[my campaign really is takin' off, folks-- even a labor leader four hours north told me yesterday I was gettin' lots of positive publicity in local papers up there(!)...yes-- I drove 5 hours up to Lake Placid and back!!!]
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Hi all...
As a good friend of mine who's been a noted statewide/national heathcare activist/expert/advocate here in NYS for decades just shared this with us on this-- "Unfortunately the big New York City hospitals who spent big bucks to send out this mailing are playing politics with our health care and have made it clear they care only about their own narrow special interests. Sadly, they have cozied up to a Congressman who voted to destroy Medicare and Medicaid in order to protect their little piece of the pie..."
[let me know if you're down for press conferences/rallies asap on all this in front of Gibson's Red Hook, Kinderhook, Saratoga Springs offices!...(only reason mailing went out to us all-- Gibson = vulnerable;
note-- kudos to Columbia County MoveOn Coordinator Shirley Ripullone for bein' right on top of this!]
In words of the immortal Chuck D (and Flavor Flav) re: Gibson's latest mailing-- don't believe the hype...
Here below-- seven must-read's Gibson's wealthy buddies are spending beaucoup bucks to gloss over:
[yes, folks-- Gibson voted for Ryan budget-- http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/house/1/277
http://www.dccc.org/races/district/new_yorks_20th ; also see: http://www.NCPSSM.org !]
1. Gibson Votes for ‘Cut, Cap and Balance’ [Kill]; Dems Don’t" by Jimmy Vielkind (AT-Union 7/20/11)
http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/75496/gibson-votes-for-cut-cap-and-balance-dems-dont/
2. "Gibson Votes To Kill Medicare-- Again" (6/2/11)
http://rensscopolitico.blogspot.com/2011/06/gibson-votes-to-kill-medicare-again.html
3. "NY-20: Gibson Lies About Medicare Vouchers" by Devtob (4/15/11)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/15/967406/-NY-20:-Gibson-lies-about-Medicare-vouchers
4. July 16th CBPP/Greenstein Statement re: GOP/Gibson "Cut, Cap, Kill Medicare" Legislation
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3537
5. "AARP Launches Second Ad To Fight GOP [Gibson] Medicare Plan" by Michael McAuliff (6/16/11)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/aarp-second-ad-republican-medicare_n_877944.html
6. NCPSSM: Leading Seniors' Organization Reacts to Senate Defeat Of GOP/Ryan Budget Plan (5/25/11)
http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/senate_defeat_ryan/
7. NCPSSM: "Debt "Super Committee" Not Looking So Super for America's Seniors and the Middle-Class"
http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/supercommittee_selection_release/ (8/11/11)
Also-- as Paul Krugman reminded us in his column August 24th:
"Raising the Medicare age would make America as a whole poorer...treatment of some conditions would be delayed and impose higher costs when people finally do get on Medicare), it would push people into higher-cost private coverage. Austin Frakt estimates $2 of private costs for every dollar of budget savings."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/the-strange-power-of-really-bad-ideas-medicare-edition/
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/07/paul-krugman-messing-with-medicare.html ;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/06/paul-krugman-medicare-saves-money.html ;
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/05/paul-krugman-medicare-and-mediscares.html
And-- don't forget-- it's not just the folks in Kathy Hochul's 26th c.d.-- Americans SUPPORT senior care!...
[yes, you better believe the seniors here in the 20th are just like the seniors in the 26th c.d.-- ticked off]
Fact is that poll after poll shows vast majority of us across U.S. want these three-- not Gibson's cuts(!):
1. Tax millionaires and billionaires at least a bit more to solve our federal budget problems.
[81% of Americans agree, according to a March NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this year:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7333/what_americans_want_the_peoples_budget ; http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ILikeIke .]
2. Protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, our schools, our hospitals, our nursing homes, home care, and our environment from any more budget cuts and layoffs that will only make the current recession we're in worse.
[78% of Americans agree, according to an April ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this year:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-shows-americans-oppose-entitlement-cuts-to-deal-with-debt-problem/2011/04/19/AFoiAH9D_story.html .]
3. Expand Medicare to cover all of us-- and save Americans $400 billion a year.
[59% of Americans agree, according to a 2009 CBS/New York Times poll: http://www.PNHP.org/ ;
http://www.healthcare-now.org/another-poll-shows-majority-support-for-single-payer/ ; http://www.petitiononline.com/onepayer ; http://www.SinglePayerNewYork.org (even VT went this way)]
Also-- frankly, let's note forget the dirty work Gibson and House GOP majority put on very top of their agenda-- voting Jan. 19th this year to repeal Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act...
[Even CNN reported March 4, 2009: literally 80 percent of uninsured Americans are in working families:
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-03-04/health/uninsured.epidemic.obama_1_families-usa-health-insurance-health-coverage?_s=PM:HEALTH !]
Fact: Obamacare extended health insurance coverage to tens of millions more Americans (70% of whom had been in working families but previously unable to afford it-- and now still unable to), "extended much needed relief to small businesses, improved Medicare by helping seniors and people with disabilities afford their prescription drugs, prohibited denials of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, limited out-of-pocket costs so that Americans have security and peace of mind, helped young adults by requiring insurers to allow all dependents to remain on their parents plan until age 26, provided sliding-scale subsidies to make insurance premiums affordable, held insurance companies accountable for how our health care dollars are spent, clamped down on insurance company abuses, and invested in preventive care"(!)...see:
http://www.standupforhealthcare.org/learn-more/quick-facts/12-reasons-to-support-health-care?gclid=CJqUuKrS-aoCFScRNAod5DxCPg ; http://www.FamiliesUSA.org ;
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/19/133050043/house-moves-toward-health-care-repeal-vote .
[health care for all is an issue near and dear to me personally-- my own stepfather died of a heart attack at the age of 59 as I was giving him CPR-- he had known something was dreadfully wrong with his health, but didn't have health insurance at the time, even though he had worked for IBM for 20 years; recall my http://www.PetitionOnline.com/forpiggy ; http://www.petitiononline.com/duhealth efforts]
Pass it on!...
Joel Tyner
Dutchess County Legislator (Rhinebeck/Clinton)
[running for 5th term unopposed, Dem for Congress, 20th c.d.]
845-876-2488 http://www.JoelforCongress.org
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel (join 190 on board already-- including "Gasland"'s Josh Fox!)
p.s. Time to step up-- send $$$ to Joel for Congress, 324 Browns Pond Rd., Staatsburg, NY 12580!...
p.p.s. Yes, this is all one more reason y'all have to come out to at least ONE of our Labor Day rallies:
[pls let us know asap if we can add your name to attendee/speaker list for any of these; numbers count]
-- I'll be hosting my 16th annual Dutchess County Labor Day Rally Monday Sept. 5th at 11 am in front of the Poughkeepsie Post Office-- with our next County Executive Dan French, Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation Coordinator Beth Soto, Democratic Assembly Candidate Alyssa Kogon, Co. Leg. Alison MacAvery, Co. Leg. Jim Doxsey, Co. Leg. candidates Francene Amparo and Brigid Casson, folksingers extraordinaire Pat Lamanna and Chris Ruhe, City of Poughkeepsie Common Council Candidate Ann Perry, Burr Hubbell, Edgar Gomez and Steve Meddaugh of Community Voices Heard (of Human Rights Wall of Truth too), Mae Parker-Harris, Barb Chapman, and many more.
[dozens already signed up for this; see: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=236607256377385 ]
-- I'll also be hosting a Columbia County Labor Day Rally the same day-- Monday September 5th at 2 pm in front of the Columbia County Courthouse at 401 Union Street in Hudson-- it's one of six different Labor Day rallies we'll be holding all over the 20th Congressional District that day-- speakers in Hudson will include Mike Lonigro, President of the Upper Hudson Valley Central Labor Council and Secretary Treasurer of SEIU United Local 200, Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioner Virginia Martin, Columbia County Democratic First Vice Chair Cyndy Hall, Democratic County Treasurer Candidate Peter Stoll, Hudson City Democratic Chair Victor Mendolia, Hudson City Democratic Mayoral Candidate Nick Haddad, Stuyvesant Democratic Town Supervisor Candidate Lee Jamison, Hudson City Council Candidate Larissa Thomas, Hudson Supervisor Candidate Sarah Sterling, Chatham Democratic Chair Ernie Reis, and Stockport Democratic Chair Carl Roby Roby.
-- I'll also be in Greene, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Warren counties on Sept. 5th-- along with pre-Labor Day Rallies before that in Essex and Washington counties Sept. 1st-- and in Otsego and Delaware counties Sept. 2nd ( http://www.JoelforCongress.org ; http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com ):
* Monday, Sept. 5th 9 am-- Greene County Labor Day Rally
In front of Greene County Office Building
411 Main St. in Catskill (12414)
[besides me, community activist Tom Carpenter will be speaking]
* Monday, Sept. 5th 4 pm-- Rensselaer County Labor Day Rally
In front of East Greenbush Town Hall
225 Columbia Turnpike in Rensselaer (12144)
* Monday, Sept. 5th 5:30 pm-- Saratoga County Labor Day Rally
In front of Chris Gibson's district office
513 Broadway in Saratoga Springs (12866)
[besides me, PEF's Pat Lavin and long-time labor activist Barbara Bellamy will be speaking]
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http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/75496/gibson-votes-for-cut-cap-and-balance-dems-dont/
Gibson votes for ‘cut, cap and balance’; Dems don’t
Posted on July 20, 2011 at 8:32 am by Jimmy Vielkind, Capitol bureau in Bill Owens, Chris Gibson, NY-20, NY-21, NY-23
Rep. Chris Gibson, a Kinderhook Republican, voted for a House GOP “cap, cut and balance” plan intended to signal the chamber’s focus on spending cuts. Leaders are negotiating a plan that will raise the federal debt ceiling as it reduces the project deficit — House Republicans say they want to do that with pure cuts, while Democrats are pushing for taxes and other revenue items as part of a package.
This plan would impose spending caps as a percentage of GDP and would require a balanced budget amendment. Gibson signaled this vote two weeks ago. Yhe House bill passed 234-190. It’s not expected to pass the Senate.
Two local Democrats, Reps. Paul Tonko and Bill Owens, voted against the plan. Here’s a statement from Tonko, D-Amsterdam:
“The Republican Majority in the House continues to work against the will of the American people. While my constituents ask for us to create jobs, the Republicans today voted for their ‘Cut, Cap, and End Medicare Plan” that will instead destroy 700,000 jobs, slash education, and bring an end to Medicare. Creating new jobs is the best way we can drive down the deficit. Instead of looking out for the middle class and our seniors, Republicans are telling Americans that Big Oil and millionaires and billionaires do not have to sacrifice and pay their fair share. Republicans are essentially saying they’d rather ask for sacrifices from the middle class than eliminate tax breaks for their friends with deep pockets.”
And Owens, D-Plattsburgh:
“I voted against this legislation because, not only does it include the Ryan budget proposal which would cripple Medicare and Social Security, but it caps spending at a specific percentage that does not take into account the cost of war or the management of the current economic crisis. This plan is dangerous for Fort Drum, the nation’s security, and local job creators. It is does not reflect Upstate New York values.
“Most leading economists – as well as the general public – believe Congress must craft a plan that includes spending cuts and revenue increases in the ongoing debt limit debate. For months, I have called for this type of compromise that will protect programs important to Upstate New York, and I will continue to do so until it is done.”
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From http://rensscopolitico.blogspot.com/2011/06/gibson-votes-to-kill-medicare-again.html ...
RenssCoPolitico
Your blogsource for all things political in Rensselaer County.
THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 2011
Gibson votes to kill Medicare - AGAIN
Isn't it just like a Republican to double down on failure? Faced with the loss of NY 26 and overwhelming poll numbers showing how much the American people hate the Ryan Budget and its Medicare-killing provisions, Chris Gibson cast a second vote to kill Medicare and raise health care costs for New York seniors.
But while Gibson is doubling down on the House Republican plan to end Medicare, he is still refusing to end taxpayer giveaways to Big Oil or tax breaks for millionaires. In a procedural move, Gibson voted to accept the House Republicans’ controversial budget which includes the Republican plan to end Medicare. Gibson’s plan is for millionaires to get a $100,000 tax break and seniors to get a $6,400 medical bill.
