The real story of the Boston tea party from an original Boston Tea party member, George Robert Twelves Hewes
Boston Tea Party was a Corporate tax break protest
Three years
Mike had such a wicked sense of humor. Yhis was typical of how it worked.
Today was Sunday and everyone who had come to say goodbye to Mike was leaving. We had Justin and Amanda, friends from Raleigh, James and Janet, Janet’s mom, Mike’s cousin, Christina. Kristy and Kathleen stopped by to make me take a few minutes for myself, and just as I got out of the hot tub, a neighbor I’d never met before came to the door to complain about all the cars parked along the street.
“You can’t have people all over the place like that,” she said. “It’s unsafe. I have to drive on this street, you know.”
I told her the people were here to say goodbye to my son, who would die in a few days and then the street would be more convenient for her. I wanted to really lash out at her.
Who the hell was she to come to my door and complain about having to drive more carefully when my son was dying? Couldn’t she have asked whether everything was OK first? The cars had been there on and off since Mike came home to die 10 days earlier. It was obvious we weren’t partying.
Well, maybe it was a party — a goodbye party for Mike.
She asked if there was anything she could do. I figured she had done enough, so I just asked her to drive carefully.
I relive these last few days every year. Friday — April Fool’s Day — will be three years without his maniacal laugh and his practical jokes, our late-into-the-night talks, his nagging as I cooked that I was doing something wrong and his total pleasure at the result anyway.The only thing wrong with my bread was that it wasn’t at his house.
Three years since we went into Great Smokies National Park with our cameras or watched Star Trek while we nibbled dark chocolate and talked about food.
Three years since he and Danny and Rob — rabid Yankees fans all — teased me about being a Red Sox fan.
Three years since I heard him say, “Love you, Mom.”
Mike was a Mama’s boy; he would tell you that as soon as he met you. We shared a birthday and we shared a wicked sense of humor, which we both got from my father — his hero.
As Mike battled and conquered addiction and then faced cancer with courage, grace and humor, he became my hero.
Three years ago tomorrow, the night before he died, he told me he was having a good time here with me.
I figure if he could be having a good time then, I should never complain again about anything.
But I do complain because I don’t think it’s fair that he was denied health care until it was too late to save his life. I think it’s wrong that he had to nearly starve to death before anything was done to help him. Twice in less than a year, and then they failed to treat a life-threatening infection.
If Dr. Herb Hurwitz at Duke hadn’t agreed to see him, he would have died from that infection. Dr. Hurwitz gave us two more years with him.
I think it’s immoral that no one even apologized for the way he was neglected.
I hate how big the hole is my heart is since he died.
I wish I had died instead.
Three years, and we’ve made so little progress in getting affordable quality health care for everyone. People are still fighting it and opponents are still spreading lies about it. The media still covers the lies as though they were truth.
Three years and 135,000 more Americans have died just the way Mike did, and there’s still no national outrage.
Every year now, I relive those last days with him.
Today was Sunday and I had two more days with him.
Remember when journalists could be trusted?
I grew up the daughter of a hard-nosed newspaper reporter who valued the truth above all. He could cover an issue he felt passionately about and leave his own feelings at the door. He had integrity.
I remember when Walter Cronkite was the nation’s most trusted man. He reported the news and nothing more, until he saw what a travesty the Vietnam War had become and felt compelled to speak out. I was disappointed, even though I agreed with him.
Opinion is why newspapers have editorial pages, and that is where opinion used to be confined.
But in recent years, opinion has crept more and more into the news, with Fox leading the way and MSNBC answering. That wouldn’t be such a problem if people got their news from more than one source. As much as I like Rachel Maddow, she is not my only source of information.
Even the New York Times can’t be trusted anymore. Remember its role as a cheerleader in the run-up to the Iraq War?
There is precious little left of the unbiased media. Someone cited liberal bias to me because a survey of Washington, DC, journalists done in 1992 showed more of them voted for Bill Clinton that the elder George Bush.
