Bad Deeds for 2-28-2011

 

The Superrich Have Grabbed Nearly Everything While Many Suffer – As seen in the graph below, the top 1% of earners are doing just great, the top 20 % are doing OK, and everyone else is losing ground. [more …]

 

First Big Coal Broke the Union; Then It Broke The Town – From a chair on the porch of her home in a hollow deep in the Appalachians, Lora can see the top of Montcoal Mountain being blasted off. The explosions a mile and a half away ruffle her curtains, rattle family photos in her living room, and may be why her walls are laced with cracks. A fine gray dust settles on the steps as fast as she can sweep it off. The noise and “fly rock” raining down have forced her daughter and dozens of neighbors to sell their houses and move away. Lora worries she’ll be next.

The roughly 1,000 union workers who toiled underground during the height of the mining boom of the late ’70s enjoyed some of the best benefits in the country. At one time, the Twilight area boasted two grocery stores, a company store called the Robin Hood, a movie theater, and a mine-sponsored softball league. That’s all gone now. Lora can’t even buy a loaf of bread in Twilight anymore. The stores are gone. Massey’s mountaintop mine there, the largest east of the Mississippi, has consumed the only road leading to the neighboring valley, turning a 15-minute drive into an hour-long trek. Traditionally, locals chose to be buried on the mountaintops, as the Native Americans had before them, so they might be laid to rest as close to God as they could get. The old cemeteries are now green islands amid rocky fields of gray, inaccessible without a mining-company escort. Lora’s friend, a 75-year-old woman who resembles Betty White (I’ll call her Opal), says she denied her husband’s dying wish to be buried up there—how would she ever visit him?

The strip mines have also buried the trout streams in rubble, polluted the water with toxic selenium, and filled the air with silica dust. All told, 501 mountaintops, more than 1,800 square miles of land, and 2,000 miles of streams across Appalachia have been affected.

 

Maine Governor LePage Hired Pro-BPA Lobbyists – Maine governor Paul LePage’s recently made weird comments about the chemical BPA. “The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen,” remarked LePage, scientifically. “So the worst case is some women may have little beards.” Uh-huh.

Turns out LePage has hired some lobbyists for out-of-state drug and toy industry groups to help him form his opinions on environmental and kid-safety legislation.

Shortly after he was elected last year, LePage released a “wish-list” of environmental and health regulations he hoped to roll back. LePage said the ideas in the document came from small business owners in Maine. But it turns out that the wish list was actually the work of Ann Robinson, head of the corporate lobbying group Preti Flaherty Beliveau & Pachios. Robinson’s clients have included PhRMA and Merck. Also the Toy Industry Association of America, which fought Maine’s proposed BPA ban in baby bottles and sippy cups last year. Robinson served as co-chair of LePage’s transition team and is currently his head advisor on regulatory reform.
In addition to Robinson, LePage also hired Patricia Aho, a lobbyist with the law firm Pierce Atwood, as his deputy commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.

Robinson and Aho are not exactly unbiased when it comes to regulations. Lobbying disclosures on file with the state Ethics Commission show both PhRMA and Merck paid Robinson to defeat the KID-SAFE PRODUCTS ACT, a 2008 law that phased out toxic chemicals in toys, car seats, baby clothes, and other children’s products. The AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE and drug maker ASTRAZENECA paid Aho to do the same. The governor’s wish list calls for “revisions to prohibitions of chemicals and materials in products”

 

California Lawmaker Receives Racist Death Threat Warning ‘Rush Limbaugh Will Kick Your Chink Ass’ – California State Sen. Leland Yee (D) called on right-wing hate radio host Rush Limbaugh to apologize for mocking Chinese President Hu Jintao and the Chinese language by speaking gibberish “ching chong chang” Chinese on his radio program. Yee, who is Chinese-American and chairs the state Senate Select Committee on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs, said Limbaugh owes the Chinese-American community an apology for his “pointless and ugly offense.” Naturally, Limbaugh did not apologize, and instead railed against Yee the following day on his radio, calling him out repeatedly by name.

Yee’s call for civility did not sit well with one Limbaugh fan, who responded by sending several racist death threats to Yee’s office this week. “Rush Limbaugh will kick your chink ass and expose you for the fool you are,” the faxes read, threatening him with “death.” As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, “The faxes include a drawing of a U.S. flag-adorned pickup truck towing a noose that is looped around what appears to be a caricature head of President Barack Obama.”

(Warning, contains racial expletives):

Regards,

Jim