Holland’s Power Plant still being debated
This article was written by Nicole Berens-Capizzi.
Holland City Council held its regular weekly meeting on Wednesday, November 28. At this meeting they discussed a variety of topics, including the 114 MW natural gas power plant being considered to power the city. In the days leading up to the meeting, the public was under the impression that Holland City Council would vote on the Baseload Generation Staff Recommendation. On November 12, Holland Board of Public Works (HBPW) approved the staff recommendation to build the natural gas power plant. Based on how the process had played out thus far, residents have expected city council would also approve this plan. In spite of this, Mayor Kurt Dykstra officially announced to the media that a decision on the issue wouldn’t be likely at this meeting. 
During the pre-council meeting the general manager of HBPW, Dave Koster, briefly discussed the plan. He said that HBPW had approved the plan and are “looking for council to follow suit”. Not long after this discussion, the mayor announced that this issue would be taken off the agenda for the night, but city council would likely vote on the issue the following Wednesday, December 5. Mayor Dykstra also announced that following the city council meeting would be a study session regarding the board’s recommendation. This concerned many at the meeting because the decision to omit this issue from the agenda while holding a separate study session after the council meeting was never announced to the public prior to the pre-council meeting. Because the study session is supposed to be open to the public it would have made sense to announce this decision prior to the meeting, in the name of transparency. This decision was also problematic because the study session wouldn’t begin until later in the evening after much of the public had already left for the night.
Members of the public who wanted to comment on the recommendation were encouraged to do so either when item twelve on the agenda was addressed, or during the study session after the council meeting. Once city council reached item twelve, three members of the public decided to speak out against the proposed 114 MW natural gas power plant.
Susan Harley, the Michigan Policy Director for Clean Water Action, stated for the record that since the study session is distinct from the city council meeting, an announcement should have been made about the study session at least eighteen hours in advance to comply with the Open Meetings Act. She expressed concern not only about the fact that city council hadn’t decided to move completely away from coal, but also the environmental impacts of fracking. She stated that HBPW didn’t include concerns about fracking throughout their decision making process because they felt this issue was out of their hands, but considering there may be more regulations on fracking in the near future, this is something they should take into consideration. Overall, she said it’s the wrong time to make a decision on natural gas.
Carol from the Holland Area League of Women Voters, like Susan, also expressed concern about the fact that the city is still planning on keeping the James DeYoung coal-fired power plant running. She spoke on behalf of LWV when stating that she is very concerned about climate change and believes Holland can be a leader in a cleaner energy future, should they decide to move toward a sustainable energy policy.
Jan O’Connell, the Energy Issues Organizer for the Michigan Chapter of the Sierra Club, said that “HBPW’s recommendation and vote is putting the cart before the horse in setting up and recommending a plan to build a large, 114 MW natural gas plant without fully factoring in and maximizing energy efficiency as well as renewable energy”. She also expressed concern about the fluctuating price of natural gas and the city locking itself into one particular source of energy when it might not be financially sustainable in the future.
The study session regarding HBPW’s recommendation to move forward with the natural gas plant began at approximately 9:30pm. Unfortunately, much of the public had left by this time. Dave Koster of HBPW began the presentation by reiterating the idea that the public has had many opportunities to give input, though the public hasn’t felt very included in the process. (A previous article explores this more in-depth.) He went on to summarize HBPW’s proposal to “pursue combined-cycle technology in a 2 x 1 configuration approximately 114mw in size”. In the presentation, they also included the idea that a “7.5% more efficient cycle means less emissions, less fuel burned and therefore less cost per kWh”. Unfortunately, like many of the other arguments in favor of the natural gas power plant, this only looks at the bottom line and doesn’t take into consideration the impact that fracking for natural gas has on the environment.
Unlike the October 29 meeting, the public was given the opportunity to comment after the presentation by HBPW. Most of the meeting thus far had focused on the economics of HBPW’s recommendation, with a few comments on the environmental impact of this plan. The first person to comment during the study session, however, really brought the issue home. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to follow up with her after the meeting since she left right after speaking. She said that if the city decides to go with natural gas, she hopes they continue researching other options, and she also asked HBPW if they knew who the provider of the natural gas would be. Mr. Koster stated that HBPW owns a natural gas pipeline in Overisel that is connected to an interstate pipeline and has multiple suppliers. After he said this, the concerned resident also expressed her fears about fracking. She said that many Allegan residents have received letters or solicitations to lease their property for fracking. In her words, this was “too close for comfort” given how unsafe fracking is and how they are exempt from regulations regarding clean air and water. She said fracking destroys communities, and that people are paid big money for leasing their land, but have to sign nondisclosure agreements in the process. “This imprisons people”, she said.
