| PEACE ACTION FOR A SANE WORLD, the nation's largest grassroots peace network, with chapters and affiliates in over 30 states, organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, Internet actions, citizen lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and as a leading member of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals. Real change comes from the bottom up. We are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level. Peace Action Youngstown, the local chapter in Youngstown OH since 1989, merges the organization's national mission with efforts to build community peace and social justice programs, including neighborhood restoration and the arts. Together, we have the power to be the change we wish to see in the world. |
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| WAR IS OVER |
| "No matter how cynical you get, it's almost impossible to keep up." - Lily Tomlin |
| Way Worse Than a Dumb War: Iraq Ten Years Later Phyllis Bennis on March 18, 2013 - The Nation Editor’s Note: This statement on the tenth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War was signed by Phyllis Bennis, John Cavanagh and Steve Cobble (Institute for Policy Studies); Judith LeBlanc and Kevin Martin (Peace Action); Laura Flanders (GritTV); Bill Fletcher (The Black Commentator); Andy Shallal (Iraqis for Peace); Medea Benjamin (Code Pink); Michael T. McPhearson and Leslie Cagan (United for Peace and Justice); Michael Eisenscher (US Labor Against the War) and David Wildman. All organizations for identification only. It didn’t take long for the world to recognize that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq constituted a dumb war, as then Senator Barack Obama put it. But “dumb” wasn’t the half of it. The US war against Iraq was illegal and illegitimate. It violated the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and a whole host of international laws and treaties. It violated US laws and our Constitution with impunity. And it was all based on lies: about nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, about never-were ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, about Iraq’s invisible weapons of mass destruction and about Baghdad’s supposed nuclear program, with derivative lies about uranium yellowcake from Niger and aluminum rods from China. There were lies about US troops being welcomed in the streets with sweets and flowers, and lies about thousands of jubilant Iraqis spontaneously tearing down the statue of a hated dictator. And then there was the lie that the US could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world to wage war on the cheap. We didn’t have to raise taxes to pay the almost one trillion dollars the Iraq war has cost so far, we could go shopping instead. But behind these myths the costs were huge—human, economic and more. More than a million US troops were deployed to Iraq; 4,483 were killed; 33,183 were wounded and more than 200,000 came home with PTSD. The number of Iraqi civilians killed is still unknown; at least 121,754 are known to have been killed directly during the US war, but hundreds of thousands more died from crippling sanctions, diseases caused by dirty water when the US destroyed the water treatment system and the inability to get medical help because of exploding violence. And what are we leaving behind? After almost a decade the US finally pulled out most of its troops and Pentagon-paid contractors. About 16,000 State Department-paid contractors and civilian employees are still stationed at the giant US embassy compound and two huge consulates, along with unacknowledged CIA and FBI agents, Special Forces and a host of other undercover operatives. The US just sold the Iraqi government 140 M-l tanks, and American-made fighter jets are in the pipeline too. But there is little question that the all- encompassing US military occupation of Iraq is over. After more than eight years of war, the Iraqi government finally said no more. Their refusal to grant US troops immunity from prosecution for potential war crimes was the deal-breaker that forced President Obama’s hand and made him pull out the last 30,000 troops he and his generals were hoping to keep in Iraq. But as we knew would be the case, the pull out by itself did not end the violence. The years of war and occupation have left behind a devastated country, split along sectarian lines, a shredded social fabric and a dispossessed and impoverished population. Iraq remains one of the most violent countries in the world; that’s the true legacy of the US war. We owe a great debt to the people of Iraq—and we have not even begun to make good on that commitment. The US lost the Iraq War. Iraq hasn’t been “liberated.” Violence is rampant; the sectarian violence resulting from early US policies after the 2003 invasion continues to escalate. Of course we didn’t bring democracy and freedom to Iraq—that was never on the US agenda. The failure to “liberate” Iraq cannot be the basis for assessing the war. The real assessment must be based on whether the war achieved the goals that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative, military CEO and Pentagon profiteering partners established for this war: Consolidating permanent US control over Iraq’s oil. Nope, US oil companies are just some of the myriad of foreign oil interests in Iraq’s oil fields. Leaving behind a pro-US, anti-Iranian government in Baghdad. Hardly, Prime Minister al-Maliki is barely on speaking terms with anyone in Washington. Guaranteeing permanent access to US bases in Iraq. Not even close, all but two of the 500 plus US bases and outposts were either closed down or turned over to the Iraqi military. Ensuring that a post-war Iraqi government would allow the US to use Iraq as a jumping off point to attack Iran. No way, despite continuing billions of dollars of our tax money, the Iraqi government today is allied more closely to Iran than the US. In the buildup to the war, too many media, government officials, academics and others allowed fear to curb their tongue or their eagerness to curry favor with those in power to stifle their speech. This remains a crucial lesson as we stand up to the escalation of Obama’s drone war and continue to challenge those who call for war against Iran. The war in Iraq began with significant support, with many people accepting the false claims that this new war would bring security to a still-frightened US public. But that support did not last long. Within the first years, pro-war assumptions had been reversed, and by the end, the anti-war movement and escalating casualties had turned around public opinion so thoroughly that overwhelming majorities admitted the war in Iraq was wrong and should never have been fought in the first place. And this war showed us our power. It proved the possibility of globalizing opposition even before the war began. The mobilization of February 15, 2003, when the broad United for Peace and Justice coalition joined with allies around the world on the day the world