Unbossed and
unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 14 No. 48…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…November 28, 2011
Intuit's Vibe
Home, Sweet Home
By John Howard Payne (1791-1852)
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home,
Oh, there's no place
like home!
An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain;
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!
The birds singing gayly, that come at my call --
Give me them -- and the peace of mind, dearer than all!
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home,
Oh, there's no place
like home!
I gaze on the moon as I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother now thinks of her child,
As she looks on that moon from our own cottage door
Thro' the woodbine, whose fragrance shall cheer me no more.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home,
Oh, there's no place
like home!
How sweet 'tis to sit 'neath a fond father's smile,
And the caress of a mother to soothe and beguile!
Let others delight mid new pleasures to roam,
But give me, oh, give me, the pleasures of home.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home,
Oh, there's no place
like home!
To thee I'll return, overburdened with care;
The heart's dearest solace will smile on me there;
No more from that cottage again will I roam;
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
Home, home, sweet, sweet, home!
There's no place like home,
Oh, there's no place
like home!
On Being Thankful!
By Dot
Since reading a
well-written and documented survey of American history, I have maintained a
healthy skepticism regarding the storyline of the first Thanksgiving. I am sure
you have seen an elementary school production based on that eventful gathering;
it is the fiction about Pilgrims and Indians told to public school children. As
it turns out, our children are spared the harsh realities and are not expected
to learn any facts beyond that fairy tale.
Truth be told, the Native
American has been driven to the brink of extinction by those
"friendly" settlers with whom they shared their bounty. Those
friendly settlers and the ones that followed stole native American land from
sea to shining sea and forced the native Americans on reservations, a saga
being played out today in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians.
There is something not quite right about celebrating that bit of history. So, my family has developed its own tradition of gathering and giving thanks. We try to gather weekly, as opposed to annually, to share with one another what transpired this week and upcoming events. On a shoestring budget -- no one in my family is a member of the 1%-- we manage to make these gatherings festive occasions.
This year, as part
of our usual get together, we completed my granddaughter's Thursday homework
assignment, which was part of her Thanksgiving homework packet. The assignment
called for each family member to write a sentence to form a "progressive
story." My daughter suggested we all say something about which we are
thankful.
As it turned out, we
were gathered around the dining room table satiated and noisy playing a game of
UNO when my daughter remembered the assignment. So, my granddaughter ran to get
pencil and paper and wrote the first couple of sentences to get us started.
Each of us wrote
something about family, love and home and how thankful we are to have someplace
warm to gather and enjoy each other. As such, it was not much of a
"progressive" story; there is no telling how my granddaughter's
teacher will grade it. But, we were delighted with the message. It said
something about us and being thankful.
These are difficult
economic times. And, I think each of us, even the very young, realize how
fortunate we are. Millions of Americans have lost jobs and their homes or are
facing foreclosure. Hunger stalks even more people than food banks and other
charitable organizations can assist.
On Thanksgiving,
politicians can be seen standing in serving lines helping to feed the hungry.
But, Thanksgiving is just one day. Many people do not have enough to eat or a
place to sleep on a daily basis. Ironically, some of these same politicians
advocate cutting social service programs, including education, and investing in
risky endeavors, such as nuclear energy, that could render our home, planet
Earth, unfit for human habitation.
This is
The Need to Debate Nuclear Power
By John Burl Smith
Entering
the White House, President Barack Obama talked of a new energy policy with
renewable and alternative energy sources as the centerpiece. As a result of
such talk and even some action in the private sector efforts to move away from
nuclear power and oil 
have
become less expensive and more prevalent. The American Wind Energy Association
reports that close to 10,000 megawatts (Mw) of new wind power joined the grid
in 2009. This is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 times what an AP1000 nuclear
reactor will generate but without the long wait of construction or the
radiation risk and waste. According to a report by the nonprofit Environment
California, solar panels installed on rooftops across the state are generating
one gigawatt of solar power, equaling the power generation capacity of 2
typical coal-fired power plants. Solar and Nuclear Costs Magazine reported that
solar electricity has become cheaper than electricity from nuclear plants in
However, Mr. Obama
stepped on his message regarding alternative energy sources in February 2010
while trying to court Republican support for his climate and energy policies by
announcing a loan guarantee of $8.3 billion to help the Southern Company build
twin reactors in
The new Plant Vogtle
in
Issues surrounding
certification of the Westinghouse-Toshiba AP1000 are many. Some are standard
design flaws but the petition documents 7 un-reviewed safety concerns which
have come to light with the ongoing disaster at
Gundersen says,
"Westinghouse's assumption of zero probability of reactor and/or spent
fuel cooling failure poses a dangerous risk to public health and safety.