Mr. Koster stated that HBPW isn’t in the business of fracking or looking to get into the business, they just focus on what sources of energy are best for the city. He also encouraged her to look up a fact sheet from the Michigan DEQ that “dispels myths about fracking”, and he reassured her that the process is safe and has been going on in Michigan for years.
Monica Hallacy, a concerned Holland resident, commented on how new horizontal hydraulic fracturing is to the state and expressed similar concerns regarding the industry’s exemptions from basic regulations. She said that Holland wants to be a leader in clean energy.
I was the last person to comment during the study session. I said that while I understand HBPW isn’t in the business of fracking, it’s irresponsible to not consider the impact fracking has on the environment when making decisions about the overall environmental impact of a particular source of energy. I made the point that the DEQ and EPA are pro-industry, not community, and that the way to learn the truth about the impacts of fracking is to talk to those who live in communities where it’s taken place. I mentioned the increased rates of breast cancer among those living near frack sites, and also the impact consumption of contaminated water has on farmers (their animals in particular). After this comment, city council and HBPW moved on to a discussion of the proposal in general.
Even though no final decision was made on November 28, a few members of city council expressed various concerns about the board’s recommendation, including the possible location of the new natural gas power plant, as well as cautioning against relying strictly on one source of energy. City council seemed more divided on this issue than some of us previously believed.
Obama and GOP Play Tag Team on Entitlements
This article by Glen Ford is re-posted from Black Agenda Report.
It seems that every breathless moment of corporate media news is choreographed to convince Americans that austerity is as inevitable as tomorrow’s weather. The objective of this con game is to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The two principle parties engaged in negotiations – the White House and congressional Republican leaders – are both agreed that entitlements must be put under the knife. The “grand bargain” that both Obama and the GOP seek has already been made, in principle. Austerity is the common language and goal of the talks, and nobody that counts in the discussions is defending entitlements.
There is only one problem: the vast majority of Americans oppose cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
This is the great difficulty facing both Obama and the Republicans: the fact that the public favors the maintenance and even expansion of the meager U.S. social safety net. The disagreement, the great debate, is not between Republicans and the White House, who both agree on putting entitlements on the chopping block. The disagreement is between strong majorities of the American people, who want no tampering with the three entitlement programs, and Obama and his Republican friends, who are hell bent on so-called entitlement “reform.”
This is not a fight between the two parties; it is a choreographed beat-down of the American majority by corporate Democratic and Republican thugs, aided by shrieking corporate media banshees screaming, Watch out for the cliff, Watch out for the cliff!.
The “grand bargain” was struck back in the summer of 2011, when both sides agreed on roughly $4 trillion in cuts. The agreement only unraveled because a presidential election was drawing near, and the two parties needed to pretend that they were separated by vast political differences. Now that the election is over and the verdict is in, corporate Democrats and Republicans can abandon the pretense of a great ideological divide, and return to their shared mission of cutting entitlements. Both hide behind the phony “fiscal cliff” to convince the public that the pending theft of entitlements is an unstoppable act of nature, rather than a conspiracy of corporate henchmen, against the clear wishes of the majority of Americans.
Robert Reich, the liberal former Labor Secretary in President Bill Clinton’s administration, says that Obama is not behaving like a president who is serious about facing down the Republicans. If he were, Obama would let the Bush tax cuts die at the end of this year, and then have Democrats introduce new tax cuts for the middle class. The president could dare the Republicans to hold middle class to tax cuts hostage to cuts for the rich. In that kind of facedown, Obama would likely win.
But Obama is not trying to outmaneuver Republicans; he and the GOP have teamed up to stampede the public – the suckers in this game – into giving up their entitlements. As David Swanson puts it, we are not witnessing the making of a grand bargain, but a “grand catastrophe.”
Minneapolis Congressman Keith Ellison, the Black co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says he and the other 75 members “are not going to allow the most vulnerable Americans to shoulder the burden of this fiscal problem.” But the left wing of the Democratic Party can only stop the forces arrayed against entitlements by actively opposing their own president, who is playing austerity tag team with the Republicans. And the so-called progressives don’t have it in them.
What If America’s Leaders Actually Want Catastrophic Climate Change?
This article by Dave Lindorff is re-posted from Counter Punch. Editor’s note: What this writer is referring to in terms of the US government’s planning for climate catastrophe is what Christian Parenti explores in his book “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.”
What if the leaders of the United States — and by leaders I mean the generals in the Pentagon, the corporate executives of the country’s largest enterprises, and the top officials in government — have secretly concluded that while world-wide climate change is indeed going to be catastrophic, the US, or more broadly speaking, North America, is fortuitously situated to come out on top in the resulting global struggle for survival?
I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist, but this horrifying thought came to me yesterday as I batted away yet another round of ignorant rants from people who insist against all logic that climate change is a gigantic fraud being perpetrated, variously, by the oil companies (who allegedly want to benefit from carbon credit trading), the scientific community (which allegedly is collectively selling out and participating in some world-wide system of omerta in order to get grants), or the world socialist conspiracy (which of course, is trying to destroy capitalism).
