Since you mentioned it....

Cape Cod Online offered the following article which I thought was pretty interesting --

Bat nursed to health in time for Halloween

Wild Care in Eastham is rehabilitating a small brown bat that was found on the ground malnourished and with tears in its wings.Cape Cod Times/Steve Heaslip
By Jason Kolnos
October 16, 2010
EASTHAM — He won't turn into Nosferatu. He prefers a simple insect repast to a bloodbath. And he likely won't dive-bomb into your hair.

A little brown bat is getting the royal rehab treatment at Wild Care in Eastham, and that's a bit of good news for a species that has been decimated across the region.

This plucky fanged fella was brought to the wild animal hospital two weeks ago with multiple puncture wounds and damage to his wing's webbing.

A cat had gotten at the bat, hypothesized Lela Larned, executive director of Wild Care.

After daily doses of electrolyte-infused fluids and tasty mealworms, the bat more than doubled his weight.

"When he first came in, he was emaciated, sluggish and unresponsive," Larned said. "Now, he's self-feeding, taking short flights and much more aggressive."

Folks at Wild Care are treating this little brown bat as a member of an endangered species, even though it isn't yet listed as one in Massachusetts.

Bats are dying in the state's caves and mines — where they hibernate during winter months — at alarmingly high levels, according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife). Biologists attribute the cause to white-nose syndrome, a crusting fungus that attacks their muzzles and other body parts. Mortality rates may be as high as 95 to 100 percent.

An unpleasant example comes from the state's largest hibernaculum (winter bat quarters) in Chester, where a normal winter population was 8,000 to 10,000 bats. But during recent winters, all those bats have apparently died, according to MassWildlife.

"With all the declines that bats have suffered, we wanted to go to every length to make sure this one survives," Larned said.

And if you're sick of scratching bug bites, it behooves you to befriend a bat, too. These winged spelunkers are serial killers of mosquitoes and other insects.

Larned encourages folks to consider installing bat boxes that can host hundreds of them, including females and baby bats.

"A single bat can eat thousands of insects a night, so if you have one of these, you won't have mosquitoes," Larned said.


Coincidentally, thedailygreen offered 7 Surprising Facts About Bats that offers some great pictures and narrative.

Both of those forced me the re-visit Wednesday, August 4, 2010 STATE SPRAYING TO TARGET DISEASE-CARRYING MOSQUITOES.

All of which makes me ponder our arrogance and stupidity as a species.

Allow me -- when the public matter of mosquitoes arose, we were baffled!

For just about 30 years, a few bats have nested under our rake boards. They raise their families and grow and do their thing in the evenings. We have a nodding and appreciative neighborly relationship. Their numbers periodically increase as the harvest increases.

They've been pretty tolerant and forgiving like the time the house was power washed before painting.

A trip outside, into the garden invited the abundance of dragon flies to dive bomb maybe in search of prey that was becoming scarce.

On the evening we were forced to endure aerial spraying, it was misting - not quite a rain. Our bats had been circumnavigating the house, doing their job, sadly oblivious to the poison falling from the skies.

That poison, promoted as benign, destroyed the bats and the dragonflies, allowing the mosquito population to rebound and flourish.

Yesterday, October 17, was the first day a dragonfly was seen.

Years ago, a friend recommended Farnam's Nature's Defense® Water-based Fly Repellent Spray and Concentrate that we've used successfully that includes this product description --

Water-based formula combines citronella with other botanicals
Repels horn, stable, house, horse and deer flies, plus mosquitoes and gnats
Contains no preservatives, additives or artificial colors
Alcohol-free – will not irritate sensitive skin
For use on horses, ponies and foals
Available in ready-to-use formula with trigger sprayer or concentrate (dilutes 4:1)

It's herbs, folks! Harmless stuff the Big Chemical Companies don't promote, instead of poisoning the environment.

Instead of blindly accepting the hysteria, insisting on our superiority as a species, we might consider that the bats are warm blooded, just like humans. What are we doing to ourselves?

How stupid are we as a species?