The move Gibson used to signal his unwavering support for big oil and millionaires and "let them eat cake" attitude toward the rest of us, was his support of a “deeming resolution” in H. Res. 287 which states “the provisions of House Concurrent Resolution 34 […] shall have force and effect […] in the House as though Congress has adopted such concurrent resolution”. [H. Res. 287, Vote #382, 6/1/11]
The result: millionaires get more than a $100,000 tax cut in GOP Budget, while seniors get a $6,400 medical bill. [Tax Policy Center via Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 4/20/11, 4/07/11]
Gibson voted to end Medicare by supporting the Republican budget. [H Con. Res. 34, Vote #277, 4/15/11]; opposed a measure that could have cut taxpayer subsidies to big oil when he voted to bypass consideration of the Big Oil Welfare Repeal Act of 2011 (H.R. 1689) which would repeal key taxpayer funded subsidies for oil and gas companies. As reported by The Hill newspaper, “House Democrats intend to force a vote on a measure that would eliminate a key oil industry tax break when Republicans bring a bill to expand domestic oil and-gas drilling to the floor Thursday.” [H Res 245, Vote #293, 5/05/11; The Hill, 5/04/11; CBS News, 5/04/11]
But it is not just us saying Gibson wants to kill Medicare. Read what others are saying:
• Wall Street Journal: The House Republican Budget for 2012 Would “Essentially End Medicare.” “The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills.” [Wall Street Journal, 4/4/11
• Nonpartisan Congressional Research Service: Individuals Would Not Be Able to Enroll in Current Medicare Program. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that the Republican budget ends Medicare: “Individuals who become eligible (based either on age or disability) for Medicare in 2022 and later years would not be able to enroll in the current Medicare program. Instead, they would be given the option of enrolling in a private insurance plan through a newly established Medicare exchange.” [CRS Report, 4/13/11]
• NCPSSM: GOP Budget Plan Destroys Medicare and Cuts Social Security Benefits. Max Richtman, executive vice-president of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said the Republican budget would destroy Medicare: “Over time, this will destroy the only health insurance program available to 47 million Americans.” [NCPSSM press release, 4/5/11]
Sadly, his supporters in NY 20 just don't get the implication, preferring to keep their heads buried in the sand, thinking Gibson is doing the right thing for his constituents.
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From http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3537 ...
CBPP Statement: Updated July 16, 2011
For Immediate Release
Greenstein Statement on the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” That the House Will Consider on July 19
Robert Greenstein
The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” that the House of Representatives will vote on next week stands out as one of the most ideologically extreme pieces of major budget legislation to come before Congress in years, if not decades. It would go a substantial way toward enshrining Grover Norquist’s version of America into law.
• The plan would lock in cuts over the next ten years at least as severe as those in the Ryan budget plan that the House passed in April, by writing spending caps into law at the year-by-year levels of spending (as a share of GDP) the Ryan budget contains.
• It also would hold the increase in the debt limit needed by August 2 hostage to approval by two-thirds of the House and the Senate of a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget every year while effectively barring any increases in revenues. The constitutional amendment would make all revenue-raising measures unconstitutional unless they secured a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and the Senate.
• The “Cut, Cap & Balance” measure cites three constitutional balanced-budget amendments (H.J. Res 1, S.J. Res 10, and H.J. Res 56) and states that Congress must approve one of them or a similar measure before the debt limit can be raised. All three of the cited proposals would require cuts deeper than those in the Ryan budget. All three measures would establish a constitutional requirement that total federal expenditures may not exceed 18 percent of GDP, and all three would essentially require that the budget be balanced within the coming decade.
The Ryan plan, by contrast, does not reach balance until the 2030s, and its federal spending level is just below or modestly above 20 percent of GDP for most of the next two decades, equaling 20? percent of GDP in 2030 for example, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The only budget that comes close to meeting the requirements of these constitutional amendments is the Republican Study Committee budget, which eliminates 70 percent of non-defense discretionary funding by 2021, contains deeper Medicare cuts than the Ryan budget, cuts Medicaid, food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor in half by the end of the decade, and raises the Social Security retirement age to 70.
Talking points that the legislation’s proponents circulated on July 15 seek to foster an impression that the measure would protect Social Security and Medicare. Such an impression would not be accurate. The legislation would inexorably subject Social Security and Medicare to deep reductions.
The measure does not cut Social Security or Medicare in 2012. And it does not subject them to automatic cuts if its global spending caps are missed. It is inconceivable, however, that policymakers would meet the bill’s severe annual spending caps through automatic across-the-board cuts year after year; if they did, key government functions would be crippled.
Policymakers would have little alternative but to institute deep cuts in specific programs. And as noted elsewhere in this statement, before the debt limit could be raised, Congress would have to approve a constitutional balanced budget amendment that essentially requires cuts even deeper than those in the Ryan budget. Reaching and maintaining a balanced budget in the decade ahead while barring any tax increases would necessitate deep cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. After all, by 2021, total expenditures for these three programs will be nearly 45 percent greater than expenditures for all other programs (except interest payments) combined. Big cuts in these programs would be inevitable.
Moreover, because taxes — including payroll taxes — would be virtually impossible to raise as a result of the new constitutional barrier, Social Security solvency would have to be restored entirely through benefit cuts. Balanced Social Security packages that include measures to raise Social Security’s $106,000 payroll tax cap, so that higher-income Americans do not escape the tax on much of their earnings, would effectively be ruled out.
• The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” would require cuts totaling $111 billion immediately, in the fiscal year that starts 75 days from now, despite a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. These cuts would equal 0.7 percent of the projected Gross Domestic Product in fiscal year 2012 and would thus cause the loss of roughly 700,000 jobs in the current weak economy, relative to what the number of jobs otherwise would be.
• The bill overturns a feature of various bipartisan budget laws over the past quarter century, by subjecting programs for the poorest Americans to the specter of meat-axe across-the-board cuts. It does so even as it protects tax breaks and tax subsidies for the wealthy and powerful by erecting a constitutional barrier to any measure that would raise any revenue.
The “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act” that House Republican leaders are circulating achieves these results through a multi-faceted attack on the federal government. It would require that total federal spending shrink to about 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) starting in 2015 (by writing the Ryan budget’s year-by-year expenditure levels as a share of GDP into law, as caps to be enforced through automatic across-the-board budget cuts if the caps otherwise wouldn’t be met). The Ryan budget would slash non-security discretionary programs by 33 percent by 2021 (relative to CBO’s January baseline), cut Medicaid by $1.4 trillion over the decade, and cut an array of other programs from Medicare to Pell Grants, while shielding the defense budget and further cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
In addition, as noted, the measure seeks to render it virtually impossible to raise new revenue by barring the necessary increase in the debt limit until both houses of Congress have approved a constitutional amendment which requires that the budget be balanced every year, that no measure raising any taxes may pass Congress unless two-thirds of the House and Senate approve it, and that budget cuts deeper than Ryan’s be instituted.
Adding to the extreme nature of the measure, the legislation also reverses a feature of every law of the past quarter-century that has contained a fiscal target or standard enforced by across-the-board cuts. Since the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law of 1985, all such laws have exempted the core basic assistance programs for the poorest Americans from such across-the-board cuts. “Cut, Cap, and Balance,” by contrast, specifically subjects all such programs to across-the-board cuts if its spending caps would be exceeded.
It does so even as it seeks to erect a constitutional firewall to safeguard tax cuts and tax breaks for the most well-off Americans. Thus, an impoverished elderly widow living on Supplemental Security Income — which provides benefits that lift people to just 75 percent of the poverty line — could have her assistance cut back under the measure’s across-the-board budget cuts even as millionaire hedge-fund managers retained their lucrative carried-interest tax breaks.
# # # #
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization and policy institute that conducts research and analysis on a range of government policies and programs. It is supported primarily by foundation grants.
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From http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/15/967406/-NY-20:-Gibson-lies-about-Medicare-vouchers
devtob
A Daily Kos Community Site
FRI APR 15, 2011 AT 06:00 PM PDT
NY-20: Gibson lies about Medicare vouchers
by
devtob
Tea Party Rep. Chris Gibson voted for the Ryan budget today, like almost every other Republican Member of Congress.
So he voted to end Medicare as we know it, and turn it into a voucher program that will impoverish senior citizens of modest means.
Like most Republican candidates last fall, Gibson ran ads decrying the fictional $500 billion cuts to Medicare in the health care reform law.
Gibson lied in scaring seniors during the campaign, and he also lied in telling them that he opposed Medicare vouchers.
For an allegedly squeaky-clean veteran, Gibson is quite the accomplished liar.
Details of his serial lies, on just this one issue, below.
During the campaign, Gibson benefitted from some six-figures worth of Medicare scare ads paid for by the 60 Plus Association, a Republican astroturf outfit that supports privatizing Social Security and Medicare.
Back in September, Maury Thompson of the Glens Falls Post-Star asked Gibson a question about 60 Plus that resonates today:
Thompson: What about Medicare vouchers?
Gibson: No — not at all. I don’t support that.
Pants on fire.
Gibson strongly supported the Ryan budget, with its Medicare voucher plan, as soon as it was announced, appearing several times on local conservative talk radio to sing Ryan's praises.
And, when called out on that, Gibson lied about it some more on his Facebook page last week:
The plan proposed by House Republicans is based on a proposal developed by the Obama Deficit Commission. It is NOT a voucher program.
Two lies in two sentences, par for the course with Gibson -- of course, it is a voucher program, and it's based on a proposal developed NOT by the Obama Deficit Commission, but by one of its wingnut members, Paul Ryan.
Later in that comment thread, Gibson says that the Ryan Medicare proposal is "premium support," not vouchers.
Yet another lie, according to Henry Aaron, a think tanker who developed a premium support model for Medicare.
Ezra Klein got Aaron on the record, under the headline "Creator of premium support says Ryan has ‘vouchers, not premium support’".
Aaron's take on the Ryan plan that Gibson mendaciously supports and voted for:
Ryan is associated with at least three different plans. There was Rivlin-Ryan, plain old Ryan, and now there’s the Path to Prosperity. They’re all different. In some ways, the Path to Prosperity plan improves on previous version, because the role of exchanges and risk adjustment is nearer to what we had in mind. But it is hands down the worst because it links premiums to consumer prices, which is the slowest growing index.
snip
We’re looking at linking to an index that grows less rapidly than health-care costs by three to four percentage points a year. Piled up over 10 years, and that’s a huge erosion of coverage. It’s vouchers, not premium support.
snip
There’s one provision of the Ryan bill that stands out as being hands-down the worst, and that is giving the seniors who are poor enough to also be on Medicaid a medical savings account. Does he know who these people are? They’re very sick, they’re very poor and many of them have cognitive as well as physical problems. They would be asked to cope with the inevitable headaches of dealing with private insurance and managing a personal checking account to pay periodic bills. This is not a sensible proposal.
The other five NY Republican freshmen -- Michael Grimm, NY-13; Nan Hayworth, NY-19; Richard Hanna, NY-24; Ann Marie Buerkle, NY-25; and Tom Reed, NY-29 -- also voted to end Medicare as we know it and substitute an impoverishing voucher program.
They presumably have lied about it too, but it would be hard for any of them to match Gibson's record of mendacity on this issue.
AFAIK, Gibson is in a class of his own, at least among that motley crew, as a shameless serial liar about Medicare.
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From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/aarp-second-ad-republican-medicare_n_877944.html :
Michael McAuliff
mike.mcauliff@huffingtonpost.com
AARP Launches Second Ad To Fight GOP Medicare Plan
First Posted: 06/16/11 08:06 AM ET Updated: 06/16/11 08:19 AM ET
WASHINGTON -- Maybe the government should cut funding for treadmills for shrimp and poetry in zoos before hacking away at Medicare or Social Security, the influential lobby for older Americans, AARP, is arguing in a new national TV ad released Thursday.
With Congress and the White House locked in intense negotiations over spending cuts and the nation's looming debt limit, the multimillion-dollar ad buy marks AARP's second major campaign aimed at derailing proposals to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.
AARP had been relatively quiet when House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) first released his proposal in the spring that included a spending plan that replaces Medicare with a private system the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found would nearly double costs for seniors over 10 years.
Democrats had worried that AARP was standing on the sidelines, but sources familiar with the influential lobby say it didn't think the Ryan plan could pass.
The fact that it has made its second expensive ad buy suggests it is much more worried now that some of the Ryan ideas could be adopted in the high-pressure budget negotiations being conducted on Capitol Hill. That pressure will only rise as negotiations near Aug. 2, the date by which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has warned the country must hike its $14.3 trillion borrowing cap or face default.
"While some members of Congress are considering making changes to Medicare’s structure, what few people realize is that some proposals being discussed behind closed doors include harmful cuts to the critical Medicare and Social Security benefits that are lifelines for millions of today’s seniors," said AARP's Nancy LeaMond.
The new ad takes a more mocking tone thanAARP's first spot, pointing to several questionable programs funded by Congress over the last few years, including a cotton institute in Brazil, treadmills for shrimp and poetry in zoos.