said “No to War!” February 15 created what The New York Times called “the second super-power,” ready to challenge the US drive towards empire. Our movement changed history. While we were not able to prevent the invasion of Iraq a month later, that mobilization proved the illegality of the war. It demonstrated the isolation of the Bush administration, pulled governments and the United Nations into a trajectory of resistance, helped prevent war in Iran and inspired a generation of activists, including some of those who, eight years later, would create the Arab Spring in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The US troops left behind a devastated, tortured Iraq. What they didn’t leave behind is one dollar for reparations or compensation. That battle still lies ahead. The US war in Iraq may be over, but we owe an apology to all those who suffered from the war. And that apology must be grounded in recognition of our enormous debt to the people of Iraq, a debt for which compensation and reparations are only a start. Our real obligation, to the people of Iraq and the region and the rest of the world, is to transform our government and our country so that these resource-driven wars, shaped by lies and fought for power and for empire, whether in Iran or somewhere else, can never be waged again Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/173396/way-worse-dumb- war-iraq-ten-years-later#ixzz2UK5b0Fvc |
| Weekend Edition November 8-10, 2013 COUNTERPUNCH.ORG Nuclear Greens in a Post-Fukushima World The Ring of Eternal Fire by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant in Japan and asked: ‘Can it happen here?’ They already knew the answer. As the late great environmentalist, David Brower, used to put it, ‘nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults’. Along much of America’s West Coast runs the Ring of Fire, which stretches all around the Pacific plate from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, Alaska, and down the coast to Chile. Some 90 per cent of the world’s earthquakes happen around the Ring. Apparently acting predictively on Brower’s piece of sarcastic wisdom, the US has deployed four nuclear plants near the Ring of Fire fault lines, two of them in Brower’s home state of California. In Eureka, California forty miles up the road from CP headquarters in Petrolia, there was a boiling-water reactor that was closed in 1976 following an earthquake from a ‘previously unknown fault’ just off the coast. In its place, there are now spent nuclear fuel rods—except one they now cannot find—in ponds, right on the shoreline; nicely situated for a tsunami, such as the one that disabled the relief diesel generators that were designed to pump emergency coolant in the Fukushima plant. Three plates meet at Triple Junction off Cape Mendocino. The region experienced a 7.1 earthquake in 1992. Moral number one in the nuclear business: eyes wide shut at all times; deny the predictable. Further south, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. It was planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri Fault, part of the Ring of Fire, a few miles from the coast. Further enquiry established that there had been a 7.1 earthquake forty years earlier, offshore from the plant, which was duly completed in 1973. The power company, Pacific Gas & Electric, said it would beef up defences. In their haste, the site managers reversed the new blueprints for earthquake-proofing the two reactors, so the retro- fit was not a total success. Moral number two in the nuclear business, as in any other human enterprise: somewhere along the line people always fuck things up. Diablo Canyon was supposedly built and retro-fitted to survive a 7.3 quake intact. In 1906, San Francisco was destroyed by a 7.7 quake, which ripped the San Andreas fault for 300 miles, north and south of the city. Back to the first moral, ‘deny the predictable’: Diablo Canyon authorities recently learnt of yet another fault and are now worried about ‘ground liquefaction’ in the event of a big quake. In 2008 there was an attack by a smack of jellyfish (Yes, the collective noun is correct), which blocked the cold-water intake; the plant was shut down for a couple of days. At the last count there were four identified faultlines offshore from Diablo Canyon. Another 150 miles south lies the recently shuttered San Onofre plant, perched on the shoreline. It has been cited as ‘the scariest workplace in America’. People swim in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there to enjoy the elevated temperatures; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit, a spherical containment of concrete and steel, the smallest wall being an adamantine six feet thick; just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the collapsing Fukushima units. Further illustration of moral number two, ‘fucking up’, is to be found in one of San Onofre’s two sizzling units: the mighty engineering and construction firm Bechtel installed a 420-ton nuclear-reactor vessel here backwards. The nearest faultline is the Cristianitos, deemed inactive; see moral number one. The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand along Japan’s north-east coast, as the tsunami from the 9.0 Tohoku earthquake rolled in. San Onofre is seawater-cooled. Environmentalists didn’t care for that, so they planned to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California’s main north–south road; immune to jelly-fish attack, but open to other methods of assault. The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures a 67 per cent probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher for Los Angeles, 63 per cent for San Francisco. Up here in the Cascadia subduction zone—where one bit of a plate pushes under another, as happens off north-east Japan—we have a 10 per cent possibility of an 8 or 9 force quake; a Big One is a near certainty fairly soon. The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nation. