the Federal Reserve like Kasich's Wall Street buddies.
And in 1998 Kasich voted to make life easier for millionaires and strip the treasury of more revenue by raising the exemption for estate taxes to $1 million http://www.votesmart.org/issue_keyvote_detail.php?cs_id=8257&can_id=27017
In his speech, Kasich lamented the loss of jobs and population in Ohio and talked about bringing Bill Clinton into the state. Perfect, the criminals returning to the crime scene. In addition to supporting the overturning of Glass-Steagall, Clinton supported North American Free Trade Act and China's admission to the World Trade Organization both of which Rep. Kasich voted for.
The NAFTA vote paved the way for corporations to exploit cheap labor and non-existent environmental and labor laws in Mexico costing the US some 1 million jobs by 2006 including nearly 50,000 in Ohio http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp173/ Between China's admission to the WTO in 2001 and 2008, about 2.4 million US jobs were lost or displaced including nearly 92,000 in Ohio http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/bp173/
Kasich said Ohio isn't just "under seige" from China and India, but neighboring states like Indiana who he accused of pirating jobs by offering tax breaks, forgetting that Ohio ended all corporate taxes in 2005.
"The higher our costs are, the more opportunity another state has to come in here and offer a better deal," Kasich said. "That's why we can't raise taxes."
The truth is companies relocate primarily because of the things that the tax cuts Kasich advocates are destroying: a solid infrastructure, good schools and an educated workforce. The corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks is just the cherry on a sundae. However, companies have sucessfully been pitting states like Ohio against one another in a race to to give out the most tax breaks for decades and taxpayers are the ones who end up getting burned http://www.greatamericanjobsscam.com/pages/book.html
Just as Kasich thinks the only way to draw in businesses to Ohio is to bribe them he thinks that's the only way to keep Ohioans from moving out of the state. You're not leaving because you lost your job, it's because of those pesky estate taxes. The reailty is estate taxes affect only a fraction of Ohioans, those with estates worth at least $338,333. http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/ohio-news/gop-effort-to-repeal-ohio-estate-tax-raises-debate-1067554.html The $55 million in revenue is minimal in the context of Ohio's approximately $120 billion budget and affects only one in 14 Ohio estates, but that's what's killing the state, according to Kasich.
Kasich also wants to save money by having your elderly parents to stay at home with you rather than go to a nursing home implying that children put their parents in nursing homes because they don't love them, not because they can't take care of elderly people with serious medical conditions or Alzheimer's disease.
"We need to think outside the box on Medicaid," said Kasich whose party wants to overturn healthcare reform which would increase the deficit by $230 billion http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/06/cbo-health-care-repeal-deficit_n_805192.html and deny coverage to between 111,000 and 282,000 in our congressional district including between 8,000 and 35,000 children http://docs.house.gov/energycommerce/health_2011/OH9.Kaptur.pdf
Kasich also spoke of giving parents more choice in schools, code for busting teachers unions as part of the union busting Senate Bill 5 and making taxpayers pay for vouchers for charter schools. Unlike public schools, charters can cherry pick top students and don't have to provide English as a Second Language classes and special education.
Kasich also said Ohio needs to enter the "international uranium market." Perhaps we can sell some uranium to Japan so they can build new nuclear power plants as if they don't have enough problems with the old ones since the earthquake.
And Kasich said we need to make more ethanol which costs more to produce than the gas savings and increases pollution, erosion and world food shortages http://motherjones.com/environment/2007/10/ethanol-effect-when-alternative-fuels-go-bad#
Kasich who previously warned we need to "get on the bus or get run over by it" said that we're all Ohioans and we'll, "climb the mountain and make Ohio great." The reality is Kasich's split-and-divide policies will drive us off a cliff.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Run Sherrod Run
An open letter to one of my US senators.
3-7-11
Evan Goodenow
Bellevue, OH 44811
Sen. Sherrod Brown
713 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Sen. Brown,
I recently returned to Ohio after losing my job as a journalist in Michigan and have been meaning to write and thank you for showing courage on issues like healthcare reform, ending tax cuts for the rich and ending the Senate filibuster which effectively allows gridlock and tyranny of the minority.
On Sunday I spoke with your State Director John W. Ryan who addressed a rally of striking Tsubaki workers in Sandusky. I told John I was pleasantly surprised with you.