What prompted me to this speculation about an American conspiracy of inaction was the seemingly incomprehensible failure of the US — in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Earth is heating up at an accelerating rate, and that we are in danger of soon reaching a point of no return where the process feeds itself — to do anything to reduce either this country’s annual production of more atmospheric CO2, or to promote some broader international agreement to slow the production of greenhouse gases.
It seems insane that this nation’s leaders, corporate and political, would even now still be deliberately refusing to take action to protect the Earth, which of course they and their children and grandchildren will also have to live on, and yet almost to a one they are on the side of the deniers or the delayers. The business leaders for example overwhelmingly provided campaign funding to the Republicans — a party that makes jokes about global warming and openly urges more burning of coal.
Okay, a lot of Republicans are wacky believers in a 6000-year-old world where Adam and Eve hunted dinosaurs and god talked to Moses. But it seems equally or even more insane that people who clearly know better, like President Barack Obama, or most of the Democratic Party leadership in Congress, would resist even minimal efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and would directly work to undermine international efforts at reaching a rigorous treaty on global reduction of carbon emissions.
Unless, that is, you consider that in a dog-eat-dog environment of nations struggling to survive in a world that, as the World Bank’s latest report predicts, could be 4°C hotter (7.2°F) by as early as 2060, with mass starvation in Africa, Asia and South America, flooding of critical river deltas and low-elevation population centers like Shanghai, Bangladesh, Holland, etc., and the loss of most of the world’s fish to an acidified ocean, the US could be sitting pretty, at least relatively speaking. Sure low-lying places like Cape Cod, the Outer Banks, the lower Florida peninsula, New Orleans, and the Rockaways and the Manhattan financial district would be gone, but given this nation’s current wealth and military power, its vast natural resources, and its widely varied climate zones, including Alaska, the U.S. could probably come out ahead in such a survival-of-the-fittest struggle.
Consider that perhaps the current breadbasket region of the midwest might become a dust-bowl. Okay, nasty, but the evidence so far suggests that at least for the next hundred years, all the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and other land ice in northern Canada, will be impacting the nation’s northeast by having all that new fresh water pushing the Gulf Stream out to sea (a Gulf Stream that we are told will also be weakening dramatically), actually making the northeast cooler and wetter during that period. That is to say, states from Ohio to Maine, and south to perhaps Virginia or North Carolina, could become better places to grow crops, at least until all the ice up north is gone. Arizona and Florida would be hell for retirees, but they could retire elsewhere. Deep wells could draw on prehistoric aquifers, as farmers in Texas and Oklahoma have done for years, which could compensate for epic climate-change-caused droughts. So what if this would destroy the aquifers eventually? Nobody thinks a century ahead anyhow.
Meanwhile, while the US would adapt fairly handily to the global catastrophe, most of the rest of the world would become a pure hell, with nations desperately battling nations over dwindling water supplies, and famine killing people not by the tens of thousands as today, but by the millions, or perhaps even billions. Think of China and India, our biggest competitors in global markets these days. With their relative poverty, their massive populations, mostly concentrated along low-lying coastal areas, they will be toast in a 4°C hotter world.
I’m sorry to say it, but I don’t have a hard time imagining most of our ruling elite looking at this scenario and thinking, “Hey! That could work out well for us! With huge oceans separating us from the desperate masses in Asia and Africa, and only a relatively small desert border to protect to our south, and with a small, weak and friendly nation to the north, we could come out of this with the world at our feet, ripe for the picking.” What’s a mass extinction event that wipes out half of all living species to such people? What’s it matter to them if the teeming oceans lose their food chain and become filled with nothing but jellyfish? What’s it matter of hundreds of millions of poor people starve to death, or if nations in Africa or Asia blow each other up? If they, the US and their companies, can come out of this rubble largely intact, and with the same elites still in charge, where’s the downside?
I haven’t looked closely at the science of this, but I think I’m correct in saying that the US is probably better situated than most other countries to survive a major global warming event. Of course, even in the US, climate change of this scale would be massively destructive and destabilizing, and would cause huge social and political upheaval. This may explain why we keep reading about the Department of Homeland Security ordering huge quantities of dumdum bullets (even for places like Social Security Administration field offices!) and building mass detention centers, or about Congress continuing to pass ever more intrusive and invasive police state-type legislation, while militarizing local police.
I’m not suggesting that these leaders would be contemplating just walling off the US, and allowing us all to continue on as the free society that we have grown used to over the last few hundred years, while the rest of the world goes through its death throes, horrendous and unacceptable as that would be. Rather, I’m speculating that the elites may be contemplating a way that they, the ruling class, not we as Americans, could, by doing nothing to stop climate change, come out on top as a result of it.