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, prone to endless leaks and kindred malfunctions; all of them dangerous. Twenty-four of them are the same design—by General Electric— as the Fukushima reactors. Take the Shearon Harris power station in North Carolina, also a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants. It would not even require a quake or tsunami, only a moderately ingenious terrorist to breach Shearon Harris’s puny defences and sabotage the cooling systems. A study by the Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire there could cause 140,000 cancers, and contaminate thousands of square miles of land. The reactions to Fukushima from the nuclear industry’s shills have been predictable— if still scarcely believable—sallies into cognitive dissonance. Thus Paddy Reagan, professor of Nuclear Physics at the University of Surrey: “We had a doomsday earthquake in a country with 55 nuclear power stations and they all shut down perfectly, although three have had problems since. This was a huge earthquake, and as a test of the resilience and robustness of nuclear plants it seems they have withstood the effects very well.” Also jumping on the bandwagon are prominent greens like George Monbiot, who has seized the opportunity of one of the worst disasters in the ‘peacetime’ history of nuclear power to announce his endorsement of atomic energy in the Guardian: You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. Does Monbiot live on Fantasy Island? “Sound as the roots of the anti-nuclear movement are, we cannot allow historical sentiment to shield us from the bigger picture,” he wrotes. “Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet than coal- burning stations . . . The Chernobyl meltdown was hideous and traumatic. The official death toll so far appears to be 43–28 workers in the initial few months then a further 15 civilians by 2005.” The 1986 explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine does indeed remain the benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters. Denial that Chernobyl actually killed—and is killing—hundreds of thousands of people is crucial to the efforts of the nuclear lobby. Amid the Fukushima crises, Fergus Walsh, the BBC’s medical correspondent, comforted his audience with the absurdity that by 2006, Chernobyl had prompted only sixty deaths from cancer; the same drivel has been repeated many times over since the Fukushima catastrophe, buttressed by a shameful report overseen by the UN’s nuclear lobby. In 2009 the New York Academy of Sciences published Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, a 327-page volume by scientists Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko, the definitive study to date with comprehensive health statistics. In the summary of his chapter ‘Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe’, Yablokov demonstrates that 4 per cent of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe: Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath; think of southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, an advisor to Clinton and CounterPunch contributor, wrote a few weeks after the meltdown that a single spent fuel-rod pool—as in Fukushima Number 4 or Shearon Harris—holds more caesium–137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear-weapons tests in the northern hemisphere combined; an explosion in that pool could blast ‘perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster’. Pro-nuclear greens like Monbiot and the despicable James Hansen prattle on about “better safeguards.” Can they not get it into their heads that nuclear power’s entire history has been the methodical breaching of supposedly reliable safeguards? There are 40-foot sea walls around much of Japan’s coastline. The Fukushima tsunami went through them like a wavelet through a child’s sandcastle. Monbiot writes as though the nuclear-industrial-academic complex—one of the most powerful lobbies in the world, in continuous operation for seventy years—did not exist. Yet its real-world effects are plain enough. President Obama, for example, took plenty of nuclear-industry money, specifically from the Exelon Corporation, for his presidential campaign. In his State of the Union address in January 2011, Obama reaffirmed his commitment to ‘clean, safe’ nuclear power, as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice, clean form of syphilis. Post-Japanese earthquake, Obama’s press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy ‘remains a part of the President’s overall energy plan’. Even as Fukushima Daiichi threatened a runaway meltdown, Obama found time to record a tv interview for a news programme in southwestern New Mexico on his 2010 proposal for nuclear-warhead development. The centrepiece of this plan is funding for a sprawling $6bn factory to produce explosive triggers for thermo-nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos nuclear compound, 50 miles from Santa Fe. Why choose the moment of Fukushima’s collapse to address New Mexico? As the tv interviewer made clear, it is home to powerful potential donors of Democratic Party campaign funds: Lockheed Martin (which manages the Sandia National Laboratory, Bechtel, Babcock & Wilcox and the urs Corporation (which, along with the University of California, collectively administer Los Alamos). In Germany and in France there have been huge turnouts against atomic energy in the wake of Fukushima. In the US only a handful of Greens have spoken out. Why have we not seen furious demonstrations outside every one of America’s 104 nuclear plants? One reason: major environmental organizations long ago made a devil’s pact with the nuclear industry, which since the early 1970s has worked to frame carbon dioxide as the real environmental problem and nuclear power as its only solution. Fixated by speculative and increasingly discredited models of anthropogenic global warming, mainstream greens took the nuclear option. We are talking here about the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club—which forced out David Brower when he opposed Diablo Canyon—and people like Obama’s White House advisor John Holdren, along with supposedly progressive outfits like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists. There has been no upsurge against nuclear power here because American progressives still mostly cram in under the toxic umbrella of Obama’s energy plan. When the House of Representatives (though not the US Senate) voted for a climate bill in 2009, a “clean energy bank” to provide financial backing for new energy production, including nuclear, was part of the bargain. In political terms, nuclear power has always been a war on the people, starting with the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, going on to the Marshall Islanders, ranchers and kindred inhabitants of test sites across the West, Native Americans, poor Latinos and African Americans (the usual involuntary neighbours of waste dumps), people in the path of ‘accidents’ or deliberate secret experiments, and most recently Fukushima. Not the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company. They are in Tokyo or heading further south. It is ‘worker heroes’ — who know perfectly well they are doomed. It is the Board of TEPCO and the likes of Monbiot and Hansen that should be sent to the front lines. Look at the false predictions, the blunders. Remember the elemental truth that Nature bats last, and that folly and greed are ineluctable parts of the human condition. Why try to pretend that we live in a world where there are no force 8–9 earthquakes, tsunamis, dud machinery, forgetful workers, corner-cutting plant owners, immensely powerful corporations, permissive regulatory agencies, politicians and presidents trolling for campaign dollars? Is that the shoal on which the progressive movement in America is beached? This shameful pact between the nuclear industry and many big greens must end. A version of this article appeared in the April 2011 print issue of CounterPunch. |
| PEACE ACTION YOUNGSTOWN |
