Following issues and politics in St. Louis area from the retired "Steelworker" view. Politics will be the main theme, but news of the group and Steelworkers will also be followed.
snip, note some will be protesting social security and medicare cuts
It’s time to take mass nonviolent action on a historic scale to save our democracy. If at least 1,000 people pledge to risk arrest by December 15th, we will organize one of the largest civil disobedience actions in a generationin Washington, D.C. next April. We will call on Congress to take immediate action to end the corruption of big money in politics and ensure free and fair elections in which every American has an equal voice.
The campaign will begin with a march from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. where, if Congress has failed to meet our demand, thousands will gather to reclaim the US Capitol in a powerful, peaceful, and massive sit-in that no one can ignore. Join us!
This will be the fourth year in a row Walmart has been affected by protesters on one of the US's largest shopping days, and the retailer surely hoped to avoid another protest when it raised its minimum pay to $9 an hour earlier this year. No such luck for the retailer, though, which will now face 1,000 protesters across all 50 states. Over 100 workers also plan to organize and fast outside of Walmart's stores.
One worker tells Reuters that she will fast all 15 days and claims that others will do a liquid fast or fast on most days.
In previous years, protests outside of Walmart were organized by OUR Walmart, however, that organization broke up into two separate pieces in September. Instead, a group led by a former United Food and Commercial Workers International Union member is heading up this year's efforts.
Uzbekistan: World Bank must speak out as rights activists are beaten and detained for documenting forced labour in cotton
The government of Uzbekistan continues its brutal crackdown on human rights defenders documenting the massive use of forced labour in the cotton harvest. “For years”, writes Human Rights Watch, “the government has relied on the forced labor of over a million people each year – including children, teachers, medical workers, college and university students, and public employees – to pick cotton. It uses coercion, including intimidation and threats of loss of job, social welfare benefits, utilities, expulsion, and even prosecution to force people into the fields.” And for years the government has persecuted rights defenders documenting this coercion. The World Bank, which is financing the ‘modernization’ of Uzbek agriculture, is supposed to be monitoring the presence of forced labour and has pledged to withdraw over USD 450 million in funding for agriculture if forced labour is confirmed in project areas.
What is it doing in the face of this crackdown?
On September 19, police arrested Elena Urlaeva, who heads the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, together with her husband and young son, for photographing and interviewing workers harvesting cotton in the Tashkent region. They were later released after police confiscated the photographs. Urlaeva has been detained at least four times in the last 4 months and regularly harassed over the past decade. In May this year, Urlaeva was drugged, interrogated and brutalized by the police for documenting the forced mobilization of education and health workers for cotton work. Among the materials confiscated by the police was her fact sheet on ILO Conventions. Two days later, police detained and beat another rights activist, Dmitry Tikhonov, for documenting busloads of people sent to the cotton fields by government officials .
An even more startling contrast can be found between the mortality rates of Hispanics, and of whites with no more than a high school education. Since approximately 80 percent of middle-aged Hispanics never went to college, the educational credentials of this group largely overlap with those of white Americans with high school degrees or less. Yet the middle-aged members of the Other White America now have a mortality rate that is an astonishing 173 percent higher than that of their Hispanic peers.
What could account for such astounding disparities? Case and Deaton found that most of the increased mortality rates among middle-aged residents of the Other White America could be accounted for by just three interrelated factors: drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, and chronic liver diseases that are usually a product of long-term alcohol abuse. (These factors are closely related in that the line between deaths formally classified as suicide and other forms of self-destruction can be quite fuzzy).
Release of the Full TPP Text After Five Years of Secrecy Confirms Threats to Users’ Rights
Update [11/9/2015]:President Obama formally notified Congress of his intent to sign the TPP on Thursday November 5—90 days after which he may sign the agreement and send the agreement to Congress for ratification.
Trade offices involved in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement have finally released all 30 chapters of the trade deal today, a month after announcing the conclusion of the deal in Atlanta. Some of the more dangerous threats to the public's rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online are contained in the copyright provisions in the Intellectual Property (IP) chapter, which we analyzed based on the final version leaked by Wikileaks two weeks ago and which are unchanged in the final release. Now that the entire agreement is published, we can see how other chapters of the agreement contain further harmful rules that undermine our rights online and over our digital devices and content.
MILLION FAX MARCH ACTION PAGE:(sends e-faxes for you, just submit the form)
Finally Reject The Trans Pacific Partnership
Though from leaks we had strong reason to believe there was a lot of bad stuff in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), now that the final text has been made public it is worse than we had even feared.
To help decide whether TPP lives up to the promises made by those selling it, here are some questions to ask as you read the agreement. Don’t be misdirected by what might have been in TPP or what we were afraid it might do; look at what is in it now and how what is in it will affect our jobs, pay and benefits, our environment, our relationship to the giant corporation and the billionaires and their immense and growing power, and our ability to self-govern and make laws and regulations that benefit and protect us.