I realize this is conspiracy thinking, and that as such it is rather far-fetched, and yet what troubles me is that it’s hard to imagine a alternative explanation for the years of complete inaction on combating global warming, and the deliberate undermining of any sort of international accord which America has engaged in for the past decade.
Our leaders, political and corporate, may be puerile, egocentric greed-heads, but they are not stupid. They surely for the most part recognize that the Earth is heating up and heading at full speed towards ecological, social and political disaster. How else to explain, then, their astonishing unwillingness to take action?
Grand Rapids pays someone to represent the City in Washington
This morning, MLive posted a story about what the City of Grand Rapids pays a lobbyist in DC. The article identifies Dykema Gossett PLLC as being the lobbying firm the city has used since 2006.
The cost to the City of Grand Rapids, and thus to taxpayers, is $5,250 per month, which comes to $63,000 a year.
The remainder of the brief article includes comments from a City staff member and First Ward Commissioner Dave Shaffer, both of which speak very highly of the lobbying firm. The article lists several projects, which had received federal funding because of the lobbying efforts of Dykema Gossett PLLC.
The article ends with the following comment:
“We believe that given the direction in Congress (with the ban on earmarks), it’s very important for us to have representation in D.C.” Alibasic said. “We’re going to be looking to really strengthen our grant opportunities through this contract.”
Such a statement is a reflection of how politics works in this country. If you pay someone to “represent” your interests, government works. Questioning the City staffer who made such a comment was not what the MLive reporter was interested in, even though asking for further clarification on what was meant by paying someone in DC to represent “us” really means.
The MLive story is also lacking on content about the lobbying firm itself, not even a link to the company’s site.
It would stand to reason that if taxpayers are coughing up $63,000 a year to this company, they should know something about the firm the City of Grand Rapids has hired.
Dykema Gossett has several offices in Michigan and across the country. They provide a number of services besides lobbying, such as legal work and consultation. The firm works in numerous fields of business, but represents three main industries – automotive, energy and the financial industry. A pretty corrupt trio.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Dykema Gossett didn’t spend much money during the last election cycle, with only two payments to candidates, both going to 2nd Congressional Candidate Bill Huizenga. However, employees of the firm made significant contributions to candidates, with a total of 337 separate donations, many of which were $1,000 or more. Here is a list of recipients of that money from Dykema Gossett.
Dykema has a pretty interesting client base, in addition to the City of Grand Rapids. Such a client list would make anyone with a conscience have serious reservations about doing business with a company that profits from the likes of Bank of America, Bayer Corporation, Compuware Corporation, eBay Inc., Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Honda North America, JPMorgan Chase, McDonald’s Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Sears Roebuck & Company, The Walt Disney Company, Verizon Wireless and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
It’s unfortunate that MLive did not bother to provide readers with any background information on the company that Grand Rapids taxpayers have given nearly $400,000 to since 2006.
Staggering Amount of Chemicals Entering Great Lakes—Do You Buy Products that Threaten Drinking Water?
This article by the Alliance for the Great Lakes is re-posted from Ecowatch.
The Great Lakes are home to 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater and, increasingly, host to a worrisome class of chemical compounds known as contaminants of emerging concern.
Often originating from everyday products ranging from shampoos and pharmaceuticals to textiles and home furnishings, as well as from common agricultural practices around the Midwest, these compounds can have impacts on people and wildlife that are far from benign and are raising concerns about their effects on the body’s endocrine system—the driver of key functions such as growth and development, metabolism and reproduction.
A report released today by the Alliance for the Great Lakes notes that since the production of synthetic chemicals took off after World War II, the waters of Lake Michigan—which take a century to refresh—have yet to see a complete turnover.
Halfway through this cycle, scientists are beginning to see alarming trends of an increasing multitude of chemicals found in the water. In southern Lake Michigan, one of the most urbanized and industrialized areas in the Great Lakes Basin and home to approximately a third of the Great Lakes population, these contaminants are a steady source of chemical exposure for aquatic species, and affect the quality of the waters we rely upon for drinking and look to for recreation.
“The number of chemicals entering the nation’s environment each year is staggering, as is the potential for them to degrade the water we drink and swim in,” says Alliance President and CEO Joel Brammeier. Upwards of 85,000 chemicals are in production and use in the U.S. today—more than 2,200 of them produced at a rate of 1 million-plus pounds a year. Beyond this, consumers can choose from more than 50,000 pharmaceutical products, and nearly 20,000 registered pesticide products have entered the market since registration began in 1947.
The report applies a published, peer-reviewed scientific framework to rank chemicals of highest concern found in national waters that are representative of those found in the Great Lakes. The methodology examines both surface water and treated drinking water—identifying the top 20 emerging contaminants for each based on occurrence, ecologic and human health impacts, and water treatment capabilities. The top-ranking chemicals include representatives from a broad range of categories: hormones, synthetic musks, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, antimicrobials and preservatives, UV blockers, plasticizers, flame retardants and pesticides.
