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Beltway Progressive
Weekly posts on politics, the presidential election, news, education, career, food, men, women, and whatever sets off a rant.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
James A. Chamblee, 12/02/1938 - 8/18/2005
Friday, July 27, 2012
Who is behind those political ads? Find out with a NEW APP!
The sponsors of the attack ads are as few as five - and up to less than 200 - billionaires. These PACs are their financial playgrounds. Their "free speech" is not only costing billions of dollars, but tens of thousands of votes, and the voices of millions of citizens.
UPDATE: Sunlight Foundation has a new App -- ADHAWK where you can hold your phone up to the ad and it will tell you whose paying - if it's not secret. http://adhawk.sunlightfoundation.com/
Read about the project here: http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/outside-spending/super-pacs/
Organization
|
Total
|
View*
|
Independent
Expenditures
|
Elec
Comm
|
Comm
Costs
|
Super
PAC
|
527s†
|
501c
|
$53,878,098
|
C
|
$53,878,098
|
$0
|
$0
|
x
| |||
$17,002,762
|
C
|
$17,002,762
|
$0
|
$0
|
x
| |||
$16,087,987
|
L
|
$16,087,987
|
$0
|
$0
|
x
| |||
$12,442,024
|
C
|
$12,155,247
|
$286,777
|
$0
|
x
|
x
| ||
$10,999,826
|
C
|
$10,999,826
|
$0
|
$0
|
x
|
x
| ||
Monday, February 20, 2012
The false link between FDA and Monsanto: consumers and progressives should support Michael Taylor
Food activists and consumer groups take issue with the fact that the former chief lobbyist for Monsanto, the dominant maker of genetically modified seeds and pesticides, oversees the nation’s food safety. Here’s a bit on the recent GMO kerfuffle.
“Michael Taylor is a devoted public official and I thought it was outrageous that he was being attacked in this mindless petition, “ said Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the CSPI, an organization normally known for holding government and industry feet to the fire.
Here is the Chicago Tribune article:
The open letter signed by the pro-consumer activists is here (pdf).
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Rev Martin Luther King Jr: I've Been to the Mountain Top for collective bargaining rights
He was there to lend his support to sanitation workers who were on strike, protesting terrible working conditions and low wages. Taylor Rogers and Elmore Nickelberry were among the 1,300 who walked off the job in 1968.
Rogers remembers picking up tubs of garbage that were full of holes. "That garbage would leak all over you," he says. By the time he got home, his clothes were dirty and full of maggots that had fallen on him.
"I had maggots run down in my shirts, and then maggots would go down in my shoes," Nickelberry says. "And we worked in the rain — snow, ice and rain. We had to. If we didn't, we'd lose our job. They said, 'A garbage man wasn't nothing.'"
Rogers says, "It was awful." One day, two workers, who had gone into a trash compactor to escape the rain, were crushed to death. "Sometimes you cry," Nickelberry says.
"Sometimes you get mad and get up in the morning and ... say, 'I ain't going to work.' ... I had to work because that's the only way I could feed my family."
'All We Wanted Was Some Dignity'
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89361277
See also: http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/memphis-v-mlk/
Thursday, March 24, 2011
The 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fires
These public servants, who have no budget yet for this year and are operating under a continuing resolution from a dysfunctional Congress, are used as punching bags by a workforce which it has made to be one of the safest in the world; that is, when OSHA is allowed to police profiteers who use immigrants as disposable labor.
OSHA wall posters now can include the workers who were kidnapped, locked in, and sexually assaulted at the DeCoster egg farms over the past 25 years.
WaPo's Howard Meyerson discusses the horrific tragedy of the Triangle fires:
The seamstresses were just getting off work that Saturday, some of them singing a new popular song, “Every Little Movement (Has a Meaning of Its Own),” when they heard shouts from the eighth floor just below. They saw smoke outside the windows, and then fire. As David Von Drehle recounts the ensuing catastrophe, in his award-winning book “Triangle,” just a couple minutes later the ninth floor was fully ablaze.
* * * *
[M]any, facing the choice of death by fire or death by impact on the city streets, chose the latter and leapt. Down they came, some already engulfed in flame — first a few, then a torrent, before the horrified crowd that had gathered by the building, which was just off Washington Square in the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village.
When it was over, 146 people had either died by fire or jumped to their deaths. Most were young women, almost entirely Jewish or Italian immigrants, many still in their teens, one just 14.
Every little movement has a meaning of its own,
Every thought and feeling by some posture can be shown,
And every lovelight that comes a stealing
All your dreams must be revealing
All its sweetness in some appealing little gesture
All of its own.