Day: August 7, 2008

Verizon UpDate #3

This is the press release as of 1930 hrs on 06 Aug 08

Report from the CWA-IBEW Bargaining Committees Negotiations continued throughout the day and will continue into the evening. We’ve made some progress but not enough. As we said earlier, we will do whatever it takes to secure our contract, one way or another. That means we’ll get it done at the bargaining table or on the picket line. We’re stepping up our mobilization because we know it makes a real difference. Plans are in the works for worksite rallies on Friday to focus more attention on our fight for jobs and a fair contract. So stick with the mobe plan, check with your local about actions and stay strong and ready. If progress stops, we’ll all stop.

Celebrity Is The New Communist

Forty years ago, the worst thing that you could say about your political opponent was that he was a communist sympathizer or that there programs were “communistic “or “socialistic”. Of course, none of that was true, but it was a successful tactic, a type of fear card, if you will. Socialism is still used to this day as a form of fear card. Especially aimed at those voters that are old enough to remember Communism.

After the fall of the USSR, the newer term for democrats was “tax and spend”, yet another fear tactic to try and make people think that that is the whole purpose of democrats is to raise taxes and spend the money frivolously. But unfortunately, the term “Fiscal policy” means just that taxation and spending the revenue. Guess what? Every candidate no matter the party will have a Fiscal Policy.

And then more recently it was using the reference to terrorists and 9/11. To try and paint the candidate as soft on terrorism or less patriotic. Yet another fear card. And with the American voter, fear is a prime motivator.

But with this election cycle the newest fear card is “Celebrity”. Comparing a candidate to the vacuous blondes, Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, to emphasize the inexperience of the person. To try and paint them as having no substance other than popularity and have no message at all. These pundits and surrogates are trying to turn popularity or celebrity, if you will, into some dirty word.

All one can ask is why would a popular candidate be bad for the country? I guess the answer is if the other candidate is not as popular, then jealous runs the campaign. The use of any fear cardis usually effective and that says volumes about the ignorance of the American voter, that they can to sidetracked with utter manure and ignore the issues completely. This tactic will ALWAYS work on low information voters.

In conclusion I will leave the reader with the words of H.L. Menken, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Candidates Butt Heads On Nuclear Energy

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee toured the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant, a 1,100-megawatt boiling water reactor on the shores of Lake Erie.

The site seemed an odd choice for a campaign event intended to promote the safety of nuclear power. A nearby reactor was decommissioned in 1975 after a partial fuel meltdown that caused no injuries.

Speaking to reporters after his tour, with the two cooling towers puffing over his shoulder, McCain launched a fresh attack on Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee.

“Sen. Obama has said expanding our nuclear power plants, quote, doesn’t make sense for America, unquote,” McCain said. “He also says no to nuclear storage and no to nuclear processing. I could not disagree more.”

Obama’s campaign has said that McCain is distorting the Democrat’s position. In a statement issued before McCain toured the power plant, campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Obama “supports safe and secure nuclear energy. . . . However, before an expansion of nuclear power is considered, Obama thinks key issues must be addressed, including: security of nuclear fuel and waste, waste storage, and proliferation.”

The two candidates disagree on how to treat and store the radioactive waste created during nuclear generation. McCain supports entombing spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, in the Nevada desert, while Obama opposes using the mountain facility.

McCain also has called for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, as is widely done in France and other countries. Obama says experts must first solve safety and security concerns.

The Energy Department on Tuesday released a report that concluded it would cost $96.2 billion to research, build and operate Yucca Mountain until it closes in 2133, a 38% increase from a 2001 estimate. Part of that increase is based on a projection that it would need to store 30% more nuclear waste, requiring a major expansion of the planned facility.

In his remarks to reporters, McCain again pledged to build 45 new nuclear plants by 2030, a sharp increase over the nation’s 104 operating commercial reactors.

McCain has not explained how he would achieve that goal. Although the federal government already provides generous tax incentives and loan guarantees, no utility has begun construction on a new nuclear plant since the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in western Pennsylvania in 1979 led to more federal regulations and local opposition.

A CLOSING NOTE:  As much as I dislike the Summer Olympics, I am almost thankful for them this time.  Maybe the constant barrage of he said, they said will be given a rest, at least for 10 days or so.