Those efforts likely don't amount to much in the greater federal budget, but the point is clear.
"Instead of cutting waste, or closing tax loopholes, next month Congress could make a deal that cuts Medicare, even Social Security," says the ad script. "I guess it’s easier to cut the benefits we earned -- than to cut pickle technology."
AARP has also mounted a broader lobbying effort that includes a petition that it says has been signed by nearly 1.5 million people, and a campaign that has generated almost 260,000 phones calls and emails to members of Congress.
LeaMond says the new ad "will put Congress on notice that AARP will fight with the strength of our millions of members to prevent harmful cuts to Medicare and Social Security from being included in any deal to pay the nation’s bills."
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From http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/supercommittee_selection_release/ ...
THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE
~ Trusted ~ Independent ~ Effective ~
August 11, 2011
NEWS RELEASE
Debt "Super Committee" Not Looking So Super for America's Seniors and the Middle-Class
"You don't have to be a Washington insider to see that, with the selection of appointees to Congress' new 'Super Committee', our nation's vital safety net programs still remain the primary targets in this debt debate. Half of these Committee members have pledged to keep revenues out of the solution, and even more than half are on the record with statements about the need to consider cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We can only hope the political deck is not stacked in this process in which decisions impacting virtually every American family will be debated by just 12 people, could be passed by just 7 and then fast-tracked through Congress without amendment.
Even though Social Security has not contributed to our current deficit crisis, too many on this 'Super Committee' are willing to trade away its benefits while vigorously protecting the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate loopholes which contribute so much to our deficit. Let's be very clear - the American people want fiscal sanity returned to Washington . But they also know cutting more than $1 trillion from programs serving millions of average Americans while protecting Bush era tax cuts that added $1.7 trillion in added deficits is not fiscal responsibility. Even though the majority of Americans understands this - I'm not convinced a majority of this committee does." Max Richtman, NCPSSM President/CEO
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The National Committee, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization acts in the interests of its membership through advocacy, education, services, grassroots efforts and the leadership of the Board of Directors and professional staff. The work of the National Committee is directed toward developing better-informed citizens and voters.
Media Inquiries to:
Pamela Causey 202-216-8378/202-236-2123
Kim Wright 202-216-8414
www.ncpssm.org
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From http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/senate_defeat_ryan/ ...
THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE
~ Trusted ~ Independent ~ Effective ~
May 25, 2011
NEWS RELEASE
Leading Seniors' Organization Reacts to Senate Defeat Of GOP/Ryan Budget Plan
"We applaud the Senate for turning back efforts to pass a budget which is more about ideological politics than sound fiscal policy. Americans of all ages understand we don't have to destroy vital programs like Medicare and Social Security to be fiscally responsible. That message has been delivered loud and clear in town halls nationwide, in poll after poll, and again last night in New York's Congressional race, where Medicare played a key role in that outcome.
The GOP/Ryan budget would turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system meaning future beneficiaries would lose Medicare's guaranteed benefit. This budget would have also shifted the rising costs of healthcare directly to seniors, doubling their healthcare costs without adequately addressing ways to contain those costs. The trigger mechanism included in this GOP budget would force the creation of legislated benefit cuts in Social Security, while also fast-tracking those provisions through Congress.
The GOP/Ryan budget would have had devastating effects on millions of Americans still struggling in our weakened economy. Thankfully, the Senate understands this and has rejected this fiscal approach."...Max Richtman, Executive Vice President/ Acting CEO, National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.
###
The National Committee, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization acts in the interests of its membership through advocacy, education, services, grassroots efforts and the leadership of the Board of Directors and professional staff. The work of the National Committee is directed toward developing better-informed citizens and voters.
Media Inquiries to:
Pamela Causey 202-216-8378/202-236-2123
Kim Wright 202-216-8414
www.ncpssm.org
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
16th annual Dutchess County Labor Day Rally Sept. 5th-- all over 20th c.d. too!...
Hi all...
Wake the pets, phone the neighbors-- let us know if you can come out to our 16th annual Dutchess County Labor Day rally-- Monday Sept. 5th at 11 am in front of the Poughkeepsie Post Office at Mansion/Market Streets]!...(or any of the others we're holding below)...
So far confirmed to attend-- Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation Coordinator Beth Soto, our next County Executive Dan French, Dem Assembly Candidate Alyssa Kogon, Co.Leg. Alison MacAvery, Co. Leg. Jim Doxsey, folksingers extraordinaire Pat Lamanna and Chris Ruhe, City of Poughkeepsie Common Council Candidate Ann Perry, Burr Hubbell, Steve Meddaugh (of Human Rights Wall of Truth fame), Mae Parker-Harris, Barb Chapman, Diana Devlin, Cathy Deppe, Michelle Richardson, Jessica Stapf, Elaine Fernandez, Phyllis Newham, Tom Carpenter, Alex Bennett, many more fanned out across 20th c.d.-- in all ten counties!...
Protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: Tax Millionaires Fairly!
Solidarity with CWA/IBEW vs. Verizon, Green Jobs, Living Wage Now!
End Corporate Welfare, Employee Free Choice Act, Fair Trade Now!
Jan Schakowsky's Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act!
FDR Didn't Get Us Out of the Depression with Budget Cuts and Layoffs!
Ten-County Labor Day Rallying All Over 20th Congressional District
[we'll be in Greene, Dutchess, Columbia, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Warren counties on Sept. 5th-- along with pre-Labor Day Rallies before that in Essex and Washington counties Sept. 1st-- and in Otsego and Delaware counties Sept. 2-- scroll down just a bit for details]
* Monday, Sept. 5th 9 am-- Greene County Labor Day Rally
In front of Greene County Office Building
411 Main St. in Catskill (12414)
[besides me, community activist Tom Carpenter will be speaking]
* Monday, Sept. 5th 11 am-- 16th Annual Dutchess County Labor Day Rally
In front of Poughkeepsie Post Office
Mansion/Market Streets in Poughkeepsie (12601)
* Monday, Sept. 5th 2 pm-- Columbia County Labor Day Rally
In front of Columbia County Courthouse
401 Union Street in Hudson (12534)
[besides yours truly, speakers will include Mike Lonigro, President of the Upper Hudson Valley Central Labor Council, Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioner Virginia Martin, Columbia County Dem First Vice Chair Cyndy Hall, Democratic County Treasurer Candidate Peter Stoll, Hudson City Dem Chair Victor Mendolia, Hudson City Dem Mayoral Candidate Nick Haddad, Stuyvesant Dem Chair and Town Supervisor Candidate Lee Jamison, Hudson City Council Candidate Larissa Thomas, Hudson Supervisor Candidate Sarah Sterling, Chatham Dem Chair Ernie Reis, former Kinderhook Town Supervisor Doug McGivney, more!]
* Monday, Sept. 5th 4 pm-- Rensselaer County Labor Day Rally
In front of East Greenbush Town Hall
225 Columbia Turnpike in Rensselaer (12144)
* Monday, Sept. 5th 5:30 pm-- Saratoga County Labor Day Rally
In front of Chris Gibson's district office
513 Broadway in Saratoga Springs (12866)
[besides me, PEF's Pat Lavin and long-time labor activist Barbara Bellamy will be speaking]
* Monday, Sept. 5th 7:30 pm-- Warren County Labor Day Rally
In front of Glens Falls City Hall
42 Ridge Street in Glens Falls (12801)
[besides me, community activist Alex Bennett of Glens Falls Democracy for America will be speaking]
And again-- don't forget these four pre-Labor Day rallies too:
* Thursday Sept. 1st at 11 am in front of Lake Placid Village Hall at 2693 Main Street (12946) in Essex County-- and then at 2 pm in front of the Washington County Municipal Center (Building B) at 383 Broadway in Fort Edward (12828)
* Friday Sept. 2nd at 11 am in front of Cooperstown Village Hall at 22 Main Street (13326) in Otsego County-- and then at 2 pm in front of Delhi Town Hall at 5 Elm St. (13753) in Delaware County
[pass it on!]
Joel Tyner
Four-term Dutchess County Legislator
[now running for 5th term unoppposed this fall]
Democratic Candidate for Congress, 20th C.D.
http://www.JoelforCongress.org
[endorsed by Josh Fox ("Gasland" Director), Dutchess and Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioners Fran Knapp and Virginia Martin, Columbia County Democratic Chair Chris Nolan, and 180+ more; see/sign http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel !]
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First, and most importantly, at all six of our Labor Day rallies Sept. 5th, we'll
be standing in solidarity with tens of thousands of our CWA/IBEW brothers and sisters who recently went out on strike to stop Verizon's disgusting attack on them and the middle class (I've already joined CWA rallies in Pleasant Valley, Poughkeepsie, Wappinger, Albany, and Hudson).
Note-- update here on this-- "Unions End the Biggest Strike in Years—but the Battle for Verizon Workers Continues" by Brian Tierney August 21st:
http://www.thenation.com/article/162886/verizon-workers-and-unions-end-strike .
[recall CWA/IBEW solidarity letter I got five of my colleagues to sign on to at the Aug. 8th Dutchess County Legislature full board mtg.-- Kuffner, Doxsey, MacAvery, Jeter-Jackson, and White--
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/08/cwa-solidarity-macavery-doxsey-kuffner.html ]
But at our ten Labor Day rallies all over the 20th c.d. this year we'll also be standing up and speaking out for these eight issues below crucial to working families here in Dutchess and across NYS as well:
[see http://www.RebuildtheDream.com/ -- ten-point Contract for the American Dream embraced last month by over 130,000 Americans at over 1600 house parties-- members of the national RebuildtheDream.com coalition include MoveOn, AFL-CIO, SEIU, Working Families Party, Campaign for America's Future, and dozens of other prominent progressive organizations]
[recall-- even Aug. 15th NYTimes editorial ("A Jobs Agenda, Anyone?") mentioned Jan Schakowsky's push (I strongly endorse) for FDR-style public works program-- "Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act"-- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/a-jobs-agenda-anyone.html -- to create at least two million jobs through new School Improvement Corps, Park Improvement Corps, Student Jobs Corps, Neighborhood Heroes Corps, Health Corps, Child Care Corps, Community Corps:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/11-10 ]
1. Tax millionaires and billionaires at least a bit more to solve our federal budget problems.
[81% of Americans agree, according to a March NBC/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this year:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/7333/what_americans_want_the_peoples_budget ; http://www.PetitionOnline.com/ILikeIke .]
Note-- we'll also be standing at these Labor Day rallies in solidarity with our CSEA, PEF, and NYSUT brothers and sisters unfairly under attack-- because too many GOP (and Dems) in our state's power structure refuse to stand up for extending/expanding NY's current millionaire's tax-- even though recent Marist, Siena, Quinnipiac, Hart polls all show 70% of state residents strongly support a millionaires tax (a Quinnipiac poll last summer found even most rank-and-file GOP voters for this)-- and let's not forget the massive statewide Growing Together Better Choice Budget Coalition-- NYS Library Association, NYS Coalition Against Domestic Violence, NYS AFL-CIO, NYSUT, CSEA, PEF, AFSCME, NY Jobs with Justice, Dutchess Outreach, NY Statewide Senior Action Council, NYS Alliance for Retired Americans, Interfaith Alliance of NYS, Interfaith Impact of NYS, Environmental Advocates, Citizen Action, NYS Community Action Association, Hunger Action Network of NYS, New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness, Fiscal Policy Institute, et. al.
[see http://www.ABetterChoiceforNY.org/ ;
http://www.hungeractionnys.org/Poeple%20SOS%20release%202011.pdf ;
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=940073&category=state ;
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/08/16/100816ta_talk_surowiecki ; recall-- I got 200 CSEA/PEF folks to come out June 9th (including Danny Donahue and PEF leadership) to June 9th rally I organized to save quality services and staff at the Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie-- made front page of Poughkeepsie Journal):
http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/06/rally-to-save-hudson-river-psychiatric.html .
2. Protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, our schools, our hospitals, our nursing homes, home care, and our environment from any more budget cuts and layoffs that will only make the current recession we're in worse.
[78% of Americans agree, according to an April ABC News/Washington Post poll earlier this year:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-shows-americans-oppose-entitlement-cuts-to-deal-with-debt-problem/2011/04/19/AFoiAH9D_story.html .]
3. Expand Medicare to cover all of us-- and save Americans $400 billion a year.
[59% of Americans agree, according to a 2009 CBS/New York Times poll: http://www.PNHP.org/ ;
http://www.healthcare-now.org/another-poll-shows-majority-support-for-single-payer/ ; http://www.petitiononline.com/onepayer ]
4. Revitalize our economy by raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour to put more money into the pockets of working class New Yorkers-- even the Wall Street Journal has stated that 70% of our economy is driven by consumer demand.
