Three years

March 30, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on 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?

March 29, 2011 a world of progress, media Comments Off on 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

March 28, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on 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

March 26, 2011 a world of progress Comments Off on 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

March 25, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on 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

March 20, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on 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 …

March 18, 2011 a world of progress Comments Off on 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

March 17, 2011 a world of progress Comments Off on 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.

It only adds up for the wealthy

March 14, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on It only adds up for the wealthy

Protesters gather in the Capitol Building in Lansing, MI, to fight for their rights to govern themselves.

Attacks on the working class are stepping up in ferocity.

In Wisconsin, the union-busting bill passed in the middle of the night with no debate and no quorum, using parliamentary trickery.

In Michigan, things are even worse. Newly elected Gov. Rick Snyder has decided he can declare martial law and send his people in to govern towns and school districts with no elected power whatsoever. He can even dissolve cities and towns.

All he has to do is declare a fiscal emergency to set all this in motion.

What’s worse, he’s not the only one who can set it in motion:

The governor can hire a private company to declare financial emergency and take over oversight of the city. So now a private corporation can declare your city in a state of financial emergency and send in its Emergency Manager, fire your elected officials, and reap the benefits of the ensuing state contracts, completely ursurping the power of elected officials — and the voters who put them there.

Of course, it’s easy to create a fiscal emergency when you sign in $1.8 billion in tax breaks for the wealthy and big business and then declare you need $1.7 billion in taxes from the elderly and the poor, and whatever you don’t get back from that, you get from cutting social services.This was a direct transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy.

It all just gets more brazen as time goes on. Walker gets away with his strong-arm tactics to kill collective bargaining rights and then Snyder declares dictatorial powers.

This is how facists take power: Create and emergency and then declare you’re the only one who can deal with it.

What’s next, and when does President Obama stand up and call these people out in no uncertain terms?

A big double standard

March 11, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on A big double standard

Corporate pimp James O'Keefe, whose lies might give the Republicans the excuse they want to de-fund NPR.

Scenario one: A conservative governor gets on the phone with a person he believes is a big corporate supporter and brags about how he will bust the unions. They essentially make plans for the corporate takeover of the state. People get angry, but he doesn’t have to resign because he knows it will blow over.

Scenario two: The head of a public broadcasting group talks to a fake Muslim fake donor and NPR could lose its federal funding.

So what’s the difference here? Maybe it’s that liberals have a sense of shame. It’s possible to embarrass us.

But the key here is that the videos here involved the fake pimp whose videos gave the Republicans an excuse to shut down ACORN, one of the most effective voter-registration groups in the nation.

James O’Keefe, a true pimp for corporate interests, devised a fake Muslim group that offered $5 million to NPR.  Executives at the broadcasting company never intended to take the money and actually questioned the tax-exempt status of the group. But the willing right-wing media made a big deal out of it, just as they did the fake pimp videos. It proves NPR has a liberal bias.

It’s OK for Fox News to be the mouthpiece of the right, but it’s not OK to have a news organization that broadcasts real truth. Even the supposed “liberal” media jump all over it, believing the right-wing hype to be real news because “people are talking about it,” as a former editor of mine once put it.

Of course people are talking about it. If you put it out there again and again, people will talk about it, just like they talk about Charlie Sheen. It’s a perfect shiny issue. “Don’t look at the rape of American workers, look over here; this is shiny.”

It’s a double standard, pure and simple, and it threatens to take down our Democracy.

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