First of all, we don’t use 20-year-old data. Second, you can hold your personal opinions and still be fair.
I have covered issues like abortion and been called fair by both sides.
However, the media does make one huge mistake these days, and that is validating information that is just plain wrong by tring to tell both “sides” of a story.
You wouldn’t expect to see someone saying tobacco is safe in a story about thye damages smoking and “dipping” do.
No one would say the Earth is flat in a story about geology.
Few people believe that psychiatric illness is caused by demons, and no reporter would think he or she has to quote someone who does believe that.
The fact is that the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are losing ground, and it’s because we keep cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations and making up for lost money by taking services from the poor and shipping jobs overseas, villifying those who receive unemployment benefits as lazy and turning away the sick because they don’t have insurance.
The wealthy conservatives get away with it because the media continues to give validity to the lies and disinformation, and if someone doesn’t, they’re attacked as biased.
When the Harvard Medical School study that found 45,000 Americans die prematurely each year because they don’t have insurance was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, I offered a copy of the study to my local paper. The editor told me there wasn’t enough staff to cover a national story like this and the paper would rely on The Associated Press to cover it.
Well, the AP didn’t do a story. In fact, when I searched the Web for any mention of the study in the media, I found only two mentions: one in the Boston Globe Harvard is in Boston) and one in the Sacramento Bee.
It was Keith Olbermann who covered the story. Ed Shultz grabbed onto it like a pit bull and didn’t let go. Eventually, the story was mentioned in other media, but it was downplayed.
That’s just one example. Remember the Downing Street Memo that proved George W. Bush was tweaking the evidence to gain public support for his illegal war in Iraq? For months, the only place I heard about it was on Al Franken’s radio show.
We can’t trust big media anymore. Not Fox News, not even the New York Times. They’re withholding important information that Americans need to know and perpetuating the lies of the right.
Aliens among us
I’m a lifelong “Star Trek” fan. Well, since the original series came on in 1966, anyway. I was almost 14, and I was captivated.
In the series’ second incarnation, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a race called the Ferengi was introduced. They’re money-grubbing, power-hungry beings, guided by the “Rules of Acquisition,” which glorify greed and cheating.
Rule of Acquisition 1: “Once you have their money, never give it back.”
There are no labor unions among the Ferengi workers; the goal of every Ferengi is to become the exploiter. And women are forced to stay home and wear no clothing. When a Frenegi enters the home of a friend, he offers money for admittance.
When they die, their bodies are descicated and the family sells of pieces of it to raise money and so family and friends can own a piece of their loved one.
The Ferengi religion brings the dead to the Blessed Exchequer, where they can bribe their way into the Divine Treasury.
It was supposed to be fiction, but I saw this “photo” this morning and it dawned on me that these two really would make good Ferengi. Too bad they’re real and they’re ours to deal with.
For 30 years, the Kock Brothers worked behind the scenes, funding right-wing causes, buying influence, corrupting our political system and undermining Democracy. By the time they were outed last year by The New Yorker, their work was pretty much done. They had created the Tea Party astroturf movement and helped set up a system of disinformation that would tilt the landscape far to the right.
To the far-right, the Koch brothers are heroes, doing battle with the great villain George Soros.
Of course, Soros hasn’t poured but of fraction of the money into political movements has the Kochs have, and he’s always been above -board. I don’t think the Kocks and their ilk even begin to understand the difference.
Walker is arrogance personified
Apparently Scott Walker believes he doesn’t have to listen to the courts any more than he has to listen to his constituents.
Walker, Wisconsin’s ultra-corporate-friendly governor, has decided to publish the anti-labor law he illegally pushed through the state senate. The law strips most public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights.
Legislative Reference Bureau director Steve Miller said publishing the law in the Internet doesn’t mean the law takes effect Saturday. He says that won’t actually happen until Secretary of State Doug La Follette orders the law published in a newspaper, and a judge ordered last week that La Follette not do anything.