| Published on Sunday, November 10, 2013 by The Huffington Post Why Does Congress Think It's OK for Working Americans to Go Hungry? by Jerry Lanson The Dow closed the week at a record high. And all those billionaires? They're barely even an exclusive club anymore, what with 442 in the U.S. in 2012 and almost a thousand more than that globally, a jump of 200 in a single year, Forbes data shows.Capital Area Food Bank serving the Washington DC metro area (Photo: Capital Area Food Bank) So why is it OK for working Americans to go hungry? Why in the midst such affluence for the wealthy do we, as a nation, simply turn our back on those struggling, even when they are lucky enough to land a job and work for a living? To me, it is the shrug with which most Americans seem to greet such questions today that offers the most alarming evidence we live in a broken and declining society. Sure, each month we wait with anticipation for the job growth and unemployment data. Today public radio was abuzz with excitement at the better-than-anticipated numbers for new job creation in October. I'm all for success; we need a whole lot more. But why do we barely notice the figures about failure -- not the failure of individuals, but the failure of a society to take care of its children, its disabled, its old people? The failure of that society -- our society -- to even acknowledge it's wrong to let people starve in the midst of affluence. Below the fold in today's New York Times, below all the excitement about Twitter's public offering on the market, is a smallish article is titled "Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor." It tells the story of peple like Rafaela Rivera, a home health aide who earns $10 an hour. Her husband is on disability. They support a household of four. They already supplement the money for food they get from food stamps with handouts from food kitchens. But on Nov. 1, Rafaela Rivera took a $36 cut in her food stamps. She's one of millions who saw her benefits nibbled on the same day. "Your not dealing with big numbers," Christopher Bean, executive director of Part of the Solution, told the paper in a web video accompanying the article. "Maybe for a lot of people $36 doesn't seem like a lot. If you're a family that's relying on $300 to $400 just to go everywhere, $36 is huge." A few weeks ago, Charles Blow wrote a column for The Times that once again noted the growing disparity between rich and everyone else. It was titled "Billionaires' Row and Welfare Lines." He noted that while the rich are getting richer, U.S. Census data shows that the median income in the country, in real purchasing power, has declined more than 8 percent since the last recession began in 2007. And he quoted from a Pew Research Center report that noted: During the first two years of the nation's economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent. But the numbers don't tell the stories of the country's Rafaela Riveras, people struggling to feed their families, working people. They're at the bottom of the food chain, and there are many of them, quietly I'll bet, even in middle-class communities. They are the one in seven Americans on food stamps today, most of them living below the poverty level. Last year these Americans, many working, many others disabled, cost the government more than $78 billion. It's a record, though still much less than a fifth of the U.S. annual defense budget, the world's largest. And soon that percentage spent on food stamps will drop further, perhaps dramatically so. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would cut the food stamp budget in half over a decade's time. The Senate, meanwhile, has proposed cuts of "only" $4.5 billion, an amount on a par with what's rippled down in cuts of $10 and $20 and $30 a month to millions of recipients this November, causing so much hardship. Congress, of course, deals with data -- numbers -- not people. These times are just fine for the constituents who lobby them and who pay their campaign bills. But real people, people like the Riveras, will have limited choices as Congress continues to turn the screws -- scavage for more food in kitchen pantries, go hungry or steal. Tell me. Doesn't that bother you just a little? Copyright 2013 The Huffington Post Jerry Lanson is an associate professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston. His third book, "Writing for Others, Writing for Ourselves: Telling Stories in an Age of Blogging" will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this fall. His blog can be found at jerrylanson.wordpress.com |
Congress Blew
It - Again: The
National Budget
Should Reflect
National Priorities
Wed, 11 Dec 2013
By Jo Comerford, Truthout|
News Analysis
Americans deserve
representatives in Congress
who take seriously their role
as stewards of the people's
business. We deserve a federal
budget that reflects Americans'
priorities for how our tax dollars
are spent. Unfortunately,
Congress seems determined
to give us neither.
Earlier this month, lawmakers
missed yet another federal
budget deadline, this one set by
congressional appropriators as
"the very latest" date that the
congressional budget
conference committee could go
without producing topline budget
numbers. If the committee
couldn't reach agreement by
December 2, appropriators
warned, we would face
"extremely damaging
repercussions," including:* the
risk of another government
shutdown in early 2014;
* inability to stop further cuts to
critical federal programs via
sequestration; and
* the need to budget by
continuing resolution - an
outcome that would virtually wipe
the slate clean of the budgeting
work done by Congress so far
this year.
Of course, this isn't the first
budget deadline missed by
Congress this fall. In October,
Congress failed to pass
appropriations bills on time,
leading to a government
shutdown lasting more than two
weeks. These are only the most
recent examples in a
decade-long pattern of
budgetary irregularities, where
continuing resolutions, often
created behind closed doors in
secretive negotiations, take the
place of open, accountable
appropriations processes. Sitting
on top of this dysfunction is the
sequester, itself the result of
another missed deadline,
chewing away at public services
and infrastructure through
across-the-board cuts.
To add insult to injury, this
Congress also earned the
distinction of the least productive
Congress in US history. Fewer
than 60 public laws were passed
prior to December. That's even
lower than the number of laws
passed by the Republican
Congress during 1995 under
President Clinton. Instead of
focusing their time on a
spending and revenue plan, our
lawmakers passed a bill
specifying the size of
commemorative coins for the
Baseball Hall of Fame. The
113th Congress hasn't even
agreed on how to fund the
Pentagon, a part of the budget
lawmakers are usually eager to
support. When this Congress
cannot get its act together even
to fund the military industrial
complex in this country,
something is wrong.