Dollar Stores, Family Dollar, Dollar General

As the middle class loses its buying power and poverty increases as a consequence of failed Reactionary Party fiscal policies that plunged us into the "Great Recession," this article was pretty interesting.

Maybe we'll all be working 80 hours a week for a pittance.

Banana Republic here we come!

CorpWatch Community Portal: http://community.corpwatch.org
***************************************************
Dollar Stores: Top Link in the Sweatshop Chain
By Kent Paterson, Special to CorpWatch, October 6, 2010

A growing group of chain-store corporations that cater to America's poor with
cheap goods are classifying workers as managers. By categorizing employees as
salaried managers these dollar stores avoid paying overtime wages that the Fair
Labor Standards Act mandates for hourly workers.
http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15629


Family Dollar
http://www.crocodyl.org/wiki/family_dollar


Dollar Stores: Top Link in the Sweatshop Chain


by Kent Paterson
October 6th, 2010

Abel Lopez was a busy man. The El Paso resident’s job with Family Dollar, Inc. averaged 60-80 hours a week. A former graphic designer and ad man from neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Lopez spent his days unloading trucks, processing freight, scouring toilets, running cash registers, cleaning, shelving, changing prices, doing inventory, and covering for other employees. As a bonus, he was even held up by armed robbers.

Like others at Family Dollar who wind up spending most of their time doing grunt work, Lopez bore the title of manager. He contends that the company routinely classifies regular workers as managers in order to categorize them as exempt employees and in doing so ensure they are not subject to the overtime provisions of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). (See box.)

Family Dollar is one of a growing group of chain-store corporations that cater to America's poor by selling cheap goods, many imported from sweatshops in low-wage countries including China and Mexico.

Critics of the two largest dollar store chains, Family Dollar and Dollar General, contend that the companies extract super-profits from the uncompensated labor of overworked store “managers” and other employees.

“It’s corporate theft,” asserted Alabama attorney Lance Gould, whose firm represents some of [Dollar General’s] managers. “All these dollar stores, their company structure is the same. Their largest controllable expense is their labor budget.”

Last April, after more than seven years on the job, Abel Lopez was fired. Family Dollar blamed him – unjustly, the worker says -- for bad upkeep of the store. Recently, he and a small group of supporters conducted roving pickets at different Family Dollar stores in El Paso. One day he stood outside a store wearing a t-shirt that read: “Family Dollar: Exploited Manager,” while an El Paso police officer warned the group not to leaflet on company premises.

“We’re being misclassified as store managers to avoid paying overtime,” Lopez charged. “I think the profit is made out of the hours they don’t pay the managers. ...They give you a payroll, and actually most of the time the payroll doesn’t cover you,” Lopez said, adding that managers were forced to do the jobs of workers they could not afford to staff.
Stout and straight-talking, Lopez resumed picketing as the mid-day traffic picked up and the hot sun blazed the pavement of the border city.

Pennies on the Dollar


Pay for Family Dollar managers like Lopez starts off around $550 per week but the long hours required result in some employees barely earning above minimum wage, Lopez says. At the opposite end of the company’s income spectrum, Family Dollar CEO Howard Levine enjoyed an annual compensation package of $5.38 million in 2010--part of a five-year bundle valued at $14 million, according to Forbes.

Based in North Carolina, Family Dollar began in 1959 with one store in Charlotte. More than 40 years later, the chain has more than 6,700 stores in 44 states with 45,000 employees. Earning nearly $7.9 billion in revenues for fiscal year 2010, Family Dollar recorded nine consecutive quarters of double-digit earnings per share growth through the summer of this year. The chain “significantly expanded operating margins and improved inventory productivity” while continuing to return “excess cash” to its shareholders, according to a company statement.

For the first three quarters of fiscal year 2010, Family Dollar paid out approximately $58 million in dividends.

While Family Dollar raked in profits, Lopez scrambled to make ends meet. With mortgage payments, as well as a wife and three young daughters to support, he did what so many other workers are forced to do by the Great Recession: dip into his 401(K)3.

