BEACH REPORT:

Margate Commission Race a Dead heat !!

    It's not really a dead heat, but with 13 possible winners who knows? Lots of signs all over town with Swift's's the biggest even though he swore off lawn signs. John placed his BIG signs  on his family's property right as you enter town at Jerome ave. off the Margate bridge. You cannot miss them. John's running as the tax cutter. Becker and team listen, ( but do they hear?) Campbell, Turner , Blumberg (if you want more of the same you got the last 4 yrs.) Reale and whomever if you want Vaughan back again and Young Chris Nigro if you want a fresh young face.   Oh and there is even a Hiltner running, Jim if you want the Hiltner's to totally dominate the town from the Commission on down. No end of choices this year, an ex-AC policemen Tony Viccarilli ( the retirement is boring ticket) and an AC Fire Chief with Joe Rush ( I need more to do now that Gov. Christie has taken over AC). We also have three well qualified women candidates this year with Lee Turner of the Jewish Relief Agency, Brenda Taube a business women and small business instructor and last but not least Kirsten Canuso whose in the Construction business as an auditor.  So if your looking for an all female Commission  and Mayor you can get that this year if you'd like.  Notice how in Margate an admittedly Republican town democracy is alive and well and the Gov. hasn't taken over, yet.  I guess you could say some people are seen as being able to handle their own affairs and others not so much. ( the White man's burden syndrome.)

COMING UP SOME INTERVIEWS

I'll be posting  interviews with some of the candidates this coming week.  I'd like to do all of them but to be honest I don't have all of their phone nos. If your a candidate and you want to be interviewed by us, please let us know by leaving a comment here and a contact ph. or e-mail. 

THE SHOE IS NOW ON THE OTHER FOOT !!

HA HA !! Now its the GOP's turn to hear what people have to say and they're NOT going to like it. It appears not to many people coming out to these meetings are buying what the GOP Congress is trying to sell them these days. Take a listen, my guess is this is just the start of the earful these people are going to get. Absent is the so called Tea party at these meetings, why?

THE DAILY SHOW - SCARED OLD PEOPLE

The Daily Show - Longformers - Scared Old People
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Published on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 by Black Agenda Report

Michigan’s “Emergency” Financial Regime: What Fascism Looks Like

A Black Agenda Radio commentary

by Glen Ford

Fascism is not all about jack-boots and guys with mustaches. It is a system of economic and social control. The particularities of fascism in any given nation grow out of the special dynamics of that country. Fascism in the United States will be blow-dried. And its legal and bureaucratic form will take shape in places like Michigan, where an innocuous sounding piece of legislation called the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act is the prototype for a host of laws designed to make government – the state – a compliant tool for the dictatorial rule of the most predatory sections of the ruling class. In 2011 America, that’s Wall Street, finance capital.

Michigan’s law allows the state to appoint emergency managers to nullify contracts, including labor agreements – which is what has unions upset. But the scope and intention of the law is much deeper and wider than simply anti-union. The legislation allows emergency managers to nullify the powers and authority of local governments of all kinds. One of its supporters gave the game away when he spoke of the need to impose a kind of “financial martial law” in which all pretense of democracy would be abolished in targeted communities. The community the Republican politician had in mind was Detroit, the Black metropolis, where the public schoolswere promptly put under emergency state control. But there is nothing to stop the state from abolishing democratic governance in any of Michigan’s cities, if an emergency can be declared or created. On April 15, the mostly Black city of Benton Harbor, the poorest jurisdiction in the state, was placed under total financial martial law, its citizens suddenly made more powerless than Blacks in Selma, Alabama, prior to the civil rights movement.

Fascism always requires an “emergency,” a “crisis,” to justify the surrender of whatever citizen liberties previously existed. Its mass organizing principle revolves the “Other” – the scapegoating of a hated group that can be blamed for the emergency. Historically, in the United States, that “Other” has been Black people – although other “Others” have been added to the list. The U.S. has always been fertile ground for fascist politicking – in fact, I have long maintained that White Terror under southern Jim Crow was a peculiar form of American fascism.

Fascism is also associated with militarism and the national security state, which are certainly famiiar aspects of modern Americana. More importantly, the militarization of the inner cities has been an established fact since the mid-1960s. The proof is in the one million African Americans behind bars.

The “crisis” that justifies the outright abolition of democracy – beginning, of course, in Black America – is the crisis afflicting finance capitalism. Wall Street then imposes instant emergencies on the larger society by starving cities and schools and the public sector in general, in order to strip down, privatize and commodify every asset in sight. Michigan's fascist model will doubtless be duplicated across the nation, as Wall Street moves to rule directly, through its emergency managers, by one name or another. The permanent emergency has begun.

