It Had to be Squirrels?

I am a Southerner. I grew up in the South, and I am currently raising a family here. I am fully aware of the horrible history of my home region, and the way that history infects the rest of the country today.  That being said, I love living here, and I do feel that we are making hard-fought progress.

And then I get emails like this:

Greetings [School District] Families.

You may have read a report earlier today from the [Our Town] Police Department regarding people allegedly hunting squirrels from within a car in the town limits.

When our schools in the vicinity received this report, immediate action was taken to ensure student safety. We have now confirmed with the Police that this event is no longer active and we will implement school dismissal as regulary scheduled.

Thank you for your continued support.

Go ahead yankees, laugh away.

A Dirty Business

You might remember that back in early February a Duke Energy coal ash containment pond ruptured, spilling tens of thousands of tons of coal ash into the Dan River, near Eden (Ha!), NC. Coal ash is full of yummy stuff like arsenic, selenium, and cadmium, and Duke Energy has 33 ash ponds scattered around the state.

In response to the devastating spill and contaminated groundwater at other Duke Energy sites, environmental groups asked the state's Environmental Management Commission to interpret state environmental rules in such a way as to order "immediate action to eliminate" contamination from ash ponds that violate state standards. The EMC, however, rejected this request, arguing that Duke's efforts at clean up could take "a reasonable amount of time to accomplish."

Now, obviously what seems a reasonable amount of time to you or me, or the fish that live in the Dan, or the people who get their drinking water from the river, might not match up with what the good folks at Duke Energy feel is a reasonable amount of time to clean up their mess. So, in early March, Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway cleared up the confusion, overruling the EMC decision and ordering Duke Energy to take immediate action to stop groundwater contamination from coal ash.

Fast forward to this week when the Environmental Management Commission, in conjunction with their employers, uh, I mean good friends, Duke Energy, appealed Judge Ridgeway's ruling.

You may be wondering why on earth would a commission tasked with protecting the environmental health of the State of North Carolina seemingly go out of its way to side with polluters? Well, you'd have to ask Governor Pat McCrory, Duke Energy employee for 28 years and political pet of Art Pope (our own home-grown Koch Brother).  He and the Republican-dominated General Assembly neutered both the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the EMC upon taking control of the levers of state power.

And the results are a surprise to absolutely nobody:

Disgusting. The whole sordid mess is disgusting.

Of. Course.

Soooo, this happened today:

Senate Republicans Block Paycheck Fairness Act

MICHAEL R. CRITTENDEN

April 9, 2014 1:11 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a measure aimed at eliminating pay disparities between men and women, a key piece of Democrats' midterm agenda.

Democrats were unable to win the 60 votes needed to overcome a procedural hurdle and move forward on the measure, which would prevent employers from punishing workers for sharing salary information with each other, as well as require employers to demonstrate that pay disparities were based on performance rather than gender. The bill would close what many Democrats see as loopholes in a 1963 law intended to promote equal pay for women. No Republicans voted to move forward with the bill. 

And the reason the Republican Poohbahs gave for thwarting the will of the majority and not   allowing a vote on the measure:

Republicans have argued that the measure, which Democrats call the Paycheck Fairness Act, would make it easier for people to sue businesses and that it amounts to an election-year ploy to attract female voters.

Because, apparently,  the only voters it's legitimate to try to attract are male ones. Oh, and white ones. Oh, and wealthy ones. Aaaannd, let's not forget the straight folks, while we're at it.

I just love that the hypothetical possibility that at some point in the future, someone might just maybe sue a corporation over gender discrimination is a good enough reason to oppose this bill.

Remind me again: What war on women?

Equal Pay Day!

This is what an ally looks like:

Obama Signs Measures to Help Close Gender Gap in Pay

By PETER BAKERAPRIL 8, 2014

      

      

          President Obama signs two executive orders aimed at narrowing the gender pay gap

Tomorrow the Senate votes (again) on the Paycheck Fairness Act, which essentially does two things: it would make it illegal for companies to retaliate against employees for talking with co-workers about their salaries, and it would also require the EEOC to gather information about pay and demographics of employees. 

The first part of the act is necessary because many companies forbid employees from discussing salary, and you can't know you're being short-changed if you don't know how your compensation compares to that of your fellow employees. The second provision is to bring hiring discrepancies to the attention of employers, giving them a chance to redress inequalities on their own, and to give employees access to information to challenge discriminatory practices if companies don't do it themselves.

You know who is for the Paycheck Fairness Act? Fair-minded people everywhere. You know who is against it? The G.O.P.:

Paycheck Fairness Act has already failed twice. Will the third time be the charm?

• BY NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON

• April 8 at 6:00 am

. . .                      

What do Republicans think of this bill?

Not much. The bill has no Republican co-sponsors, and they blocked it from going forward when it came up for a vote in 2012. Republican women, perhaps a natural place to look for support, voted with their party. Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Act in 2009, were no votes in 2012.