Fukushima Unit 4 released enormous amounts of radiation when its spent fuel
pool cooling system was shut down during the tsunami. This same sequence is
possible with the AP1000 - and the lessons learned from the
For instance,
Gundersen identifies further concerns, "The AP1000 containment system is
"extraordinarily close to exceeding its peak post accident design
pressure. Its containment is designed for 59 pounds of pressure and the
accident calculations analysis is for 58.3 pounds of pressure. So the margin is
very small or 7/10 pound of pressure between what the containment can withstand
and what they believe will be produced after an accident. The AP1000 Oversight
Group has already identified the inability of the AP1000 shield building to act
as an effective ultimate heat sink and its containment system to prevent
releases of radioactivity in the event of an accident. "The NRC said that
containments never leak but
TEPCO's admission
(11-2-11) that melted nuclear fuel inside three of the
Even though, the
Fukushima accident is rated at Level 7, the highest on the UN's International
Nuclear Event Scale, and is considered the world's second most serious nuclear
disaster, after Chernobyl, there is scant debate among Republicans over the use
of nuclear power as a source of energy vis-à-vis safer sources or what
to do with waste, as well as clean up in the event of an accident. Just
considering the radiation releases that caused more than 80,000 people to be
evacuated for 30 kilometer (20 miles) not to mention the environmental
aftermath, every American not only Georgians and
With power companies
pushing for 30 new reactors across the U.S., 14 are AP1000s -- and all of those
are slated for sites across the South: Duke Energy's Lee plant near Gaffney,
S.C.; Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point plant south of Miami; Georgia
Power/Southern Company's Plant Vogtle near Augusta, Ga.; Progress Energy's
Shearon Harris plant near Raleigh, N.C. and its Levy County plant in Florida;
the SCANA/South Carolina Electric & Gas Summer plant near Jenkinsville,
S.C.; and the Tennessee Valley Authority's Bellefonte plant in Hollywood, Ala.
--- the prospects for a nuclear accident grows exponentially. The next
president will definitely face these decisions. Where he stands on nuclear
power and how to deal with waste and accidents are "homeland
security" issues that should be debated like "war."
Americans should
occupy nuclear power plants to pressure lawmakers to insure that the RNC is
rigorous with certification. Moreover, congressional candidates should lead a
national debate on nuclear power versus support of alternative energy sources
no matter who is president. Plant Vogtle and VC Sumner are lines drawn in the
sand; once we cross them, they become another problem we are passing on to our
grandchildren to solve. (Sources http://atlantaprogressivenews.com,
www.truth-out.org, and www.ens-newswire.com)
Thanks for What?
By Robert Scheer
I
love Thanksgiving for its illusion of abundance. It brings back early childhood
memories of the one day each year during the Depression when the food on my
family's table was not the leftover produce that my Uncle Leon could no longer
sell at his stall, or the nearly spoiled organ meats that our local butcher
offered at a steep discount.
But
Thanksgiving day was quite the opposite, and while I obviously can't recall
what was served in 1936, the year I was born, the holiday was soon seared into
my childhood memory as the day when the good times looked upon us in the form
of charity gift baskets from philanthropists of various religious and political
orders, much like the needy will be served today in volunteer kitchens across
America and just as soon will be forgotten.
It did not take long
before I was old enough to realize that the largesse of Thanksgiving was the rare
exception, and that "just getting by," as my mother's brave optimism
would have it, was the norm. Getting by, thanks to Mom's piecework in the
downtown sweatshops and my mechanic father's signing on to one of the New
Deal's public jobs programs.
Then came the
economic miracle of World War II, dismissed in its day by some Republicans as
Franklin Roosevelt's treachery, and my parents and other relatives got their
jobs back. The relevance of the wartime jobs to Thanksgiving in our family was
that my Uncle Edward, the welder, was rewarded every year at his plant with one
enormous turkey or two smaller ones.
The result was what
I recall as an annual day of bloating, as if my extended family was frantically
storing calories in preparation for a severe economic winter that was certain
to return. But for us it didn't return. Not with the good union jobs that
abounded in the postwar boom and the opportunities provided by the GI Bill and
the spread of affordable college education that made upward mobility a truly
plausible American goal.
Every time I need to
be reminded of what was done for my generation in the way of generous
government-funded programs, I reread the part of Colin Powell's inspiring
autobiography where he writes about the educational opportunities and vigorous
community support programs that postwar kids in the
I thought back to
those buoyantly optimistic times at CCNY, the working-class Harvard as it was
justifiably called, last week when students protesting onerous tuition hikes at
the
No
more. On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the bounty of that harvest
as the stakes have been pulled up on 50 million Americans who have lost or soon
will lose their homes. The housing crisis haunts a majority of Americans, even
those who own their homes outright but have lost their jobs and must now sell
in a downward-swirling housing market.