In other words, as you read the text of TPP ask what specifically do regular, non-wealthy people in the U.S. get from TPP, and what do regular, non-wealthy people in the U.S. lose?
● How does TPP undo the damage done by past trade agreements that President Obama says “haven’t lived up to their promise”?
● How, specifically, does TPP reverse past outsourcing of U.S. jobs, factories and industries?
● Or are there still NAFTA-style provisions that encourage outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries like Vietnam?
● How does TPP increase the number of jobs and the pay for regular working people in the U.S. and elsewhere, and by how much?
● Does TPP have provisions that force wages in countries that currently pay very little to rise to a level that approaches U.S. wages? (This would help those workers buy American-made products, too.)
John Oliver, comedian and host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight" on Friday said that he's not at all interested in having Donald Trump on his show.
"I don’t really care about him in any capacity," he said on CBS' "This Morning." "I don’t really have anything to say to him."
Oliver explained that an interview with Trump would not yield anything new about the real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate.
"He’s said everything he wants to say. He has no internal monologue, that man. So it’s not like you’re going to find the secret nugget he’s been holding back. He’s an open book And that book doesn’t have that many interesting words in it," Oliver said.
The British comedian also complained about the long presidential election and extensive coverage of the race.
Image copyrightUS Department of DefenseImage captionThe report described the cost of construction of the station as "gratuitous and extreme"
The US Department of Defense has spent $43m (£28m) on a vehicle fuelling station in Afghanistan, according to a recently published oversight report.
The project was intended to show how Afghanistan's natural gas reserves could be used as an alternative to expensive petroleum imports.
However, it cost more than 140 times that of a similar project in neighbouring Pakistan.
The report called the spending "gratuitous and extreme".
The highly critical report was published by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a group overseeing the use of the approximately $110bn the US has spent in Afghanistan since 2002.
"It's an outrageous waste of money that raises suspicions that there is something more there than just stupidity. There may be fraud. There may be corruption," said John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
That KXL southern leg is now operational, despite the unusual way in which the Army Corps of Engineers seems to have helped TransCanada, the pipeline's owners, avoid the normal type of environmental review process that has otherwise been in place for similar projects since the 1970s. Horn's investigation looks into the question of whether two federal judges actually stood to profit from their rulings, whether they should have recused themselves from the cases in question, and how "a game of Orwellian rhetoric" allowed the Administration to approve the project without standard environmental scrutiny.
The process "happened behind closed doors," Horn tells me, creating a "horrible precedent" in the bargain. "Basically it happened without public hearings. That was the entire premise of the lawsuit." That suit, however, brought by the Sierra Club, was ultimately rejected with the help of two federal judges — U.S. District Court Judge David Lynn Russell and 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Bobby Ray Baldock (both Reagan nominees) — who Horn finds, each stood to gain financially from the pipeline being built.
Horn describes the Southern portion of the KXL pipeline as "extremely important", as "it connects to the rest of the Keystone pipeline system," allowing for "the highest amounts of oil in recorded history now flowing from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast." He charges that a disturbing precedent has now been set that allows Big Oil "to usurp long-standing [environmental] processes."
Welcome to my blog. As a member of the St. Louis chapter of the Retired Steelworkers and a member of the Alliance for Retired Americans, I can say without a doubt groups are busy in the St. Louis area. This blog is a modest effort to inform members and the general public of some of our activities and concerns. I will also "soapbox" areas and issues.
We see the solution to many of the woes of the St. Louis area as economic and political. St. Louis has a myrid of problems, but a strong economy with responsible leaders would help greatly in the solution to these woes. Alas, such is lacking on several levels with many of the "civil leaders" squabbling like children or worse, taking care of special interests instead of the public. Business leaders? get real, many of these so called leaders shame the term "Captains of Industry".
Once the St. Louis area was a leader in many areas. Now, some of the area can be compared to Third world areas with no problems what so ever.
That is unacceptable.
I take full responsibily for contents of this blog
The government of Uzbekistan continues its brutal crackdown on human rights defenders documenting the massive use of forced labour in the cotton harvest. “For years”, writes Human Rights Watch, “the government has relied on the forced labor of over a million people each year – including children, teachers, medical workers, college and university students, and public employees – to pick cotton. It uses coercion, including intimidation and threats of loss of job, social welfare benefits, utilities, expulsion, and even prosecution to force people into the fields.” And for years the government has persecuted rights defenders documenting this coercion. The World Bank, which is financing the ‘modernization’ of Uzbek agriculture, is supposed to be monitoring the presence of forced labour and has pledged to withdraw over USD 450 million in funding for agriculture if forced labour is confirmed in project areas.
US Department of Defense