Having not been familiar with your record in Congress when I first moved to Ohio in 2004, I was afraid that you were the kind of Clintonian, centrist, corporate Democrat who sold out working people, like the Tsubaki strikers, years ago. Instead, you have been an eloquent defender of working people showing far more spine than President Obama.
I cannot comprehend the enormous amount of money you would have to raise and organization you would have to form to run against Obama - AKA The Great Capitulator - in 2012, but I can tell you that I would volunteer to knock on doors on your behalf. I recognize a primary challenge would split the Democratic Party, but if it were mounted it should be to defeat Obama, not an effort to push him leftward.
The Tsubaki strikers and the thousands of Ohioans I protested with in Columbus last week against the union busting Senate Bill 5 don't want Republican Lite from Democrats like Obama whose watered down healthcare and financial reforms, inadequate stimulus and failure to push for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act represent a failure to capitalize on the momentum he had when elected.
We need a president who remembers why he was elected, not one preoccupied with getting re-elected. While a run by you in 2012 might be quixotic, perhaps 2016 isn't out of the question although I shudder think of the state of our nation in 2016 if Obama continues to appease the right.
In the meantime, I ask you to push for a financial transactions tax on hedge fund and other risky, speculative trading, a windfall profits tax on corporations like Exxon-Mobil and General Electric which failed to pay any corporate income tax in previous years and a one-year foreclosure moratorium until the failed Home Affordable Mortgage Program can be reformed. The revenue from the taxes should go for preserving local and state public sector jobs and to repair our crumbling infrastructure.
I would also ask you to courageously support our troops by voting against appropriations for the disastrous and unwinnable Afghanistan War. Voting for money to keep our troops in harm's way is the equivalent of funding flame retardant clothing for people in a burning house rather than getting them out of the house. It is morally and financially bankrupting us.
If you were to articulate that to voters they would understand as well as explaining that for every civilian we kill in Afghanistan – as well as the illegal, secret wars being waged without our consent in Pakistan and Yemen – we create 10 more enemies. The blowback inevitably leads to terrorism like 9/11 and homegrown terrorism like the Fort Hood massacre and the attempted Times Square bombing.
I also ask that you push for new climate change laws and defend abortion laws and Planned Parenthood which is being defamed by Republican anti-abortion zealots. And please continue to defend Medicare and Social Security from the hypocritical deficit hawks who have no problem increasing the deficit with tax cuts for the superrich.
Being unemployed, I have a lot of time on my hands. If I can be of any help to you and your staff in pushing for the initiatives I described, please contact me.
Sincerely,
Evan Goodenow
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Union Busting
(Updated 3-6-11 to reflect correction: Senate Bill 5 passed in the Ohio Senate, but is not yet law. It is expected to pass this week in the House of Representatives where Republicans have a majority.)
"If you were my husband I'd throw you're out on your ass," my multi-millionarie Republican state Sen. Karen Gillmor told me Tuesday, a day before passage of Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. Gillmor said I should work part-time at Lowe's rather than collect the benefits from the unemployment fund I've been paying into for over 30 years.
As Gillmor sat in her state capitol office in Columbus lecturing me about how America's economic problems are due to people not wanting to work - implying those of us who collect unemployment are deadbeats - I stared up at a photo of Gillmor and her late husband, U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor, posing with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush. It was Bush who inherited an approximately $260 billion surplus and left office with a $1.3 trillion deficit primarily due to tax cuts for wealthy people like the Gillmors.
Paul Gillmor was the 43rd richest member of Congress with wealth of at least $6 million and and stock holdings $25 milllion when he died in 2007, according to Roll Call, the congressional newsletter http://www.badcongress.com/news-politics/the-50-richest-members-of-congress.htm Like most Republicans, Paul Gillmor voted to lower the capital gains tax which helps the superrich like himself, but he also voted to stick it to the poor by raising the eligibility rate for food stamps from 25-years-old to 35.