© 2011 Black Agenda Report

Back A

ublished on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by In These Times

Democracy vs. Profit is Central Issue in Takeover of Benton Harbor, Mich.

by Roger Bybee

There is no place in the United States that more cruelly illustrates the intensifying conflict between corporate power and democracy than Benton Harbor, Mich., the first city to be placed under what some Michiganders call “financial martial law.”

About 100 Benton Harbor residents and supporters protested the opening of Whirlpool's "Jack Nicklaus signature golf course" in Jean Klock Park, on August 10, 2010. (Photo by Daymon Hartley/VoiceofDetroit.net)In March, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder won approval of Public Act 4, which permits him to declare that a city is in fiscal crisis and then to appoint an overseer with unlimited powers including the elimination of existing union contracts. Significantly, chief sponsors of Public Act 4 were State Rep. Al Pscholka, who was a former aide to Whirlpool heir U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, and also "a former vice president for one of the major entities involved in building the luxury golf development," The Rachel Maddow Show reported last week.

One of the first battlegrounds in Benton Harbor is the Jean Klock Park: Will it continue to be a public facility on Lake Michigan for poor kids or will it be converted into the massive proposed Harbor Shores golf course, condo and marina development?

Benton Harbor's population is 92% African-American and deeply impoverished by the de-industrialization of the city and surrounding area. Whirlpool’s recent plant shutdown is the most recent, crushing blow as the corporation continues to expand significantly in low-wage plants in Mexico, despite taking $19 million in federal recovery funds. Benton Harbor is plagued by the lowest per capita income in Michigan ($8,965), with 42.6 percent of the population living below the poverty line, including a majority of kids under age 18. 

Like a set of other overwhelmingly poor and black cities whose economic hearts have been torn out by de-industrialization—such as East St. Louis, Ill., Gary, Ind., Chester, Pa.—Benton Harbor‘s plight was largely ignored by the state legislature (although past Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm staged a more limited intervention into the city's troubled finances.).

But Benton Harbor was selected as the first target for takeover. With new  emergency financial manager Joseph Harris making all decisions unilaterally, elected bodies like the City Council and School Board can meet, but cannot make any decisions. The votes of neither elected bodies nor Benton Harbor voters simply do not count; the sole decider is Harris.

State Rep. Fred Dunhal, interviewed by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, views the takeover legislation as part of a national drive by a new crop of fiercely right-wing governors, exemplified by Snyder, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich.

Their goal is to virtually eliminate any forces that counter corporate domination of state and local government.

“This is part of a national agenda,” said Rep. Dunhal. “It involves breaking the contracts of unions and interfering with the ability of cities to make their own decisions.“

MUCH OF STATE RIPE FOR TAKOVER

With Michigan already staggering from the effects of de-industrialization, the Great Recession hammered the state relentlessly with blow after blow. Every mass layoff caused by the recession means more job losses down the street and less tax revenue to cover rising social needs associated with rising hunger, homelessness, disappeaing healthcare coverage and increasing violence both within the home and on the street.

About 100 other cities, villages and townships are on the verge of fiscal collapse, along with 120 school districts, said Dunhal. Long-suffering Detroit is due for a $179 million cut in state aid thanks to Gov. Snyder, and it too looks vulnerable for a takeover.

Snyder is taking a step normally unthinkable for a Republican: He is raising taxes to the tune of $1.7 billion. But these tax increases are not designed to ease the pain of the recession or address the state's budget deficit. The tax increases will come at the expense of seniors who lose their property tax credits, the poor who are deprived of Earned Income Tax Credits, and people who want to make tax-deductible donation to public universities.

Incredibly, Snyder is also planning on handing out $1.8 billion to corporations in new tax cuts. While these corporate subsidies will be handed out in the name of “job creation,” a half century of using this approach nationally shows a pattern of abject failure when viewed from the national level.

"Success" in pirating a plant from another state comes at the expense of another region; the $70 billion annually spent on tax cuts and other incentives fail to secure long-term, high-wage employment from foot-loose corporatioins always on the hunt for a better deal; and the tax incentives drain state governments of revenues needed for schools and healthcare, as Greg LeRoy documents in The Great American Job Scam.

However, rather than take steps to address the fiscal crises breaking out all over the state, Snyder’s strategy will leave him in a position to take over more and more of the state’s cities and towns and school districts. He can thus fundamentally reshape Michigan through his appointees by breaking union contracts, substituting private voucher schools for public schools, sell off or lease public assets (e.g., parks, public buildings, power plants, etc.), and privatize water and power systems.

PARK FOR KIDS OR PRIVATE GOLF COURSE FOR ELITES?