[67% of Americans agree, according to an October 2010 ABC/Washington Post poll:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/06/americans-minimum-wage-poll_n_752921.html .]
5. Enact the Employee Free Choice Act-- to make it easier for workers to unionize on the job if they so choose-- without being harassed, intimidated, or fired. "America's workers want to form unions. Research shows nearly 60 million would form a union tomorrow if given the chance. Union members are 52 percent more likely to have job-provided health care, nearly three times more likely to have guaranteed pensions and earn 28 percent more than nonunion workers. Nearly three-quarters of the public-73 percent-support the Employee Free Choice Act. Hundreds of respected religious, academic and business people and organizations have signed on in support":
http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/10keyfacts.cfm ; see my http://www.petitiononline.com/yourback ; http://www.AllianceIBM.org (solidarity with our IBM workers!).
6. Make sure that our trade policy is reformed to truly protect American workers-- and not facilitating American corporations offshoring jobs-- end NAFTA, GATT, and WTO.
[69% of Americans think free trade has cost U.S. jobs and hurt us (2010 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll):
http://www.americablog.com/2010/09/majority-of-americans-believe-free.html . As Thom Hartmann notes, "when Ronald Reagan came into office, the U.S. was the world's largest importer of raw materials, the world's largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods, and the world's largest creditor. After thirty years of Reaganomics, we've completely flipped this upside down; we've become the world's largest exporter of raw materials, the world's largest importer of finished goods, and the world's largest debtor." (from Hartmann's "Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country" http://www.thomhartmann.com/ ).
7. Create green jobs with energy efficiency, solar, moving towards zero waste, not burning/landfilling.
Dutchess County alone could create thousands of green jobs and save $1 billion on energy costs over next decade for homeowners and business owners with energy-efficiency/renewables loan fund similar to what GOP-led Town of Bedford in Westchester and what the Town of Babylon have put in place, according to Sustainable Hudson Valley Chair David Dell of Poughkeepsie. Note-- if this initiative were truly embraced across the 20th c.d., it could save literally two billion dollars on energy and electric bills for homeowners and businesses over the next ten years-- why?...because-- there are roughly 650,000 folks in the 20th c.d.-- a bit over twice the population here in Dutchess County Germany has less sunlight than NY-- yet more solar than New York-- it's time for green jobs and Solar Jobs Act of 2011!
[time also to clean up our county's air (ranked "F" for third year in a row by American Lung Assoc. of NY]
Ten times as many jobs could be created through recycling and composting compared to incineration and landfilling according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Dutchess County alone now incinerates/landfills $15 million worth of materials and resources that could be recycled, including plant debris, food waste, paper, wood, ceramics, soils, metals, glass, polymers, textiles, chemicals, and various items for reuse at an eco-industrial park here-- this could and should be done all over the 20th.
[ http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/03/our-bright-idea-growin-brighter-and.html ;
http://www.NYSEIA.org ; http://www.citizenscampaign.org/campaigns/solar-jobs-new-york.asp ;
http://www.nyserda.org/GreenNY/ ; http://www.energyfinancesolutions.com/main/homeownersnyfour ;
http://www.petitiononline.com/pacehere ; http://www.LIGreenHomes.com ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York's_20th_congressional_district ; http://www.EnergizeBedford.org ;
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html ; http://www.petitiononline.com/zeroyes ;
http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/pubworks/sw-future/docs/resource-assessment.pdf ;
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090510/NEWS01/905100344/Dutchess-County-Resource-Recovery-Agency-Inefficient-expensive-in-debt ]
8. Last but not least-- and perhaps most importantly-- as your representative for the 20th Congressional District, I would stand up and fight for legislation like Rep. Jan Schakowsky's "Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act" (see below).
From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/11-10 ...
Published on Thursday, August 11, 2011 by Huffington Post
"Jan Schakowsky Announces New Budget Plan With Focus On Jobs"
by Jordan Howard
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, announced on Wednesday that she will introduce a progressive-minded budget outline aimed at putting more than two million people to work.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, announced on Wednesday that she will introduce a progressive-minded budget outline aimed at putting more than two million people to work.
Titled the "Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act," the plan would cost $227 billion and would be implemented over two years. It would be financed by separate legislation introduced by Schakowsky called the "Fairness in Taxation Act," which would raise taxes for Americans who earn more than $1 million and $1 billion. It would also eliminate subsidies for big oil companies while closing loopholes for corporations that send American jobs overseas.
The congresswoman said that her plan would create 2.2 million jobs and decrease the unemployment rate by 1.3 percent.
"If we want to create jobs, then create jobs," Schakowsky said in a press release. "I'm not talking about "incentivizing" companies in the hopes they'll hire someone, or cutting taxes for the so-called job creators who have done nothing of the sort. My plan creates actual new jobs."
Schakowsky's proposal reads more like a progressive wishlist than legislation likely to be signed into law. But it does provide a template of sorts to help Democrats frame their budget argument as lawmakers enter the high-stakes super committee negotiations.
Under her plan, the following policies would be implemented:
* The School Improvement Corps would create 400,000 construction and 250,000 maintenance jobs by funding positions created by public school districts to do needed school rehabilitation improvements.
* The Park Improvement Corps would create 100,000 jobs for youth between the ages of 16 and 25 through new funding to the Department of the Interior and the USDA Forest Service's Public Lands Corps Act. Young people would work on conservation projects on public lands including the restoration and rehabilitation of natural, cultural, and historic resources.
* The Student Jobs Corps would create 250,000 more part-time work study jobs for eligible college students through new funding for the Federal Work Study Program.
* The Neighborhood Heroes Corps would hire 300,000 new teachers, 40,000 new police officers and 12,000 new firefighters.
* The Health Corps would hire at least 40,000 health care providers, including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and health care workers to expand access in underserved rural and urban areas.
* The Child Care Corps would create 100,000 jobs in early childhood care and education through additional funding for Early Head Start.
*The Community Corps would hire 750,000 individuals to do needed work in communities, including housing rehab, weatherization, recycling, and rural conservation.
In addition, the bill would give priority to the longterm unemployed -- the so-called "99ers" who have exhausted both their state and federal unemployment benefits. Federally extended unemployment benefits are set to expire this year, even though nearly 14 million Americans remain out of work and it takes the average worker nine months to find a new job.
"The worst deficit this country faces isn't the budget deficit," Schakowsky said. "It's the jobs deficit. We need to get our people and our economy moving again."
Friday, August 26, 2011
re: Hurricane Irene, Bill McKibben, 350.org, TarSandsAction.org!...
[note-- email 25 of us in the Dutchess County Legislature on this at countylegislators@co.dutchess.ny.us-- no reason we can't get involved!]
[...and if you haven't yet-- sign on to http://www.tarsandsaction.org/obama-petition/ -- pass it along, fwd]
[update: Josh Fox has endorsed my campaign!...see http://www.JoelforCongress.org -- and if you agree, join more and more across 20th c.d. signed on to endorse-- see http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel (you better bet that if I was your congressman in the 20th I'd be standing up loudly to fight this publicly]
[note-- it's not just 350.org and Bill McKibben fighting good fight against tar sands mining, folks-- also on board in opposition-- Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, League of Conservation Voters; see: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/24-10 !]
[...finally-- what's the number to reach the White House public comment line?....(202) 456-1111: use it...]
[note-- chilling update here below-- "State Department's Environmental Analysis Gives Pipeline an Initial Green Light" by Lee-Anne Goodman-- published today by Canadian Press-- http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-10 ]
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"Global Warming's Heavy Cost"
by Bill McKibben [of http://www.350.org -- who referenced events exactly like this recently at Cary Inst.!]
Aug 25, 2011 9:29 PM EDT
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/25/hurricane-irene-can-be-tied-to-global-warming-says-bill-mckibben.html
[Hurricane Irene's dangerous power can be traced to global warming says Bill McKibben-and Obama and the House GOP majority are at fault for their failed leadership on the environment.]
Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
As she roars up the Eastern Seaboard, everyone is doing what they should-boarding windows, preparing rescue plans, stocking up on batteries. But a lot of people are also wondering: what's a "tropical" storm doing heading for the snow belt?
Category 3 Storms have rarely hit Long Island since the 1800s; one was the great unnamed storm of 1938, which sent 15-foot storm waters surging through what are now multimillion-dollar seaside homes. Normally, says Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, it's "difficult for a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane crossing north of North Carolina to maintain that intensity, because wind shear rapidly increases and ocean temperatures plunge below the 26°C (79°F) level that can support a hurricane." The high-altitude wind shear may help knock the storm down a little this year, but the ocean temperatures won't. They're bizarrely high-only last year did we ever record hotter water.
"Sea surface temperatures 1° to 3°F warmer than average extend along the East Coast from North Carolina to New York. Waters of at least 26°C extend all the way to southern New Jersey, which will make it easier for Irene to maintain its strength much farther to the north than a hurricane usually can," says Masters. "These warm ocean temperatures will also make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical, since much more water vapor can evaporate into the air from record-warm ocean surfaces. The latest precipitation forecast from NOAA's Hydrological prediction center shows that Irene could dump over eight inches of rain over coastal New England."
Remember-this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in U.S. history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas. Just about the only trauma we haven't had are hurricanes plowing into the U.S., but that's just luck-last year was a big storm year, but they all veered out to sea.
This year we're already on letter I-which in a normal year we don't get to until well into October. Every kind of natural system is amped up, holding more power-about ? of a watt extra energy per square meter of the Earth's surface, thanks to the carbon we've poured into the atmosphere. This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.
But you'd never guess that anything was amiss if you asked the Obama administration. In one of those ironies of timing, Friday saw the release of the environmental impact statement (EIS) for the most contested energy project in many years, the so-called Keystone Pipeline that would connect the tar sands of northern Alberta with the Gulf of Mexico. Those tar sands are the second-biggest pool of carbon on the continent; if we tap into them in a big way, says the federal government's premier climate scientist James Hansen, it's "essentially game over for the climate."
But the EIS-full of detailed discussion of exactly how many times it's acceptable for the new pipeline to spill its freight of acidic bitumen from Alberta, or how much natural gas it will take to heat the oil out of the ground-does not even mention the climate change that would result from helping ramp up the exploitation of this Saudi-scale ocean of carbon. The Obama administration mostly stopped talking about climate change years ago; when the president talks about the environment, which is rarely, he'll discuss green jobs, or a clean energy future. But if he signs the certificate allowing the pipeline to be built, he'll make it clear he's not serious even about that. One more huge oil field is one more way to prevent making transformative change for another generation, and it means hundreds of thousands of windmills and solar panels will go unbuilt.
Warm ocean temperatures will make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical.
That's why more than 300 of us have been arrested outside the White House in the last week, the largest civil disobedience demonstration in a generation for the environmental movement. They're trying to get the president to see the danger of climate change. Irene will be a distraction in the short run from our efforts, but in the long run it underlines what the fight is all about. If the president goes for business as usual, we're going to get planet weird.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Bill McKibben is the author of Eaarth and more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global-warming awareness campaign that is planning a Global Work Party on climate change for 10-10-10.
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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/24-10 ...
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by Huffington Post
Keystone XL Pipeline Obama's 'Biggest Climate Test,' Green Groups Say
by Lucia Graves
WASHINGTON - In a boost for grassroots efforts pressuring the Obama administration to block approval of TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline, the heads of major environmental organizations released a letter on Wednesday calling on Barack Obama to deny presidential approval to the pipeline, which would stretch from tar sands in Alberta to oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
In their letter to Obama, the groups described the pipeline as "perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election," and warned that a failure to deny the permit could come back to haunt him in 2012.
"If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election," wrote the groups.
Signatories included leaders from Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Rainforest Action Network, among others.
"There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the protesters being arrested daily outside the White House," wrote the groups in their letter.
As of Wednesday afternoon, 275 people had been arrested in connection with the protests. Organizers say more than 2,000 volunteers have signed up to participate in the sit-ins, which are slated to run through Sep. 3.
"For those of us out there protesting, the best thing about this ringing statement is that the administration won't be able to play one group off against another by making small concessions here and there," author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, who is helping to organize the protests for tarsandsaction.org, wrote in a statement accompanying the press release. "They've all shown that there is one way to demonstrate to the environmental base that the rhetoric of Obama's 2008 campaign is still meaningful -- and that's to veto this pipeline. Since he can do it without even consulting Congress, this is one case where we'll be able to see exactly how willing he is to match the rhetoric of his 2008 campaign."
