Trumka Warns of the "Forces of Hate" That Smash the Ideal of America

by: RDemocrat Thu Apr 08, 2010 at 20:29:00 PM EDT

It is no secret that in this current environment with so many workers unemployed, underemployed and making less money that anger is rampant among American workers. It is understandable as working America watches the bankers who crashed our economy costing them millions of jobs get bailed out while in every town in America they are still hurting. This on top of the fact that Corporate America has stagnated wages on jobs they have not shipped overseas to virtual slave markets. Yes, anger is justified and rampant in many unemployment lines and workplaces. However, working America must be very careful of how to channel this understandable anger. You see, just like in past days forces of hatred are seeking to divide workers keeping them from forming a united front to really change this country and their own lots in life.

RDemocrat :: Trumka Warns of the "Forces of Hate" That Smash the Ideal of America

With this in mind AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka today spoke to American workers warning them of the forces of hatred that depend on being able to divide them and turn them against one another and their own interests. He spoke of intellectuals speaking out in these times in defense of the working class: It is all about standing up to entrenched economic power and the complacency of the affluent. It's an alliance that depends on intellectuals being critics, and not the servants, of economic privilege. http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/04... He pointed out how the voices of hatred we hear so readily spewing their twisted logic is nothing new, it has been around for a long time and our generation is far from the first to see such a war against working and intellectual America: This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia. I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred-of anti-intellectualism-will grow. He called on intellectuals and working families to be part of the solution, shunning these voices of hatred that would make America in to a clone of Europe in the Dark Ages and band together and fight for an economy that works for all giving working men and women a voice once again in our Republic: If you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs-the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job. Go here to read the full text of Trumka's speech: http://www.aflcio.org/mediacen... And right on cue, the Oxymoron decides to spread more hatred and propaganda, by blaming government not Corporate America or the bankers for the problems workers face: Now, as many of you that have followed my musings may be aware, I am an admirer of Richard Trumka. Speeches like this one should show everyone why. The forces of the "robber barons" are still very alive and still seek to rape the American worker. They care little about anything but protecting their own profits and killing the American dream for 98% of us all while turning worker against worker in a never-ending game of "ring around the rosy". With the well-funded enemies of progress for all Americans firing up the weak-minded to oppose their own interests so the greediest and least patriotic among us can continue to rob our country blind only one solution is left for Progressives, working men and women, and intellectuals. We must band together and DEMAND that America is once again the land of the free and the home of the brave instead of the home of a cutthroat, laissez-faire society we escaped in the New World. We have been far too quiet and complacent during the tea-bag era of ignorant misled souls marching against themselves and all of us. We simply must stand together and fight as hard as we are being fought against by the forces of hatred whose sorry asses are covered because they are rich and could care less how many people get sick or die as long as they can hoard the money amongst themselves. The time has come for us all to stand up and stand together and fight for the ideals our country was founded on before we all must watch them be relegated to the history books as the world's beacon of freedom and liberty is smashed to bits in the name of Corporate profits, Greed and hatred. Now is the time for all patriots to come to the aid of our country because our very way of life is threatened with extinction by the same forces of cruel greed that breed ignorance and steal away the liberties our people have long fought to uphold. Either we stand now and fight back, or the ideal that was America will die a slow, painfully tortured death.

Tags: Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO, Rush Limbaugh, Greed, robber-barons, Crashed Economy, Bankers, Corporate America, corporate profits, hatred, Racism, homophobia, propoganda, (All Tags)

Let The Sun Shine In......

If it comes to it, allow those who want to secede to do so......

Peacefully.

Prepare for a land swap to support those of us who wish to leave the new confederacy, or whatever, to rejoin the U.S.A.

Its is far better to fall apart than it is to go to pieces. 

MARC PERKEL FOR BUZZFLASH

Right wing Republicans and Tea Party extremists are talking about seceding from the United States. I say - go for it. Governors like Rick Perry of Texas and Bob McDonald of Virginia want to inflame the hatred of America then they should leave and form their own country.