Good public education on every level, from preschool through college, is now a
matter of inherited privilege reserved for those who can pick and choose
affluent neighborhood settings for their children's schools. And the prospect
of affording one of those settings is dim for most parents in a country where
securing a good job is beyond the reach of so many highly motivated people.
How many folks from
my generation are honestly sanguine about the economic future of their children
and grandchildren? What I have heard constantly, and just this week from a
former top investment banker addressing a college class I teach, is that our
offspring probably will face a decade of lost opportunity. I thought back to my
college days and how shocked any of us, even those from the most impoverished
of circumstances, would have been to hear such a prediction.
As The New York
Times editorialized this Thanksgiving, "One in three Americans - 100
million people - is either poor or perilously close to it."
A
bummer of a message, I know, until I think of those pepper-sprayed college
students linking arms, and of all the Americans, young, old and between, who
have occupied their minds with a challenge - that it doesn't have to be this
way. For their brave spirit of resistance we should be most grateful this
Thanksgiving.
About Me: Scheer is editor in chief of
Truthdig. Over 30 years as a journalist, his columns have appeared in
newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.
His columns can be read at www.truthdig.com.
US Census Figures Show Jump in Child Poverty
By Fred Mazelis
Figures
released by the US Census Bureau indicate an official child poverty rate of
21.6 percent, the highest since the specific surveys of child poverty began in
2001. The report comes from the American Community Survey, a nationwide study
that includes an 
annual
sample size of about 3 million addresses across the
The highlights of
the latest survey, for the year 2010, show that 15.75 million children lived in
poverty and that more than 1.1 million children had been added to the total
between 2009 and 2010.
Black children, as
has been the case historically, had the highest poverty rate, at 38.2 percent.
Poverty among Hispanic children was 32.3 percent.
The number and
percentage of children in poverty increased in 27 of the 50 states during this
period, and no state saw the number or percent of children in poverty decrease.
Ten states had child poverty rates of 25 percent or higher, with the highest
rates reported in
The child poverty
rate has trended upward in the past 10 years. After falling slightly in the
years 2006-2008, it has shot up following the 2008 financial collapse, rising
1.8 percentage points between 2008 and 2009 and then another 1.6 in the
following year. It is now more than 20 percent for the first time since the
surveys began.
About one out of
every three children in poverty lived in the four most populous states of the
country--
The
official poverty rate among children is, according to the Census, determined by
comparing annual income to a set of threshold dollar values that vary by family
size, number of children and age of householder. If the given family's income
is less than that threshold value, the individuals in it are considered below
the poverty level. The thresholds are based on a cost of living that is
calculated using the Consumer Price Index, which is very widely considered to
understate the actual expenses for families, including housing, health care and
other needs. Food costs, which have historically been stable and in some cases
trailed the overall rate of inflation, have jumped drastically for many
necessities in the last several years.
The latest ACS
survey of child poverty follows other recent data released by the Census
Bureau, including a revised measure showing a 16.1 percent national poverty
rate, compared to a rate of 15.2 percent. The Census reported 49.1 million in
poverty, but also acknowledged that nearly double that figure, 98 million, or
almost one third of the
During the Great
Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt, seeking to save the
capitalist system, declared in his second inaugural address, in January 1937,
"I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clothed and
ill-nourished." This famous phrase, associated with the heyday of American
liberalism, was delivered literally in the midst of the famous
Today, as the census
figures attest, it would be no exaggeration to say that nearly one third of the
nation struggles with many of the same issues as those of 75 years ago. But the
current Democratic occupant of the White House, presiding over crisis-ridden
and declining American capitalism, is completely silent on fighting poverty.
Instead, the White House and congressional Democrats are engaged in
behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Republican leadership to decide how
many additional cuts will be made in programs like food stamps, unemployment
benefits, Medicare, Medicaid and other life-and-death necessities for the
working class, retirees and the poor.
The current
stalemate on the so-called supercommittee of Congress revolves around how much
to cut from these programs. Not a single voice has been raised among the big
business politicians for a genuine war on poverty and homelessness. Instead,
they argue over whether the savage cuts are to be "balanced" by some
token tax increases on the wealthy. This shows in the clearest possible fashion
that the task of fighting poverty can only be taken forward through the
independent political struggle of the working class, in a bitter fight against
the Democratic Party and all of the institutions of big business. (Source: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/nov2011/pove-n22.shtml)
Foreclosed Homeowners Re-Occupy Their Homes
By Zaineb Mohammed
Gage's
monthly payments spiked after her adjustable rate mortgage kicked in, and she
could no longer afford the payments on her three-bedroom house in the city's
Bayview Hunters Point district. She says she tried to modify her loan with her
lender, Florida-based IB Properties, but to no avail.
When Gage initially
left about 10 months ago, she took some personal items with her, but left most
of the furniture and continued paying for some utilities. "It didn't feel
right for me to move. I just left my things because I knew I was going to
return to them eventually," she said. She had to re-activate a few
utilities when she returned, like the water, but found the process fairly easy.
