REVOLUTION
Lo, no virtue?
Root, unveil our novel It
O, live no rut. Rev unto oil.
Our violent into velour,
Rune to viol, ruin to love.
Verandah Porche / The Rag Blog
March 14, 2011
[Verandah Porche is a poet and writing partner in Guilford, Vermont. Read more of her work at verandahporche.com.]
By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / March 14, 2011
Jewel of warmth, Jewel of the Sun/
And the blossoming of Spring has begun.
Sunday, March 20, 2011 is the Vernal (or Spring) Equinox, also named Ostara and Lady Day. The full moon of 3/19/11 will still be exerting her influence but Sunday is the Sun’s day and his growing strength is likely to overpower Lady Moon’s lingering energies.
Use any pastel shades of color in your decorations, but emphasize pink, yellow, and green hues. Also use eggs, crosses with equal arms (solar and Celtic designs), wildflowers, living plants, and rabbit-images. Rabbits were sacred to Diana, one of the goddesses honored on this day; eggs have an association with Eoster, a goddess of Springtime, whose name comes from the same Indo-European root (“Au) as Eos and Aurora (the Greek and Roman dawn goddesses).
Eoster, like Diana, is a maiden aspect of goddessness, signifying youth, new growth, beginnings, and spring. Eoster was fond of sweet things, so incorporating honey and chocolate into your menu will please her as well as your guests.
Eggs are the most important part of this celebration and should be used in the foods eaten, the activities pursued, the decorations for the celebration. One activity that encompasses all these areas is he use of hard-boiled and decorated eggs as place cards/party favors for your guests.
When all are seated, all should crack their eggs (symbolizing the cracking of winter’s ice), peel away the white (symbolizing the melting of winter’s snow), and expose the hard-cooked yolk (symbolizing Lord Sun in all his golden glory). Then all guests should share pieces of their egg with all other guests (symbolizing a sharing of Lord Sun’s glory).
While this is being done, it would be good for you as leader to remind your guests that the eggshell represents Earth, the egg’s membrane represents Air, its yolk represents Fire, its white represents Water; Earth, Air, Fire, and Water are the four elements that are required to create all things so an egg may be considered the symbol of all and everything.
Solstices and Equinoxes are times when we become more aware of the continual balancing and rebalancing of Planet Earth and of ourselves and our souls. Let the concept of balance in all things form the center of your plans, activities, and celebrations.
[Kate Braun’s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com.]
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011
[This is the third of Paul Beckett’s reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]
MADISON, Wisconsin — Saturday, March 12, 2011. The wind off the frozen lakes was often 20 miles an hour (or more) and from the north. Windchills were in the 20s. It was mainly cloudy. Here and there, old snow and ice remained, and where there was no ice, the Wisconsin Capitol grounds had been trampled into a slippery, muddy morass. And it was beautiful!
Absolutely unprecedented crowds gathered for a whole day of protest events. Police estimates were 100,000 (but exact estimates are impossible). The crowd filled the Capitol square streets, sidewalks and what once were lawns, and then flowed down State Street and Wisconsin Avenue.
This time, a powerful sound system was in place and you could hear the speeches from far out in the crowd. In fact, you could hear them twice as the sound reflected off the taller buildings.
The breadth of social groups protesting Governor Scott Walker’s “union-busting” and public service-cutting Budget Repair Bill was truly awesome. The private sector unions were there (often with major leadership figures). The public service unions (AFSCME and the teachers unions) were there. The firemen, policemen and prison staff were there. Teachers and workers had come from Michigan, where things are also bad.
But the dominant impression one got was just of PEOPLE: all kinds of people, from all over Wisconsin, unaffiliated, unorganized. Just people. A feeling of complete like-mindedness and shared values and interests linked 100,000 people together.
Thank you, Scott Walker.
By 3 p.m., when the main program began, no one could move. The 14 Democratic senators who had decamped to Illinois to thwart passage of Walker’s bill were welcomed back. Each gave a speech to tumultuous applause and chants of “Thank you! Thank you!” They had not, in fact, stopped the bill. But they had provided almost three weeks for understanding — and protest — to develop
The speakers (besides the 14, they included Jesse Jackson, Tony Shalhoub, and Susan Sarandon) noted that now the battle continues, but the battlefield changes.
Suits are already being brought to challenge the legality of the law in the courts.
More important in the longer run are the recall campaigns . While “Recall Walker” was a constant theme in signs and chants, under Wisconsin law that effort can not begin until next year. But petitions against eight Republican Senators have been filed, with May 2 deadlines for completion. There was an enormous sense of energy for these yesterday.
Meanwhile, a Utah-based anti-immigration group has already invaded Wisconsin (it is perfectly legal, it seems) to organize recalls against members of the Democratic “Fab 14” who got so much thanks and appreciation yesterday.
Control of the Wisconsin Senate will be determined during the coming summer by the outcome of these efforts.