Read the full letter below:
Dear President Obama:
Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil disobedience; some do. Regardless, speaking as individuals, we want to let you know that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone Pipeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House. This is a terrible project -- many of the country's leading climate scientists have explained why in their letter last month to you. It risks many of our national treasures to leaks and spills. And it reduces incentives to make the transition to job-creating clean fuels.
You have a clear shot to deny the permit, without any interference from Congress. It's perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election. If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election. We expect nothing less.
Sincerely,
Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund
Michael Brune, Sierra Club
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council
Phil Radford, Greenpeace
Larry Schweiger, National Wildlife Federation
Erich Pica, Friends of the Earth
Rebecca Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network
May Boeve, 350.org
Gene Karpinski, League of Conservation Voters
© 2011 Huffington Post
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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/24-3 ...
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by TruthDig.com
D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake
by Amy Goodman
The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they'll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
A "keystone" in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line-as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing-these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.
Bill McKibben was among those already arrested. He is an environmentalist and author who founded the group 350.org, named after the estimated safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 350 ppm (parts per million-the planet is currently at 390 ppm). In a call to action to join the protest, McKibben, along with others including journalist Naomi Klein, actor Danny Glover and NASA scientist James Hansen, wrote the Keystone pipeline is "a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet."
The movement to oppose Keystone XL ranges from activists and scientists to indigenous peoples of the threatened Canadian plains and boreal forests, where the tar sands are located, to rural farmers and ranchers in the ecologically fragile Sand Hills region of Nebraska, to students and physicians.
Asked why the White House protests are taking place while President Obama is away on a family vacation on Martha's Vineyard, McKibben replied: "We'll be here when he gets back too. We're staying for two weeks, every day. This is the first real civil disobedience of this scale in the environmental movement in ages."
Just miles to the east of Martha's Vineyard, and almost exactly 170 years earlier, on Nantucket, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, abolitionist, journalist and publisher, gave one of his first major addresses before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass is famous for stating one of grass-roots organizing's central truths: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Demanding change is one thing, while getting change in Washington, D.C., is another, especially with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives' hostility to any climate-change legislation. That is why the protests against Keystone XL are happening in front of the White House. Obama has the power to stop the pipeline. The Canadian corporation behind the project, TransCanada, has applied for a permit from the U.S. State Department to build the pipeline. If the State Department denies the permit, Keystone XL would be dead. The enormous environmental devastation caused by extracting petroleum from the tar sands might still move forward, but without easy access to the refineries and the U.S. market, it would certainly be slowed.
TransCanada executives are confident that the U.S. will grant the permit by the end of the year. Republican politicians and the petroleum industry tout the creation of well-paying construction jobs that would come from the project, and even enjoy some union support.
In response, two major unions, the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union, representing more than 300,000 workers, called on the State Department to deny the permit. In a joint press release, they said: "We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil. Š Many jobs could also be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid, maintaining and expanding public transportation-jobs that can help us reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency."
Two Canadian women, indigenous actress Tantoo Cardinal, who starred in "Dances With Wolves," and Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in "Superman," were arrested with about 50 others just before the earthquake hit Tuesday. Bill McKibben summed up: "It takes more than earthquakes and hurricanes to worry us-we'll be out here through Sept. 3. Our hope is to send a Richter 8 tremor through the political system on the day Barack Obama says no to Big Oil and reminds us all why we were so happy when he got elected. The tar sands pipeline is his test."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-10 ...
Published on Friday, August 26, 2011 by Canadian Press
State Department's Environmental Analysis Gives Pipeline an Initial Green Light
by Lee-Anne Goodman
WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department says TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline poses no major risks to the environment and will not spur further oilsands production in Alberta, moving the controversial project one step further to a final decision by the Obama administration.
The State Dept. report was not a surprise to the American environmental movement, for whom opposition to the pipeline has become a passionate rallying cry in the aftermath of failed climate change legislation last year.
The Obama administration now has 90 days to determine whether the controversial project is in the national interest of the United States. In that determination, Jones said, State Department officials will consider the environmental assessment as well as the economic impact of the pipeline and "foreign policy concerns."
The outcome wasn't a surprise to the American environmental movement, for whom opposition to the pipeline has become a passionate rallying cry in the aftermath of failed climate change legislation last year.
Leading environmentalists say the State Department has refused to fully assess the risks.
The Natural Resources Defense Council accused the State Department of failing to study pipeline safety measures or examine alternate routes that would avoid the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska, a crucial source of water in the state.
The NRDC's Susan Casey-Lefkowitz expressed dismay at the State Department's assessment in a statement.
"It is utterly beyond me how the administration can claim the pipeline will have 'no significant impacts' if they haven’t bothered to do in-depth studies around the issues of contention," she said.
"The public has made their concerns clear and the administration seems to have ignored them. If permitted, the proposed Keystone XL tarsands pipeline will be a dirty legacy that will haunt President Obama and Secretary Clinton for years to come."
Jim Lyon, senior vice-president of the National Wildlife Federation, said the analysis was "strike 3 for the State Department" after two "failed rounds" of environmental review and warned of legal woes ahead.
"The document still fails to address the key concerns for landowners and wildlife," he said. "It is almost certain to be scrutinized in other venues, including a probable legal challenge. This only escalates the controversy in a process that is far from over."
The State Department analysis comes as anti-pipeline activists continue a two-week civil disobedience campaign outside the White House.
More than 300 people, including Canadian actress Margot Kidder, have been arrested as they try to convince U.S. President Barack Obama to block the pipeline. As many as 54 more were arrested on Friday.
Environmental activists say Keystone XL is a disaster waiting to happen, pointing to several recent spills along pipelines, and are opposed to Alberta's oilsands due to the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions involved in their production.
© 2011 Canadian Press.
[...and if you haven't yet-- sign on to http://www.tarsandsaction.org/obama-petition/ -- pass it along, fwd]
[update: Josh Fox has endorsed my campaign!...see http://www.JoelforCongress.org -- and if you agree, join more and more across 20th c.d. signed on to endorse-- see http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel (you better bet that if I was your congressman in the 20th I'd be standing up loudly to fight this publicly]
[note-- it's not just 350.org and Bill McKibben fighting good fight against tar sands mining, folks-- also on board in opposition-- Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, League of Conservation Voters; see: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/24-10 !]
[...finally-- what's the number to reach the White House public comment line?....(202) 456-1111: use it...]
[note-- chilling update here below-- "State Department's Environmental Analysis Gives Pipeline an Initial Green Light" by Lee-Anne Goodman-- published today by Canadian Press-- http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-10 ]
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"Global Warming's Heavy Cost"
by Bill McKibben [of http://www.350.org -- who referenced events exactly like this recently at Cary Inst.!]
Aug 25, 2011 9:29 PM EDT
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/25/hurricane-irene-can-be-tied-to-global-warming-says-bill-mckibben.html
[Hurricane Irene's dangerous power can be traced to global warming says Bill McKibben-and Obama and the House GOP majority are at fault for their failed leadership on the environment.]
Irene's got a middle name, and it's Global Warming.
As she roars up the Eastern Seaboard, everyone is doing what they should-boarding windows, preparing rescue plans, stocking up on batteries. But a lot of people are also wondering: what's a "tropical" storm doing heading for the snow belt?
Category 3 Storms have rarely hit Long Island since the 1800s; one was the great unnamed storm of 1938, which sent 15-foot storm waters surging through what are now multimillion-dollar seaside homes. Normally, says Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, it's "difficult for a major Category 3 or stronger hurricane crossing north of North Carolina to maintain that intensity, because wind shear rapidly increases and ocean temperatures plunge below the 26°C (79°F) level that can support a hurricane." The high-altitude wind shear may help knock the storm down a little this year, but the ocean temperatures won't. They're bizarrely high-only last year did we ever record hotter water.
"Sea surface temperatures 1° to 3°F warmer than average extend along the East Coast from North Carolina to New York. Waters of at least 26°C extend all the way to southern New Jersey, which will make it easier for Irene to maintain its strength much farther to the north than a hurricane usually can," says Masters. "These warm ocean temperatures will also make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical, since much more water vapor can evaporate into the air from record-warm ocean surfaces. The latest precipitation forecast from NOAA's Hydrological prediction center shows that Irene could dump over eight inches of rain over coastal New England."
Remember-this year has already seen more billion-dollar weather-related disasters than any year in U.S. history. Last year was the warmest ever recorded on planet Earth. Arctic sea ice is near all-time record lows. Record floods from Pakistan to Queensland to the Mississippi basin; record drought from the steppes of Russia to the plains of Texas. Just about the only trauma we haven't had are hurricanes plowing into the U.S., but that's just luck-last year was a big storm year, but they all veered out to sea.
This year we're already on letter I-which in a normal year we don't get to until well into October. Every kind of natural system is amped up, holding more power-about ? of a watt extra energy per square meter of the Earth's surface, thanks to the carbon we've poured into the atmosphere. This is what climate change looks like in its early stages.
But you'd never guess that anything was amiss if you asked the Obama administration. In one of those ironies of timing, Friday saw the release of the environmental impact statement (EIS) for the most contested energy project in many years, the so-called Keystone Pipeline that would connect the tar sands of northern Alberta with the Gulf of Mexico. Those tar sands are the second-biggest pool of carbon on the continent; if we tap into them in a big way, says the federal government's premier climate scientist James Hansen, it's "essentially game over for the climate."
But the EIS-full of detailed discussion of exactly how many times it's acceptable for the new pipeline to spill its freight of acidic bitumen from Alberta, or how much natural gas it will take to heat the oil out of the ground-does not even mention the climate change that would result from helping ramp up the exploitation of this Saudi-scale ocean of carbon. The Obama administration mostly stopped talking about climate change years ago; when the president talks about the environment, which is rarely, he'll discuss green jobs, or a clean energy future. But if he signs the certificate allowing the pipeline to be built, he'll make it clear he's not serious even about that. One more huge oil field is one more way to prevent making transformative change for another generation, and it means hundreds of thousands of windmills and solar panels will go unbuilt.
Warm ocean temperatures will make Irene a much wetter hurricane than is typical.
That's why more than 300 of us have been arrested outside the White House in the last week, the largest civil disobedience demonstration in a generation for the environmental movement. They're trying to get the president to see the danger of climate change. Irene will be a distraction in the short run from our efforts, but in the long run it underlines what the fight is all about. If the president goes for business as usual, we're going to get planet weird.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Bill McKibben is the author of Eaarth and more than a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, and Deep Economy. He is the founder of the environmental organizations Step It Up and 350.org, a global-warming awareness campaign that is planning a Global Work Party on climate change for 10-10-10.
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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/24-10 ...
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by Huffington Post
Keystone XL Pipeline Obama's 'Biggest Climate Test,' Green Groups Say
by Lucia Graves
WASHINGTON - In a boost for grassroots efforts pressuring the Obama administration to block approval of TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline, the heads of major environmental organizations released a letter on Wednesday calling on Barack Obama to deny presidential approval to the pipeline, which would stretch from tar sands in Alberta to oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.
In their letter to Obama, the groups described the pipeline as "perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election," and warned that a failure to deny the permit could come back to haunt him in 2012.
"If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election," wrote the groups.
Signatories included leaders from Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Rainforest Action Network, among others.
"There is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone XL pipeline, and those of the protesters being arrested daily outside the White House," wrote the groups in their letter.
As of Wednesday afternoon, 275 people had been arrested in connection with the protests. Organizers say more than 2,000 volunteers have signed up to participate in the sit-ins, which are slated to run through Sep. 3.
"For those of us out there protesting, the best thing about this ringing statement is that the administration won't be able to play one group off against another by making small concessions here and there," author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, who is helping to organize the protests for tarsandsaction.org, wrote in a statement accompanying the press release. "They've all shown that there is one way to demonstrate to the environmental base that the rhetoric of Obama's 2008 campaign is still meaningful -- and that's to veto this pipeline. Since he can do it without even consulting Congress, this is one case where we'll be able to see exactly how willing he is to match the rhetoric of his 2008 campaign."
Read the full letter below:
Dear President Obama:
Many of the organizations we head do not engage in civil disobedience; some do. Regardless, speaking as individuals, we want to let you know that there is not an inch of daylight between our policy position on the Keystone Pipeline and those of the very civil protesters being arrested daily outside the White House. This is a terrible project -- many of the country's leading climate scientists have explained why in their letter last month to you. It risks many of our national treasures to leaks and spills. And it reduces incentives to make the transition to job-creating clean fuels.
You have a clear shot to deny the permit, without any interference from Congress. It's perhaps the biggest climate test you face between now and the election. If you block it, you will trigger a surge of enthusiasm from the green base that supported you so strongly in the last election. We expect nothing less.
