Democrats Following Republican Lead in Privatizing Transit, Just Like They've Done with the Schools

All across the country, Democrats --Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Andrew Cuomo, Cory Booker-- have pushed privatization of public services: through the 2000s they have done this with public schools, closing them and replacing them with charter schools.
Now we have a Democrat doing the same thing in Maryland. Read how Democratic governor O'Malley is pushing to have a private company build and operate a public transit line. This is a dangerous pattern. The record shows that private companies abuse workers worse than do public operations. (And unionization? Hah! That'll be more difficult.) And what about night or weekend service? Will this get scaled back sometime, on the argument that it isn't profitable? Folks: red light: public transportation (Amtrak's Northeast Corridor the lone exception) is rarely profitable.
Read below, noting the references to government money into the project. Yet it will be run by a private company? Sounds a lot like charter schools. Think "charter transit line."

Maryland to seek private firm for Purple Line project

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By John Wagner, Published: August 4 E-mail the writer

Maryland will seek a private company to build and operate a planned $2.2 billion light-rail Purple Line, marking the first time the state has used such financing on a public transit project.

Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) plans to make the announcement about the 16-mile transit link at an event in Bethesda on Monday. The governor also plans to highlight more than $1 billion in new funding for transportation projects in Montgomery County, administration officials said.

he package includes a $400 million state commitment for construction of the Purple Line, as well as more funding for county bus service, new intersections and other road work in one of the most congested regions in the state.

“It doesn’t solve every problem, but it helps us a lot,” said Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), who plans to attend the event and was briefed on the package.

The event is the latest in a series launched by O’Malley after the passage this year of amajor transportation funding bill that gradually raises gas taxes. The first increase of 3.5 cents per gallon took effect last month. By mid-2016, motorists can expect to pay as much as 20 cents more per gallon, according to legislative analysts.

At the events, including one in Prince George’s County last month, O’Malley has focused not on the unpopular tax increase but the promise of new jobs and economic development that come with the projects.

The biggest-ticket item to be touted Monday is the Purple Line, which would run along an east-west route inside the Beltway through Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. The plan calls for 21 stations, with service between Bethesda and New Carrollton.

Maryland officials are counting on the federal government to cover about $900 million of the project’s construction cost and will look for contributions from local governments and the private sector as well, said Erin Henson, a spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation. Construction could begin as early as 2015.

     . . . .

[Go to the original Washington Post for the full article by John Wagner]

Democratic Mayors, Govs, Repression Against Occupy Encampments

While the pioneering Occupy encampment of the year, our Arab Spring in the autumn, has been Occupy Wall Street, in a city with a Republican mayor, Michael Bloomberg, Democratic mayors figure prominently in the cities with crack-downs today, this weekend, this month, against the Occupy encampments.

Occupy Portland, under Democratic mayor Sam Adams, facing an eviction order for midnight tonight, Saturday, November 12th.
His explanation:

Occupy has had considerable time to share its movement's messages with the public but has lost control of the camps it has created. The cost to the larger community is rapidly increasing. The city itself finds itself at a turning point. Thus, the city will soon temporarily close Lownsdale and Chapman Squares to the public to put an end to public safety, health and crime problems, and to repair the park land.

--From KDRV, http://kdrv.com/page/230337
--Actually, one can read a more balanced presentation (with lengthy, uninterrupted statements by an Occupy Portland representative, Jim Olver) at the PBS News Hour site from Veteran's Day, November 11: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/occupyportland_11-11.html

My position is this: sadly, with human nature there is often violence and unkempt decorum. Since when have cities demonstrated an absolute record of totally preventing crime and litter? The first amendment, with its guarantee of free speech and assembly, has no exemptions for the prerogatives for police power.
Is it not interesting that this weekend is seeing an almost simultaneous police enforcement of curfew laws / organized repression of free assembly and free speech?