As the months dragged on, Lopez waged a battle on two fronts: out on the streets and inside state unemployment offices, there he eventually prevailed against Family Dollar’s initial rejection of his claim, he said.

Abel Lopez is not the first company manager to challenge the Tennessee-based retailer. In 2006, more than 1,400 former and current company managers won an Alabama lawsuit alleging FLSA overtime violations and seeking compensation. Agreeing with the plaintiffs, a federal jury ordered the company to pay $35.6 million. Family Dollar appealed.

Family Dollar chairman and CEO Howard Levine praised the hard work of his employees but insisted they were exempt from laws requiring overtime pay. “We believe we are correct in classifying our store managers as salaried managers, and we intend to continue to fight for what we believe is right,” Levine said in a statement.

In 2008, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and upheld the judgment against Family Dollar. The Fortune 500 company did not respond to several requests for comment on the current complaints against the company.

The Inflation of Dollar Stores

Rising from the U.S. Bible Belt, the dollar store trend began back in the 1950s. Today, three Fortune 500 companies compete for the title of Old King Buck--Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree. The corporate chains appeal to legions of economically-stressed shoppers, with Dollar General even sponsoring an advice-column blog authored by “Ms. Cheap.”

Unlike many retailers, the dollar store industry is thriving in these hard economic times. At the top of the heap is Dollar General. Beginning as a family business in Springfield, Kentucky, it expanded into a huge company that was eventually taken over in 2007 by affiliates of corporate raiders KKR and Goldman Sachs.

Publicly traded since 2009, Dollar General counts more than 9,000 stores, 72,000 employees and sales in the neighborhood of $11.8 billion. Like some Family Dollar stores, Dollar General accepts food stamps and goes beyond the buck-an-item model by also featuring grocery aisles. While checking the weekly coupon stand, customers can browse tabloids with headlines like “Michael Jackson Seen Alive.”

Dollar General faces the same overtime issues as Family Dollar. The “majority of [mangers'] work is the same as hourly employees,” said Gould, an attorney for Beasley-Allen, the Alabama-based law firm that since 2004 has handled thousands of employee complaints against Dollar General. Unlike actual executives, Gould charged, Dollar General’s managers must defer to district bosses for significant decisions. The approximately 750 cases pending in various U.S. courts make overtime lawsuits filed by managers of retail outlets “one of the fastest-growing areas of litigation,” said Gould.

A spokesperson for Dollar General said the company does not comment on litigation.

True to its name, Dollar Tree does indeed offer mostly very cheap goods. As the night of witches and goblins approached, El Paso shoppers were greeted with a gaudy “Halloween Headquarters” stocked with $1 candy bags, “boneyard” skulls, black crows and other apparitions of faux terror.

For a mere buck, borderland children can play at killing with toy assault rifles and grenades, the make-believe images of real-life weapons used every day just across the river in violence-torn Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. They can also pretend to ply the tools of the trade of returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans stationed at El Paso’s Fort Bliss in ever increasing numbers.

Boasting more than 3,900 stores in 48 states, Dollar Tree traces its evolution to the Ben Franklin variety store in Virginia. Changing into a publicly-traded company decades later, Dollar Tree has recently busied itself buying up similar retailers in different states. During the second quarter of 2010, Dollar Tree opened 56 stores and closed only five.

Between Wal-Mart and a Garage Sale

“Dollars may not grow on trees but outlets of Dollar Tree’s stores seem to,” noted Hoover’s.

“Customers are responding in record numbers to our outstanding values and fun shopping experience,” said president and CEO Bob Sasser, who presumably also finds fun in a four-year compensation package Forbes estimated at $9.42 million.

Filled with the products of the world’s low-wage manufacturing centers, the dollar store industry occupies an economic niche somewhere below Wal-Mart and K-Mart, and somewhat above the weekend garage sale. They fill store fronts in moribund cities and strip malls around the country, as in economically depressed Barre, VT, where a Family Dollar displaying cheap items in bright colors nestles next to a nail emporium, a Chinese restaurant, a basic Radio Shack, and a long-empty storefront.