Sincerely,
Fred Krupp, Environmental Defense Fund
Michael Brune, Sierra Club
Frances Beinecke, Natural Resources Defense Council
Phil Radford, Greenpeace
Larry Schweiger, National Wildlife Federation
Erich Pica, Friends of the Earth
Rebecca Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network
May Boeve, 350.org
Gene Karpinski, League of Conservation Voters
© 2011 Huffington Post
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From http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/24-3 ...
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by TruthDig.com
D.C. Protests That Make Big Oil Quake
by Amy Goodman
The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.9-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates. More than 2,100 people say they'll risk arrest there during the next two weeks. They oppose the Keystone XL pipeline project, designed to carry heavy crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
A "keystone" in architecture is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the arch together; without it, the structure collapses. By putting their bodies on the line-as more than 200 have already at the time of this writing-these practitioners of the proud tradition of civil disobedience hope to collapse not only the pipeline, but the fossil-fuel dependence that is accelerating disruptive global climate change.
Bill McKibben was among those already arrested. He is an environmentalist and author who founded the group 350.org, named after the estimated safe upper limit of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of 350 ppm (parts per million-the planet is currently at 390 ppm). In a call to action to join the protest, McKibben, along with others including journalist Naomi Klein, actor Danny Glover and NASA scientist James Hansen, wrote the Keystone pipeline is "a 1,500-mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet."
The movement to oppose Keystone XL ranges from activists and scientists to indigenous peoples of the threatened Canadian plains and boreal forests, where the tar sands are located, to rural farmers and ranchers in the ecologically fragile Sand Hills region of Nebraska, to students and physicians.
Asked why the White House protests are taking place while President Obama is away on a family vacation on Martha's Vineyard, McKibben replied: "We'll be here when he gets back too. We're staying for two weeks, every day. This is the first real civil disobedience of this scale in the environmental movement in ages."
Just miles to the east of Martha's Vineyard, and almost exactly 170 years earlier, on Nantucket, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave, abolitionist, journalist and publisher, gave one of his first major addresses before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass is famous for stating one of grass-roots organizing's central truths: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Demanding change is one thing, while getting change in Washington, D.C., is another, especially with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives' hostility to any climate-change legislation. That is why the protests against Keystone XL are happening in front of the White House. Obama has the power to stop the pipeline. The Canadian corporation behind the project, TransCanada, has applied for a permit from the U.S. State Department to build the pipeline. If the State Department denies the permit, Keystone XL would be dead. The enormous environmental devastation caused by extracting petroleum from the tar sands might still move forward, but without easy access to the refineries and the U.S. market, it would certainly be slowed.
TransCanada executives are confident that the U.S. will grant the permit by the end of the year. Republican politicians and the petroleum industry tout the creation of well-paying construction jobs that would come from the project, and even enjoy some union support.
In response, two major unions, the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Transport Workers Union, representing more than 300,000 workers, called on the State Department to deny the permit. In a joint press release, they said: "We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil. Š Many jobs could also be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid, maintaining and expanding public transportation-jobs that can help us reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency."
Two Canadian women, indigenous actress Tantoo Cardinal, who starred in "Dances With Wolves," and Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in "Superman," were arrested with about 50 others just before the earthquake hit Tuesday. Bill McKibben summed up: "It takes more than earthquakes and hurricanes to worry us-we'll be out here through Sept. 3. Our hope is to send a Richter 8 tremor through the political system on the day Barack Obama says no to Big Oil and reminds us all why we were so happy when he got elected. The tar sands pipeline is his test."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.
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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/26-10 ...
Published on Friday, August 26, 2011 by Canadian Press
State Department's Environmental Analysis Gives Pipeline an Initial Green Light
by Lee-Anne Goodman
WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department says TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline poses no major risks to the environment and will not spur further oilsands production in Alberta, moving the controversial project one step further to a final decision by the Obama administration.
The State Dept. report was not a surprise to the American environmental movement, for whom opposition to the pipeline has become a passionate rallying cry in the aftermath of failed climate change legislation last year.
The Obama administration now has 90 days to determine whether the controversial project is in the national interest of the United States. In that determination, Jones said, State Department officials will consider the environmental assessment as well as the economic impact of the pipeline and "foreign policy concerns."
The outcome wasn't a surprise to the American environmental movement, for whom opposition to the pipeline has become a passionate rallying cry in the aftermath of failed climate change legislation last year.
Leading environmentalists say the State Department has refused to fully assess the risks.
The Natural Resources Defense Council accused the State Department of failing to study pipeline safety measures or examine alternate routes that would avoid the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska, a crucial source of water in the state.
The NRDC's Susan Casey-Lefkowitz expressed dismay at the State Department's assessment in a statement.
"It is utterly beyond me how the administration can claim the pipeline will have 'no significant impacts' if they haven’t bothered to do in-depth studies around the issues of contention," she said.
"The public has made their concerns clear and the administration seems to have ignored them. If permitted, the proposed Keystone XL tarsands pipeline will be a dirty legacy that will haunt President Obama and Secretary Clinton for years to come."
Jim Lyon, senior vice-president of the National Wildlife Federation, said the analysis was "strike 3 for the State Department" after two "failed rounds" of environmental review and warned of legal woes ahead.
"The document still fails to address the key concerns for landowners and wildlife," he said. "It is almost certain to be scrutinized in other venues, including a probable legal challenge. This only escalates the controversy in a process that is far from over."
The State Department analysis comes as anti-pipeline activists continue a two-week civil disobedience campaign outside the White House.
More than 300 people, including Canadian actress Margot Kidder, have been arrested as they try to convince U.S. President Barack Obama to block the pipeline. As many as 54 more were arrested on Friday.
Environmental activists say Keystone XL is a disaster waiting to happen, pointing to several recent spills along pipelines, and are opposed to Alberta's oilsands due to the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions involved in their production.
© 2011 Canadian Press.
join SEIU 200's Mike Lonigro, HVALF's Beth Soto, Gerald Hayes-- hold Marist accountable!...
[Fact: Marist not exactly hurting for cash; see: http://www.marist.edu/alumni/campaignpriorities.html --
"Capital Campaign Priorities-- Marist College launched its comprehensive capital campaign, the Campaign for Marist, publicly in November 2007, announcing a goal of $75 million. The launch followed an initial, silent phase during which $45 million was raised in gifts from trustees, friends, and alumni. The campaign goal was increased to $150 million following a bequest of $75 million that the College received from Raymond A. Rich in fall 2009. The campaign now has reached $141 million, or nearly 95 percent, of its goal. Sixteen capital projects totaling $2.1 million were completed during the summer of 2009. Construction of the $35 million, 57,000-square-foot Hancock Center has been completed. More projects that will enhance the collegiate experience for students are also in the works. The dining hall will be renovated, and the McCann Recreation Center will receive a $7.5 million makeover."]
[Marist can afford tens of millions in upgrades to their campus-- they should pay their workers properly!...J]
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From: Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation
http://www.hvalf.org/index.cfm?zone=%2Funionactive%2Fview_article.cfm&HomeID=215845#.Tlbitu4qS8U.facebook
Subject: Is This Economic Development?
Date: Aug 25, 2011 1:38 PM
Phone: (845) 567-7760 Fax: (845) 567-7742
Email: esoto@hvalf.org Website: www.hvalf.org
Join The SEIU Local 200 United Informational Picket
• Date: Saturday, August 27, 2011
• Time: 7 AM to 1 PM
• Location: Marist College, 3399 North Road Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
Marist College is not negotiating in good faith with its workers. The hard working employees of Marist College deserve a fair contract!
Dennis Murray is the President of Marist College and the Co-Chair of the Regional Economic Development Council.
Is this Dennis Murray's idea of economic development?
Tell him to negotiate a fair contract with the people that make Marist work!
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[note-- don't wait too much longer to send your ideas re: economic development to the ruling powers at the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council; email nys-midhudson@empire.state.ny.us;
see http://nyworks.ny.gov/content/mid-hudson (and much, much more on this below; up to you all; see:
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20110819/NEWS01/108190340/Regional-job-growth-panel-makes-public-debut ]
[and-- kudos to Marguerite Knox and others @ Community Voices Heard; email edgar@cvhaction.org; Marguerite spoke on how budget cuts not helping economy; see http://www.ABetterChoiceforNY.org !]
From http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2011/August/19/HVREDC-19Aug11.html (re: last Thurs.)...
Regional council leaders say unified effort needed to fix economy
POUGHKEEPSIE – Amid a growing lack of confidence in the economy and fear of even great unemployment, witness yet another triple-digit loss on Wall Street, a group tasked with turning the climate around in the Mid-Hudson Valley met at Marist College in Poughkeepsie Thursday.
Marguerite Knox, a local activist representing “Community Voices Heard,” which has chapters in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, said the “unemployed should be involved” because “while we need jobs as a community they need ones they can fill.”
The Regional Economic Development Council is part of Governor Andrew Cuomo economic effort known as “N.Y. Open for Business.” Lieutenant Governor Robert Duffy represented the governor and called the effort “unprecedented.”
Council Co-Chairman, Dr. Dennis Murray, the president of Marist College, told the panel the ultimate goal is jobs.
“Everyone that I talked to in every county recognizes that as we create a job in any county, it will probably benefit the region,” he said. “We are going to try to find those strategies that will create the greatest number of jobs in the region and have the greatest positive economic impact on all seven counties.”
#######################################################
[recall below sent out on this last Thurs....(and-- I did get a chance to speak-- folks listened, interested!]
3:45 pm @ Marist-- speak up at public mtg. of Mid-Hudson Economic Development Council...
[speak up-- to make sure we here in Dutchess get our due and proven progressive ideas as well!]
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From http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110818/NEWS/110819824 ...
Development council meeting open to public
By Adam Bosch
Published: 2:00 AM - 08/18/11
POUGHKEEPSIE - The Mid-Hudson Economic Development Council will hold a meeting open to the public at 3:45 p.m. on Thursday in the Hancock Center at Marist College in Poughkeepsie.
The council is made of 31 business leaders and lawmakers from a seven-county region.
Councils throughout the state are competing for $1 billion in economic development cash.
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As one noted environmentalist here in the Hudson Valley wrote recently about this:
"This is the first time this council will have a public meeting...Their first meeting the other day was not open. This is a fast-track process and each council representing regions of the state has to prepare a proposal for state funding within several months...it will likely have some influence on future growth and development in the region..."
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Here are main points I hit on last Thursday when I finally had a chance to participate in public comment:
Create green jobs with energy efficiency, solar, moving towards zero waste, not burning/landfilling.
Dutchess County alone could create thousands of green jobs and save $1 billion on energy costs over next decade for homeowners and business owners with energy-efficiency/renewables loan fund similar to what GOP-led Town of Bedford in Westchester and what the Town of Babylon have put in place, according to Sustainable Hudson Valley Chair David Dell of Poughkeepsie.
Note-- if this initiative were truly embraced across the 20th c.d., it could save literally two billion dollars on energy and electric bills for homeowners and businesses over the next ten years-- why?...because-- there are roughly 650,000 folks in the 20th c.d.-- a bit over twice the population here in Dutchess County Germany has less sunlight than NY-- yet more solar than New York-- it's time for green jobs and Solar Jobs Act of 2011!
[time also to clean up our county's air (ranked "F" for third year in a row by American Lung Assoc. of NY]
[ http://www.dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2009/03/our-bright-idea-growin-brighter-and.html ;
http://www.NYSEIA.org ; http://www.citizenscampaign.org/campaigns/solar-jobs-new-york.asp ;
http://www.nyserda.org/GreenNY/ ; http://www.energyfinancesolutions.com/main/homeownersnyfour ;
http://www.petitiononline.com/pacehere ; http://www.LIGreenHomes.com ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York's_20th_congressional_district ; http://www.EnergizeBedford.org ;
Ten times as many jobs could be created through recycling and composting compared to incineration and landfilling according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Dutchess County alone now incinerates/landfills $15 million worth of materials and resources that could be recycled, including plant debris, food waste, paper, wood, ceramics, soils, metals, glass, polymers, textiles, chemicals, and various items for reuse at an eco-industrial park here-- this could and should be done all over the 20th.
http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/recyclingmeansbusiness.html ; http://www.petitiononline.com/zeroyes ;
http://ccgovernment.carr.org/ccg/pubworks/sw-future/docs/resource-assessment.pdf ;
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20090510/NEWS01/905100344/Dutchess-County-Resource-Recovery-Agency-Inefficient-expensive-in-debt ]
[...and again-- Gateways to Entrepreneurial Tomorrows ( http://www.GetHudsonValley.org ) is still looking for real support here in Dutchess to serious lend $ to budding entrepreneurs-- why is it that Newburgh and Orange County have proven to be so much more re: microenterprise; why, Dutchess?]