Those who participated Saturday went home elated and politically energized in a way that few of us have been for some time. But all understood, as well, that Saturday did not mark the end of a battle, but its beginning. It will be a long battle for the future of Wisconsin, and no one can be sure of the outcome. And Wisconsin, in turn, clearly is just one battleground in the broader struggle for the country’s future.
[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]
By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011
By now everyone knows about the disastrous earthquake that has hit Japan. At a magnitude of 8.9 it is one of the largest earthquakes to hit any country, and it has been a catastrophe to the heavily populated nation.
As I write this the official death toll is around 700 people, but many thousands are still missing and there’s little doubt that the death toll will climb much higher. My thoughts and best wishes go out to the people of Japan in their time of need, and I hope this country will offer Japan all the aid it is possible to give.
But in this post I want to concentrate on one aspect of the disaster — nuclear power. Japan has invested heavily in nuclear power and currently receives a large portion of its electrical power from this source. But they may now be paying the price for that. At least two nuclear power plants at Fukushima have been heavily damaged and are currently in danger of a “meltdown,” which could cause a large explosion that would release heavy doses of very radioactive material into their environment.
They are trying to cool the nuclear cores down by flooding them with seawater and boron, but that is a desperate measure that will take days and no one knows if the cores can be cooled in time to prevent a meltdown. The authorities have said that little radioactivity has been released so far, but they are evacuating people from within a 12-mile radius of both plants and are issuing iodine tablets to the population living in those areas (iodine is supposed to inhibit the body’s intake of radioactivity).
And that is just what is happening at those two plants. Other plants were also damaged and are currently being evaluated. More may be heading for the same kind of trouble. The earthquake and resulting tsunami were bad enough for the Japanese people — the damaged nuclear plants are just adding to their difficulties.
Here in the United States we are currently having a debate over energy. Currently the country relies heavily on fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) but those fuels are causing problems. Much of the oil we use comes from foreign countries — countries where the supply is always in danger (as we can see from the current problems in the Middle East).
Many on the right seem to think that this problem can be solved by just drilling more and more. But the fact is that there just aren’t enough American reserves of oil (even if we tap into our protected wilderness areas) to satisfy the addiction this country has to oil. And many experts (including our own military) believe the world is reaching (or has already reached) the point of “peak oil” — the point at which production begins to fall no matter how much drilling is done.
Coal is not a much better alternative. Although it is plentiful right now and could last for many years, it is also one of the dirtiest of the energy-producing fuels. Even with the new technologies (which industry is fighting tooth-and-nail) it continues to destroy our environment.
Using more coal will simply speed up global climate change (which is a looming environmental and economic disaster regardless of what the right-wing climate-deniers claim). Some are talking about the development of a “clean coal” technology, but this is just a myth being advanced by the coal industry. There is no such thing as clean coal, and I doubt that there ever will be.
But even if the fossil fuels weren’t damaging our environment, they will run out in the future. Coal and natural gas may be more plentiful than oil, but there is not an endless supply of any fossil-based fuel. And someday they will all disappear.
The fact is that new sources of energy must be found or developed. The ideal thing is to find renewable and clean sources of energy (like wind, solar, wave, or geothermal). So far, these sources have not been developed to the point where they could completely replace fossil fuels. That is why many in America (and elsewhere) are advocating a return to nuclear power.
After the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear energy was put on the back burner in this country. But now the idea of nuclear power is making a comeback. Many believe it could fill the gap left by renewable sources and help to wean the country off fossil fuels. And they are quick to tell us that the technology has advanced to the point where accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl couldn’t happen again.
I don’t doubt that the technology has advanced. I’m sure it has. I’m also sure that the Japanese were using the best technology available (since they are one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world). But that 8.9 magnitude earthquake didn’t care about the technology, and the best technology in the world couldn’t have prevented the damage to the Japanese nuclear plants.
This should give Americans pause. Should we go back to building nuclear power plants — knowing the dangers they could pose? And lest we forget, we still haven’t come up with a solution for disposal of nuclear waste from these plants (which is highly radioactive and will remain so for a very long time).
I have to say that I really don’t know what to do about nuclear energy. I like the idea that it doesn’t pollute the environment while producing energy, but I have to wonder if it’s only delaying that pollution since we haven’t solved the disposal problem. I would feel a lot better if we could figure out how to safely dispose of the nuclear waste (for many centuries). And the Japanese experience is showing us, at the very least, that great care must be taken about where any new nuclear power plants are located.
It is time to rethink the usefulness of nuclear power. Maybe it is a viable alternative, but we should carefully consider all the dangers before proceeding with building any new plants.
[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]
INDIANAPOLIS –On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House.
The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).
The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.
The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.
Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:
Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:
We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students –whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products — we stand together!
There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.
One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.
Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.
Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.
The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.
[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]
On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large
supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the
Indianapolis State House. The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers
Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice
activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for
Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe
County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).
The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere.
Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing
onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans.
Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy
atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown
Indianapolis.
The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of
Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear
realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.
Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the
cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:
1. The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.
2. The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work
legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.