And Gillmor flaunted Ohio's residency law by spending most of his time at the family's $1 million home in the Columbus suburb of Dublin rather than at a Tiffin condo in his district http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS09/70513002 Karen Gillmor was cleared of violating the residency rule in a decision essentially relied on taking her word for where her primary residence is http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/12/16/gillmor-residency-status-upheld.html
Wealthy and powerful people like the Gillmors get the make up the rules as they go along and their idea of democracy and equality is a dog-eat-dog capitalism at its worst. If you're rich it's because you're smart and hard working and if you're poor it because you're dumb and lazy. When I told Gillmor deficits like Ohio's projected $8 billlion shortfall was due to a lack of revenue from lowering federal taxes on rich people like her rather than overspending - and Ohio eliminating corporate taxes in 2005 http://www.ohiomeansbusiness.com/incentives-and-tax-reform/tax-climate/index.php - she said rich people had earned their wealth.
I reminded her that most wealth is inherited - like the trucking business Paul Gillmor inherited from his family - and that a lot of it was misbegotten wealth like JP Morgan gettiing rich selling defective rifles to the US Army and John D. Rockefeller having Pinkerton thugs shoot striking coal miners in West Virginia.
Those strikers were in a union like the public and private union workers I rode up with on a bus to Columbus. They included striking workers from the Tsubaki manufacturing plant in Sandusky http://www.sanduskyregister.com/sandusky/news/2011/feb/17/us-trsubaki-looks-new-workers The company fired workers like Jerry Goff, a 43-year employee and worker Mike Leone who refused to make huge concessions in benefits after agreeing to past pay freezes.
"The more they do us out of the more they have," Leone told me. "When you have somebody bargaining the way they do, I don't know what you can do."
Just 6.9 percent of private sector workers are unionized, but about 35 percent of the public sector. Unions mostly contribute to Democrats despite being sold out by the party years ago http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0h&oq=winner+&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS407US407&q=winner+take+all+politics which is why Republicans like Ohio Gov. John Kasich targeted them. And most of the approximately 20,000 people out there protesting with me outside the capitol voted against Kasich - a former executive at Lehman Brothers - the company that helped cause the Wall Street crash with risky financial derivative trading - so it's a win-win for Kasich and Republicans.
SB-5 criminalizes the right to strike, removes the right to collectively bargain over healthcare benefits and pensions and privitization. Privitization is a primary objective of union busting because of the financial windfall for corporations. I asked Gillmor to be a hero and rather than support the investor class, stand up for the working class which comprises most people in her district.
Gillmor, who voted for SB-5 which passed by a narrow 17-16 vote in the Senate Wednesday http://www.dispatch.com/wwwexportcontent/sites/dispatch/local_news/stories/2011/03/02/vote.pdf said she would vote the way the majority of her constituents would vote. This is the classic split and divide, race to to the bottom strategy. Because many private sector workers don't have decent wages and benefits we should take them away from public sector workers even though I pointed out to Gillmor that Ohio public sector receive 5.9 percent less compensation than comparable private sector workers http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ohio_publicsector_workers_are_undercompensated/
Gillmor said she received 63 percent of the vote in the last election including some Democrats and doesn't think her SB-5 vote will cost her re-election. I hope she's wrong.
One of the few positive impacts of the union busting that's going on in Ohio, Wisconsin and much of the nation, is that the political apathy that so many Americans brag about is decreasing. People are slowly starting to recognize the myth of rugged American individualism and recognize that the only gains working people have made were by fighting together.
"We can't go back," Democratic State Sen. Nina Turner told a cheering crowd inside the capitol on Tuesday. "And we won't go back."
Yes, SB-5 is will almost certainly become law with passage in the Ohio House of Representaves where Republicans have a majority, but we can try to overturn it with a ballot initiative in November. We need to agitate, educate and organize.
There are two kinds of people in this world: bosses and workers. The bosses have the guns, money, pols and the power. They've created an us-against-them society. But there are more of us than them. We can't go back and we aren't going back.
"If you were my husband I'd throw you're out on your ass," my multi-millionarie Republican state Sen. Karen Gillmor told me Tuesday, a day before passage of Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. Gillmor said I should work part-time at Lowe's rather than collect the benefits from the unemployment fund I've been paying into for over 30 years.
As Gillmor sat in her state capitol office in Columbus lecturing me about how America's economic problems are due to people not wanting to work - implying those of us who collect unemployment are deadbeats - I stared up at a photo of Gillmor and her late husband, U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor, posing with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush. It was Bush who inherited an approximately $260 billion surplus and left office with a $1.3 trillion deficit primarily due to tax cuts for wealthy people like the Gillmors.