As the chemical presence around us expands, the potential for them to end up in the Great Lakes also grows—arriving there via atmospheric deposition, stormwater runoff and sewage overflows. Others are released into the Great Lakes at trace concentrations via treated wastewater discharges because conventional sewage treatment isn’t designed to remove them.
Lake Michigan’s surface waters are affected, with six of the top 20 chemicals detected—among them flame retardants, synthetic fragrances, bisphenol A (BPA), and a popular cholesterol-lowering drug—found in the open lake waters. Current data shows that, after processing in a treatment plant, drinking water drawn from Lake Michigan may not be significantly burdened with contaminants, with only one chemical—a flame retardant—detected of the top 20 identified in the report. The report cautions that the data collected thus far provides only a snapshot of what might be in the open waters of the Great Lakes, however, and doesn’t take into account the health risks that bioaccumulating chemicals in the water pose to people who eat Great Lakes fish. Also not known is the level of risk these trace levels of contaminants in the water actually pose for people and wildlife.
“With hundreds of mostly unregulated compounds detected in Great Lakes surface waters today, it’s critical to start identifying now those chemicals that pose the greatest threat to the health of the lakes, the wildlife and the 40 million people who depend on them for drinking water,” says Olga Lyandres, Alliance research manager and author of the report.
Some municipalities and public utilities already monitor or study emerging contaminants, among them Chicago, Milwaukee and the Central Lake County Joint Action Water Agency—which supplies drinking water to Lake Michigan communities in northern Illinois. But many smaller communities, such as Gary, Ind. and Racine, Wis., don’t monitor for them because of the absence of clear guidance on how to do so.
Although water treatment plays a key role in removing contaminants, the report emphasizes that water and wastewater utilities are not solely responsible for preventing and controlling contaminants in Great Lakes water. To that end, it calls for a comprehensive approach that involves not only technological solutions, but collaboration among utilities, regulatory agencies, public health officials, manufacturers and environmentalists to focus on pollution prevention.
“Together these entities must work to encourage policy, social and behavioral changes that propel businesses to evaluate chemicals before they enter the marketplace, and individuals to reduce their use of chemicals—thereby lessening the risks associated with the chemicals’ eventual release into the environment,” the report states. The report further calls for:
- Funding development of consistent, uniform regional monitoring standards.
- Encouraging the U.S. and Canada to draw on credible prioritization methods to set binational objectives for controlling high-priority Great Lakes contaminants, and to pursue these goals through domestic policy reforms.
- Reforming the 36-year-old federal Toxic Substances Control Act to feature a framework that places pollution prevention at the forefront of new chemical design and production.
CEO Evening News?
This article is re-posted from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
The CBS Evening News has decided the best way to inform viewers about the impending “fiscal cliff” is to let corporate CEOs affiliated with the Fix the Debt campaign recommend cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
On November 19, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was tapped for his apparent expertise in long-term budget forecasting. His message was simple: Benefit cuts are necessary. “The entitlements, and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to–they’re not going to get it,” he asserted.
Blankfein offered more specifics, explaining that
Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. So there will be certain things that the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.
It’s hard to know what he’s talking about when he refers to a “25-year career.” Perhaps some Goldman Sachs employees retire in their early 40s, but most workers do not–and they certainly don’t get Social Security retirement benefits when they do so. But Blankfein derives a straightforward moral from this dubious talking point: These benefits must be cut “because we can’t afford them.”
The following night, anchor Scott Pelley had a new expert: Honeywell CEO David Cote, who warned that the country’s debt load meant that “we’ve got to do something.” Why should viewers care what Cote says about any of this? Pelley explained that he “knows about fixing finances. He pulled Honeywell out of a slump.”
Cote’s fix is to reduce tax deductions, since “there were like 169 different ones used in, I don’t know, 2008 or 2009, somewhere in there.” Like the other CBS CEO, Cote also wants benefit cuts: “The big nut is going to have to be Medicare/Medicaid.… At the end of the day, you can’t avoid the topic. Especially with the Baby Boomer generation retiring. It’s going to literally crush the system.”
On November 21, CBS Evening News was still on the case. The experts this time were, as anchor Jeff Glor put it, “two men who say they know how it should be done–if only Washington would listen.” The two are Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired a 2011 White House debt commission. The chairs issued a report, based on drastically shrinking the federal government, that was championed by many in the press (Extra!, 1/11), but failed to be approved by the full commission. Both are co-founders of the corporate-backed “Fix the Debt” campaign.
That was followed on the broadcast by another segment with Goldman Sachs’ Blankfein, who told anchor Scott Pelley:
Look, if we go over the fiscal cliff it will be very bad, hugely bad–hugely negative for the stock market, which is, you know, a source of people’s wealth, people will feel poor.