3. The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would
negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.
4. Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by
Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.
5. The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in
Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled
to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian
legislation.
6. Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.
7. The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in
Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification
elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public
employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from
establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.
8.The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would
authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any
teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in
private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would
be transferred to private for-profit corporations.
9.The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting
of funds for colleges and universities.
10.The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.
Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:
We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because
together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or
students–whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful
products-we stand together!id=fullpost a the and in of Another all
Type rest of the post hereSource /
By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011
[This is the second of Paul Beckett’s reports from Madison for The Rag Blog.]
MADISON, Wisconson — In less than 24 hours, in a series of shocking and unprecedented developments, public sector union and collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin have been eviscerated by a Republican legislative majority controlled by Governor Scott Walker.
What seemed to Democratic legislative members and to neutral observers (but there are few of those in Wisconsin now) a putsch, began about 6 p.m. on the evening of Wednesday, March 9. As coups go, this one clearly was carefully — even brilliantly — prepared. The surprise was absolute.
Governor Walker spoke to a news conference on Monday, March 7. He referred to meetings at the Illinois border his staff had had with some of the 14 Democratic state senators who had left Wisconsin on February 17 in order to prevent passage of the “union busting” legislation, SB11. (See my article, “Madison and the Revolution at Home,” on The Rag Blog, March 8, 2010.)
A compromise was brewing, Walker implied. “The problem,” Walker said, “is Senator [Mark] Miller.” (Miller is the titular leader of the Senate Democrats.) Maybe it is time, Walker went on, for the Democratic caucus to elect a new leader.
All eyes turned to the Group of 14 Democratic senators: were they divided? Would one or more accept some form of compromise and enable the Republicans to complete their passage of SB11? (The presence of only ONE Democratic senator in the chamber would legitimate the vote passing SB11.] (Read the full text of SB11 here.)
Meanwhile, unperceived, Republicans prepared a trap that would snap shut on Wednesday. The complicated, 144-page “Budget Repair Bill” (SB11) was being taken apart by staff and reformulated, ostensibly to strip out everything BUT the collective bargaining provisions.
The result was labeled a conference amendment to SB11, and was only six pages shorter than the original. But the point was that this new version could be labeled as non-fiscal and would not carry the quorum requirement of the original.
A bizarre reversal of positions was now apparent. Incorporation of the collective bargaining provisions within the Budget Repair Bill, very definitely a “fiscal” measure, had been stoutly justified by Governor Walker on the grounds that they were inseparable from the fiscal repair provisions. (Opponents had argued that the provisions had nothing to do with fiscal “repair” and should be taken out of the Budget Repair Bill and debated separately.)
Now, the Republican position was the opposite. The new version was NOT fiscal. With the quorum requirement changed, whether the Group of 14 were in the Chamber or in Illinois was immaterial. The bill could be passed with Republican votes alone.
The ambush worked perfectly. Democrats and protesters remained focused on the hold-out by the 14 Senators and on the possibility of compromise. Word of Walker’s plan leaked out only at the last minute, late on Wednesday afternoon. Beginning about 5:30 p.m. a cluster of emails, most of them billed “emergency,” appeared in my email inbox. The following, from the Dane County Democrats, is typical:
Breaking Update: Tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor we are hearing that Senate GOP is going to split the budget repair bill, fiscal from non-fiscal, and ram it through in the dark of night. Given that they’re attempting to ram through the bill without any media attention we wanted to let you know that very important developments are likely to occur tonight at 6:00 pm in the Senate Parlor.
Please be at the capital by 6:00PM TONIGHT!
Actually, I did not receive any of the emails until the next day. I was having a quick dinner a block away from the Capitol at Ian’s Pizza (an enterprise that has become known internationally for its role in keeping the protesters in the Capitol Rotunda sustained). I was on the way to a 7 p.m. debate between Madison’s two mayoral candidates.
Suddenly people were shouting, “To the Capitol. They’re going to pass the bill! Tonight!” People in groups of two, four, six, were hurrying up State Street toward the Capitol. I followed. At the top of State Street was a volcano-shaped mountain of snow (some five inches had fallen the night before). On its peak a tall young man stood shouting in an amazing voice: “Everyone to the Capitol! Everyone to the Capitol!” He waved us onward.
The word spread amazingly. By 6 p.m. hundreds were there; very soon thousands. It was dark. Everyone wanted to enter the Capitol. A long line formed at the only entrance that was (in a limited way) open. The line moved glacially. Inside, on the other side of the revolving door, protesters were packed, waiting, apparently, to be taken one-by-one through the security wanding procedure. Noise was deafening: “Whose house? Our house!”
Soon, however, any pretense of an open Capitol was abandoned; the police closed the doors absolutely, leaving some inside and thousands outside. People were angry.
The bill was then instantaneously passed (or “passed”) by the Senate Republicans.
