Action Alert — Stop Development of Zion-Mojave Wilderness

PDA
Action Alert

Urge your Representative, especially
those in the House Resources Committee to oppose the present bill HR
5769
This bill is suspect from environmental, conservation and
cultural reasons — Even the Bush Administration is in opposition!

HR 5769, introduced by Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) on 12 September 2006
and its companion bill, S. 3636 introduced by Sen. Bob Bennett
(R-UT)
on the same date has the short title of The Washington County Growth and
Conservation Act of 2006. Despite its stated desire to
“conserve,” in reality, the bill does while designating certain areas
of the environmentally sensitive Zion-Mojave area of Washington County,
Utah, protected areas, does much more than that. It seeks to
authorize — at government expense — “critical water, transportation
and utility corridors.” A similar proposed designation of lands
in Nevada (the White County
Conservation, Recreation and Development Act of 2006) was
to be subject to public hearings on disposal of public lands, while
this bill allows over 20,000 acres to be gobbled up for such projects
as developers might see fit with no such public input required.
The Nevada bill also sought to help purify the waters of Lake Mead, and
promote water conservation and the development of affordable housing
through Nevada.

The full text of the bill(s) are available via GovTrack.us
(http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-5769)

During initial subcommittee testimony against the bill, Jerry
Greenberg, Vice President for Regional Conservation with The Wilderness
Society on behalf of Friends
of Nevada Wilderness, The Nevada Wilderness Project, Campaign for
America’s Wilderness, Red Rock Audubon, and The Wilderness
Society spoke in opposition to the Washington County legislation.

“Greenberg noted that the Nevada and Utah bills are very different. The
Washington County bill has inadequate wilderness protection, leaves out
many of the most ecologically sensitive areas, and sets arbitrary
mandates on land sales. While conservationists have consistently said
they believe the acreage figure for land sales in the Nevada bill is
excessive, the parcels must be identified through the BLM’s resource
management planning process. The Utah bill mandates sales for
approximately 20,000 acres and does not require that those lands be
identified through a public planning process.” — Wilderness.org
(http://action.wilderness.org/wildernessII/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=2601348)

Not merely opposed by national environmental groups, but even by
President Bush’s own Bureau of Land Management, the bill is seriously
flawed. Chad
Calvert, the Principal Deputy Asst. Secretary, Land and Minerals
Management, US Dept. of the Interior, noted the danger in the bill in
its present form in testimony before the House Subcommittee on
Forests and Forest Health on 16 September 2006. Calvert noted
that not only would the sale of the nearly 25,000 acres “effectively
require the Treasury to borrow more funds to pay this interest” on the
sale, but that the parcels proposed for sale were unacceptable to the
BLM since “the density of unique and special cultural resources in the
identified area is exceptionally high.”
(http://www.blm.gov/nhp/news/legislative/pages/2006/te060914.htm)

This bill, while protecting a certain percentage of public lands in
Utah, also is a handout for developers who are seeking corporate
welfare to produce more housing in a fast-growing area adjacent to some
of the most environmentally sensitive and culturally significant wild
regions in the West. The “development” portion of the bill’s text
would effectively allow the City of St. George, already the
fast-growing city in Utah to be additionally overdeveloped by the
utility, water, and transportation corridors proposed. Rather
than seeking to conserve electricity and water and fossil fuel use in
the Zion-Mojave area, this bill seeks to encourage it — at public
expense.

Additionally the Southern
Utah Wilderness Alliance is also fighting the drilling of gas wells
in the White River Wilderness Area along with the pork barrel aspects
of HR 5769. The BLM has planned for drilling and construction of roads
for access through this presently pristine wilderness surrounding the
New River. They seek input from the public at the above link to
show disapproval of this move.
(http://www.suwa.org/entry.php?entry_id=792)

Urge all your Representatives and Senators to oppose the bill, HR 5769
and to comment in opposition on the Bureau of Land Management’s plans
to develop the New River Wilderness.

Talking Points;
Environmental Conservation
Cultural Significance
Unsustainable Growth
Corporate Welfare

The New C-word, or an open letter to the working people of the USA

The True C-Word

The actual “C word” which cannot be uttered on the radio, on the television, or appear in print has five, not four letters. It is, of course, class. We hem and haw at the concept of the United States even having classes, much less dare attempt to make political appeals to any save a tremendous mythic “middle class.” By contemporary standards, everyone who can make carfare to get to work and not sleep in the street is “middle class,” save a few “rich” and the “poor.” For some odd reason people who work for others see themselves as “middle class.” That is for two reasons: the first is based on our rejection of the titled Europeans as our “betters,” and the other is the fact that economically, most working people were once at a standard of living that rivalled the European middle class and the people were truly mobile, that is, a man who worked hard as a laborer could, indeed, see his children become middle management and his grandchildren become professionals. That day is over. There might still linger a Duke of Devonshire in England, but there is just as surely a Marquis of Microsoft, not merely in the United States, but with title good throughout the world: Forbes magazine is the new Almanach de Gotha.