Of course, many people don’t consider the stock market a source of their own wealth. And 50 million Americans already “feel poor” because they are.
Blankfein added: “To me, whether the tax rate is 2 percent lower or higher or the cutoff age on some entitlement is one year less or more is secondary or tertiary to the fact that this country is focused on its future.”
A cut in Social Security or healthcare probably is “tertiary” to a guy who makes millions of dollars every year. Which makes his perspective a peculiar one to highlight twice in one week.
So what accounts for the urgent need to cut benefits?
The “fiscal cliff” is a scheduled set of tax increases and spending cuts that, if allowed to roll out over the course of 2013, would likely do considerable harm to the fragile economic recovery. It is not really a “cliff,” though; Congress and the White House could go over it on January 1 and still reach a subsequent deal in the days or weeks afterwards.
Some of those pushing the “cliff” crisis seem more interested in making some permanent cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare–which would have far more serious consequences for Americans than the “fiscal cliff.” Among those advocates are the business interests behind the Simpson/Bowles Fix the Debt campaign. All of the CBS fiscal experts featured last week were affiliated with this group.
There are critics of this plan. The Institute for Policy Studies recently issued a report (11/13/12 ) explaining the corporate interests behind the debt campaign. Report co-author Sarah Anderson told Democracy Now! (11/13/12) that Fix the Debt is “really just a Trojan horse. They’re pushing for the same old tax breaks for corporations that they’ve been pushing for for about a decade.”
Instead of doing journalism to expose the interests behind this campaign, CBS is giving them a megaphone.
ACTION: Tell CBS Evening News that their discussion of the “fiscal cliff” should include experts who aren’t entitlement-busting CEOs.
CONTACT: CBS Evening News Phone: 212 975-3247 evening@cbsnews.com
AIDS and Activism Part II: Reagan, DeVos and the 1980s crisis
Since as early as 1981, AIDS was known to be a deadly disease. Even by 1983, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had begun a national hotline for AIDS.
Cases of AIDS were being reported in almost every major city in the US beginning in 1982, but the national news media did not report on it until the following year. In fact, the New York Times did not make AIDS a front-page story until May 25, 1983.
This delayed reporting on AIDS by the New York Times becomes more striking, when one considers the following:
Similarly, the discovery of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area in October 1982 prompted a huge spate of press coverage. The New York Times covered the story every day of October, and then ran 23 more stories in November and December. In the end, seven people died from the capsules.
By contrast, The New York Times published only three stories on AIDS in 1981, and only three more in all of 1982, none of which were on page one. Yet by the time of the Tylenol poisonings, 260 Americans had died of AIDS, and 374 more had been diagnosed.
One person who was making AIDS a concern of reporting was Randy Shiltz, a journalist who was assigned to report on AIDS in San Francisco in 1982 for the San Francisco Chronicle. Shiltz was a member of the Gay community and had already written a powerful biography of slain Gay activist and San Francisco official, Harvey Milk.
Shiltz relied heavily on early HIV/AIDS activists like Bill Kraus and Cleve Jones for information and came to the realization that AIDS was a disease impacting thousands and it was a story that outside of the Gay community was either unknown or suppressed. Shiltz eventually wrote his book, And the Band Played On, which chronicled the first half of the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic. The book was published in 1987 and spent 5 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
By 1987, 20,000 had died from AIDS and despite the growing epidemic the federal government did not take any formal action until that year. Reagan did appoint the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic in the summer of 1987; it was later renamed the Watkins Commission, after its chair.
With the appointment of this commission, Reagan was able to appease those who demanded a more sustained federal response to AIDS. He also answered the concerns of the New Right by appointing an AIDS commission that included few scientists who had participated in AIDS research and few physicians who had actually treated people with AIDS. In addition, the commission included outspoken opponents of AIDS education, such as New York Cardinal John O’Connor. O’Connor was not only opposed to AIDS education, he was openly hostile to the Gay community.
Religious Right leader Gary Bauer, who was in the Reagan administration in 1987, said of those appoint by the President:
…..the panel was designed to be ”a cross-section of thoughtful Americans” rather than another medical or scientific group that would duplicate dozens of previous efforts. ”We intentionally tried to get people from a wide variety of walks of life, and took the risk that there would be disagreements and fireworks,” Mr. Bauer said. He also called it ”a good group” to deal with such issues as insurance coverage and care for AIDS patients and said he doubted that quarantines, school policy or casual transmission would become a major focus.
The Religious Right was particularly incensed by the AIDS crisis and saw it as purely a result of immoral behavior, especially in the Gay community. Religious Right leaders at the time, such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, equated the deaths with the Gay community as retribution from God for their “sinful” lives. Falwell not only despised the Gay community, he despised the larger society which “tolerated” Gays. Falwell’s famous statement was:
“AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, It is God’s punishment for a society that tolerates homosexuals.”