By about 6:25 p.m. it was all done. The session was immediately adjourned, and the Republican Members were reportedly smuggled out of the Capitol building and beyond the crowds through a tunnel. (Their escape and removal by a special Madison Metro bus was not as secret as they would have liked.)
The word spread among the protesters and, more than any other time in the three weeks of protest, the mood was one of deep anger and frustration. Later in the evening some of the inside protesters opened an unguarded outside door. Crowds outside pushed in, brushing aside the police, who had raced to stop them. Thousands ended up inside, chanting, commiserating, venting. Most left by 2 or 3 a.m.
The expectation was that the building would open at 8 a.m. Thursday morning and that the Assembly would begin passage of the “conference amendment” by 9 a.m. In fact, the building did not reopen in the morning. The Department of Administration announced that an “assessment of building security requirements” was in progress. By 11 a trickle of protesters was permitted in as the Assembly slowly began to organize itself for the crucial session to pass the Senate version.
The session, billed a “Special Session” to allow more flexibility with rules and the traditions of the “Body” as it is always called, was brought to order at 12:34 p.m. Incongruously (considering he had been refused entry to the Capitol an hour or so earlier), the Reverend Jesse Jackson was allowed to deliver an opening prayer. He took no sides on the issues, and insisted that the legislators join hands (literally) across the aisle. They did, and then a bitter partisan verbal battle began.
A little over three hours of speeches were allowed. Most of these were from Democratic representatives clad in the bright orange T shirts proclaiming workers’ rights that they had adopted three weeks before. The session was broadcast by WisconsinEye and is available for viewing here.
The Democrats argued the illegality of procedures. They asserted that the bill before the Assembly was not the same one that had been before the Senate, and that senators (they were all Republican) had not been informed, had not been given copies of the new legislation, and could not have understood what they were voting for. They cited the shame brought on “this Body,” and on Wisconsin by all that had been done over the recent days and weeks.
More than that, they condemned the loss of workers’ rights and human rights, and the great harm that would be done to Wisconsin families and communities by the bill. Representative Tamara Grigsby, Democrat from the 18th District, delivered a particularly powerful and moving speech. (Had this reporter been a member of the Republican caucus he would have instantly moved across the aisle, sobbing with shame.)
To no avail. At 3:40 in the afternoon, abruptly, with some 20 representatives still to speak, the chair called for the vote (it is electronic and almost instantaneous), announced that the bill was passed, and adjourned the meeting.
The Republicans once again dematerialized mysteriously from the Capitol building.
It was over. Or, perhaps, just begun. The Democratic Party and labor unions are filing complaints and suits challenging the legality of the bill’s passage. The Governor’s use of the State Patrol (now under the direction of the father of Scott Fitzgerald, leader of the Senate Republicans, and his brother Jeff Fitzgerald, leader of the Assembly Republicans) to enforce the Capitol closures is being challenged.
But it has been understood from the beginning that this is less a legislative battle than a long-term political one that will touch every community and involve every important issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of Wisconsin is at stake. And as Michael Moore has been saying so eloquently, the implications for the nation are huge.
Already planned for Saturday, March 12, is a major protest, bringing together farmers (who will mount a “tractorcade” around the Capitol square), labor, educators, students, liberal-progressives from all over the state, and many members of smaller communities that are becoming aware of the hit their schools and local governments are about to take from the Walker budget. Major speakers are invited, and it is reported that the 14 Democratic Senators will return to thank the public for their support.
Recall campaigns are planned on both sides. Under Wisconsin’s recall law almost a year must go by before a campaign to recall Scott Walker can begin. The same is true of Assembly members. So effectively, only senators are presently subject to recall. A bevy of progressive organizations are organizing campaigns directed against at least four of the Republican senators and, so far, there seems to be enormous energy behind these. Success would shift the Senate back to Democratic hands. The Republican recall campaigns, if they are pursued, would be directed against members of the “Group of 14” representing swing districts.
The political fallout of this tempestuous three weeks events will soon begin to be known. It is interesting, already, that one Republican senator and four Republican representatives voted against the “conference amendment.” And there is speculation that one reason that Scott Walker opted for this radical and legally risky legislative maneuver was that he sensed weakening on the part of other of the Republican senators.
[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com.]
By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2011
Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.
The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.
All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as 50 countries.
San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.
Diablo Canyon is at Avila Beach, on the coast just west of San Luis Obispo, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A radioactive eruption there would pour into central California and, depending on the winds, up to the Bay Area or southeast into Santa Barbara and then to Los Angeles. The cloud would at very least permanently destroy much of the region on which most Americans rely for their winter supply of fresh vegetables.
By the federal Price-Anderson Act of 1957, the owners of the destroyed reactors — including Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison — would be covered by private insurance only up to $11 billion, a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars worth of damage that would be done. The rest would become the responsibility of the federal taxpayer and the fallout victims. Virtually all homeowner insurance policies in the United States exempt the insurers from liability from a reactor disaster.
The most definitive recent study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster puts the death toll at 985,000. The accident irradiated a remote rural area. The nearest city, Kiev, is 80 kilometers away.