The southern Republican leaning states are the high welfare states and the progressive north is stuck supporting them. I would love to see them pay their own way and they can take the Bush debt with them. They can deregulate everything and pay for their own bailouts. I for one am tired of putting up with the bad judgment of the politicians they elect. Maybe if they had to take care of themselves they they would understand that taking responsibility and fixing problems is more work that anger, apathy, and ignorance.

But here in "Real America" we had an election. We won, you lost. Get used to it.
MARC PERKEL FOR BUZZFLASH

Let The Sun Shine In......

Regarding The Beck Diatribe to the South

Beck says that Little Barack was so surrounded by Communists that there ws no way he could be rooted in the founders. I venture to say that that is true of most Americans. Who bothers to teach civics anymore? Which is, I suppose, Beck's excuse for not having a clue about the founders.

Barack Obama is a constitutional Attorney. I would venture to say that he has more knowledge of the founders in his little finger than Beck has in his entire pudgy, little body.

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Slimiest Beck Diatribe Yet!

 

  Maybe the scummiest Glenn Beck show ever: Smears Obama's parents, says Mom 'abandoned' him for 'Marxist political theory' | Crooks and Liars
- Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Tea party, violence, GOP fundraising

Off topic, but I sure would like to see Charlie Crist run as an true independent, win and behave as one would in the Senate. How refreshing. 

How impossible?

by Meg White
You'd think after being portrayed as at least tangentially involved in the intimidation and threats of violence against members of Congress over the healthcare bill, tea party organizers would tone down the rhetoric and try to make the practical first birthday of the movement less inflammatory than in recent weeks.

So what's their latest plan for fundraising over the Tax Day holiday? I kid you not, they're promoting a Great Patriot Money Bomb. Basically, a nonpartisan (really?) group of tea party activists have put together a list of bona fide tea party candidates (or as they call themselves "constitutional conservatives") and linked them all together on one fundraising page.

I suppose they're hoping this effort will be more successful than the Republican National Committee's campaign to set ablaze fire House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (though the campaign has raised a fat $1.5 million for the GOP, there's little doubt that Pelosi will retain her seat).

It does bear mention that Liberty Candidates' Photoshop abilities don't come close to the slick imagery of GOP.com surrounding Pelosi in flames -- a shocking number of candidate pictures are very shoddy cut-and-paste jobs of a candidate's photo on top of the American flag (as you can see from the few I've scattered into this piece). But the passion is all there.

The time period of the money bomb is from midnight on Tax Day to April 18 (the anniversary of Paul Revere's famous ride). The idea is for tea partiers who are all jazzed up following the April 15 protests to have a place to go spend their money other than the local Gadsden flag emporium. The site's creators are no doubt hoping that when protesters ask Tax Day tea party speakers what they can do to get involved, they are directed to this site.
Questionable imagery aside, it's a very smart idea. Lesser-known liberal candidates have found grassroots fundraising success (and a certain amount of outside-the beltway street cred) online in ActBlue.com since back in 2004.

And considering the RNC's apparent inability to move away from courting the bulging pockets of corporate executives with strip club outings, small-scale campaign contributions from the right have to go somewhere.

Candidates who wish to be considered for the fundraiser must abide by five principles:  individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy. On the campaign's website, this translates into the notion that the "recovery should be left to the free market," the federal government should not restrict personal liberty beyond what is explicitly laid out in the constitution, foreign policy should be limited to commerce, the Federal Reserve Bank should be dismantled, gun rights should be strengthened, and increased use of domestic oil, coal, gas and nuclear energy.

If you agree with the above, all you need in order to be considered is to say so in a short survey, have a website and a picture. (Oh and if you don't happen to have a website, the vice president of Liberty Candidates, Sally O'Boyle, would be happy to charge you to make one. She can also make you a logo and create your very own online store -- "your profit is low, but it's all yours," she notes.)