Occupy Oakland, under Democratic mayor Jean Quan, facing police eviction notices: Oakland Tribune: http://www.insidebayarea.com/top-stories/ci_19319311

Occupy St. Louis, under Democratic mayor Francis Stay: a federal judge denied a request for a restraining order to allow them to stay in Kiener Plaza through this weekend: KMOV video: http://www.kmov.com/news/local/Occupy-St-Louis-protesters-given-3-pm-Friday-deadline-to-clear-out-Kiener-133651343.html

Occupy Dallas, under Democratic mayor Mike Rawlings, facing a Saturday eviction order as well, in spite of video showing that a police officer pushed a protestor from a planter: NBC DFW: http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/133717633.html

UPDATE: DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS ALSO:
Occupy Albany: New York State governor Andrew Cuomo (Democrat) has insisted that an 11:00 PM curfew be enforced this evening (Saturday, November 12th) at state-owned Lafayette Park. Yet, Albany County District Attorney P. David Soares (admittedly, also a Democrat) has said that he will not prosecute peaceful violators of the curfew. (AP at: http://online.wsj.com/article/APaf6a39e0a44d4544b30a84a9cbf6287f.html)

See the scene across the United States at more occupy events at Free Speech TV: http://www.freespeech.org/blog/daily-occupy-report-111111

CORPORATE MEDIA, PARTIES, THE 99%
Have the politicians, police, media forgotten that issues such as wildly out of control CEO salaries, evisceration of progressive tax rates, wealth gaps unseen for a century, went unrecognized, unmentionable by the corporate media or wannabe populist politicians, until the Occupy Wall Street movement arrived on the scene.
Notice that these local and state governments are run by Democrats. Whose party are they? Are they facilitating free speech by people from the 99% Or, by their exclusion of protestors from public assembly, are they more accurately seen as the party of the 1%. Rich people and corporations have spaces in which they can assemble and discuss their views. Cannot the sub-0ne percent people have their own speech in public places of their choosing?

Big Tar Sands Sit-in Protests at White House -Will Obama Listen?

Interesting timing that global warming protests at the White House were scheduled for a week right after Hurricane Irene, the largest Mid-Atlantic and New England --very convenient, and pertinent.

140 protesters were outside the White House on August 29, 2011, submitting to arrest. (Today is day 10 of a two-week protest.) They were protesting against Keystone's Tar Sands pipeline from Alberta, Canada to Texas, U.S. As an opponent of the pipeline noted, we have seen an increasing number of episodes of extreme weather.

Now, albeit, a single incident of extreme weather does not always indicate an effect of global warming. Take for example, the cycle of large hurricanes hitting the New York City/ Long Island region in recent decades, 1938, 1960, 1985, 2011. In the cycle we have hurricanes coming about every 25 years. And, the scientific consensus is that we cannot we identify a causal relationship of global warming upon tornadoes.

But, in aggregate, we are seeing more days of very high temperatures, weeks of 90s, 100s degree temperatures from Texas to Florida. And we are seeing severity of weather patterns in certain parts of the country: in the Southwest and Mountain West: drought and wildfires; and in much of the rest of the continental U.S.: record rainfalls.

WHAT IS THE TAR SANDS PIPELINE PROJECT?
There is much oil in Alberta, Canada. The United States has a high appetite for fossil fuels. Transcanada, is building the Keystone Pipeline to carry diluted bitumen, a crude oil, from there to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. Proponents of the project say that the oil from the project will help ween the United States off its dependence on foreign oil (often pundits mention the Middle East, but they omit Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela).

You can watch a short debate between an opponent and a proponent of the pipeline on the PBS News Hour show of August 29. Here, below, is a map of the pipeline's projected route. (Note its path through several red states and to Rick Perry's Texas. Watch Governor Perry gloat over the money that it brings through the state and ignore Obama's role in the pipeline.)

Read more background on the Keystone Project at PBS News Hour's Rundown blog, "Proposed Tar Sands Oil Pipeline Elicits Protests."

Then again, consider the above mentioned signs of worsening weather, the melting of glaciers, and the international scientific consensus: we are experiencing global warming, and humans ARE causing this.
We should be investing in renewable energies: wind, solar, corn-based ethanol. We should be shifting from investments in roads and airports to inter-city trains, and for regional population clusters, high speed rail. We should be developing residential and work communities in compact arrangements, similar to the patterns that we see in the older cities of the Mid-West and the Northeast. The judgment behind this pipeline proposal is questionable.
Protesters were calling on President Barack Obama to take action to stop the project. Specifically, they want Obama to deny a permit to the project. Details, see "NW environmental news: Oil sand pipeline in the crosshairs of activists", at OregonLive.com, August 29, 2011.