What's going on here?
It is as if Congress thinks that
the American people are not
paying attention, and thus they
can do whatever they want with
taxpayers' money. Partisan
political games, backroom deals
and deafness to the preferences
of constituents has led to
unconscionable gridlock and a
federal budget largely out of
balance with the
people's priorities.
Here's some bad news
for Congress:
The American people are
paying attention, and they do
not like what they see. The most
recent poll from The
Economist/YouGov shows a
catastrophic 6 percent approval
rating for Congress. Six percent.
Compared to Congress, people
prefer toe fungus, zombies or
jury duty (no joke), according to
another poll by Public Policy
Polling. It took throwing people
like Charles Manson and
Vladimir Putin into the mix for
Public Policy Polling to find
someone less popular than
Congress.
For their part, Congress better
start paying attention. According
to an October Rasmussen poll,
78 percent of Americans would
vote to get rid of every member
of Congress and start from
scratch.
At National Priorities Project,
we have two major suggestions
for Congress: Start listening to
the American people and
recommit to an appropriations
process that solicits and
honors their input.
Listening to the
American People
Congress members may have
a hard time agreeing on
whether the sky is blue these
days, but Americans tend to
agree on a surprising number of
priorities. Four issues in
particular rise to the top of their
list: securing Social Security,
closing corporate tax loopholes,
reducing military spending and
containing health-care costs.
Securing Social Security.
Despite more than a decade of
repeated "sky is falling" rhetoric
on this critical public program,
voters show little interest in
reducing Social Security
benefits, preferring in large
majorities to raise taxes if
needed over reducing benefits.
It's easy to see why: Social
Security keeps almost half of
elderly Americans out of
poverty. Lawmakers should
listen to the American people
and eliminate the $113,700 limit
on earnings subject to Social
Security taxes to help preserve
the program for future
generations.
Closing Tax Loopholes
for the Wealthy and
Corporations.
Sixty-six percent want tax
loopholes closed for wealthy
Americans so the revenue can
be used to shrink the federal
budget deficit, and 80 percent of
Americans want tax loopholes for
big corporations closed.
Overall, Americans don't think
it's fair that tax breaks for
offshore corporate income cost
the government $42 billion last
year alone. The capital gains tax
break, which primarily benefits
the very wealthy, cost $83
billion. Congress should close or
modify these breaks to provide
more revenue for public services
and infrastructure.
Reducing Military
Spending.
The United States will spend an
astounding $653 billion on the
military in 2014, more than 56
percent of the entire
discretionary budget. In fact,
yearly US military spending
exceeds that of the next 13
nations combined. It's no
wonder that, on average,
Americans want to cut military
spending by 18 percent.
Congress should heed the
advice of the bipartisan task
force that found $1 trillion in fat
over the next 10 years hiding in
the Pentagon budget - and start
cutting.
Contain Health-Care
Costs.
The cost of health care
consistently tops Americans' list
of concerns when asked by
pollsters, and some estimates
show that up to one-third of
health-care spending is wasted.
Congress should explore laying
groundwork for systems such as
"bundled payments," where
health-care providers receive
payments for overall patient care
rather than for each procedure
or test. Doing so can cut costs
by as much as 15 to 20 percent.
These four priorities represent
critical areas of agreement among
Americans, but they are hardly
unique. Take a look at just how
broad the consensus on federal
spending and revenue actually
is in this country:
* 95 percent of Americans
say restoring jobs is a top
priority
* 88 percent of Americans
say preserving the long-term
stability of Medicare is
essential.
* 75 percent of Americans
oppose cuts to SNAP.
* 83 percent of Americans
oppose cuts to K-12
education.
* 56 percent of Americans
want to see a mix of
spending cuts and tax
increases.
In the face of these clearly
stated budget priorities, it is
incredible that Congress is
gripped with such dysfunction
that it cannot even keep the
government open on a
consistent basis, much less
deliver a budget plan for the
American people. One of the
most critical symptoms of this
dysfunction is the broken
appropriations process, which
absolutely must be remedied if
the priorities described above
are to be translated into law.
Get Appropriation
Back on Track
For the past decade, not once
has Congress passed all 12
appropriations bills on time. Most
recently, this failure caused the
government shutdown this past
October. One of the most
corrosive effects of this ongoing
budget breakdown is an
over-reliance on continuing
resolutions, the fallback method
of budgeting where Congress
takes last year's budget, makes
some token adjustments, and
puts a new date on it. You might
be wondering: Why is this a bad
thing? Why should we care if
Congress just updates last
year's work? Well, there are a
number of reasons why this isn't
smart budgeting.
First, budgeting by continuing
resolution prevents needed
adjustments to cut waste and
create efficiencies. If a program
created in 2012 is set up
improperly, using the 2012
budget as the 2013 budget
keeps you from fixing it properly
- you just move forward with the
broken program for another
year. When you combine this
with the lazy, across-the-board
cuts from sequestration, you get
a federal budget optimized for
breakdown.
Second, budgeting by continuing
resolution short-circuits the
accountability of the federal
budget process.