One contentious issue in Benton Harbor is the fate of the Jean Klock Park, where developers want to complete a full-scale private golf course. The land was originally given to Benton Harbor in 1917 by the Klock family in honor of their daughter who died at a very young age. At the ceremony where the land was given over to the city, John Nellis Klock, the girl’s father, movingly made clear his intentions and those of his wife:

The giving of this park to the city of Benton Harbor has been to Mrs. Klock and myself, the happiest moment of our lives. The deed of this park in the courthouse of St. Joseph will live forever. Perhaps some of you do not own a foot of ground, remember then, that this is your park, it belongs to you. …The beach is yours, the drive is yours, the dunes are yours, all yours. It is not so much a gift from my wife and myself, it’s a gift from a little child. See to it that the park is the children's.

John Klock believed strongly, “There is little joy in piling up money that you do not need, and so the majority of my earnings have been spent in providing beaches, parks, churches and schools." But to Harbor Shores developers close to the Whirlpool Corp., the Klocks' dedication of the park appears to be merely an obstacle to their profits.

The developers have gained enough land in the park for a three-hole private golf course designed by golfing legend Jack Nicklaus. In exchange, Harbor Shores developers swapped the city with land owned by Whirlpool that turned out to be highly contaminated; "taxpayers are now paying for the cleanup of that land through a brownfield redevelopment credit worth millions of dollars," according to a local blogger and activist.

Fortunately, the developers’ plan is being fought both in the courts and at the grassroots level by community and environmental groups. But the courts have seemed remarkably pliable in response to the developers' claims about proper public use of parkland.

'DISASTER CAPITALISM' AND 'THE SHOCK DOCTRINE'

Thus far, the Michigan martial-law plan closely follows Naomi Klein’s description of corporate elites’ practice of “disaster capitalism” as discussed in her superb book Shock Doctrine. When a disaster strikes—be it the 1973 military coup in Chile or the 2005 Katrina hurricane—it inevitably disorients and disorganizes a population. It creates an opportunity for corporate elites to rush in with plans for a new economic order that would never gain majority support if majority rule and democracy were functioning.

Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has been helping Benton Harbor organizations to resist the state takeover just as he aided workers in Wisconsin to fight against Scott Walker’s union-busting efforts, has called attention to Gov. Snyder's use of fiscal problems to justify terminating democracy in Benton Harbor:

There's nothing about the economic crisis that says we should decimate a democracy for a dictatorship. Tyrants often, in the name of emergency, will suspend democracy and seize control of all levels of the government.

© 2011 In These Times

AC TODAY!!

   Sound familiar folks? This is exactly what is happening to Atlantic City, NJ, as I write this.  A faux so called "Economic Emergency" has been cooked up by the State's leadership and the democratically elected city Gov't has been pushed aside and an unelected authority the CRDA ( appointed solely by the Gov.) has taken control of the town's resources. In essence the Gov. is now AC's Dictator. Where does this stop is the big ? 

WITH WHAT JUSTIFICATION?

 Did AC cause the Great Depression 2? Is it the fault of the elected Mayor and Council that  25% of the demand out here has vanished because  Wall st. and its "captured" DC elites have essentially "looted" the World's finances and then colluded to cover up this sour reality by lying and cooking the books. Even now an elaborate "kabuki show" is being carried on in DC called the deficit dance which is trying to lay blame for this disaster on everyone and anyone but the actual criminals that brought this all about through they're central roles in rigging the markets with the creation & use  of elaborately conceived and fraudalent financial instruments. ( CDOs  derivatives etc.) The Gov. and other GOP Govs. are using the terrible economic conditions that still exist everywhere in America today to justify these anti-democratic takeovers. IMO this  is the beginning of the end of democracy in America after a 250 yr. trial run.  The forces of economic royal-ism and conservative / neo-liberal political elitism are essentially saying, "YOU FOLKS CAN'T RULE YOURSELVES, or at least some of you can't."  That the so called Democratic party in NJ and DC is going along with this charade tells you that in essence we are under the rule of a ONE party State ( the $$ party) with it's two wings the Dems. and the Gopers.

COINCIDENCE?

 Is it any coincidence then that the first priority of the powers in Trenton was to remove any "real" oversight of AC's Casino Industry under the guise of merely bringing it up to "existing Industry standards?"  What does that mean? I think it means the State has adopted  a policy of turning away or benign neglect. In short, enforcing the law isn't that important anymore, or at least not as important as profits.  Why is the State turning over the Cities  marketing to the Casino Industry, when its failing? Does this make any sense? It seems whats happening here is that the  biggest failures in town ( the present managements of the 11 casinos) are being  given even more power to foul things up.  Reality and reason would beg the question why? Why is the Gov. and the rest of Trenton's establishment buying into the notion that what AC needs is more of the same failed strategies and failed leadership by these companies and others? Haven't they  already  demonstrated these last 4 yrs. they're largely clueless?  Instead, were being asked to in essence double down on a losing group of proven fuck ups. Pathetic and were to accept that this is now (sic) LEADERSHIP? Cut me a break, what it really is is just more PR as leadership. My guess is two yrs. from now when little has changed but a few name plates on some fancy offices, we'll be back wondering out loud , what happened?