And as for the “American Dream,” based on the proposition that hard work resulted in decent benefits as well as good pay, and thus upward mobility (if not for the workers, then at least for their children), it seems that we, the American worker, whether at the counting house or on the assembly line, are rapidly becoming “expendable.” The economy is booming! The numbers do not lie. Unfortunately, it is booming based on the sale of electronic trinkets sold here but made in Asia and clothing made of cotton grown here but spun into thread, woven into cloth and cut and sewn in Asian sweatshops instead of here. Our cars from Detroit are now compressed and placed onto cargo ships where the steel is melted down and turned into Asian models.

The vast majority of people in the United States and Canada are paid wages for work performed or else are pensioned. We do not live off rents received from property we own or dividends on investments while producing nothing but carbon dioxide. We do not practice one of the free professions. We get paid by an individual or a company or a corportion either for our time or by our commissions: we are the working people, but seem ashamed to call ourselves what we are.

It is time for that to change.

We must become what Jefferson, Roosevelt, Truman and Jackson, great Democrats, dreampt: a nation of the common folk, capable of governing ourselves and independent from the restraints of decaying European social systems. We however have reached an industrial base which Jackson and Jefferson never imagined — not that we do not still produce a tremendous amount of agricultural produce. In fact, we feed a large portion of the world. We now have new feudal masters, as surely as Pre-Revolutionary France. The new “betters” are the Lords of the Universe, the unholy alliance of big business and big capital. Our government revolves around their axes.

They have created for us a nation of unhealthy air, nonpotable water, and oil slicks befouling our shores. Mountains of garbage fill plots just beyond our cities, our public transportation remains in danger at a simple majority of elected officials’ whims and continued sufferance, and in many places is either entirely lacking or else nothing more than a vanity vestige of its former glory. The major population centers, of course, are excepted in the area of public transport, the workers simply being utterly dependent upon the trains and buses that enable them to get to and from work. The rest of us outside of Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles and a few other places are at the mercy of the automobile. Even rudimentary concessions such as bicycle lanes are missing from our public thoroughfares. We have abandoned our cities for auto-dependent suburbs and exurbs, increasing our pollution and dependence on foreign oil while ignoring all alternative fuels. The globe is warming, the ice caps of the Artic and shelves of the Antartic are melting while glaciers receed in South America, Greenland and Europe. Do we wish half of Florida to be under water in one hundred years or for grain and trees to flourish in Iceland?

This is a global problem, and it is rooted in the mismanagement of the stewartship given us by Nature’s bounty to the people. Yet it is not the people, per se, who have mismanaged the lands and airs and waters. Our individual contributions are small, yet it is our system of large corporations shaping our daily lives that bear the brunt of the fault. It is not a man or a woman or even a family who decided to denude the mountainsides of Appalachia for coal. It is not a single person who decided that a single hull was sufficient to contain a tanker full of crude oil from grounding, but a corporation. It is corporations that have fought tooth and nail in a primal brutish fashion all attempts at making public and universal our most basic necessities: health care and energy production.

Finally, it is corporations who furnish the 24 hours of daily fear and hate that blanket our airwaves. The Republican corporate party appear to answer only to corporations, because that is wherein their campaign funds lie. The tell us that dissent is “treason.” To question the morality of the Iraq war is not to “support the troops” when they send our boys into battle underarmored and bereft of armor; and when we raise the reasoning of American youth ambushed in a war that was based on falsehood in a country in civil war, they tell us “stay the course.” These are the people who blanket our airwaves: shills and pawns of megacorporations. We ask for peace and they give us war. We ask for health care benefits and a decent pension and a just wage and they tell us with rhetoric and sermon that we are ingrates, deserving only what bones are tossed to us and that we are lucky to even have jobs, as we are easily replaced to another continent. The Republican government provides us no relief from “free trade” or “outsourcing” or “drowning the Federal government in a bathtub” — what we get is tax relief for the wealthy and our sons and brothers making a choice between the enlistment lines or unemployment lines and money disappearing faster than it can be printed: record defecits and trade inbalance. The present Republican corporate administration tells us that “unemployment is down” but neglects to mention that one disappears from the unemployment list after six months time and that many of the “new jobs” are nowhere near the benefit and pay level that the newly reemployed once had. The government neglects to inform us of the hardship in Mexico that NAFTA has caused, with native agriculture falling to record low levels as people flock from their self-sufficient farms with corn surplus to the colonias, that delicate word that replaces “open cesspool, no benefits, foul aired urban proletariat border zone to where US manufacturing jobs have disappeared.” Pity the poor Mexicans who have become urban peons, with no insurance, no environmental enforcement, and only more hours of labor the next day for a few pesos as solace. Is this what we wish the United States to become?