2008 Anal-Ocity

Life is still good and yet another anal statement has fallen into my lap…I cannot make this crap up!

A female FOX News commentator, Hamm, replying to news that race had been injected into to the political campaign, again, this time by Bob Herbert of the NY Times.

She said that it was just a “dose of white guilt”.

Sorry girl, but Bob Herbert is an African-American journalist!

Oil Industry Damaged By Katrina

McCain in his attempt to convince the American people that offshore drilling is a good and safe thing, has said that Hurricane Katrina did not substantially damage the oil industry. To this I say, BS!

Hurricane Katrina damaged or displaced an estimated 58 Gulf of Mexico oil platforms and drilling rigs, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Among those, 30 rigs and platforms have been reported lost. No company breakdown was available, said Tim Sampson, an API spokesman.

One of the more significant reported losses of platforms or rigs came from Houston-based Apache Corp. On Thursday, Apache said it lost eight platforms that produce 7,158 barrels of oil and 12.1 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

That’s about 10 percent of the lost oil production and 2 percent of the shut in gas reported earlier this week, said company spokesman Bill Mintz.

Earlier in the week, Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc.’s Ocean Warwick was found about 60 miles from its original position near Dauphin Island off the coast of Alabama. A photo of the displaced rig found its way on Internet sites and newspapers worldwide, creating one of many indelible images of Katrina’s strength.

Speaking of oil spills, SkyTruth images revealed significant spills covering a large area of the northern Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. At the time, nobody was talking about what had happened to the 4,000 offshore oil platforms – and 34,000 miles of pipeline on the seafloor – when Katrina ripped through the Gulf as a Cat 5 storm, followed a few weeks later by Hurricane Rita. Attention was rightly focused on the unfolding human tragedy, as well as the 7-9 million gallons of oil spilled from damaged pipelines, refineries and storage tanks onshore.

But for months after the storms, officials from government and industry repeatedly claimed that there were no “significant” spills in the Gulf. That line is still heard even now. Yet in May 2006, the U.S. Minerals Management Service published their offshore damage assessment: 113 platforms totally destroyed, and – more importantly – 457 pipelines damaged, 101 of those major lines with 10″ or larger diameter. At least 741,000 gallons were spilled from 124 reported sources (the Coast Guard calls anything over 100,000 gallons a “major” spill).

Today In Labor History

07 August

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Wobblie organizer, born – 1890

Eugene Debs and three other trade unionists arrested after Pullman Strike – 1894

Actors Equity members across the United States begin what is to become a month-long strike for better pay and conditions. It was common practice for actors to pay for their own costumes, to rehearse endless hours without pay, and to be fired without notice – 1919

United Slate, Tile & Composition Roofers, Damp & Waterproof Workers Association changes name to Roofers, Waterproofers & Allied Workers – 1978

The Love Canal subdivision of Niagara Falls, N.Y., built on the site of a former Hooker Chemical Co. chemical dump, is formally declared a toxic disaster area by President Carter – 1978

Some 675,000 employees struck ATT Corp. over wages, job security, pension plan changes and better health insurance. It was the last time CWA negotiated at one table for all its Bell System members: divestiture came a few months later. The strike was won after 22 days – 1983

Television writers, members of The Writers Guild of America, end a 22-week strike with a compromise settlement – 1988

Civilian Response Corps–Part 3

III:

The Peace Corps, inaugurated during the administration of President John F. Kennedy, played a role in this process. This initiative was useful both in attempting to refurbish America’s image abroad, supposedly combating poverty, and in engaging young people who were appalled at conditions in “Third World” countries. The Peace Corps was prompted primarily by fears of revolution in countries where the US had very little credible presence and where it feared growing Soviet influence.

Kennedy’s emphasis on the universal rights of man and the need to “abolish all forms of human poverty” nevertheless had a different ring than current US policies. The US government committed limited resources to social reform. It turned out to be the last gasp of social reform both in foreign and domestic policy.

The volunteer crusade served several political purposes. It helped supply free labor to cover up the elimination of government programs. From health care to child care to education, essential services were cut, made “volunteer” (preferably “faith-based”), and drastically reduced. Volunteer agencies were made institutionalized subcontractors.