Rich DeVos and the AIDS Commission
One of the people appointed to the 13-member AIDS Commission was Amway co-founder Rich DeVos. DeVos was chosen in part because he was one of the largest financial supporters of the Republican Party, but also because of his role in the Religious Right.
In an interview with MLive a few years ago, DeVos made some pretty revealing comments about his attitudes towards the Gay community while sitting on the AIDS Commission.
When HIV first came out, President Reagan formed a commission and I was honored to be on that commission. I listened to 300 witnesses tell us that it was every body else’s fault but their own. Nothing to do with their conduct, just that the government didn’t fix this disease. At the end of that I put in the document, it was the conclusion document from the commission, that actions have consequences and you are responsible for yours. AIDS is a disease people gain because of their actions. It wasn’t like cancer. We all made the exceptions for how you got it, by accident, that was all solved a long time ago. That’s when they started hanging me in effigy because I wasn’t sympathetic to all their requests for special treatment. Because at that time it was always someone else’s fault. I said, you are responsible for your actions too, you know. Conduct yourself properly, which is a pretty solid Christian principle.
Not only does DeVos show his homophobic bias, his comments demonstrate his ignorance of the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS. It was within this climate of homophobia and inaction on the part of the federal government that AIDS activism would take a new direction in 1987, with the creation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). We will explore the impact of ACT UP in Part III of this series.
Why is Obama Silent Over the New Congo War?
This article by Shamus Cooke is re-posted from Counter Punch.
The last Congo war that ended in 2003 killed 5.4 million people, the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II. The killing was directly enabled by international silence over the issue; the war was ignored and the causes obscured because governments were backing groups involved in the fighting. Now a new Congo war has begun and the silence is, again, deafening.
President Obama seems not to have noticed a new war has broken out in the war-scarred Congo; he appears blind to the refugee crisis and the war crimes committed by the invading M23 militia against the democratically elected government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
But appearances can be deceiving. The U.S. government has their bloody hands all over this conflict, just as they did during the last Congo war when Bill Clinton was President. President Obama’s inaction is a conscious act of encouragement for the invaders, just as Clinton’s was. Instead of Obama denouncing the invasion and the approaching overthrow of a democratically elected government, silence becomes a very powerful action of intentional complicity on the side of the invaders.
Why would Obama do this? The invaders are armed and financed by Rwanda, a “strong ally” and puppet of the United States. The United Nations released a report conclusively proving that the Rwandan government is backing the rebels, but the U.S. government and U.S. media cartoonishly pretend that the issue is debatable.
The last Congo War that killed 5.4 million people was also the result of the U.S.-backed invading armies of Rwanda and Uganda, as explained in the excellently researched book “Africa’s World War,” by French journalist Gerard Prunier.
In fact, many of the same Rwandan war criminals involved in the last Congo War, such as Bosco Ntaganda, are in charge of the M23 militia and wanted for war crimes by the U.N. international criminal court. The current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, is a “good friend” of the U.S. government and one of the most notorious war criminals on the planet, due to his leading roles in the Rwandan genocide and consequent Congo War.
A group of Congolese and Rwandan activists have been demanding that Kagame be tried for his key role in the Rwandan genocide.
As Prunier’s book explains, the Rwandan genocide was sparked by Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda — from U.S. ally Uganda. After Kagame took power in post-genocide Rwanda, he then informed the U.S. — during a trip to Washington D.C. — that he would be invading the Congo. Prunier quotes Kagame in Africa’s World War:
“I delivered a veiled warning [to the U.S.]: the failure of the international community to take action [against the Congo] would mean that Rwanda would take action… But their [the Clinton Administration’s] response was really no response at all” (pg 68).
In international diplomacy speak, such a lack of response — to a threat of military invasion — acts as a glaring diplomatic green light.
The same blinding green light is now being offered by Obama to the exact same war criminals as they again invade the Congo.
But why again? The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s current President, Joseph Kabila, helped lead the military invasion during the last Congo war. As a good stooge, he delivered Congo’s immense mining and oil wealth to multi-national corporations. But then his puppet strings started to fray.
Kabila later distanced himself from U.S. puppets Rwanda and Uganda, not to mention the U.S. dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The IMF, for example, warned Kabila against a strategic infrastructural and development aid package with China, but Kabila shrugged them off. The Economist explains:
“…[The Congo] appears to have gained the upper hand in a row with foreign donors over a mining and infrastructure package worth $9 billion that was agreed a year ago with China. The IMF objected to it, on the ground that it would saddle Congo with a massive new debt, so [the IMF] is delaying forgiveness of most of the $10 billion-plus that Congo already owes.”