The organized opposition has been going for two years now. The current protest has given the story more legs. At earlier this month, Daily Kos ran this post with an online petition to Obama to stop the pipeline.

NASA'S JAMES HANSEN'S CRITICISMS
Number 112 of the 140 arrested today at the White House was James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, New York. Elizabeth McGowan in "Amid Cheers, NASA Chief Is Arrested at Oil Sands Pipeline Protests: James Hansen, the 70-year-old renowned climate scientist, was the 112th of 140 arrested on day 10 of the Keystone XL pipeline sit-ins", wrote:

Hansen—who has been arrested a couple of times before for protesting the harvesting of fossil fuels—regularly criticizes the Keystone XL pipeline as the "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet." The Obama administration is expected to issue a decision on the international project by the end of the year.

WILL PRESIDENT OBAMA BE MOVED?
Given that President Obama is heeding the prerogatives of the Corporate Occupied Political System, the odds are very slim that he would to anything to oppose this project. His record in the past two years has shown that he attends to the interests of corporations. Plus, he's got the Tea-Party Republicans, such as Rep. Michele Bachmann breathing down his neck to keep oil prices down. My prediction, despite any protests, Obama will be more concerned with satisfying vehicle drivers that want low gas prices. Despite the protests, Obama will not deny the pipeline project a permit. He will play to the middle and show himself to be the centrist that he is.

Jeff Cohen: Obama is not Caving into Corporate Interests; He already has Caved in

Jeff Cohen of Ithaca College makes a compelling argument at MichaelMoore.com against the corporate bias that President Barack Obama has demonstrated from the start of his presidency.

He wraps up by suggesting that a progressive candidate challenge him in the 2012 Democratic primaries for president.

July 25th, 2011 8:24 AM
Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests

By Jeff Cohen

In a campaign almost as frenzied as the effort to get Barack Obama into the White House, liberal groups are now mobilizing against the White House and reported deals that would cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. They accuse President Obama of being weak and willing to “cave” to corporate and conservative forces bent on cutting the social safety net while protecting the wealthy.

Those accusations are wrong.

The accusations imply that Obama is on our side. Or was on our side. And that the right wing is pushing him around.

But the evidence is clear that Obama is an often-willing servant of corporate interests -- not someone reluctantly doing their bidding, or serving their interests only because Republicans forced him to.

Since coming to Washington, Obama has allied himself with Wall Street Democrats who put corporate deregulation and greed ahead of the needs of most Americans:

In 2006, a relatively new Senator Obama was the only senator to speak at the inaugural gathering of the Alexander Hamilton Project launched by Wall Street Democrats like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and deputy secretary. Obama praised them as “innovative, thoughtful policymakers.” (It was Rubin’s crusade to deregulate Wall Street in the late ‘90s that led directly to the economic meltdown of 2008 and our current crisis.)
In early 2007, way before he was a presidential frontrunner, candidate Obama was raising more money from Wall Street interests than all other candidates, including New York presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
In June 2008, as soon as Hillary ended her campaign, Obama went on CNBC, shunned the “populist” label and announced: “Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.” He packed his economic team with Wall Street friends -- choosing one of Bill Clinton’s Wall Street deregulators, Larry Summers, as his top economic advisor.
A year into his presidency, in a bizarre but revealing interview with Business Week, Obama was asked about huge bonuses just received by two CEOs of Wall Street firms bailed out by taxpayers. He responded that he didn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus to J.P. Mogan’s CEO or the $9 million to Goldman Sachs’ CEO: “I know both those guys, they are very savvy businessmen,” said Obama. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.”

After any review of Obama’s corporatist ties and positions, the kneejerk response is: “Yes, but Obama was a community organizer!”

He WAS a community organizer. . .decades before he became president. Back when Nelson Mandela was in prison and the U.S. government declared him the leader of a “terrorist organization” while our government funded and armed Bin Laden and his allies to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. That’s a long time ago.