Paul Gillmor was the 43rd richest member of Congress with wealth of at least $6 million and and stock holdings $25 milllion when he died in 2007, according to Roll Call, the congressional newsletter http://www.badcongress.com/news-politics/the-50-richest-members-of-congress.htm Like most Republicans, Paul Gillmor voted to lower the capital gains tax which helps the superrich like himself, but he also voted to stick it to the poor by raising the eligibility rate for food stamps from 25-years-old to 35.
And Gillmor flaunted Ohio's residency law by spending most of his time at the family's $1 million home in the Columbus suburb of Dublin rather than at a Tiffin condo in his district http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS09/70513002 Karen Gillmor was cleared of violating the residency rule in a decision essentially relied on taking her word for where her primary residence is http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/12/16/gillmor-residency-status-upheld.html
Wealthy and powerful people like the Gillmors get the make up the rules as they go along and their idea of democracy and equality is a dog-eat-dog capitalism at its worst. If you're rich it's because you're smart and hard working and if you're poor it because you're dumb and lazy. When I told Gillmor deficits like Ohio's projected $8 billlion shortfall was due to a lack of revenue from lowering federal taxes on rich people like her rather than overspending - and Ohio eliminating corporate taxes in 2005 http://www.ohiomeansbusiness.com/incentives-and-tax-reform/tax-climate/index.php - she said rich people had earned their wealth.
I reminded her that most wealth is inherited - like the trucking business Paul Gillmor inherited from his family - and that a lot of it was misbegotten wealth like JP Morgan gettiing rich selling defective rifles to the US Army and John D. Rockefeller having Pinkerton thugs shoot striking coal miners in West Virginia.
Those strikers were in a union like the public and private union workers I rode up with on a bus to Columbus. They included striking workers from the Tsubaki manufacturing plant in Sandusky http://www.sanduskyregister.com/sandusky/news/2011/feb/17/us-trsubaki-looks-new-workers The company fired workers like Jerry Goff, a 43-year employee and worker Mike Leone who refused to make huge concessions in benefits after agreeing to past pay freezes.
"The more they do us out of the more they have," Leone told me. "When you have somebody bargaining the way they do, I don't know what you can do."
Just 6.9 percent of private sector workers are unionized, but about 35 percent of the public sector. Unions mostly contribute to Democrats despite being sold out by the party years ago http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0h&oq=winner+&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS407US407&q=winner+take+all+politics which is why Republicans like Ohio Gov. John Kasich targeted them. And most of the approximately 20,000 people out there protesting with me outside the capitol voted against Kasich - a former executive at Lehman Brothers - the company that helped cause the Wall Street crash with risky financial derivative trading - so it's a win-win for Kasich and Republicans.
SB-5 criminalizes the right to strike, removes the right to collectively bargain over healthcare benefits and pensions and privitization. Privitization is a primary objective of union busting because of the financial windfall for corporations. I asked Gillmor to be a hero and rather than support the investor class, stand up for the working class which comprises most people in her district.
Gillmor, who voted for SB-5 which passed by a narrow 17-16 vote in the Senate Wednesday http://www.dispatch.com/wwwexportcontent/sites/dispatch/local_news/stories/2011/03/02/vote.pdf said she would vote the way the majority of her constituents would vote. This is the classic split and divide, race to to the bottom strategy. Because many private sector workers don't have decent wages and benefits we should take them away from public sector workers even though I pointed out to Gillmor that Ohio public sector receive 5.9 percent less compensation than comparable private sector workers http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ohio_publicsector_workers_are_undercompensated/
Gillmor said she received 63 percent of the vote in the last election including some Democrats and doesn't think her SB-5 vote will cost her re-election. I hope she's wrong.
One of the few positive impacts of the union busting that's going on in Ohio, Wisconsin and much of the nation, is that the political apathy that so many Americans brag about is decreasing. People are slowly starting to recognize the myth of rugged American individualism and recognize that the only gains working people have made were by fighting together.
"We can't go back," Democratic State Sen. Nina Turner told a cheering crowd inside the capitol on Tuesday. "And we won't go back."
Yes, SB-5 is will almost certainly become law with passage in the Ohio House of Representaves where Republicans have a majority, but we can try to overturn it with a ballot initiative in November. We need to agitate, educate and organize.
There are two kinds of people in this world: bosses and workers. The bosses have the guns, money, pols and the power. They've created an us-against-them society. But there are more of us than them. We can't go back and we aren't going back.
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