Dollar stores are also fixtures of immigrant communities. In New Mexico, west Texas and elsewhere it is common to find them near indoor flea markets, pay-day lenders and other manifestations of what Eric Murillo of the El Paso-based Retail Workers Rights Committee (RWRC) called the brave new world of the “predatory economy”.

Organizing for Fair Treatment

Organized this year to support Abel Lopez and other workers, the Retail Workers Rights Committee is laying the groundwork for a fresh burst of labor activism in an industry that is notoriously anti-union.

The new group demands a halt to the misclassification of store managers, an end to threats and intimidation of employees, and an increase in workplace security and no-retaliation pledges.

Founder of El Paso’s Border Workers Association, Guillermo Glenn, noted that the Family Dollar battle has special resonance in a city where retail jobs are one of the few options left. After NAFTA and other free trade pacts were implemented, nearly 40,000 manufacturing jobs were demolished in what Glenn termed a Katrina-like economic storm.

Unpaid overtime is a major problem in the retail and fast food industries of his city, Glenn maintained. Worse yet, he said, is weak Texas labor law that gives employers the power to fire even “if they don’t like your shoes.”

Ironically, in El Paso’s shops now, gadgets and gizmos made in China and other low-wage havens compete with cheaply produced Mexican goods. If workers’ grievances are as severe as they appear to be, it poses the question of whether retail stores are the sweatshops at the top of the sweatshop chain.

Added Glenn: “I see the movement of the retail workers as very important because there is [so much] sub-employment in this area-part-timers and people that don’t work sufficient hours.”

Backed by allies from different social movements, the RWRC is planning an October 16th national day of action against Family Dollar in cities such as El Paso and San Antonio. Organizer Eric Murillo said Family Dollar employees across the country were in the same boat. “We feel if we keep this pressure up, we’ll get other Family Dollar workers and perhaps other retail workers involved in this struggle as well,” Murillo said.

Unpaid Overtime: Ripping Off Workers,
Communities

At the root of
employee complaints against
Family Dollar, Dollar General, and other
retail chains is a somewhat archaic Fair
Labor Standards Act passed in
the 1930s.
The Act came about when “mom-and-pop”
establishments and not
“mega-
corporations” were the norm, said Karen
Dulaney Smith, owner of
the KDS
Consulting labor-management firm in
Austin, Texas. Exemptions
for retail
managers and others under the FLSA set
the stage for a wider
assault on overtime
and the 40-hour workweek.

Long backed by the
U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and other business
associations, the Bush
administration’s
Department of Labor (DOL) attempted to
expand overtime
exemptions in 2003 to
cover more than 8 million additional
workers,
according to an analysis prepared
by the Washington. D.C.-based Economic
Policy Institute (EPI).

“It was fraudulently sold to the public and
Congress as something that would simplify
the law,” said EPI Executive
Vice-President
Ross Eisenbrey “Some of these people
think there
shouldn’t be minimum wage.”

Adopted in 2004, softened but still
expanded overtime exemption rules
affected about 6 million new workers,
Eisenbrey estimated. Chefs, sous chefs,
nursery school teachers,
mortgage loan
officers, media workers, and others were
suddenly handed
“promotions” that
bumped up their status from lowly, hourly
workers.

At the same time it was relaxing overtime
requirements, the Bush
administration
quietly gutted the DOL’s wage and hour
law enforcement
capabilities by simply not
filling a large number of positions after
employees retired, said Dulaney Smith,
who worked as a DOL investigator
between 1987 and 1999.

A report from the Brennan Center for
Justice found that the number of DOL wage
and hour investigators dropped
from 921
in 1975 to 788 in 2004, while the number
of workers who
received back wages fell
from 380,254 to 288,296 in the same time
frame.