It’s worth remembering that decades before Reagan became president, the great communicator was a leftwing Democrat and advocate for the working class and big federal social programs.

The sad truth, as shown by Glenn Greenwald, is that Obama had arrived at the White House looking to make cuts in benefits to the elderly. Two weeks before his inauguration, Obama echoed conservative scares about Social Security and Medicare by talking of “red ink as far as the eye can see.” He opened his doors to Social Security/Medicare cutters -- first trying to get Republican Senator Judd Gregg (“a leading voice for reining in entitlement spending,” wrote Politico) into his cabinet, and later appointing entitlement-foe Alan Simpson to co-chair his “Deficit Commission.” Obama’s top economic advisor, Larry Summers, came to the White House publicly telling Time magazine of needed Social Security cuts.

At this late date, informed activists and voters who care about economic justice realize that President Obama is NOT “on our side.”

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- widely seen as “America’s Senator” -- is so disgusted by recent White House actions that he called Friday for a challenge to Obama in Democratic primaries: “I think it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition.”

Although Sanders has said clearly that he’s running for reelection to the senate in 2012 – not for president -- his comment led instantly to a Draft Sanders for President website.

Imagine if a credible candidate immediately threatened a primary challenge unless Obama rejects any deal cutting the safety net while maintaining tax breaks for the rich. Team Obama knows that a serious primary challenger would cost the Obama campaign millions of dollars. And it may well be a powerful movement-building opportunity for activists tired of feeling hopeless with Obama.

It’s time for progressives to talk seriously about a challenge to Obama’s corporatism. Polls show most Americans support economic justice issues, and that goes double for Democratic primary voters.

If not Bernie, who? If not now, when?

Hmm: Russian & Pakistani Media are Needed for Us to Know of News Blackout on (Nearly) Flooded Nuclear Plant

Something is dead wrong when the nuclear-promoting Barack Obama presidency is succeeding in making us rely first and foremost on media reports from Russia and Pakistan to learn about the near-flooding of Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant in Nebraska.
Another case showing that we need a Green Party to advocate clean, renewable energy, instead of risky nuclear plants as the corporate president Obama does.

Here's the news thumbnail from Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" on the near-disastrous nuke plant flooding:

Massive flooding along the Missouri River has put two nuclear plants in Nebraska on alert. On Sunday, the Cooper Nuclear Station declared a low-level emergency as the Missouri River threatened to flood the nuclear power facility. Authorities say the plant, which is about 70 miles south of Omaha, will have to close down if the river rises another three inches. Meanwhile, the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant, located about 20 miles north of Omaha, has been shut down since April 9, in part due to flooding.

Here's the lead material from the Huntington, WV story, itself relying on Russian sources:

US Accused of News Blackout on Nebraska Nuke Plant

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 20:53 Special to HuntingtonNews.Net

By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers (from a Russian Agency Report)

A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant [photo top left] located in Nebraska.

According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.

Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”

Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.

Though this report confirms independent readings in the United States of “negligible release of nuclear gasses” related to this accident it warns that by the Obama regimes censoring of this event for “political purposes” it risks a “serious blowback” from the American public should they gain knowledge of this being hidden from them.

Interesting to note about this event was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chief, Gregory B. Jaczko, blasting the Obama regime just days before the near meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant by declaring that “the policy of not enforcing most fire code violations at dozens of nuclear plants is “unacceptable” and has tied the hands of NRC inspectors.”

Read more at the Huntington News source page:
http://www.huntingtonnews.net/5415

And watch Thom Hartmann's report on his "The Big Picture" TV show at Russia Today at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NidxieeUl4&feature=player_embedded#at=208
(Evoking Gil Scott-Heron ["We Almost Lost Detroit"], someone linked this video at DemocraticUnderground.com with the phrase, "We Almost Lost Nebraska." The plant is near the borders of Missouri and Kansas as well.)

Pakistan's "The Nation" first broke this story, June 18, last Saturday, at
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/18-Jun-2011/US-orders-news-blackout-over-crippled-Nebraska-Nuclear-Plant-report.

Thank you, Pakistani and Russian media, for leading us out of the dark.