Additionally, volunteerism was part of an ideological campaign to undermine social consciousness by transferring responsibility for alleviating poverty from the government to the individual. In this mindset, poverty is not an official outrage, but an unpleasant (but unavoidable) circumstance and even a personal choice. Americans were being conditioned to understand that they were no longer “entitled” to jobs, housing and a decent standard of living. This was the repudiation of even the limited programs of the Great Society, and the ruling elite made no effort to disguise this.

In 2002 President Bush called for 4,000 hours of volunteer service by all Americans and created USA Freedom Corps, a White House office. Proposed in the president’s State of the Union address, USA Freedom Corps was to include Operation TIPS—the Terrorism Information and Prevention System—“a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letters carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.”

This attempt to turn volunteerism into a direct tool for spying on citizens was followed up by the decision to give the Department of Homeland Security a granting agency for “citizen involvement [volunteerism] in public health, public safety and disaster relief.”

Barack Obama has now called for universal voluntary public service and has pointedly included military service under this rubric. In fact, his plan for the increasing the military is contained in his “service” policy statement, alongside the expansion of AmeriCorps and the creation of a Classroom Corps, a Health Corps, a Clean Energy Corps and a Veterans Corps.

Obama’s position has considerable support. Last year Time magazine profiled the calls of a number of prominent Democrats in a cover story, “The Case for National Service,” supporting a plan to mandate universal service and establishing a cabinet-level Department of National Service. The plan envisioned 419,000 jobs annually for young people between the ages of 18-25 doing one year of “national or military service.”

The reactionary content of “volunteerism” is more and more transparent. Today, however, the decades in which the ruling class has tried to pass it off as being a matter of the majority of Americans helping the “disadvantaged” minority are rapidly drawing to a close. As millions lose their homes to foreclosure and the vast majority of workers struggle to meet the rising costs of basic necessities as unemployment climbs, the fraud of capitalist charity has become clear to many.

Foreign Labor On The Gulf Oil Rigs

This is a piece that I found on Daily Kos and was cross posted onto The Working Life.

Business Week has an article about a scheme concocted by US oil companies working in the Gulf of Mexico to replace American workers making $18/hr with foreign workers making as little as $3.33/hr for 12 hour shifts. Former oil rig workers have now filed a lawsuit in a Texas federal court to reclaim wages they claim were lost due to the practice.

Given that offshore drilling has become such a huge subject in the ongoing presidential campaign, it’s something of a mystery to me how this story hasn’t received wider coverage. With the exception of a fleeting article posted on Business Week’s website, there has been no coverage of this by the mainstream media. Let’s be clear, the oil fields in which these rigs are located are in US territorial waters. And it’s not like we’re talking about someone going down to the local Home Depot to get these guys. The elaborate scheme involved in getting these guys to the rigs begins with staffing companies that recruit from the Iban people of Sarawak.

The recruited workers were taken to the U.S. embassy in their home countries, where they told the embassy that they would work on foreign-flagged vessels. That would place them outside the requirements of U.S. labor and immigration laws. The staffing firm then flew the workers to Houston or another Gulf-area location, Ireland said, where it informed customs that the workers were going to work for foreign vessels offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. After clearing customs, they would then be picked up by a shipping agent, taken to a shore-based helicopter base, and then to vessels offshore…. Once aboard the vessels, the workers are paid 20%-40% of what a U.S. worker such as Johnson would earn, says the plaintiff’s attorney. For example, Jenggi Kaloum, an Iban worker for Stolt Offshore referenced in the 2005 Ireland deposition, was paid $40 per 12-hour day, while an American worker would make $200 or more per day for the same work. Kaloum could not be reached for comment. Once offshore, the workers can remain on vessels for 150 days in a row, earning no overtime, says Buzbee. He says the workers are paid only when they return to their home countries with money routed by the staffing firm.

This is what American workers were put into competition with. Workers under the absolute control of the company, who can’t complain because they have no one to go to to ask that their rights be respected. And the Oil companies did this in order to slash labor costs, putting many American workers into the unemployment line and supressing wages for those that remained on the rigs. And remember these are the very same offshore oil rigs that are supposed to be the silver bullet to bring down oil prices. But at what cost?