Though Liberty Candidates is attempting to make this a "nonpartisan clearinghouse" for tea party candidates, the ideological checklist sounds a lot like the Republican purity test proposed by the RNC late last year. While the Liberty Candidates' checklist is covered by the purity test, the GOP added in a few non-liberty items, such as retaining the defense of marriage act (don't think that one's in the Constitution, guys) and some decidedly interventionist plans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.

Liberty Candidates will have none of that. Indeed, on their front page the group posts something of a warning to the RNC:

It is critical that Liberty Candidates be separated from neo-con Republicans, "Tea-o-cons" and others who would attempt to hijack the Liberty Candidates movement!

Tea-o-cons, huh? That's a new one for me. Will elected constitutional conseratives be Tea-presentatives of the people? Could Marco Rubio become Florida's Tea-nator?

In all seriousness though, this might be the tea party's best chance at electoral legitimacy. The GOP seems intent on out-crazying the crazies, so Republicans are increasingly unable to claim the upper hand in restrain or sanity on the right. While they love the tea party's anger at the status quo, Republicans can't seem to grasp the importance of the tea party's pockets, perhaps because they're not as deep as the pockets they're used to reaching into.

But, when large crowds are necessary, the tea party and the GOP will always have their collective willingness to rely upon the vague suggestion of violence to unite them.

So while the mainstream media plays up Steele's follies as a coup for the Democratic Party, be wary that the tea party may be raising more than hell. After all, who needs lesbian-themed bondage clubs and Photoshopped flames when you've got the American flag (however pixelated) backing you?

BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Let The Sun Shine In......

Action Alert: Pushing WellPoint Back to Nonprofit?

 I've been wondering why someone hasn't mentioned divestment of, as well as striking products of corporations whom it is determined to be misbehaving in a particularly obnoxious pattern.

"The Antidote to Despair is Action"

By LINDA GREENE

When it comes to health care reform, single-payer advocate Rob Stone, M.D., says, "We're still for it, and we're not done yet."

The need is undeniable. Over 46 million Americans are uninsured, and a recent study reported in the American Journal of Public Health showed that 45,000 die each year because they lack health insurance. Tens of millions are underinsured, able to afford coverage only with policies with gigantic deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses.

Of U.S. health care spending, 31 percent covers administrative costs, or overhead. Medicare, in comparison, spends only 3.1 percent on overhead. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, countries with universal health care spend about 50 percent of what we spend per capita and have superior health outcomes.

***

Stone, an emergency physician at Bloomington Hospital, director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan (HCHP) and board member of Physicians for a National Health Plan (and occasional CounterPunch contributor), is working on a two-pronged campaign for changing the health care status quo.

One is an "inside" approach, offering a resolution for the health insurance company Wellpoint stockholders to vote on. The resolution calls for WellPoint to study the feasibility of returning to its nonprofit status.

Several shareholders, including Stone, have successfully placed the resolution on WellPoint's proxy statement, released this week and to be voted on at WellPoint's annual stockholders' meeting on May 18 in Indianapolis.

The resolution also asserts that "no country has achieved universal health care through for-profit health insurance. ... WellPoint was a nonprofit insurance company before it demutualized, raised capital through stock offerings, merged with, acquired, and demutualized other nonprofit Blue Cross/Blue Shield companies [in the early '90s]."

With its for-profit status, WellPoint has changed its focus from patient care to profits for its stockholders.

Hoosier health care activists are targeting WellPoint because it's the largest corporation in the health insurance industry and has headquarters in Indianapolis. Further, WellPoint is a leader in the industry in marketing high-deductible policies.

The resolution, which has been presented to the stockholders for a vote by proxy, needs to receive 3 percent of the votes for it to be considered for a second year. If it receives 10 percent of the votes the second year, it can be introduced third year.

The health insurance industry is vulnerable. Lately it's received negative publicity about policy cost increases. In her recent testimony on those increases before Congress, WellPoint's CEO, Angela Brawley, whose salary is $9 million per year, left an unfavorable impression of the corporation. WellPoint's reputation has suffered also as a result of the negative publicity surrounding its efforts to oppose health care reform.