In a predictable budget process,
Congress would pass a budget
authorization bill after
constructing it in the House
Budget Committee and its
various subcommittees. That
authorization would be used as a
framework for 12 different
appropriations bills, which
themselves would be created in
the House Appropriations
Committee and its various
subcommittees. The bills would
be brought to the floor of each
House of Congress for a vote,
and then a conference
committee would convene to
reconcile the two chambers'
work into a single bill. That bill
would be voted on by the House
and Senate and sent to the
president for his signature. At
each step along the way, from
the earliest subcommittee
hearings to the final decision by
the president on whether to sign
the bill or not, citizens would be
able to weigh in and make their
opinions known.
By contrast, consider what has
happened in recent years. Say
you took a few of the
opportunities to weigh in during
the appropriations process
described above. Your
congressperson and senator
took your opinions into account
when working to influence the
content of the budget. But then,
imagine Congress ran out of
time and did not pass that bill,
and in the rush to pass
something just to keep the
government open, they simply
discard this year's budget work,
copy their work from last year
and negotiate changes to it
behind closed doors. Your input
has now been erased, along with
your optimism for the democratic
process. Budgeting by
continuing resolution in this way
replaces what should be an
open, transparent and
accountable process with a
secretive - and frankly,
ineffective - back-room deal.
When Congress works this way,
who can blame the American
people for wanting to send them
all back home and give someone
else a chance?
The Clock Is Ticking
Having missed the Dec. 2 date
for reporting a top-line budget
number for appropriators to work
with, the budget conference
committee is in real trouble.
Under the agreed-to framework
that ended the last government
shutdown, the conference
committee has until Dec. 13 -
just over a week - to finish its
work. If they fail, we could face a
repeat of the budget and
debt-ceiling fiasco of this past
year.
With their constituents so united
in a vision of what our country
should prioritize over the coming
year, it would truly be an
incredible abdication of
responsibility if Congress were
to fail again to keep our
government running with a
budget that reflects our values.
Will Congress slip from being
less popular than toe fungus to
being less popular than serial
killers and dictators? We are
about to find out.
Give Congress a push:
Sign our petition at
http://bit.ly/RyanMurrayPetition.
Author's Update:
On Tuesday, Dec. 10,
the budget conference
committee released The
Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 --
otherwise known as the top-line
spending numbers for fiscal
years 2014 and 2015. While this
release is an important step in
the work to stabilize a nation
plagued by crisis budgeting,
it must also be seen as a missed
opportunity for Congress to
budget in line with broadly held
national priorities.
It - Again: The
National Budget
Should Reflect
National Priorities
Wed, 11 Dec 2013
By Jo Comerford, Truthout|
News Analysis
Americans deserve
representatives in Congress
who take seriously their role
as stewards of the people's
business. We deserve a federal
budget that reflects Americans'
priorities for how our tax dollars
are spent. Unfortunately,
Congress seems determined
to give us neither.
Earlier this month, lawmakers
missed yet another federal
budget deadline, this one set by
congressional appropriators as
"the very latest" date that the
congressional budget
conference committee could go
without producing topline budget
numbers. If the committee
couldn't reach agreement by
December 2, appropriators
warned, we would face
"extremely damaging
repercussions," including:* the
risk of another government
shutdown in early 2014;
* inability to stop further cuts to
critical federal programs via
sequestration; and
* the need to budget by
continuing resolution - an
outcome that would virtually wipe
the slate clean of the budgeting
work done by Congress so far
this year.
Of course, this isn't the first
budget deadline missed by
Congress this fall. In October,
Congress failed to pass
appropriations bills on time,
leading to a government
shutdown lasting more than two
weeks. These are only the most
recent examples in a
decade-long pattern of
budgetary irregularities, where
continuing resolutions, often
created behind closed doors in
secretive negotiations, take the
place of open, accountable
appropriations processes. Sitting
on top of this dysfunction is the
sequester, itself the result of
another missed deadline,
chewing away at public services
and infrastructure through
across-the-board cuts.
To add insult to injury, this
Congress also earned the
distinction of the least productive
Congress in US history. Fewer
than 60 public laws were passed
prior to December. That's even
lower than the number of laws
passed by the Republican
Congress during 1995 under
President Clinton. Instead of
focusing their time on a
spending and revenue plan, our
lawmakers passed a bill
specifying the size of
commemorative coins for the
Baseball Hall of Fame. The
113th Congress hasn't even
agreed on how to fund the
Pentagon, a part of the budget
lawmakers are usually eager to
support. When this Congress
cannot get its act together even
to fund the military industrial
complex in this country,
something is wrong.
What's going on here?
It is as if Congress thinks that
the American people are not
paying attention, and thus they
can do whatever they want with
taxpayers' money. Partisan
political games, backroom deals
and deafness to the preferences
of constituents has led to
unconscionable gridlock and a
federal budget largely out of
balance with the
people's priorities.
Here's some bad news
for Congress:
The American people are
paying attention, and they do
not like what they see. The most
recent poll from The
Economist/YouGov shows a
catastrophic 6 percent approval
rating for Congress. Six percent.
Compared to Congress, people
prefer toe fungus, zombies or
jury duty (no joke), according to
another poll by Public Policy
Polling. It took throwing people
like Charles Manson and
Vladimir Putin into the mix for
Public Policy Polling to find
someone less popular than
Congress.
For their part, Congress better
start paying attention. According
to an October Rasmussen poll,
78 percent of Americans would
vote to get rid of every member
of Congress and start from
scratch.
At National Priorities Project,
we have two major suggestions
for Congress: Start listening to
the American people and
recommit to an appropriations
process that solicits and
honors their input.