But San Luis Obispo is some ten miles directly downwind from Diablo Canyon. The region around San Onofre has become heavily suburbanized.
Heavy radioactive fallout spread from Chernobyl blanketed all of Europe within a matter of days. It covered an area far larger than the United States.
Fallout did hit the jet stream and then the coast of California, thousands of miles away, within 10 days. It then carried all the way across the northern tier of the United States.
Chernobyl Unit Four was of comparable size to the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, and somewhat larger than the two at San Onofre.
But it was very new when it exploded. California’s four coastal reactors have been operating since the 1970s and 1980s. Their accumulated internal radioactive burdens could exceed what was spewed at Chernobyl.
Japanese officials say all affected reactors automatically shut, with no radiation releases. But they are not reliable. In 2007 a smaller earthquake rocked the seven-reactor Kashiwazaki site and forced its lengthy shutdown.
Preliminary reports indicate at least one fire at a Japanese reactor hit by this quake and tsunami.
In 1986 the Perry nuclear plant, east of Cleveland, was rocked by a 5.5 Richter-scale shock, many orders of magnitude weaker than this one. That quake broke pipes and other key equipment within the plant. It took out nearby roads and bridges.
Thankfully, Perry had not yet opened. An official Ohio commission later warned that evacuation during such a quake would be impossible.
Numerous other American reactors sit on or near earthquake faults.
The Obama Administration is now asking Congress for $36 billion in new loan guarantees to build more commercial reactors.
It has yet to reveal its exact plans for dealing with a major reactor disaster. Nor has it identified the cash or human reserves needed to cover the death and destruction imposed by the reactors’ owners.
[Harvey Wasserman edits NukeFree.org. He is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. He co-authored Killing Our Own: the Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation.]
I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor?
By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / March 10, 2011
The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress in 1947 about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies.
The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.
We frequently marginalize each other — social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.
I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.
That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.
Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level — we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.
Then NPR asked folks to name the most important cause of poverty in the United States.
Number one is “the poor quality of public schools.”
At about the same time, the Heritage Foundation decided to prove poverty in the United States wasn’t a problem after all. The Heritage Foundation survey is titled, “Understanding Poverty in America.” Here’s the starting point.
The next bar graph compares the living space of poor people in the United States favorably to that of the average European.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE.
Here are two more rational definitions of poverty:
Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. — United Nations
To meet nutritional requirements, to escape avoidable disease, to be sheltered, to be clothed, to be able to travel, and to be educated. — Amartya Sen
Better, right? We’re at least getting to the idea of living well and a more humane definition. Notably lacking is the mention of labor unions and collective action, although you could make the argument that the United Nations definition pushes us in that direction with language about effective participation, dignity, and jobs. The lack of worker organization isn’t mentioned in the NPR study. Neither is discrimination, race, ethnicity, or gender or environment or workers’ rights.
Would you have named lack of unionization or lousy labor law or something like that as an important reason why poverty exists in this country?
In July 2002, union members overall had a 20% higher hourly wage ($20.65 vs. $16.42). In blue-collar industry it was $18.88 vs. $12.95; in service occupations, $16.22 vs. $8.98. That’s not counting benefits. Those ratios have remained constant.
Currently nearly one in three public workers are union members compared with 6.9 percent of the workers in private-sector industries. These organized workers are under siege in Wisconsin, Puerto Rico, Indiana, Ohio, and here in Texas. Many work in public schools and universities. The occupation of the Wisconsin capitol started with 2,000 graduate teaching assistants and union members from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on Feb. 14. The attack on these workers and on the work that they do is tightly connected — and they are fighting back.
First, education is not, in and of itself, a cure for poverty. NPR poll aside, “Poor quality of public schools” is not the most important cause of poverty. We could go on and on about how good or bad our schools are, but lack of education is not the leading indicator of poverty.
As much as we’d like it to be so, there isn’t any substantial difference in the average wage of a high school graduate and a high school drop out. It’s considerably less than the boost from unionization. Remember unionization gave a worker at least a 20% boost in wages. A high school diploma gives a less than 15% boost.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency.
Unfortunately, the way we’ve been looking at education both at primary and secondary level is supply-side economics: improve the quality of workers through education and grow the quantity of quality workers– all for the rich employers — and they won’t be poor no more because the rich will take care of them. Well it doesn’t work that way any more than tax breaks for the rich have created an economy that benefits all of us.
All this talk about creating a competitive workforce for the global economy and endless debates about whether our public schools and universities do or don’t meet the demands of the marketplace is a bunch of hooey. But most folks believe this nonsense. Me too. When I think about our teen-age son’s future, I immediately think: will he finish high school; will his grades and SAT scores be high enough to get into a good college; what’s a high ranked college we can afford… and so on.
Even though I know darn well that there would be much better ways to go about making sure that our child has a good future — make sure that his nutrition is good, introduce him to cultural expression, work to strengthen our community with public transportation, public space, libraries, and museums, fight for the rights of public school workers and quality public schools, and fight for the rights of all workers, especially their right to organize.