***

Two, the "outside" approach, is divestment of stock from the for-profit health insurance industry as a whole. Investors can use divestment, the selling of stock and thus the opposite of investment, to protest particular corporate policies.

 

"Divestment," according to Stone, "is an economic and political tool that puts political pressure on corporations to change their policies."

The idea for divesting from the health insurance industry originated with Kurt Edelman, from the Service Employees International Union, during an activists' conference call about the industry.

Divestment from the health care industry has, as its model, divestment from South Africa during its racist, apartheid regime. Then, divestment entailed persuading companies to cease doing business in South Africa in protest the regime.

Although health care activists' goal is complete divestment of stock in the publicly traded health insurance industry, in Stone's words, the industry is a "parasitic middleman that increases cost and complexity, with no value added."

The starting point is WellPoint. Last year a WellPoint shareholders' resolution calling on the company to divulge the pay given to executives almost passed, with 46% of the votes. It could pass this year, according to Stone.

One avenue Stone and his fellow activists are exploring is mutual funds that own stock in WellPoint. TIAA-CREF, in which many teachers and college professors have investments for their pensions, is the 12th largest stockholder in WellPoint and holds 5 million shares of Wellpoint, worth about $320 billion.

Stone figures people in the teaching profession are more likely than some others to be sympathetic to a divestment campaign. The aim is to weaken the health insurance industry, and academics can put pressure on their employers to divest.

***

Single-payer advocates and proponents of a public option, as Stone says, are "let down, worn out and disappointed" in the current health care "reform." But he adds immediately, "The antidote to despair is action."

Stone said HCHP will release the resolution during a press conference at 11 a.m. on Wed., April 7, in front of WellPoint's headquarters on Monument Circle in Indianapolis. The public is welcome to attend.

Attending a rally in front of WellPoint headquarters at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, May 18, after WellPoint's annual stockholders meeting, is even more important, Stone said.

The point of the rally is to draw attention to WellPoint's current negative public relations and to build a campaign to expose the problems with for-profit health insurance.

At the rally singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer will perform, and the speakers will include Wendell Potter, a former vice president of communications for the health insurance company Cigna. He was in charge of running a campaign to discredit Michael Moore's film Sicko, but he switched sides in the health care debate after observing hundreds of people without health care wait for care at a free clinic in Appalachia.

Linda Greene can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us.

This article originally appeared on the Bloomington Alternative.

Let The Sun Shine In......

A Woman With Good Oaklahoma Values Takes On Wall Street.....

....and we should all be cheering her on an voting against Republicans and Democrats that do not vote for the ordinary Joes and Josephines but, instead, play the cash game with the wealthiest of the very wealthy.

 

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An Inside Outsider Takes On Wall Street

Wednesday 07 April 2010

by: Jim Hightower, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Photo: New America Foundation; Edited: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t)

Wall Street banksters -- who could possibly love them?

OK, presumably their mommas do, and possibly their pet dogs, but that's it. The general public loathes them and would be delighted to see the whole bunch tarred, feathered and deported to a barren atoll, where their punishment would be living with themselves.

These preening, narcissistic elites turned America's financial system into a rigged casino game that paid off big-time for them. Then it crashed, wrecking our real economy and making life miserable for millions of people. Yet, there they are, still on their exalted thrones, still playing casino games (now with our bailout funds) and still lavishing obscene bonuses on themselves.

Despite their perfidy, they've not been made to pay any price by our public officials. Americans of all political stripes have watched in dismay as both Democratic and Republican leaders rushed to pat the hands and soothe the fevered brows not of us aggrieved parties, but of the banksters.

(Democrats at least publicly scolded the Wall Street chieftains, while such Republican bosses as Rep. John Boehner of Ohio and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas have turned public dismay into disgust by openly blowing kisses to the disgraced bankers. Boehner and Cornyn have been pledging that their party will keep fending off legislative restrictions on executive pay if Wall Street would only show a little return love in the form of more campaign cash for GOP coffers.)