In organization with the National
Employment Law Project (NELP),
AFL-CIO,
Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center and
other labor advocates,
the Just Pay
Working
Group is negotiating with the DOL to
address
overtime and other pay issues. A
2010
Just Pay report documented rampant
overtime violations. The study cited a 2008
survey of 4,387 workers in
New York,
Chicago, and Los Angeles that reported
workers were cheated
out of
approximately $56.4 million in wages every
week in the three
cities alone. Not only do
family budgets suffer from the wage theft,
but
so do local economies and tax bases,
the report noted.

Immigrant
workers are disproportionately
impacted by wage theft, said Catherine
Ruckleshaus, NELP legal co-director. If it is
not curbed, massive wage
theft has
negative implications for reversing the long
economic slump,
Ruckleshaus added. “The
more our society permits these jobs to be
low
and underpaying, the less our
economy picks up,” she said

Jetson Green

Since it seems the Reactionary Party would make their Dirty Energy policy a campaign issue, Jetson Green offers great ideas and insight about energy usage and alternatives and is available with a free subscription. Their site is worth an exploration.

Racing Against Time: A Bright Future
By Preston Koerner

This article is a contribution to Honda’s “Racing Against Time” thought leadership series.*

Recently, I was approached by Honda to tackle the topic of "peak oil" in relation to the normal conversation on Jetson Green. This site is devoted to green building innovation, and you may be thinking the subject of peak oil -- specifically, the idea that oil is a finite resource -- is a little tangential.

But it's not. In fact, oil is used to make all sorts of products and to power residential and commercial buildings. Honda's invitation has given me an opportunity to brainstorm on the subject and, after some contemplation, I believe there are six ways the building, design, and construction industry can eliminate the use of oil entirely.

#1: Ultra Conservation at the Outset
Recently, Bill McDonough said, "efficiency will not save us" and "being less bad is not being good." There's a point in these bold statements, regardless of whether you believe incremental effort is helpful or mandatory for environmental progress. So I want to be clear. When I say "ultra conservation," I'm not saying we should seek greater efficiencies. I'm saying we should use extreme conservation as a path toward eliminating the use of a resource entirely.

Perhaps the Passive House standard illustrates my point. Generally, a Passive House is extremely airtight and ultra efficient. These cutting-edge homes are primarily heated by warmth from people, equipment, and solar gain. In other words, a Passive House is designed and built to nearly eliminate heating and cooling equipment. A house that doesn't need an active HVAC system is a house that doesn't use energy and won't need oil.

#2: Bridging the Gap with Technology

Ultra conservation, however, shouldn't require that people stop moving, working, and doing. Lifestyles may change, but a spartan living will not create the kind of movement that would eliminate the use of oil. After ultra conservation, we can and should tap renewable resources -- sun, wind, earth -- with available and reasonably priced technology.

Technology such as solar panels, small wind turbines, and geothermal systems all present viable opportunities to power the built environment with something other that oil (or replacement fossil fuels). Indeed, energy producing buildings can sell extra power to the grid or use that energy to power the next generation of vehicles.

#3: Controlling Transportation Energy Intensity

Even if a building is a net non user of energy or produces energy, it's important to examine the environmental impact associated with the location or siting of the structure. The transportation energy intensity of a building, which is the amount of energy expended in getting people to and from a building, can't be ignored. This is where a lot of oil is consumed through vehicles.

Commuting to the average office building accounts for roughly 30% more energy use than the building uses itself, according to Environmental Building News. For the average new office building, commuting accounts for more than twice the energy used by the building itself. For this reason, folks scrutinize density and proximity, so that people can access work and services without traveling large distances.

Building users should think through their choice of where to live and work, if possible. Why not live within five or 10 minutes of your office, church, and services? The closer you are, the more likely you will be to walk, ride a bike, or use mass transportation -- eliminating the need for oil-based energy.

#4: Sourcing Local Materials Properly


Similarly, materials used by a building's occupants or incorporated into a building are transported only by the use of energy. Though some forms of transportation are more efficient than others, it's impossible to ignore the amount of energy used in hauling materials around the world.

This concept, localism, if you will, regularly surfaces with the discussion of bamboo from China, natural stone surfaces from Italy, or FSC certified wood from some remote country.