The attack on teachers’ unions in this country has been absolutely barbaric and I believe it violates international standards of dignity and decency. I also believe there are large elements of sexism involved here. 70% of public school teachers are women overall. In Texas about 82% of elementary and middle school teachers are female. At UT, about 80% of full professors are male and about 60% of lecturers are female.
Working conditions for teachers are really lousy. Think about being the only adult in front of a class of 20 eight-year-olds and having to pee. Forced overtime — hours worked without pay are unbelievable — and pay isn’t so great. Wisconsin teachers average about $40,000 a year. Lecturers in my department, which is unusually well paid, start at $6,500 a class and are only allowed two classes a semester and two semesters a year. That’s $26,000 a year for what works out to be full time work with an unpaid leave over the summer.
Now I would agree that our public schools have failed Latino and African American and working class children. That’s one of the reasons that so many parents fought for integration. We know that separate is not equal. Now we have further segregation of the schools in a system based on and currently exhibiting apartheid.
I don’t think the language is too extreme. A very interesting study explores the role of the Koch brothers of Wisconsin fame in defeating the Wake County, North Carolina, socio-economic integration plan. That plan was a model of quality education for all children for the country. The Kochs poured money into the school board race, cast the plan as communistic, and put in a new school board. They won and the children and teachers of Wake County lost big.
Then we have “Waiting for Superman,” which I watched at the Alamo Drafthouse South with a “progressive” Austin audience who giggled at those lazy teachers, cried and then rejoiced with the poor little black child who won a school lottery, and really dug the idea that the problem with the public school system was teacher tenure and their union. I resorted to drink.
Here’s a cartoon from Saving Our Schools from Superman that sums up the movie.
Saving our schools from Superman
At UT, our buildings are plastered with plaques that reveal the connections between the corporate world and higher education. We have the Accenture Endowed Excellence Fund; the Arthur Anderson and Co. Centennial Professorship; Austin Smiles Endowed Fellowship in Speech Pathology; Bank of America Centennial Professorship in Petroleum Engineering; Enstar Chair for Free Enterprise; La Quinta Motor Inns, Inc. Centennial Professorship in Nursing; the BP Exploration Classroom Endowment; Conoco Phillips Faculty Fellowship in Law; and so on.
We have a University President whose three legislative priorities are:
We have a legislature and a state governor that doen’t believe in public services at all — not education, not health care — not for children, not for the disabled, not for the elderly. They’re cutting off college scholarships and denying the rights of immigrants as well as working class students an education.
That’s the external world. The internal one at the University of Texas, Austin is that the budget crunch is used as an excuse to do what the higher-ups have wanted to do all along. Raise tuitions and cut programs that serve students and lay off lecturers, graduate students, and staff (we’re down to once a month office cleanings). Do away with the Identity Studies Centers that we fought to bring to the University — African American, Asian, Mexican American, women, and gender. Forget undergraduate education and turn us into an elite research institution.
We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
Before I summarize this rant, I wanted you to see a scene from an interview I did with the Director of Public Affairs, Martin Fox, at the National Right to Work Committee. That’s one of the main organizations that the Koch brothers fund and hang out with.
The clip is from a documentary I made in the context of the Pittston coal strike, which was about health care for retired and disabled miners and widows. “Justice in the Coalfields” is about the contradictions between individual and collective rights and what justice means.
The clip begins with a map of right to work states — you’ll be hearing a lot about that in the next few months. It ends with Bradley McKenzie who led a student walkout in support of the miners. He became a non-union coal miner because there were no union jobs, but his ideas express solidarity at its core. In between is Martin Fox who handled press communications for the Committee at the time.
Martin Fox was a proud member of the National Rifle Association. I know this because I watched him get in his car, with a customized license plate that read “GETAGUN.” Martin Fox is now President of the National Pro Life Alliance and a priest. He holds forth on unions on his blog.
Who has the power to challenge these obscene thugs who have taken over our country? Who wants to challenge them?
Well we do. The “we” is organized labor — public worker unions. Really, we’re not providing state “services.” We’re providing public necessities. We’re helping the social movement create a vision of a more decent world that includes the working class. And when we collectively fight for ourselves to have decent pay and decent working conditions and democratic control in the work place, we’re not in contradiction with the public good. We’re supporting it.
There are a lot of us. The Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA local 1686 has 12,000 members in Texas. We have large numbers of women and African Americans and Latinos. Discrimination has been slightly less in the public sector and these workers are more likely to join a union because of a history of struggle. AFT has 57,000 members in Texas and TSTA has 65,000 members. And there are state workers organized by AFSCME and other unions.
Those of us in the labor movement and those of us in the social movement have got to get to know each other. We need to practice democracy together and work together. We need to join every progressive force in this country into a movement that will finally put an end to the systemic destruction of educational opportunity and workers’ rights.