But Walker says the act of publishing the law online makes it effective, and he intends to enforce it before the state’s Supreme Court decides on the lawsuit facing it. He apparently is above the power of the court that issued the restraining order. He can play with the rules and not have to answer for it.
The law is possibly the most blatant attack on labor since Ronald Reagan began the law against working Americans by firing the air traffic controllers, and seeing Walker’s success, other states are following suit.
By the mid-1980s, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, a business could be sold and the new owner come in and settle with the strongest union and then screw the rest of the employees. I watched it happen at the Herald News, when the Drucker family sold the paper to Dean Singleton’s Media General.
Singleton came in and promised a rosy future for the paper, settled with the Teamsters, and nine days after taking over, laid off a third of the newsroom staff and reduced benefits for those who remained.
He told the union members that if they didn’t negotiate “in good faith,” he would cut off their health benefits.
That’s how he broke the union in Passaic, NJ. He went on to become notorious for buying up newspapers and slashing staff and benefits — and quality.
As unions lost power under constant attack from big business — including the media — people began to believe all unions were corrupt and all their members greedy.
Only now, when private sector unions are all but gone, are working people beginning to see what has been done to them.
It may be too late to save public sector unions and build the private sector back up.
Or maybe arrogant people like Walker will awaken the working public in time to stop their progress.
The fraud isn’t by the voters
State by state and even nationally, Republicans are moving toward requiring a photo ID to vote. It will help reduce voter fraud, they say.
They talk about dead people voting in Washington County, NC; they talk about noncitizens casting hundreds of votes.
Well, from the NC Justice Center, here are some numbers:
4—number of votes allegedly cast by dead people in Washington County (Zombie voters in Washington County, Under the Dome, News & Observer, March 1, 2011)
0—actual number of votes cast by dead people in Washington County after investigation by elections officials (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)
0—number of votes cast by other people using the names of deceased voters in Washington County.
637—number of legally present non-citizens who may have voted in North Carolina in last election, and who received letters from the State Board of Elections inquiring about their status (Non-U.S. Citizens may have voted in N.C. elections, Under the Dome, News & Observer, March 2, 2011)
106—number of letters from “noncitizens” returned in initial batch of responses to Board of Elections inquiries. (Ibid)
105—number of “noncitizens” in initial response to Board of Elections who had become citizens and simply had not updated their drivers license information when the rolls were checked (Ibid)
0—number of the 106 people in the initial batch of responses to the Board of Elections not verified as citizens who voted in the last election (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)
212—total number of 637 people investigated as non citizens who the Board of Elections believes voted in the last election (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)
212—number of 637 people investigated as non citizens likely to have voted in the last election who election officials believe had become citizens (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)
6,102,163—total number of registered voters in North Carolina (State Board of Elections).
2,700,383—number of votes cast in North Carolina in 2010 elections.
0—number of people that voter ID supporters can prove voted illegally in either example currently cited as support for legislation (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)
0—number of times that supporters of voter ID legislation have acknowledged that their claims about dead people voting in Washington County or noncitizens voting have proven to be false.
In other words, there is no voter fraud. Every case they have raised has been proven false, but they continue to insist we need this legislation.
The reason they want it is that a lot of people don’t have a photo ID, mostly poor and elderly people who don’t drive. These people tend to vote Democratic, so if you can deny them their right to vote, you have a larger percentage of Republicans voting. It’s exactly how the South held down the African-American vote for generations after slavery ended.
You start with the poor and elderly, you get rid of agencies that help make it easier for them to vote — like ACORN — and then you deny the vote to anyone who’s been in jail — a population that is disproportionally African-American and Latino, who also tend to vote Democratic.
Then you send out notices to predominately low-income and minority neighborhoods and give them disinformation on what date or where they should vote, and make sure there are too few voting machines and too few poll workers for the people who do show up.
Pretty soon you have a majority of Republicans.
Now, that’s what I call voter fraud.
The politics of scarcity
We are on the side of the people of Libya, but it is a third war, which we can afford to fight even as we prepare to make draconian cuts to human services because we're too broke.