Good grief, is there no sanity, no smidgen of integrity? Are no public officials on our side?

Meet Elizabeth Warren. She heads an independent agency that Congress set up in 2008 to monitor and report on the government bailout of Wall Street -- and the main thing you need to know about her is that the big-shots of finance despise her. Now that's refreshing!

Warren doesn't play the smooth insider game of Bohner, Cornyn, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers. She doesn't because she's not a Wall Street insider. "Dang gummit," she says in her native Oklahoma twang, "somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families."

While she doesn't have the power to reform the Street's ingrained culture of greed, she can shine a light on it -- and she has been a fearless and tenacious griller of Gucci-clad bankers and weak-willed regulators. Her admiring husband describes her as a grandmother who can make grown men cry.

Coming from a working-class family, Warren knows first-hand what it is to face financial crisis (including foreclosure) and to feel the crushing power of uncaring banks. "I learned early on what debt means, how vulnerable it makes people," she told The New York Times last month. At age 16, she won a debate scholarship to college, then worked her way into law school and ultimately became a leading authority on bankruptcy.

Despite her success as a lawyer, she hasn't forgotten her populist roots and purpose. Warren is Wall Street's worst nightmare: a middle-class champion who gives a damn about workaday people, is smart and tenacious -- and can't be bought.

She is now bringing her background, legal expertise and moral outrage to bear on a proposal that she conceived and developed: a new agency with real regulatory teeth that would exist solely to protect consumers against banker deceit, scams and greed. Big bankers keel over in a dead faint at the very mention of Warren's proposal for a totally independent Consumer Financial Regulatory Agency, and they're lobbying ferociously to kill it ... and to demonize her.

However, the Wall Street reform package already passed by the House does include the independent CFPA she proposed. The Senate bill also includes a CFPA, but wimps out by putting it in the soft, banker-coddling hands of the Federal Reserve. The fight rages on, and its hard to have much faith that Washington would really go against Wall Street -- but Warren's a real fighter, and she has strong progressive supporters both inside and outside the Capital City.

She gives us someone to cheer for -- and to back. To join Elizabeth Warren's gutsy push on our behalf, contact the grass-roots coalition called Americans for Financial Reform: ourfinancialsecurity.org, (202) 263-4533.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

Let The Sun Shine In......

How the F.B.I. Identified Murray’s Caller?

 

Is this it! 

Will this get the attention of the citizens of Wingnuttia?

April 6, 2010, 6:16 pm

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

 

Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press Senator Patty Murray

As the F.B.I. moved in on a man who allegedly threatened Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, because of her support for health care legislation, law enforcement agents faced a challenge: they needed to confirm that Charles A. Wilson, the man whose phone number was used to leave menacing messages on her office voicemail, was in fact the man who made the threats.

So they found a convenient way to get Mr. Wilson talking about the issue that seemed to be weighing so heavily on him. Special Agent Cory Cote of the F.B.I. called Mr. Wilson at his home number and, according to the criminal complaint (PDF), “disguised himself as a representative of Patients United Now, a group that was ostensibly attempting to have the federal health care reform legislation repealed.”

Mr. Wilson apparently was interested in what the group had to say: the call lasted about 14 minutes, according to the complaint.

Patients United Now is a real organization, part of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a conservative, antitax advocacy group, that has actively opposed the legislation and also runs a project called “Hands Off My Health Care.” The foundation has also been active in publicizing Tea Party events. It advocates for the federal government to “return to its Constitutional limits” and also seeks to highlight the “alarmism” around global warming.

“As A.F.P. Foundation has said repeatedly, we condemn any threats of violence or acts of violence,” Tim Phillips, president of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, said in an e-mail message. “The F.B.I. did not contact A.F.P. Foundation about this matter. Over the last year, we have been one of the leading grassroots organizations opposing a Washington takeover of our health care. Perhaps that is why they chose to use our name, though they did not notify us.”