Listening to the
American People
Congress members may have
a hard time agreeing on
whether the sky is blue these
days, but Americans tend to
agree on a surprising number of
priorities. Four issues in
particular rise to the top of their
list: securing Social Security,
closing corporate tax loopholes,
reducing military spending and
containing health-care costs.
Securing Social Security.
Despite more than a decade of
repeated "sky is falling" rhetoric
on this critical public program,
voters show little interest in
reducing Social Security
benefits, preferring in large
majorities to raise taxes if
needed over reducing benefits.
It's easy to see why: Social
Security keeps almost half of
elderly Americans out of
poverty. Lawmakers should
listen to the American people
and eliminate the $113,700 limit
on earnings subject to Social
Security taxes to help preserve
the program for future
generations.
Closing Tax Loopholes
for the Wealthy and
Corporations.
Sixty-six percent want tax
loopholes closed for wealthy
Americans so the revenue can
be used to shrink the federal
budget deficit, and 80 percent of
Americans want tax loopholes for
big corporations closed.
Overall, Americans don't think
it's fair that tax breaks for
offshore corporate income cost
the government $42 billion last
year alone. The capital gains tax
break, which primarily benefits
the very wealthy, cost $83
billion. Congress should close or
modify these breaks to provide
more revenue for public services
and infrastructure.
Reducing Military
Spending.
The United States will spend an
astounding $653 billion on the
military in 2014, more than 56
percent of the entire
discretionary budget. In fact,
yearly US military spending
exceeds that of the next 13
nations combined. It's no
wonder that, on average,
Americans want to cut military
spending by 18 percent.
Congress should heed the
advice of the bipartisan task
force that found $1 trillion in fat
over the next 10 years hiding in
the Pentagon budget - and start
cutting.
Contain Health-Care
Costs.
The cost of health care
consistently tops Americans' list
of concerns when asked by
pollsters, and some estimates
show that up to one-third of
health-care spending is wasted.
Congress should explore laying
groundwork for systems such as
"bundled payments," where
health-care providers receive
payments for overall patient care
rather than for each procedure
or test. Doing so can cut costs
by as much as 15 to 20 percent.
These four priorities represent
critical areas of agreement among
Americans, but they are hardly
unique. Take a look at just how
broad the consensus on federal
spending and revenue actually
is in this country:
* 95 percent of Americans
say restoring jobs is a top
priority
* 88 percent of Americans
say preserving the long-term
stability of Medicare is
essential.
* 75 percent of Americans
oppose cuts to SNAP.
* 83 percent of Americans
oppose cuts to K-12
education.
* 56 percent of Americans
want to see a mix of
spending cuts and tax
increases.
In the face of these clearly
stated budget priorities, it is
incredible that Congress is
gripped with such dysfunction
that it cannot even keep the
government open on a
consistent basis, much less
deliver a budget plan for the
American people. One of the
most critical symptoms of this
dysfunction is the broken
appropriations process, which
absolutely must be remedied if
the priorities described above
are to be translated into law.
Get Appropriation
Back on Track
For the past decade, not once
has Congress passed all 12
appropriations bills on time. Most
recently, this failure caused the
government shutdown this past
October. One of the most
corrosive effects of this ongoing
budget breakdown is an
over-reliance on continuing
resolutions, the fallback method
of budgeting where Congress
takes last year's budget, makes
some token adjustments, and
puts a new date on it. You might
be wondering: Why is this a bad
thing? Why should we care if
Congress just updates last
year's work? Well, there are a
number of reasons why this isn't
smart budgeting.
First, budgeting by continuing
resolution prevents needed
adjustments to cut waste and
create efficiencies. If a program
created in 2012 is set up
improperly, using the 2012
budget as the 2013 budget
keeps you from fixing it properly
- you just move forward with the
broken program for another
year. When you combine this
with the lazy, across-the-board
cuts from sequestration, you get
a federal budget optimized for
breakdown.
Second, budgeting by continuing
resolution short-circuits the
accountability of the federal
budget process.
In a predictable budget process,
Congress would pass a budget
authorization bill after
constructing it in the House
Budget Committee and its
various subcommittees. That
authorization would be used as a
framework for 12 different
appropriations bills, which
themselves would be created in
the House Appropriations
Committee and its various
subcommittees. The bills would
be brought to the floor of each
House of Congress for a vote,
and then a conference
committee would convene to
reconcile the two chambers'
work into a single bill. That bill
would be voted on by the House
and Senate and sent to the
president for his signature. At
each step along the way, from
the earliest subcommittee
hearings to the final decision by
the president on whether to sign
the bill or not, citizens would be
able to weigh in and make their
opinions known.
By contrast, consider what has
happened in recent years. Say
you took a few of the
opportunities to weigh in during
the appropriations process
described above. Your
congressperson and senator
took your opinions into account
when working to influence the
content of the budget. But then,
imagine Congress ran out of
time and did not pass that bill,
and in the rush to pass
something just to keep the
government open, they simply
discard this year's budget work,
copy their work from last year
and negotiate changes to it
behind closed doors. Your input
has now been erased, along with
your optimism for the democratic
process. Budgeting by
continuing resolution in this way
replaces what should be an
open, transparent and
accountable process with a
secretive - and frankly,
ineffective - back-room deal.
When Congress works this way,
who can blame the American
people for wanting to send them
all back home and give someone
else a chance?