The GOP, which released a memo Monday, cites increased lawsuits as a possible result of the legislation. Republicans also say discrimination based on sex is already illegal, so this bill is just piling on. Some conservatives and Republicans have also been questioning how big the pay gap actually is.  

What war on women?

Not the Same

Yesterday, Paul Krugman had some interesting commentary on the launch of Ezra Klein's new media venture, Vox. Klein kicked off the site with a long piece on the ways politics seems to make us dumber, or at least less likely to consider evidence that doesn't fit in with our pre-conceived political notions.

Krugman takes Klein to task for falling into the "both sides do it" trap; a trap that is familiar to anyone who has watched media outlets compare, oh for example, the Obama administration's responsibility for the events in Benghazi to the Bush administration's responsibility for events in Iraq. Basically, a lot of media outlets are far too ready to sacrifice truth in the name of "balance".

Klein, Krugman argues, sets up a false equivalence in the ways liberals and conservatives each harden themselves into their preferred ideological positions:

What Ezra does is cite research showing that people understand the world in ways that suit their tribal identities: in controlled experiments both conservatives and liberals systematically misread facts in a way that confirms their biases. And more information doesn’t help: people screen out or discount facts that don’t fit their worldview. Politics, as he says, makes us stupid.

But here’s the thing: the lived experience is that this effect is not, in fact, symmetric between liberals and conservatives. Yes, liberals are sometimes subject to bouts of wishful thinking. But can anyone point to a liberal equivalent of conservative denial of climate change, or the “unskewing” mania late in the 2012 campaign, or the frantic efforts to deny that Obamacare is in fact covering a lot of previously uninsured Americans? I don’t mean liberals taking positions you personally disagree with — I mean examples of overwhelming rejection of something that shouldn’t even be in dispute.

In other words, it matters whether the positions you are hardening into are actually real or are just figments of an ideologically-driven imagination.

I have had so many frustrating conversations with relatives who pride themselves on being smart, logical people, who have had successful careers, but who consistently vote for a party whose members and media organs lie to them on a regular basis (or, which may be worse, are too ignorant and incurious to know that what they are saying is a lie).

How can you vote for people, I would ask, who don't deal in reality when making policy decisions that have effects in reality? We know, for instance, that abstinence-only education leads to far worse outcomes than comprehensive sex education, and yet your party uniformly crafts policy that disregards this evidence. We know that global warming is happening and is accelerating, and yet the Republicans deny that evidence and "drill baby, drill". We know that unemployment insurance and food stamps not only provide humanitarian relief to poor people, but they are also far better at stimulating the economy than tax cuts; the GOP, however, disregards all evidence that shows tax cuts aren't the solution to everything. And these are just a few examples off the top of my head.

It is amazing to me that the party that bitched and moaned about postmodernism divorcing language from meaning and making everything relative (rather than believing that there are knowable truths out there) has completely embraced this philosophy of meaning. And with great efficacy, they are using it (and the dupes who will carry the water of "both sides do it") to enact an agenda that benefits a very small group of powerful elites, and will lead to disastrous consequences for the majority of people around the world.

Eventually reality wins out. And it is going to be an awfully rude reality-check that hits us if we don't start electing people who base policy on reality rather than right-wing fevered dreams.

Getting and Spending

     The world is too much with us; late and soon,
     Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
     Little we see in Nature that is ours;
     We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
     This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
     The winds that will be howling at all hours,
     And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
     For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
     It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
     A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
     So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
     Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
     Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
     Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

                                 William Wordsworth (1807)

I have been thinking a lot lately about this poem, and about how Wordsworth's observations about what rapid industrialization was doing to England and the English people seem equally to apply to what is happening with global capitalism today. "Getting and spending" seem to be the only right and proper roles of citizens (or rather, consumers), at least as far as culture-makers are concerned.

We see this single-minded emphasis on commerce everywhere - from the rampant growth of the financial sector relative to other parts of the economy (you know the parts that actually produce goods and provide essential services); in the fact that Business Administration is the most popular college major in America; in the commonly-held belief that the purpose of college is job-training, rather than intellectual and spiritual development; and in the constant refrain that work, work, and ever-more work makes one free - never mind that many jobs involve mind-numbing drudgery.

The value of the natural world is barely even considered when it comes in conflict (whether real or imagined) with "economic growth" or "job creation". The ever-popular "family values" are given lip service, but heaven forbid we enact policies that might actually help people have happier family lives, if some corporation might lose a dime's worth of profit because of them.

I really don't think any of the major problems we face today, from climate change on down, are going to get solved without looking at the underlying sickness binding them all: The love of money (and the greedy hoarding of it by the rich and powerful) is the root of all evil.

One 72-Year-Old Heartbeat Away

Amazing to think that just a few short years ago, Bible Spice here was nearly Vice President of the United States. Love the fact that the grift-train seems to be depositing her at stations further and further removed from mainstream anything.