There’s a great line at the end of a Committees of Correspondence statement on Wisconsin:
And to the workers of Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio: our heartfelt thanks — may your occupation of the statehouses foretell the day when you become the governors.
[Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop, senior lecturer at UT-Austin, and member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA. She is the associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]
By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 9, 2011
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — William Butler Yeats
The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.
The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.
This is a month known in the USA for the “March Madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas into political capitols.
In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy built on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:
Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.
Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.
Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.
Writes Terrance Heath,
The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland’s economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction… Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity’s epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.
Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling “like an Egyptian.”
Who would have thunk?
The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the U.S. with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.
Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.
The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences — the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.
Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.
An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigueur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”
Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.
The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after learning that it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message, reports The New York Times.
And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.
Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.’s can follow it.
And even they have problems doing so.
Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.
It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.
The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.
The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system…
Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.
That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is vague and totally undocumented.
On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society Are Numbered.”
Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.
Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.
Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.
It’s clear that denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports The New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”
The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.
All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:
It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.
It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.
Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation — even a carefully constructed strategy — behind the increasingly irrational political debate.
Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.
George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.
The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.
[News Dissector and blogger Danny Schechter directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film assessing the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.
he Attack on the Public Sector and How Unions are Fighting Bac
The Attack on the Public Sector and How Unions are Fighting Back
The labor movement has rarely won anything without the social movement, and the social movement has rarely won anything without the labor movement. One often cited example is Dr. King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom initiated by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
If you have any doubts about the necessity of a combined effort, watch this archival film of John L. Lewis when he testified before Congress about health care and pensions for miners paid by the coal companies. The resulting welfare fund, hard fought at the grassroots level by miners and their families, was the most comprehensive health care that I can think of. I know because I was covered under it from the mid seventies to the eighties when it was lost under Reagan.
We frequently marginalize each other – social movement folks saying unions don’t matter anymore and condemning labor “bureaucrats” and union folks saying that social movement people don’t care about workers and have grandiose ideas of their own power. Some of us get downright schizophrenic dividing our lives into two segments. It’s time we stop this nonsense. We need to speak a common language.
I want to ask a basic question that unifies religious, labor, and community organizations at the core. Why in this, the richest country in the world, are people poor? Please think about how you might respond.
That same question was posed to a wide segment of people, rich and poor, in 2001. The NPR survey provides an analysis of public response to welfare reform (many of us called it deform) during the Clinton administration.
Here’s a table that asks whether it’s circumstances that create poverty or poor people themselves not doing enough. The percentages describe poverty level — we know it’s set way too low. In 2001 200% of poverty for a family of four was $34,000.
People not doing enough
Circumstances
Don’t know
Total
48
45
7
Type rest of the post here
During my visits with Dad at the group home, I witnessed several people with Alzheimer’s harm themselves because they did not have adequate passive assistance devices.
The Senate Special Committee on Aging this past week held hearings titled “Justice for All: Ending Elder Abuse, Neglect and Financial Exploitation.” The hearings were stimulated in large part by a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report that identified elder abuse — physical, economic, and psychological — in just over 14% of the elder population living in the community, rather than in institutions.
The GAO report defined neglect as “refusal or failure to fulfill a person’s obligations or duties to an older adult.” Specifically, the report provides that neglect means “refusing or failing to provide an older adult with such necessities as food, water, clothing, shelter, personal hygiene, medicine, comfort, personal safety, and other essentials.”
While honoring obligations to older adults can be a challenge, whether in the community or in institutions, those obligations are particularly challenging when the older adult has cognitive incapacities. I use as an example my father, who died recently at the age of 94, after living and declining with Alzheimer’s Disease for 15 years.
The most prominent and widely-recognized characteristic of Alzheimer’s is the loss of memory for recent events or knowledge that once seemed almost in-born. My father spent 44 years as a machinist. It was from him that I learned about tools, automobile maintenance, and general repairs.
After he retired, he fixed a small lock for a roll-up closure on a Hoosier chest we own. The lock had been broken and he fashioned the missing part on his lathe. I admired his skill. His ability to use algorithms and other complex math always amazed me, especially because he completed only one semester of college before learning the machinist trade and spending all of his working life at The Texas Company (which became Texaco and then Chevron).
About 16 years ago, I was installing a handicapped toilet for my mother at their home and he was helping me. I asked him to hand me the crescent wrench and he was unable to make the distinction between a crescent wrench and an open box wrench, tools he had spent a life working with, and that he had taught me how to use.
That was when I first felt that something was wrong. Mother confirmed that there had been other signs of a cognitive problem. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and prescribed various medicines that seemed to slow his decline. When my mother’s abilities started waning and Dad’s disease was clearly advancing, my parents asked if they could move in with us.
Just over two years later, mother died. Ten days later dad tripped over his own feet, breaking his left hip. Until then, despite all the reading I had done about Alzheimer’s, I had not known that walking and balance could become a special problem for Alzheimer’s patients.