The Clock Is Ticking
Having missed the Dec. 2 date
for reporting a top-line budget
number for appropriators to work
with, the budget conference
committee is in real trouble.
Under the agreed-to framework
that ended the last government
shutdown, the conference
committee has until Dec. 13 -
just over a week - to finish its
work. If they fail, we could face a
repeat of the budget and
debt-ceiling fiasco of this past
year.
With their constituents so united
in a vision of what our country
should prioritize over the coming
year, it would truly be an
incredible abdication of
responsibility if Congress were
to fail again to keep our
government running with a
budget that reflects our values.
Will Congress slip from being
less popular than toe fungus to
being less popular than serial
killers and dictators? We are
about to find out.
Give Congress a push:
Sign our petition at
http://bit.ly/RyanMurrayPetition.
Author's Update:
On Tuesday, Dec. 10,
the budget conference
committee released The
Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 --
otherwise known as the top-line
spending numbers for fiscal
years 2014 and 2015. While this
release is an important step in
the work to stabilize a nation
plagued by crisis budgeting,
it must also be seen as a missed
opportunity for Congress to
budget in line with broadly held
national priorities.
Brought to You by a Fracking- induced Earthquake The Lotto of a Fukushima-style Nuclear Disaster by MICHAEL McGEHEE December 12, 2013 Counterpunch.org It is a scary world and getting scarier every day. I live in the small town of Kennedale, Texas. Population: 7,068. We are just south of Fort Worth (whose city motto is: “Where the West Begins”), but just north of Mansfield, a fast-growing suburb. My family lives within the danger zone of two nuclear power plants, and two more whose construction have been postponed. Were Comanche Peak (1&2) to experience some kind of disaster like that in Fukushima, Japan— whose reactor was severely damaged in a 2011 earthquake— we would be up radiologically- contaminated Shit Creek without a paddle. Across the street from my home is a hydraulic fracturing well. What do these wells and nuclear power plants have in common? More than most North Texans may realize. Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” is a process where wastewater is used to fracture hard rock, like shale, in order to get to the oil and gas below by injecting it down into the ground at high pressures. A huge amount of natural gas has been discovered underneath the Barnett Shale here in the Fort Worth Basin. Over the last several years more than 50,000 of these drilling wells have sprouted up all across the state. The dangers with these wells are there are some 600 chemicals used in the waste water, some of the carcinogenic and toxic. But there is a growing body of data showing the process is linked to earthquakes (also, see here and here and here). Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, has explained it as “the air hockey table model”: “You have an air hockey table, suppose you tilt it, if there’s no air on, the puck will just sit there. Gravity wants it to move but it doesn’t because there friction [with the table surface] . . . Faults are the same.” The injection of the water allows the faults to slip more easily, producing the obvious results we have witnessed: earthquakes. In the last six years, since the fracking boom began, 60% of the earthquakes in Texas (93 of 153) have been here in North Texas. While Earthquake Track goes back only 38 years, between 7-38 years ago there were no earthquakes here. None. Nada. Zilch. Zero. In fact, from 7-38 years ago there were only 70 earthquakes in all of Texas. In a six year span there were 25% more earthquakes here in North Texas than that 28 year period for the entire state! For the state as a whole, seismic activity has increased more than 100% in six years, as compared to a 32-year period. In the aftermath of the earthquake that damaged the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, we can turn to a 2010 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study that calculated the odds of an earthquake strong enough to damage the reactor core of the two Comanche Peak plants in nearby Glen Rose, Texas. According to NBC, which covered the study, there is a “1 in 250,000 chance each year” of such a catastrophe. To get an idea of how things have worsened for us here, the old estimate, based on earthquake data as of 1989, was 1 in 833,333. The change in risk: 233%. The NRC’s data is as of 2008. Earthquakes have escalated over the last five years, especially in Cleburne, Texas, which is only twenty miles east of Comanche Peak on US-67 (in fact, there have been 16 earthquakes in Cleburne over the last five years). The probability of an earthquake producing a nuclear disaster is certainly greater. According to Luminant, the Texas- based utility company that operates Comanche Peak, “Nuclear power is a safe, dependable, clean-air energy.” Of course they make a lot of money off of the nuclear power plant. But considering the recent spate of earthquakes in Azle and Mineral Wells, I am not sure I feel as safe and comfortable as they do. Here in the Lone Star State the odds of winning the Lotto Texas are 1 in 25 million. How safe are we when we are more than 100x more likely to experience a nuclear disaster brought on by an earthquake than we are to win the lottery? By the way, this is not just limited to Texas. Our neighbors are having the same problems. In the last ten years there have been 691 earthquakes in Oklahoma, with 669 in the last six years, since they too began fracking for gas. And, to their east, and my Northeast, the same pattern holds for Arkansas: over the last decade there have been 424 earthquakes in Arkansas, with 407 occurring in the last six years. And remember, up until these wells were dug and drilling began, we in North Texas did not have earthquakes. This is the price we pay to have carbon-spewing semi- trucks—adding a climate- changing insult to the still-thawing injury we have dubbed “Icemageddon”—carrying millions of gallons of carcinogenic and toxic wastewater to tens of thousands of wells all across the state in order to fracture hard rock two miles underground so that private multi-billion dollar companies like Chesapeake Energy can make a buck or two: profits over people. Michael McGehee is an independent writer from North Texas. He can be reached at michael.mcgehee7@gmail.com |