There is an alternative: a party that preaches peace and prosperity; real security and not slogans; jobs at a living wage with guaranteed health care for all; freedom for one to worship as one wishes or not at all; a return to the heritage of Jackson and Jefferson, that is to say, to the people. That is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the The Progressive Democrats of America the PDA, the wing of the Democratic Party that champions American workers, the party of Representatives Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers.  They believe that government should be as Lincoln described: for, of and by the people.  Corporations are not people.  Do you people who work and produce want a share of political power, to have your voice unmuffled?  If you want peace and not constant threat of war, an American economy centered on American workers and not abstract “corporate bottom lines,” if you want a safe home and a secure United States, then you have a choice: vote Democratic and Progressive Democratic whenever you have the chance.  Be proud of what you are: working men and women, the most noble calling in all of Creation, the first jobs: Adam who delved and Eve who span!

WTF? BushCo, Inc.’s EPA to close regional EPA libraries!

Earlier last week, the Wicked Trio received an email from a professional colleague at the NIH libraries in Maryland about a proposal by the EPA admin to close a number of regional libraries, including the main one in DC… All we can ask is WTF?

Here is PEER’s take on the news: and here.

For Immediate Release: February 10, 2006
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337

BUSH AXING LIBRARIES WHILE PUSHING FOR MORE RESEARCH — EPA Set to Close Library Network and Electronic Catalog

Washington, DC — Under President Bush’s proposed budget, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is slated to shut down its network of libraries that serve its own scientists as well as the public, according to internal agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In addition to the libraries, the agency will pull the plug on its electronic catalog which tracks tens of thousands of unique documents and research studies that are available nowhere else.

Under Bush’s plan, $2 million of a total agency library budget of $2.5 million will be lost, including the entire $500,000 budget for the EPA Headquarters library and its electronic catalog that makes it possible to search for documents through the entire EPA library network. These reductions are just a small portion of the $300 million in cuts the administration has proposed for EPA operations.

At the same time, President Bush is proposing to significantly increase EPA research funding for topics such as nanotechnology, air pollution and drinking water system security as part of his “American Competitive Initiative.”

“How are EPA scientists supposed to engage in cutting edge research when they cannot find what the agency has already done?” asked PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is moving to implement the proposed cuts as soon as possible. “The President’s plan will not make us more competitive if we have to spend half our time re-inventing the wheel.”

Frankly, those in the know should have seen it coming down the proverbial path. Health Canada is doing the same thing in defunding at appropriate levels the various libraries that serve as a de facto national health library. One supposed that the Rt. Hon. Mr. Harper is assuming that the NIH libraries will take up the slack…

We have no idea what Mr. Bush is doing. Supposedly this will save $2 Million (US) out of a total $2.5 Million library budget. Frankly, this pittance is astonishing — one assumes that a single trip to the Brush Ranch or Kennebunkport costs at least that for a week of “deciding.”

Evidently this was a pure EPA decision, and it was done in order to court favor with the “faith based” environmental policy which BushCo, INC presently exercises, that is to say “I have faith that I shall still have breathable air and potable water for long enough for me to die of old age in bed.” In other words, a retake on “the public be damned” only add “the researchers working on public policy” along with “the public” and we have Neo-conservative policy at its worst.

We assume that reading the The Fountainhead again along with an appropriate Bible passage will function for researchers basic needs. What more could they possibly need?

Rick Santorum to Be Attacked by a Gorilla!

Screeching Rats received the most humorous and interesting email earlier this evening. I reproduce the text and links as well as the Pennsylvania Death Caged Match with the very junior Senator from Pennsylvania/Virginia. Yes, Grandpa Gorilla will challenge Little Ricky, hopefully minus his pet stillborn child, at the Middletown Grange Fair over Rick’s continued attempts at the Neocon wet dream: privatization of Social Security. The Wicked Trio, having recently had a rather disheartening run in with the SS system, dares not release the results of said run in to Screeching Rats’ faithful readers, not quite yet, anyhow…let your Wicked Threesome simmer down and the event shal be revealed in full.

Here is the email and the delicious flyer for the Death Match:

From :     Jeremy Funk, Americans United
Sent :     Wednesday, August 16, 2006 4:14 PM
To :     The Wicked Trio at Screeching Rats
Subject :     Gorilla-on-Senator Action!

Go to previous message    |    Go to next message    |    Delete    |    Inbox
Americans United For Change

Dear Wicked Trio,

Rick Santorum, meet Grandpa Gorilla.

Pennsylvania’s junior Senator thinks he can defend his seat by obscuring his die-hard support for the privatization of social security.  Right now he’s down in the polls and, desperate for votes, he’s hiding from his own record.

That’s where Grandpa comes in.  See, Rick is planning to stump at the Middletown Grange Fair in the next few days and there’s nothing like an enormous gorilla to draw the crowd’s attention to his determination to dismantle social security.

I’m forwarding a flyer to help you imagine the scene when he has to face the music and tell folks why he wants to scrap the most popular and successful public program in our country’s history.

I can’t wait to report back to you on what happens up there — and where Grandpa is headed next.

Please forward this flyer around to anyone in PA who needs to know about Rick’s pro-privatization stance — or who may just get a chuckle out of thinking about him speechless for once:

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/painvite

Thanks for being a part of our group, and stay tuned!

Jeremy

Jeremy Funk
Americans United for Change

This email was sent to: Wicked Trio

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