As the brain becomes more and more affected by Alzheimer’s, the functions controlled by the brain diminish or simply disappear. After his hip surgery and rehab, we established elaborate precautions to prevent him from having another fall. He could walk on a walker only with a wide web belt (commonly called a gait belt or transfer belt) around his chest held by someone to keep him from falling should his feet become tangled up.
When he was in a wheel chair, a seat belt connected to an alarm would alert a caregiver that he had unbuckled it and was about to stand up and someone could assist him. One morning, a caregiver failed to activate the alarm when the seat belt was fastened. After she left the breakfast table for a moment, dad got up to get some milk from the refrigerator, not remembering that he could not walk safely without assistance. He fell and broke his right hip.
For the next year or so that he lived with us, we established simple, but thorough protocols to prevent another fall. Whoever came into our home to assist him was educated about the need always to follow the established protocols. There was a bed alarm, a chair alarm, and the wheelchair seat belt alarm. All of the alarms kept him from another damaging fall.
When an Alzheimer’s Group Home opened in our town and the expenses of home care exceeded the cost of the group home, we moved him to the group home where he lived with a dozen or so other, mostly Alzheimer’s, patients. All of the protocols we had established at our home were put in place at the group home, but we had to get a written order from a physician for the seat belt alarm because the facility’s manager believed that the seat belt was a restraint. Under state rules, it is not.
The Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services provided me with the official definition of a restraint: “Restraints (physical) — Any manual method, or physical or mechanical device, material or equipment attached, or adjacent to the resident’s body, that the individual cannot remove easily which restricts freedom of movement or normal access to one’s body.” Dad often released the seat belt, the alarm sounded, and someone was able to assist him before he stood up and fell.
During my visits with Dad for the 20 months he lived at the group home, I witnessed several people for whom Alzheimer’s was a dangerous condition that caused them to harm themselves because they did not have adequate passive assistance devices.
I saw people lurch out of their chairs and smash their faces on the floor, requiring trips to the emergency room or hospitalization. I saw others who had become so unstable that they could not walk unassisted, yet they had no protections other than the alertness of a sometimes overburdened staff to keep them from falling and hurting themselves.
Alzheimer’s patients need to have protocols developed to protect them from harm without unnecessarily restraining them from normal daily activities. Such protocols are not now mandated by regulations or institutional procedures at most facilities serving Alzheimer’s patients.
Dad had been receiving hospice services for more than two years before his death. A few months before he died, the hospice nurse had recommended that I find a nursing home that would better meet his increasing needs for more nursing care. I started looking around for an appropriate nursing facility. I was pleased that several new nursing homes had opened within 15 miles of our home.
What I found when I visited most of these facilities was that they prided themselves in being “restraint-free.” To them, in spite of the regulatory definition of restraint, the seat belt was a restraint. Several refused admission for him if he kept the seat belt on his wheel chair.
I explained to all that the seat belt was necessary to prevent him from harming himself because he could not remember that he was unable to walk unassisted — an effect of the Alzheimer’s Disease. When he removed the belt, the alarm alerted staff to assist him so that he did not stand up, fall, and hurt himself.
Yet some facility managers insisted that the seat belt was a restraint. I met with facility administrators, nursing directors, and admission officers at several facilities. At one facility, after a meeting with me to discuss the matter, the manager recognized that the seat belt was not a restraint and was needed to protect my father from harm.
For those who insisted that the seat belt was a restraint, I explained that I was my father’s medical agent under a Medical Power of Attorney. According to law, therefore, when I spoke about what was acceptable medical treatment, it was as though my father were speaking. If I said he needed the seat belt to prevent harm, it was as though he had said, “I need the seat belt to keep me from harming myself.” Some of them understood. Others did not care.
Two weeks before his death, I contacted two legal groups that litigate on behalf of the disabled. I intended to sue any facility that would not accept him because of his disability, which necessitated the use of a seat belt alarm system to protect him.
Dad died before we arranged for him to move to a nursing facility, so the principle for which I was prepared to fight on his behalf was not satisfactorily resolved. Nevertheless, at the time of his death he had been accepted, seat belt and all, by at least two nursing facilities.
All nursing facilities should be required to recognize the special needs of Alzheimer’s and other dementia patients and adjust their procedures to the needs of such patients. No one should be restrained without medical necessity, but when protective assists are needed, no definition or public relations concept — such as “we are a restraint-free facility” — should be used to prevent needed care.
Disability advocates should broaden their views, and all medical agents should be prepared to take whatever actions are necessary to protect those to whom they have a legal and moral obligation. Otherwise, our system of advance directives is meaningless, and disability rights is farcical.
Elder abuse takes many forms, as testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Aging has shown. But financial exploitation, physical neglect, and psychological mistreatment are not its only manifestations. The lack of attention to the special needs of Alzheimer’s patients and others with cognitive disabilities must be considered realistically and identified clearly as another form of elder abuse deserving resolution.
We have legal and moral responsibilities to all of the elderly to make sure that our institutions that serve them satisfy their obligations of appropriate care.
[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