LEED certification, for example, rewards projects that use "regional" materials that have been extracted, processed, and manufactured within a 500 miles radius. This is good and where possible, the radius should be shortened. Nevertheless, we should recognize that a large amount of oil is burned getting materials around, so steps can be taken to entirely avoid this environmental impact entirely.

#5: Sourcing Natural Non-Petroleum Materials

Materials are also made with petroleum in some cases. Asphalt, plastics, some forms of insulation, etc. An asphalt surface may be durable, but is there an equally durable surface made with a natural material? Spray foam may provide a tight seal and ultra-efficient envelope, but is there a soy-based alternative or something else that can be substituted?

May I suggest an effort toward naturalism. Petroleum is sourced from the earth, but it's not the kind of natural material we need in our products, furniture, or homes. We need natural materials that don't have toxins and harmful volatile organic compounds in them. We need materials that are not full of oil. A movement that rewards natural materials is necessary to extricate oil from all materials.

#6: Function Like the Natural World

In nature, animals don't take and burn oil to build, move, or live. Janine Benyus, a pioneer and leader in the biomimicry movement, explains: "The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone," according to the Biomimicry Institute.

This is the premise and the promise of biomimicry, which is the science and art of emulating nature's best biological ideas to solve human problems. AskNature, an open source project and website, is one place where "bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born." For example, by studying photosynthesis, maybe we can find better ways to absorb sunlight and convert it to usable energy.

Nature is full of ideas, yet it is our responsibility to learn them. I believe this is an area that can and should be instructive going forward as we look for inspiration to avoid using oil.

The Future is Bright

Oil pervades all aspects of the built environment. However, the world is changing. The smartest innovators are working on electrical vehicles, energy storage, innovative materials, and new technology to power both buildings and cars. Consider this: we now have the technology to live in an energy producing home that's powered by on- and off-site renewable energy. We now have the technology to drive around with non-oil fuel sources. The technology of the future exists now, though we have to take action to use it.

*Jetson Green was selected to provide a unique perspective on how we should approach the discussion of oil as a finite energy source. During the first week of October 2010, five individuals provide their own thoughts on the subject. These independent contributors were not compensated for their participation and as such their views are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Honda. Details and links to what others are saying about “Racing Against Time” can be found at www.facebook.com/honda.

Does this even make sense?

At your fingertips, a world of information is opened to you if you choose to access it.

One of the areas that greatly impacts Americans is the consistent failure to address ENERGY SECURITY. (The Chinese are aggressively producing, promoting and employing 'alternatives' to enhance their ENERGY SECURITY and leaving the US in the dust.)

Yeah, it's kinda complicated because of all the misinformation tossed out there by profitable industries, well paid lobbyists and slick advertising, environment be damned!


Consider this -- Nuclear Energy costs

$7,500 per kilowatt to build

That’s more than double the capital costs for solar power and three and a half times the cost for wind.

And this is interesting --

In his address, Alexander criticized Democrats' for proposing billions of dollars in subsidies for renewable energy -- but he failed to note that nuclear power is already

the most heavily subsidized industry in the energy sector.

In 2005, Congress handed the nuclear power industry $13 billion in federal aid, and two years later went on to approve an additional $20.5 billion in loan guarantees, making U.S. taxpayers the cosigners on loans for new nuclear projects -- half of which are expected to end in defaults.

Taxpayers and ratepayers have also forked over $11 billion for the Yucca Mountain high-level waste disposal dump, which the Obama administration recently scrapped over concerns about long-term safety.

And of COAL? The Dirtiest Energy source is allowed to continue to 'extract' Cheap Coal and escape environmental protections through Mountain Top Removal that has destroyed 500 mountains and untold communities and drinking water in the process, leaving destruction in its wake.

While the rest of the world marches past the US toward Energy Independence, a few wealthy individuals who have generously fund the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Jeff Perry and Charlie Baker have jumped on board.

This only proves that the Republicans will say and do whatever they have to in order to distort the truth and protect wealthy campaign contributors to the detriment of our future.