Joel
444-0599/876-2488
http://www.JoelforCongress.org
http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel
http://www.Facebook.com/JoelTyner
p.s. Again-- frankly, all this is also a perfect opportunity to publicly push for elected officials at all levels of government to get behind and push for much-needed federally funded public works legislation like Rep. Jan Schakowsky's "Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act" (see http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/11-10 )...
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[again-- don't wait too much longer to send your ideas re: economic development to the ruling powers at the Mid-Hudson Regional Economic Development Council; email nys-midhudson@empire.state.ny.us!]
From http://nyworks.ny.gov/content/mid-hudson ...
Regional Economic Development Councils
Mid-Hudson Contact Info
33 Airport Center Drive - #201
New Windsor, NY 12553
(845) 567-4882
(845) 567-6085 Fax
Email Us: nys-midhudson@empire.state.ny.us
Mid-Hudson Regional Co-Chairs
• Dennis Murray
President of Marist College
• Leonard S. Schleifer, MD, PhD
President & CEO, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Mid-Hudson Representatives
• Terri Ward
President & CEO, Sullivan County Chamber of Commerce
• Carol Fitzgerald
President & CEO, Life Medical Technologies Inc.
• Ned Sullivan
President, Scenic Hudson, Inc.
• James Bernardo
President & CEO, Candela Systems Corporation
• Payal Malhotra
Vice President of Marketing, Café Spice GCT, Inc.
• Mary Rodrigues
Owner, A.J. Rodrigues Group Inc.
• Tom Endres
President & COO, Continental Organics
• Wiley C. Harrison
Founder & President of Business of Your Business, LLC
• Paul Ryan
President, Westchester/Putnam Central Labor Body
• Dr. Cliff L. Wood
President, SUNY Rockland Community College
• Jonathan Drapkin
President and CEO, Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress
• Aleida Frederico
Senior Vice President, TD Bank
• James Taylor, III
CEO, Taylor BioMass, LLC
• Ken Kleinpeter
Director of Farm and Facilities, Glynwood Farm
• Robin L. Douglas
President & CEO, African American Chamber of Commerce Westchester & Rockland Counties
• Vincent Cozzolino
President & CEO, The Solar Energy Consortium
• Marsha Gordon
President & CEO, Westchester Business Council
• Al Samuels
President & CEO, Rockland Business Association
• Maureen Halahan
President & CEO, Orange County Partnership
This region borders New York City, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is near the center of the country’s busiest rail corridor, boasts six interstate highways, and easy access to six international airports. With over 30 colleges and universities, the Hudson Valley maintains a highly educated labor force.
This region’s seven counties are geographically, demographically, and economically diverse, with a mix of urban areas, waterfront cities, rural villages, farmlands, and forests.
The Hudson Valley has a critical mass of industry and research: over 60 biotech companies and the Hudson Valley Research Park, home to IBM's 300mm semiconductor fabrication facility.
The Hudson Valley is also a major tourist destination: its rich scenic, historical, cultural and recreational resources include iconic 19th century mansions, the nation’s oldest winery, outlet shopping, and the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park.
The Mid-Hudson Region at a Glance
Mid-Hudson In Depth
Get more expansive regional data on Mid-Hudson below:
Physical and Built Environment
• Natural Resources, Water, Topography, etc
• 2008 Clean Watershed Needs Survey (.xls)
• 2010 - SEQRA - Dialog Final Recommendations
• Appendix A - Commissioner SEQRA Comments
• Appendix B - SEQRA Comments
• Appendix C - Comments On Draft SEQRA Recomendations
• Ashokan Reservoir & Dam
• Belleayre Crossroads Ventures
• DEC - Region 3 Environmental Issues
• Crossroads Belleayre
• DEC - Region 3 Snapshot
• Dover Knolls Project Map Graphic
• Esopus Creek
• Hudson River Valley Resorts - Williams Lake
• Mid-Hudson Maps
• Poughkeepsie Waterfront Abandoned Industrial Site Hudson River
• Taylor Biomass
• Walkway Over The Hudson
• Transportation Infrastructure
• Mid-Hudson - Transportation Map
• Master Region County Report
• Master Region Report
• Statewide Bridges
• Utility/Energy Infrastructure
• Broadband Availabilty Stats For ESD Regions (.xls)
• 2009 NYS Energy Plan
• Central Hudson Service Territory Map
• Con Edison Storm Center Map
• National Grid Service Territory Map
• NY ISO Zones Maps
• Orange & Rockland Utilities Service Territory Map
• Rochester Gas & Electric Service Territory Map
• Real Estate: Housing and Commercial Space
• HCR Catalogue of Need NYC Suburban
• HCR Catalogue of Need Hudson Valley
• Realtors
• Culture and tourism; Quality of Life
• Mid-Hudson State Parks Snapshots
• Economic Impact of Tourism in NY State & Regions 2009
• Economic Impact of Visitor Spending NYS Counties
• New York State Hospitals by Empire State Development Regions (.xls)
• Nursing Homes by Region and Bed Count (.xls)
• OPRHP 2010 State Council Annual Report
• OPRHP Statewide Capital Needs List
• Regions and Maps
Economic Environment
• Globalization
• Export Nation Brookings Poughkeepsie
• Changing Demographics
• Mid-Hudson Demographics (.xls)
• Mid-Hudson Migration Education
• NY Census 2010 First Impressions
• Regional Hispanic & Non Hispanic Latino Population
• Education System
• New York’s 100+ Private, Not-for-Profit Colleges and Universities
• CICU Regional Data - Mid-Hudson
• SUNY Regional Economic Impact Maps
• Economic Impact of Independent Colleges and Universities
• School Report Card Data (Read Me) (Regents Exam Titles)
• Workforce
• Union Stats (.xls)
• Welcome To Your Region
• NYS Green Jobs Survey Finding #1: Prevalence
• NYS Green Jobs Survey Finding #2: Green Employment
• NYS Green Jobs Survey Finding #3: Green Expectations
• NYS Green Jobs Survey Finding #4: Green Credentials Preferred by Green Employers
• NYS Green Jobs Survey Finding #5a:Common Green Occupations
• NYS Green Jobs Survey: Appendices A & B
• Industry Structure and Concentration
• Dutchess Agriculture
• Mid-Hudson Concentrated Industries (.xls)
• New Manufacturers Slide (.xls)
• Orange Agriculture
• Putnam Agriculture
• Rockland Agriculture
• Sullivan Agriculture
• Ulster Agriculture
• Westchester Agriculture
Policy Environment
• Governance - Accountability, Overlapping Layers, Local Government
• Layering Local Governments City County Mergers
• NYS Villages Population Below 500
• State & Local Government Expenditures Per Capita 2007
• Statewide Business Costs and Tax Structure
• Cost of Doing Business & Cost of Living
• Income Distribution by NYAGI of Full-Year Residents by Region (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 2009 - 2010 (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 2009 (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 04-05 (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 2004 (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 99-00 (.xls)
• Property Tax Levies by ESD Region 1999 (.xls)
• Handbook of New York State and Local Taxes October 2010
• Employer’s Guide toUnemployment Insurance,Wage Reporting,and Withholding Tax
• New York State Tax Guide for New Businesses
• Taxable Sales for ESD (.xls)
• State Tax Comparisons
• Summary of Utilization of Major Business-Related Property Tax Exemptions (.xls)
• Entrepreneurialism, Innovation and Risk Taking
• NYS Innovation Rankings
Existing Regional Strategies
• CEDS Report
Thursday, August 25, 2011
kudos to Schneiderman for holding banksters feet to fire; join us for press conference!...
Hi all...
Come out if you can to join us for thank NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for standing up for us on Main Street (not Wall Street)-- at our two-part press conference on this tomorrow (Fri.)-- the first part to start at 12:30 pm in front of NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's offices at 1 Civic Center Plaza Suite #401 (at corner of Main/Market streets) in Poughkeepsie-- to commend Schneiderman getting tough on the banksters)!...
...with the second part of our press conference to commence at 1 pm in front of the Bank of America at 45 Market Street in Poughkeepsie(!)...(recall-- Bank of America = prime example of corporate welfare)...
[note-- let us know asap if you might be able to join us for this-- numbers count for the media; signs--
Thank You Eric; Shame on You Bank of America; End Corporate Welfare-- Not Schools and Medicare!]
[update-- stay tuned for details re: press conferences/rallies on all this over next month in front of Bank of America branch at 561 Warren Street in Hudson, Bank of America branch at 50 Main Street #2 in Chatham, Bank of America branch at 501 Columbia Turnpike in Rensselaer, Bank of America branch at 27 Division Street #1 in Saratoga Springs, and Bank of America 14 Larose Street in Glens Falls too!]
As Tuesday's New York Times editorial pointed out:
"The Obama administration says that the proposed settlement would require the banks to write down the principal balance on underwater loans. According to news reports, the banks are likely to pay around $20 billion in the deal. With 14.6 million homeowners owing $753 billion more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, how far does the administration think $20 billion would go?
The Obama administration has turned up the heat on Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, to go along with a proposed settlement with the nation’s largest banks over dubious foreclosure practices. Mr. Schneiderman should stand his ground in not supporting the deal. The administration says that a settlement would quickly deliver much needed relief to hard-pressed borrowers, but it’s doubtful it would provide redress on a par with the banks’ wrongdoing or borrowers’ needs.
The deal has been in the works for nearly a year, after the state attorneys general announced an investigation into a robo-signing scandal in which banks were found to have filed false foreclosure papers in state courts. It was widely believed that the scandal would lead to a broad inquiry into how banks inflated the housing bubble, profiting as it expanded.
As it turned out, the inquiry was narrow. Mr. Schneiderman, who became the attorney general of New York after the scandal broke, has rightly refused to go along with a settlement that is not based on a thorough investigation, and has ordered investigations of his own. He has been supported by a handful of other state prosecutors, who say that the proposed deal would restrict their own investigations and prosecutions."
[from "It’s a Flawed Settlement" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/its-a-flawed-settlement.htm ]
If you haven't yet, check out these three crucial must-read's on this (and pass 'em along!):
"Obama's Deal for the Bankers: Amnesty for the Indefensible" by Robert Scheer
http://www.thenation.com/article/162930/obamas-deal-bankers-amnesty-indefensible
"Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal" [Not That GOP Would Be Better!] by Matt Taibbi
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/25-0
"Eric Schneiderman: One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street" by Robert Scheer
http://www.thenation.com/article/160738/eric-schneiderman-one-lawman-guts-go-after-wall-street
Pass it on!...
Joel
444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.JoelforCongress.org
p.s. Again-- call Schneiderman's office on this-- thank him-- at (800) 771-7755!...(and-- feel free to also
call these three numbers as well-- for them to back off and stop attacking Schneiderman's effort to stand up for us here on Main Street (instead of Wall Street) for a change!...call the White House on this at (202) 456-1111; call Congress on this (866) 338-1015; call Cuomo/state legislators-- (877) 255-9417!...
p.p.s. Recall-- Bank of America recently got $45 billion from the federal bailout-- but hasn’t paid any federal income taxes in three years-- while Dutchess County still deposits funds there, according to Dutchess County Finance Commissioner Pamela Barrack (recall: Los Angeles and Philadelphia no longer keep funds in irresponsible banks)...
[see: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/19 ; http://www.Facebook.com/MoveYourMoney ;
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/4/move_your_money_project_urges_people ]
[Over sixty folks came out to the Apr. 18th Tax Day Rally to Make Bank of America Pay Their Fair Share I organized w/65 others (MoveOn/USUncut: Barbara Upton, Linda Abbott et. al.) in front of the Bank of America branch on Market Street in Poughkeepsie; see: http://dutchessdemocracy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tax-day-rallies-bank-of-america-3-pm.html ;
http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=202668686424445 ;
http://pol.moveon.org/event/events/event.html?event_id=113991 ;
http://www.usuncut.org/actions/239 http://www.activistresource.org/calendar/cal_event.php?id=15559 ;
http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/2011/April/19/taxprot_Fish-18Apr11.html ]
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Again-- editorial here from Tuesday's Times...(one more reason Schneiderman needs to move up!)..
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/opinion/its-a-flawed-settlement.html ]
It’s a Flawed Settlement
Published: August 22, 2011
The Obama administration has turned up the heat on Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, to go along with a proposed settlement with the nation’s largest banks over dubious foreclosure practices. Mr. Schneiderman should stand his ground in not supporting the deal. The administration says that a settlement would quickly deliver much needed relief to hard-pressed borrowers, but it’s doubtful it would provide redress on a par with the banks’ wrongdoing or borrowers’ needs.