Walking back into
the house was an emotional moment for Gage, but a joyous one. "I was like
Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz; there's no place like home," Gage said.
"It's a family home; I plan to stay there."
Gage was one of
about two dozen homeowners who gathered Tuesday for a community potluck on
Homeowners expressed
outrage at the way predatory lenders have targeted their community.
Residents of the
Bayview are starting to see how the African-American community was especially
victimized in the foreclosure crisis.
Gage believes that
single women and elders in the black community were targeted for predatory
loans. At the peak of the housing boom she was solicited for an adjustable rate
loan to do some home improvements, even though she told the loan agent that she
was on disability and did not have a steady income.
According to a
report released last week by the Center for Responsible Lending, African
Americans and Latinos were consistently more likely than whites to receive
high-risk loan products. About a quarter of all Latino and African-American
borrowers have lost their homes to foreclosure or are seriously delinquent,
compared to under 12 percent for white borrowers.
Bayview residents Reverend
Archbishop Franz King and Reverend Mother Marina King, who are founders of the
St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, are also facing foreclosure. Their
eviction date is set for Dec. 22.
King expressed deep
anger and sorrow at the situation facing the black community in the Bayview.
"First redevelopment moved us out of the Fillmore and now we're losing our
properties too? It's like there's nowhere for us to go," he said.
Grace Martinez, an
organizer with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) who
helped to arrange the event, commented that banks have become increasingly
hostile to their efforts. "They call the police on us; they laugh at
us."
Vivian Richardson, a
homeowner on
On Nov. 3, over the
span of one to two hours, approximately 1,400 emails were sent and more than
100 phone calls made, imploring Chairman Theodore P. Janulis to stop
Two weeks have
passed and she has yet to hear anything further. The bank spokesperson commented
that
However,
On Dec. 6, there
will be a national day of action, "Occupy Our Homes," where people
across the country facing predicaments similar to Gage and Richardson may
follow their lead.
Partly inspired by
the Occupy movement, the day of action is supported by various community
organizations like Take Back the Land and ACCE. The call to action is for
people to move back into their foreclosed properties and to defend the
properties of families facing eviction.
Disgruntled feels: Coordinated!
Mainstream media, which are controlled by the 1%, would have us believe the
crackdown on Occupy Wall Street that occurred on the same day in major cities
across the country was not a coordinated event. No one with half a 
brain
believes that propaganda. The National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee and
the Partnership for Civil Justice have filed requests under the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) asking the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security,
the FBI, the CIA and the National Parks Service to release "all their
information on the planning of the coordinated law enforcement crackdown on
Occupy protest encampments in multiple cities over the course of recent days
and weeks." Their request specifically seeks documents or information that
pertains to federal coordination of the crackdown and the police response. I
would be surprised if that information is forthcoming. The Justice Department
under Attorney General Eric Holder has been a disappointment and is, in all
likelihood, apt to continue disappointing. However, the absence of written
documentation does in no way disprove the attack on
Disgruntled wants to know: In an effort
to appear more humanitarian and law-abiding than the prospective GOP
presidential 
contender,
Mr. Obama claimed the
Disgruntled says: First Lady Michelle
Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe 
Biden,
served as grand marshals at a NASCAR race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. They
were present to promote their Joining Forces project on behalf of military
families. A replay of a video shot shows clearly that when Mrs. Obama was
introduced the crowd booed. It was embarrassing. Rather than using this as a
teachable moment, the White House and NASCAR are busy downplaying the incident.
Clearly, Mrs. Obama, whose approval rating is one of the highest of any public
figure in the nation, was taken aback by the negative reception. Because we
would rather downplay the incident, we will never know what made this huge
crowd of good Americans boo the First Lady.
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and
Telephone Calls
Email
www.platts.com...Progress says reactor lid
not fully tightened after outage...The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission will
begin 
a
special inspection at Progress Energy's Brunswick-2 unit in North Carolina
after the utility said Friday the reactor pressure vessel's lid was not
adequately tightened when it restarted earlier this week. The unit shut
Wednesday morning after the reactor leaked. An investigation showed the
inadequately tightened reactor vessel head was a potentially
"significant" safety issue, Progress said in a report filed with the
NRC. Workers seeking the source of the leak found that at least 10 of the 64
bolts that secure the reactor vessel head to the pressure vessel were not fully
tightened. The company is reviewing what happened and whether any components
were damaged.
Email www.truth-out.org...Hunger in
America: By the Numbers...By Travis Waldron and Pat Garofalo...Last year, 17.2
million 
households
in the United States were food insecure, the highest level on record, as the
Great Recession continued to wreak havoc on families across the country. Of
those 17.2 million households, 3.9 million included children.