What a pity so many believe them.

Jeffrey Perry calls Cape Wind 'job killer'

CENTERVILLE — On the shores of Craigville Beach, with sun-drenched Nantucket Sound as a backdrop, 10th Congressional District candidate state Rep. Jeffrey Perry said Friday the proposed Cape Wind project is a "job killer."

Citing the signing Wednesday of the federal lease of the off-shore site as a subsidy for a private developer and the cost of electricity that will be generated by the 130 wind turbines, Perry said he would use the bully pulpit as a congressman to fight it.

"I will do whatever I can do to make sure this project does not go forward," Perry said, with members of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound holding anti-wind farm signs nearby.

Perry's position on Cape Wind is in sharp contrast to his Democratic opponent, William Keating, who started out the campaign opposed to the wind farm but now supports it. In a meeting with the Times editorial board earlier this week, the Norfolk County district attorney said he initially opposed Cape Wind because of computer images that depicted what it might look like. But his position on the Cape Wind project didn't jibe with his stump speeches on the need to get away from the country's dependence on oil, he said.

"I kept listening to myself in these speeches," Keating said. "It was not reconciling."

Cape Wind and other renewable energy projects, along with Massachusetts Maritime Academy and Woods Hole research institutions, provide the possibility for Cape Cod to become a leader in green jobs, Keating said.

"Short term, it's going to provide jobs, and long term, it's going to help too," he said.

Perry charged Friday that Cape Wind would be a drain on the economy. Electricity for a small grocery store would increase $500 per month if the state Department of Public Utilities gives the wind farm the green light, he said.

"That's a job killer," Perry said.

Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind, said the project is expected to create 600 to 1,000 construction jobs and, eventually, 50 permanent jobs on Cape Cod.

"It's sad that on the same day the Department of Energy announced that offshore wind power can create 43,000 American jobs over the next 20 years, with the first of these jobs being right here on Cape Cod, that Jeff Perry would stand on a beach and say 'no'," Rodgers said.

Audra Parker, president of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, said the $6 billion price tag for Cape Wind would put a burden on ratepayers already paying the fourth highest electric rates in the country.

National Grid, which has cut a proposed deal for half of the wind farm's power, has estimated that electric rates would increase by 2 percent once Cape Wind became operational. On Cape Cod, only Nantucket gets its electricity through National Grid.

Cape Wind has received federal approval but there are some lawsuits pending.

Perry said a congressman can use federal clout to block the project.

"Sen. (Edward) Kennedy certainly couldn't vote on this issue, but part of his legacy, I believe, is that he was always adamantly against this, and he used the power of his office to articulate his reasons why," Perry said. "I would like to pick up where Sen. Kennedy left off and be the voice of the 10th Congressional District in opposition to this."

Firefighters Watch as Home Burns to the Ground

The anti-taxation crowd (funded to a large extent by a few wealthy individuals like the Koch Brothers) has rallied and protested taxes without serious consideration or public dialog about public policy.

Should we each get a refund if we don't require public safety services?

Should the Police Department look up whether we paid our real estate taxes before responding?

This should precipitate a national discussion about sensible public policy intended for the Common Wealth. Maybe it's of even greater importance on a national level at which Big Corporations rule.

I'm more inclined to question the moral bankruptcy of a nation that defends this policy.


Firefighters Allow House To Burn Down After Resident Fails To Pay Fire Service Fee

Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tenn., watched his house go up in flames — so did the firefighters who showed up. Cranick had failed to pay a $75 annual fee that residents outside the city must pay in order to receive services from the fire department. Cranick’s house burned down and several pets died. Firefighters did save the house next door because those people had paid the fee. Is this right? Jonathan Cohn is senior editor for The New Republic and is author of the Citizen Cohn blog.


Firefighters Watch as Home Burns to the Ground


Reporter - Jason Hibbs
Photojournalist - Mark Owen

October 05, 2010 -- : Sep 29, 2010 - Updated: Sep 30, 2010 --OBION COUNTY, Tenn. - Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won't respond, then watches it burn. That's exactly what happened to a local family tonight.