Apparently, we have enough money for another war.
We don’t have enough to give access to quality health care to everyone.
We can’t afford to make sure schools aren’t shortchanged.
We can’t improve our public infrastructure or expand or modernize public transportation.
Upgrading the electrical grid is beyond our means.
We have to take away collective bargaining rights for people who work for a living because it’s just too expensive.
We’re talking about draconian cuts to human services because we’re in such a financial crunch.
Workers have been losing ground for 30 years because the government just can’t keep spending on regulation. And besides, it’s just too intrusive for big corporations to be regulated.
But we can afford another war.
We also can afford more tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, which we turn around and make up for with more cuts to human services.
There is enough for everyone to have what they need in this country. The gap between the rich and the working class has never been wider, but it is the middle class that is asked to sacrifice everything — including our children, who are the ones dying in these ill-conceived wars.
We don’t need a draft if we can keep working Americans down because their children will join the military for the opportunities it offers. That is, if you come out alive after repeated tours in the wars that are enriching huge, corrupt corporations.
It’s time for real change. If the people of the Middle East can take to the streets, perhaps it’s time for more of us to do the same thing.
When corporations are left to their own devices …
From Japanese television, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Finally, a week after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi began, people are starting to question the information coming from officials at Tokyo Electric, which operates the plant. Might they be hedging just a little on the extent of the disaster?
Well, duh-huh, as my kids used to say. From today’s New York Times:
“The United States, with Japanese permission, began to put the intelligence-collection aircraft over the site, in hopes of gaining a view for Washington as well as its allies in Tokyo that did not rely on the announcements of officials from Tokyo Electric, which operates Fukushima Daiichi.
American officials say they suspect that the company has consistently underestimated the risk and moved too slowly to contain the damage.”
This is another instance where government can protect people from corporate power. If it were up to the corporations, and in this country it too often is, word of danger would never leak out, and if it were too obvious to keep secret, it always would be minimized.
A few days ago, Japan was advising people within a 10-mile radius to evacuate, and those within 20 miles of the plant to stay indoors, while US offiicials were telling people to move beyond 50 miles. The Japanese government was listening to the “experts” at Tokyo Electric; US officials were somewhat wary of the company’s assessment. Obviously, no one at Tokyo Electric had paid off US officials yet.
An article in yesterday’s San Fransisco Chronicle revealed decades of faked reports and ignorance of current science and standards.
The six rectors at Daiichi were made by three different companies: General Electric, which made reactors 1, 2 and 6; Toshiba, which made reactors 3 and 5; and Hitachi, which made reactor 4.
A spokesperson for GE said all six reactors passed inspection.
According to the article in the Chronicle, Mitsuhiko Tanaka was an engineer who worked on the $250 million steel pressure vessel that now houses the number 4 reactor. Tanaka knew about it because he helped to cover it up. Having to pay for a new container would have bankrupted the company, so documents were falsified and the faulty vessel was installed.
A decade later, Tanaka went to the government to tell them about the faulty vessel and he was ignored.
Tokyo Electric knew about this and other problems at its plants, but covered them up.
Anti-nuclear activists say the government has routinely rubber-stamped the reports of power companies without doing its own inspections.
Sound familiar?
Last summer it was BP’s oil spill in the Gulf; this week it’s a nuclear meltdown in Japan.
Isn’t it time we stopped believing the corporations’ own assessments of the danger their operations pose and the extent of damages when the inevitable disaster happens?
Nuclear power is not safe, period
Workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant are losing control of the leaks. Radiation is so intense, workers can't even get close.
All along, we’ve been told nuclear power was safe, often by so-called experts who couldn’t even pronounce the word correctly.
“Sure, we’re prepared for earthquakes,” they said. “Nuke-u-lar power is safe, clean and efficient.”
In the United States, they’re still saying so. All is well, let’s expand nuclear power in the US.
Even President Obama has yet to come out and say we ought to put the brakes on any expansion. US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told members of Congress yesterday that the administration hasn’t changed its plans.