This act instantly transformed Kabila from an unreliable friend to an enemy. The U.S. and China have been madly scrambling for Africa’s immense wealth of raw materials, and Kabila’s new alliance with China was too much for the U.S. to bear.
Kabila further inflamed his former allies by demanding that the international corporations exploiting the Congo’s precious metals have their super-profit contracts re-negotiated, so that the country might actually receive some benefit from its riches.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to 80 percent of the world’s cobalt, an extremely precious mineral needed to construct many modern technologies, including weaponry, cell phones, and computers. The DRC is possibly the most mineral/resource rich country in the world — overflowing with everything from diamonds to oil — though its people are among the world’s poorest, due to generations of corporate plunder of its wealth.
Now, a new war is underway and the U.N. is literally sitting on their hands. There are 17,500 U.N. peacekeepers in the DRC, not to mention U.S. Special Forces. The invading M23 militia has 3,000 fighters. What was the U.N.’s response to the invasion? The New York Times reports:
“United Nations officials have said that they did not have the numbers to beat back the rebels and that they were worried about collateral damage, but many Congolese have rendered their own verdict. On Wednesday, rioters in Bunia, north of Goma, ransacked the houses of United Nations’ personnel.”
If Obama and/or the U.N. made one public statement about militarily defending the elected Congolese government against invasion, the M23 militia would have never acted.
Human Rights Watch and other groups have correctly labeled the M23’s commanders as responsible for “ethnic massacres, recruitment of children, mass rape, killings, abductions and torture.”
But at the U.N. the Obama administration has been actively protecting this group. The New York Times continues:
“Some human rights groups say that Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations and a leading contender to be President Obama’s next secretary of state, has been far too soft on Rwanda, which is a close American ally and whose president, Paul Kagame, has known Ms. Rice for years. The activists have accused her of watering down language in a Security Council resolution that would have mentioned Rwanda’s links to the [M23] rebels and say she also tried to block the publication of part of a [U.N.] report that detailed Rwanda’s covert support for the M23.”
It’s likely that the Obama administration will jump into action as soon as his M23 allies complete their military objective of regime change, and re-open the Congo’s military wealth to U.S. corporations to profit from. There are currently talks occurring in U.S.-puppet Uganda between the M23 and the Congo government. It is unlikely that these talks will produce much of a result unless Kabila stands down and allows the M23 and its Rwandan backers to take over the country. The M23 knows it’s in an excellent bargaining position, given the silence of the U.N. and the United States government.
If the war drags on, expect more international silence. Expect more massacres and ethnic cleansing too, and expect the still-recovering people of the Congo to be re-tossed into massive refugee camps where they can again expect militia-sponsored killings, rape, starvation, and the various barbarisms that have accompanied this especially brutal war, a brutality that grows most viciously in environments of silence.
The local group, Mutual Aid GR is hosting a meeting to discuss next steps in the local efforts to stop horizontal hydraulic fracking in West Michigan, which is one the rise, based on recent oil & mineral rights leasing data.
According to the Facebook event page, Mutual Aid GR states:
By now we know the devastating impact fracking has on water, air, health, and communities. We need to act fast to keep our state from becoming a clear-cut, polluted wasteland at the hands of the fracking industry.
In addition to fracking, we are also planning action around the tar sands pipeline that will soon cut through the state from two locations. Here is an article, including a map, with more details:
http://ecowatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/map.jpg
Joining us at this meeting will be members of Kent County Water Conservation. We will be discussing how to fight fracking in Kent County and across the state. In addition to this, we will discuss organizing actions around the proposed tar sands pipeline, setting up a teach-in for resisting fossil fuels, creating more of our own material, and other related topics.
Next Steps in resisting Fracking and Tars Sands in Michigan Meeting
Saturday, December 1
3:00 – 5:00PM
671 Davis, NW – lower level of the Steepletown Neighborhood Center
AIDS and Activism – Part I
This is the first in a series of postings that deal with the theme of AIDS and Activism. The first posting is the chapter – AIDS in the Gay Community in Grand Rapids – from the film, A People’s History of the LGBTQ Community in Grand Rapids.
In this segment of the film we discover that AIDS activism began in the early 80s and was primarily taken on by the gay community. Larry Abbott talks about how the first organizing took place, how much of their funding came from the gay community and its allies and how groups like the United Way would not fund AIDS work at that time.
In addition, the video has Rev. Bruce Roller talking about ministering to the people dying of AIDS and the difficulty in finding a funeral home that would take the bodies of those who died from AIDS.
Jan Koopman, former director of the AIDS Resource Center, talks about the work in the 90s and Jeanne Marshall talks about the first AIDS Walk in Grand Rapids. The video ends with Drew Stoppels talking about more recent organizing efforts around HIV/AIDS in Grand Rapids.
There is also footage of TV news stories on the AIDS Quilt in Grand Rapids and stories of some of those who had a quilt made in their honor.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