A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.

The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning.

Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay.

The mayor said if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck.


This fire went on for hours because garden hoses just wouldn't put it out. It wasn't until that fire spread to a neighbor's property, that anyone would respond.

Turns out, the neighbor had paid the fee.

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong," said Gene Cranick.

Because of that, not much is left of Cranick's house.

They called 911 several times, and initially the South Fulton Fire Department would not come.

The Cranicks told 9-1-1 they would pay firefighters, whatever the cost, to stop the fire before it spread to their house.

"When I called I told them that. My grandson had already called there and he thought that when I got here I could get something done, I couldn't," Paulette Cranick.

It was only when a neighbor's field caught fire, a neighbor who had paid the county fire service fee, that the department responded. Gene Cranick asked the fire chief to make an exception and save his home, the chief wouldn't.

We asked him why.

He wouldn't talk to us and called police to have us escorted off the property. Police never came but firefighters quickly left the scene. Meanwhile, the Cranick home continued to burn.

We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception.

"Anybody that's not in the city of South Fulton, it's a service we offer, either they accept it or they don't," Mayor David Crocker said.

Friends and neighbors said it's a cruel and dangerous city policy but the Cranicks don't blame the firefighters themselves. They blame the people in charge.

"They're doing their job," Paulette Cranick said of the firefighters. "They're doing what they are told to do. It's not their fault."

To give you an idea of just how intense the feelings got in this situation, soon after the fire department returned to the station, the Obion County Sheriff's Department said someone went there and assaulted one of the firefighters.

© 2009 WPSD-TV, LLC All Rights Reserved.


Would You Let This House Burn?

National Review Writers Defend County Whose Subscription-Only Firefighters Watched Home Burn Down

Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile

I like to read the ending of a [fiction] book to determine if it's worthy of reading before wasting the time for a predictable ending.

In life, it's handy to know where the Tea Party movement will take us.

The excerpt below was written by Greg Palast almost 4 years ago (no longer available on his site) and was contained in one of his compelling books, offering a glimpse of our future.

It is impressive that so many people can be so easily convinced to vote against their best interest and support their own impoverishment.

Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile

by Greg Palast


Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006
Chile’s former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet
died today at the age of 91.


Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.

All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.

But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.

The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.

Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.

The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.

By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.

To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.

For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “Its absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.” Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.

Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”

So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.

But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.

In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.

In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.

But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.

******

Dirty Coal

From Sierra Club --




The only way the Coal Industry can convince people that coal is clean is by spending $120 million on a duplicitous advertising campaign over the next three years. We don't have that kind of money, but we do have something better: You.

Would $120 million make you swoon for coal?

That's what American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal industry front group, is banking on. They are pouring $120 million into ads, slick websites, and an all out bus tour to get communities and lawmakers to forget how bad coal really is.1

Last week ACCCE's bus tour was in Missouri and just yesterday they were spotted at the Virginia State Fair. Do you think they mentioned that coal-fired power plants kill 24,000 people a year, are the largest source of human-generated mercury emissions, or waste and pollute vast amounts of our water?2

No - ACCCE is instead using outrageous scare tactics, like in this ad:

“We have to continue to advance clean coal technologies… If we don't, we may have to say ‘goodbye’ to the American way of life we all know and love.”3

some cameras can make coal into apple pie. Market-tested fear mongering can be a powerful force, but not nearly as powerful as the truth told to you by people you trust. Your friends and family listen and respect you a lot more than ads on the TV. That's why we’ve created some easy tools to help you get the word out. Will you do your part?

Let's make sure that the coal industry is pouring that $120 million down the drain. Help shutdown big coal's fancy propaganda machine with our video the grassroots way. It doesn't cost $120 million to send this to your friends.

[1] 'Coal Ad Blitz Launches New Spot at the Nytimes.com

[2] Read all about how dirty coal is here: www.coal-is-dirty.com/the-coal-hard-facts

[3] You can see this at Youtube.com


Beyond Coal Fact Sheet

Coal