And Duke Power is talking about building a new plant in Gaffney, SC.
Except for the video footage and the run on potassium iodide, you’d never know anything bad was going on, at least not on a policy level.
Nothing like that could happen here.
Nothing like that was supposed to happen in Japan, either.
This disaster in Japan is the worst since World War II, and could spike even more to be the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Here in the US, we’re not in danger of radiation from halfway across the planet, but we do have a nuclear plant sitting right on a fault line in the middle of one of the most populous regions of the country.
This is the view of Indian Point I saw from the western shore of the Hudson River about 30 miles north of Manhattan.
The Indian Point Power Plant sits on a fault line at the edge of the Hudson River in Westchester County, 30 miles north of Manhattan. I used to live across the river from it, about 5 miles away. We were supposed to hear sirens during emergency drills, but they rarely worked. If the plant were about to explode, we would not have known.
New York’s fault line isn’t terribly active, but there is the occasional low-level quake, and Indian Point is not safe, no matter what industry officials say. I don’t recall whether any of them live within the danger zone.
But New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants the plant closed, and he’s right.
We all watch with increasing dread as events unfold in Japan, but we’re not safe from nuclear disaster here, either.
We made a difference
Health care advocates from across North Carolina filled the gallery this morning when the NC House Health and Human Services Committee met to consider House Bill 115, a bill that would hand over the control of the state’s health insurance exchange to the insurance companies and their allies.
They had a bit of the deer-in-the-headlights look as they saw the gallery filled to overflowing. There wasn’t even any standing room.
As of late last week, the plan was to push H115 through to the House Insurance Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Jerry Dockham, the insurance broker who introduced it.
But we advocates got the word out about the bill, despite the reluctance of most of the state’s media to pay any attention to it, and filled the gallery. Without saying a word, we let them know the word is out and we will fight them on this.
The bill that was supposed to create the health exchange was being drafted by a diverse panel of experts including health care providers, advocates, consumers, physicans and more. The group was put together by the NC Institute of Medicine, and it met several times to turn a suggested federal bill into a framework that would work for the protection and benefit of people of North Carolina.
But the insurance companies wanted control. They wanted to be able to “pre-authorize the expensive diagnostic tests that drive up health care costs.” Sounds reasonable enough, right?
Wrong. Last year, they forced my husband to wait two days for a nuclear stress test after a bad EKG, very nearly killing him.
They wanted to be able to “offer consumers a wide variety of plans from which to choose.”
Like the catostrophic plan a friend of mine chose with a $10,000 deductible. When she developed breast cancer, she was told her chemotherapy wouldn’t be covered because it was outpatient.
What they want is to be able to confuse people into buying something that covers little more than the insurance company’s butt.
Then they asked for a voting seat on the board of directors, and nearly everyone at the meeting said it would be a clear conflict of interest. A couple weeks later, H115 appeared, before the Institute of Medicine panel could finish its work, giving seven of the 11 seats to insurance companies, brokers and their allies, all of whom opposed reform.
This morning, committee chair, Rep. Bill Current (R-Gastonia), said he didn’t even know “why we’re bothering with this since Obamacare is unconstitutional anyway.”
Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin told him it’s a good idea “just in case,” because if the Affordable Care Act isn’t unconstitutional, and North Carolina doesn’t have an exchange, the federal government would operate the exchange. Then he went on to make some proposals from what the IOM panel has worked on:
- A seven-member board composed of people with technical expertise and no financial interest in the exchange. The board would be complemented by five advisory committees that would include insurance companies and consumers.
- Compliance with open records and open meeting laws, something H115 lacks.
The committee decided to meet again to discuss the insurance exchange in two weeks, which gives advocates two more weeks to get the word out that health reform in North Carolina is in danger of being subverted by big business and big greed.
If we don’t stop the takeover here in North Carolina, other states will follow suit. If we do stop it, big insurance will be on notice that we’re watching and we intend to put a stop to their efforts.