By What Measures?

   The real question everyone should be asking is, what constitutes success for AC now? Is success more revenue for the Casinos or taxes for the State? Or Is it broad based opportunity for the community? Or is it being narrowly defined as essentially whatever Gov. Christie and Sen. Sweeney say it is?  By what objective measures do we judge the success or failure of the State run tourism zone ( AKA Atlantic City) in the future?  if the State itself is doing the grading you can expect an A no matter what  really happens.

NADER on CHERNOBYL

Published on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Nuclear Disasters Should Be Met with Scientific Inquiry, Not Silence

Remarks on the 25th anniversary of the Nuclear Meltdown at Chernobyl, Ukraine.

by Ralph Nader

The disaster at Chernobyl’s reactor on April 26, 1986 continues to expose humans, flora and fauna to radioactive lethality especially in, but not restricted to, Ukraine and Belarus. Western countries continue to reflect an under-estimation of casualties by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

IAEA’s figures top off at 4000 fatalities since 1986 that is highly questionable given IAEA’s conflict of interest between its role of promoting nuclear power and monitoring its safety. An agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization (WHO) provides for WHO’s deference to IAEA’s casualty figures which has compromised WHO’s priority of advancing health in the world. The United Nations naturally adopts the IAEA figures and the West’s nuclear regulatory agencies, similarly committed to promotional functions, ditto these under-estimations.

 

The position that the level of mortality and morbidity from Chernobyl over the past quarter century is much larger comes from a compendious of 5000 scientific studies, mostly in the Slavic languages edited by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. (Read it online here) Dr. Yablokov, a biologist, is a member of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences. The translated edition was published under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences.

At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on March 25, 2011, attended by C-SPAN, CNN and independent media, but not the mainstream media, Dr. Yablokov summarized these studies and estimated the death toll over nearly twenty five years at about one million and mounting.

Because of the mainstream media, including the major newspapers, blackout on the Yablokov report since its translated edition came out in 2009, I asked Dr. Yablokov this question at the news conference:

“Dr. Yablokov, you are a distinguished scientist in your country, as reflected in your membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, what has been the response to your report by corporate scientists, regulatory agency scientists and academic scientists in the West? Did they openly agree in whole or in part or did they disagree in whole or in part or were they just silent?”

Academician Yablokov replied that the compilation of these many reports has been met with silence. He added that science means critical engagement with the data and implied that silence was not an appropriate response from the scientific community.

Silence, of course, is not without its purpose. For to engage, whether to rebut, doubt or affirm, would give visibility to this compendium of scientific studies that upsets the fantasy modeling by the nuclear industry and its apologists regarding the worse case scenario damage of a level 7 or worse meltdown. It would require, for example, more epidemiological studies ranging into Western Europe, such as the current review of 330 hill farms in Wales. It would insistently invite more studies of the current health and casualty data involving the 800,000 liquidators—workers passing through since 1986 who have been exposed in and around the continuing emergency efforts at the very hot disabled Chernobyl reactor. And much more.

Public silence has not excluded a sub silentio oral campaign to delegitimize the Yablokov compendium. A quiet grapevine of general dismissals—unavailable for public comment or rebuttal—has cooled members of the press and other potential disseminators of its contents, including the National Academy of Sciences, the science advisers to the President and any other thinking scientists who decide that there isn’t enough time or invulnerability to justify getting into a contentious interaction over the Yablokov report.

The ability of corporate science and its regulatory apologists to inflict sanctions on dissenters is legion. There is a long history of censorship leading to self-censorship by those who otherwise might have applied Alfred North Whitehead’s characterization of science as “keeping open options for revision” to the ideology of atomic power.

I call for an open rigorous public scientific-medical debate on the findings and casualty estimates of the Yablokov report, to determine its usefulness for necessary programs of compensation, quarantine, accelerated protective entombment of the still dangerous reactor, and expanded studies of the past and continuing ravages issuing from this catastrophe and its recycling of radioactivity through the soil, air, water and food of the exposed regions. Such a public review is what the science adviser to the President and the National Academy of Sciences should have done already and should do now. The continuing expansion of the Fukishima disaster in Japan provides additional urgency for this open scientific review.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is