The deal has been in the works for nearly a year, after the state attorneys general announced an investigation into a robo-signing scandal in which banks were found to have filed false foreclosure papers in state courts. It was widely believed that the scandal would lead to a broad inquiry into how banks inflated the housing bubble, profiting as it expanded.
As it turned out, the inquiry was narrow. Mr. Schneiderman, who became the attorney general of New York after the scandal broke, has rightly refused to go along with a settlement that is not based on a thorough investigation, and has ordered investigations of his own. He has been supported by a handful of other state prosecutors, who say that the proposed deal would restrict their own investigations and prosecutions.
Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, however, says that a settlement on the narrow issue of robo-signing would not preclude other investigations by individual attorneys general. But, clearly, once the robo-signing issue is off the table, investigators would lose leverage to pursue remedies for other possible illegalities in the packaging, marketing and transferring of mortgage securities.
The administration also says that the proposed settlement would require the banks to write down the principal balance on underwater loans. According to news reports, the banks are likely to pay around $20 billion in the deal. With 14.6 million homeowners owing $753 billion more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, how far does the administration think $20 billion would go?
The administration should pursue principal reductions for stressed borrowers, and it could do so immediately by calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance the underwater loans of borrowers who are current in their payments. What it shouldn’t do is pretend that the proposed settlement is the only — or best — way to get quick relief to homeowners.
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From http://www.thenation.com/article/162930/obamas-deal-bankers-amnesty-indefensible ...
Obama's Deal for the Bankers: Amnesty for the Indefensible
Robert Scheer
August 24, 2011
This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
They will get away with it, at least in this life. “They” are the Wall Street usurers, people of a sort condemned in Scripture, who have brought more misery to this nation than we have known since the Great Depression. “They” will not suffer for their crimes because they have a majority ownership position in our political system. That is the meaning of the banking plea bargain that the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to negotiate with the titans of the financial world.
It is a sellout deal that, in return for a pittance of compensation by banks to ripped-off mortgage holders, would grant the banks blanket immunity from any prosecution. That is intended to short-circuit investigations by a score of aggressive state officials, inquiries that offer the public a last best hope to get to the bottom of the housing scandal that has cost US homeowners $6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth.
The $20 billion or so that the banks would pony up is chump change to them compared with the trillions that the Fed and other public agencies spent to bail them out. The banks were given direct cash subsidies, virtually zero-interest loans, and the Fed took $2 trillion in bad paper off their hands while the banks exacerbated the banking crisis they had created through additional shady practices, including fraudulent mortgage foreclosures.
Yet the administration has rushed to the aid of the banks once again and is attempting to intimidate the few state attorneys general who have the gumption to protect the public interest they are sworn to serve. As Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times reported:
“Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices.…
“In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement.”
Donovan has good reason not to want an exploration of the origins of the housing meltdown: He has been a big-time player in the housing racket for decades. Back in the Clinton administration, when government-supported housing became a fig leaf for bundling suspect mortgages into what turned out to be toxic securities, Donovan was a deputy assistant secretary at HUD and acting Federal Housing Administration commissioner. He was up to his eyeballs in this business when the Clinton administration pushed through legislation banning any regulation of the market in derivatives based on home mortgages.
Armed with his insider connections, Donovan then went to work for the Prudential conglomerate (no surprise there), working deals with the same government housing agencies that he had helped run. As the New York Times reported in 2008 after President Barack Obama picked him to be secretary of HUD, “Mr. Donovan was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., in charge of its portfolio of investments in affordable housing loans, including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration debt.”
The HUD website boasts in its bio of Donovan that “under Secretary Donovan’s leadership, HUD has helped stabilize the housing market and worked to keep responsible families in their homes.” If that is so, we have to assume that the tens of millions savaged by an out-of-control banking industry were not “responsible.” And if the housing market has in any way been “stabilized,” why did the Commerce Department report Tuesday that new home sales have dropped for the third month in a row?
Shifting the blame from the swindlers to the victims is the cynical rot at the core of the response of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the housing collapse. It is a response that aims to forgive and forget the crimes of Wall Street while allowing ordinary folks to sink deeper into the pit of debt and despair. It infects Donovan and many others who claim to be concerned for the very homeowners they are betraying by undermining the few officials such as Schneiderman who seek to hold the bankers accountable.
In her article about the pressure being brought to bear on Schneiderman to go along with the sellout, Morgenson reported that according to an attendee at a memorial service this month for former New York Governor Hugh Carey, as Schneiderman was leaving he “became embroiled in a contentious conversation with Kathryn S. Wylde, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who represents the public.”
When interviewed by Morgenson, Wylde claimed that her conversation with Schneiderman was “not unpleasant” but that she told him “it is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street—love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.”
When haven’t they done that?
Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/25-0 ...
Published on Thursday, August 25, 2011 by Rolling Stone
Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal [Not That GOP Would Be Better!]
by Matt Taibbi
A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.
On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.
This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day.
The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done.
To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS.
So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators.
But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR.
In addition to the global settlement, Schneiderman is also blocking an individual $8.5 billion settlement for Countrywide investors. He has sued to stop that deal, claiming it could “compromise investors’ claims in exchange for a payment representing a fraction of the losses.”
If Schneiderman thinks $8.5 billion is an insufficient, fractional payoff just for defrauded Countrywide investors, then you can imagine how bad a $20 billion settlement for the entire industry would be for the victims.
In that particular Countrywide settlement deal, it looks like Bank of New York Mellon, the New York Fed, Pimco and other players negotiated on behalf of defrauded investors. They told the Times they were happy with the deal, but investors outside the talks told Gretchen they weren’t happy with the settlement.
Schneiderman apparently listened to those voices instead of the Mellon-Fed-BofA crowd, which infuriated the insiders who struck the actual deal. In a remarkable quote given to the Times, Kathryn Wylde, the Fed board member who ostensibly represents the public, said the following about Schneiderman:
It is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.
This, again, is coming not from a Bank of America attorney, but from the person on the Fed board who is supposedly representing the public!
This quote leads one to wonder just what Wylde would consider “indefensible,” given that stealing is pretty much the worst thing that a bank can do — and these banks just finished the longest and most orgiastic campaign of stealing in the history of money. Is Wylde waiting for Goldman and Citi to blow up a skyscraper? Dump dioxin into an orphanage? It’s really an incredible quote.
The banks are going to claim that all they’re guilty of is bad paperwork. But while the banks are indeed being investigated for "paperwork" offenses like mass tax evasion (by failing to pay fees associated with mortgage registrations and deed transfers) and mass perjury (a la the “robo-signing” practices), their real crime, the one Schneiderman is interested in, is even more serious.
The issue goes beyond fraudulent paperwork to an intentional, far-reaching theft scheme designed to take junk subprime loans and disguise them as AAA-rated investments. The banks lent money to corrupt companies like Countrywide, who made masses of bad loans and immediately sold them back to the banks.
The banks in turn hid the crappiness of these loans via certain poorly-understood nuances in the securitization process – this is almost certainly where Scheniderman’s investigators are doing their digging – before hawking the resultant securities as AAA-rated gold to fools in places like the Florida state pension fund.
They did this for years, systematically, working hand in hand in a wink-nudge arrangement with clearly criminal enterprises like Countrywide and New Century. The victims were millions of investors worldwide (like the pensioners who saw their funds drop in value) and hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners, who were often sold trick loans and hustled into foreclosure when unexpected rate hikes kicked in.
In a larger sense, even the (often irresponsible) people who simply bought more house than they could afford were victims of this scam. That's because in many of these cases, credit simply would not have been available to those people had the banks not first discovered a way to raise vast sums of money dumping crap loans on an unsuspecting market.
In other words: if Bank of America hadn’t found a way to sell worthless subprime loans as AAA paper to the Chinese and the Scandavians in May, you can be sure that it wouldn’t be going back to Countrywide in June to lend out more money for more subprime loans.
And Countrywide, in turn, wouldn’t then have been sending masses of reps out into the ghettoes to offer juicy home loans to undocumented immigrants and refis to confused old ladies on social security.
This is as bad as white-collar crime gets. But to Wylde, it doesn’t rise to the level of being “indefensible.” Until they do something worse than this, we apparently should support the banks, and make sure they don’t have to pay more than a fraction of what they made off of this kind of crime.
What is most amazing about Wylde’s quote is the clear implication that even a law enforcement official like Schneiderman should view it as his job to “do everything we can to support” Wall Street. That would be astonishing interpretation of what a prosecutor's duties are, were it not for the fact that 49 other Attorneys General apparently agree with her.
In Schneiderman we have at least one honest investigator who doesn’t agree, which is to his great credit. But everyone else is on Wylde’s side now. The Times story claims that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and various Justice Department officials have been leaning on the New York AG to cave, which tells you that reining in this last rogue cop is now an urgent priority for Barack Obama.
Why? My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer.
Which is good for him, I guess. But it seems to me that it might be time to wonder if is this the most disappointing president we’ve ever had.
© 2011 Rolling Stone
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From http://www.thenation.com/article/160738/eric-schneiderman-one-lawman-guts-go-after-wall-street
Eric Schneiderman: One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street
Robert Scheer
May 18, 2011
This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
The fix was in to let the Wall Street scoundrels off the hook for the enormous damage they caused in creating the Great Recession. All of the leading politicians and officials, federal and state, Republican and Democrat, were on board to complete the job of saving the banks while ignoring their victims... until last week when the attorney general of New York refused to go along.
Eric Schneiderman will probably fail, as did his predecessors in that job; the honest sheriff doesn’t last long in a town that houses the Wall Street casino. But decent folks should be cheering him on. Despite a mountain of evidence of robo-signed mortgage contracts, deceitful mortgage-based securities and fraudulent foreclosures, the banks were going to be able to cut their potential losses to what was, for them, a minuscule amount.
In a deal that had the blessing of the White House and many federal regulators and state attorneys general—a settlement probably for not much more than the $5 billion pittance the top financial institutions found acceptable—the banks would be freed of any further claims by federal and state officials over their shady mortgage packaging and servicing practices and deceptive foreclosure proceedings.
At the same time, the SEC and other federal regulatory bodies are making sweetheart deals with the bankers to close off accountability for creating and collecting on more than a trillion dollars’ worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the nation’s economic meltdown—a meltdown that has seen the national debt grow by more than 50 percent, stuck us with an unyielding 9 percent unemployment and left 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or clinging desperately to underwater mortgages. On top of which an all-time high of 44 million people are living below the official poverty line and fewer new homes were started in April than at any other time in the past half century. With housing values still in free fall, we continue to make the bankers whole.
As Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times, the Justice Department division responsible for checking for fraud in the bankruptcy system has found a widespread pattern of deception by banks foreclosing homes, and she concluded: “So an authoritative source with access to a lot of data has identified industry practices as not only pernicious but also pervasive. Which makes it all the more mystifying that regulators seem eager to strike a cheap and easy settlement with the banks.” Not really surprising given both the enormous hold of Wall Street money over the two major political parties and the revolving door through which executives travel between firms like Goldman Sachs and the top positions in the US Treasury Department and elsewhere in the government. The financial crisis occurred only because Republicans and Democrats passed the laws that Wall Street lobbyists wrote ending reasonable banking industry regulation installed in the 1930s in response to the Depression. And when the greed they enabled threatened the foundations of our economy, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it was the bankers who were assisted into lifeboats that had no room for ordinary people.
Not surprising then to find all of the power players in on the latest deals: the Obama administration that had bailed out the banks but not troubled homeowners; the regulators and Fed officials who all looked the other way when the housing bubble was inflated; and the state attorneys general who backed away from going after the perpetrators of robo-signed mortgages and other scams used to foreclose homes.
But now Schneiderman has a chance to derail the deals, given that he is supported by the state’s tough 1921 Martin Act, which one of his predecessors as New York state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, had used to good advantage in exposing the financial behemoths that are so heavily based in New York. The Wall Street Journal describes the Martin Act as “one of the most potent prosecutorial tools against financial fraud” because, as opposed to federal law, it doesn’t carry the more difficult standard of proving intent to defraud.
Last week, it was revealed that Schneiderman’s office has demanded an accounting from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as to the details of their past practice of securitizing those mortgage-based packages that proved so toxic. Maybe he will fail against such powerful forces, as did Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo after him, but it is a test worth watching, since no one else, from the White House on down, seems to be concerned with holding the bailed-out banks accountable for the massive pain and suffering they inflicted on the public.
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