As the call began, the suspect, Mr. Wilson, confirmed his identity for the undercover F.B.I. agent.

And according to the complaint charging him with threatening a public official, Mr. Wilson quickly supplied confirmation that he had made the threats against Senator Murray.

“Wilson made several statements that further confirm he was the caller on the voicemail messages,” the complaint said.

(a) Wilson repeatedly expressed his strong dislike for the recent health-care reform legislation (i.e. “I hate it. I hate it!”) (b) Wilson confirmed that he regularly placed calls to Senator Murray’s and Senator Maria Cantwell’s offices. (i.e., “I call Murray every day. I call Cantwell. They don’t like hearing from me. … I call them every day.”) (c) Wilson referred to Senators Murray and Cantwell as the “Pike Street whores,” as does the caller in the voicemail messages; (d) Wilson also referred to Senator Murray as “sneaker shoes Murray,” a phrase that also was stated on some of the voicemail messages; and (e) Wilson made the following remarks, which are similar to the rhetoric in many of the voicemail messages. “They need to be strung up, and I mean put the gallows. I will take no prisoners. …  And I don’t care what they think. They want to come throw me in jail, they can go ahead and do that. That’s fine.”

Let The Sun Shine In......

Politically connected owners of W. Virginia mine

 Same story for as long as coal has been mined; profit above all else, even safety.

Corporations need to be punished to the full extent of the law and sotckholders, if Massey is a public company.

.... have long history of violations and ignoring fines

BY Tina Moore
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, April 7th 2010, 1:38 AM

Bird/AP

Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship said that a carbon monoxide warning at Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch mine was the first sign of trouble before a huge underground explosion killed 25 miners.

 

Sullivan/Getty

Parishoners gather to pray for the miners lost in a coal mine exposion at the Performance Coal Company.

Related News

• Articles
• Rescue on hold as hope fades for four trapped W.Va. miners
• West Virginia coal mine explosion reaches 25 dead

The company that runs the West Virginia coal mine where 25 workers died in a horrific blast has a history of thumbing its nose at federal safety laws.

The Upper Big Branch Mine had 458 safety violations last year, records show. Fifty of the violations, about 10%, were declared willful or gross negligence - five times the national rate of 2%.

Just last month, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration slapped the owners of Upper Big Branch with 57 more violations - for ventilation failures and improper escape route plans.

The mine is a run by a subsidiary of politically tied Massey Energy, whose deep-pockets CEO, Don Blankenship, has no problem spending money on pro-coal, anti-union pols.
Blankenship keeps as a trophy in his office a TV that was hit by a bullet when he battled a past strike. The Upper Big Branch Mine, where three miners had died in the past year, isn't unionized. In 2004, Blankenship spent $3 million for advertising to help a challenger defeat a sitting state Supreme Court justice. The new judge refused to recuse himself in a $70 million case against Blankenship; the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled he should have.

In the same case, the chief justice of the state court also hadto recuse himself after photos surfaced of him on vacation with Blankenship in the French Riviera.

Blankenship insisted in a statement the company's "top priority is the safety of our miners and the well-being of their families." Critics say that's just not the case.
Monday night's explosion is thought to have been caused by a pocket of methane. Proper ventilation is key to preventing the buildup of such gases.

The Massey subsidiary that runs Upper Big Branch, Performance Coal Co., has a checkered history of fighting fines - or simply failing to pay them. It was hit with $897,325 in fines last year but has paid only $168,393.

In 2006, a fire at Aracoma Alma No. 1 mine, another Massey mine in West Virginia, trapped 12 workers. Two miners suffocated while searching for a way to escape. Aracoma admitted in a plea agreement that two permanent ventilation controls were removed a year before.

The Aracoma fire led to 25 health and safety violations and criminal charges against company executives. The Mine Safety and Health Administration hit Massey with a $1.5 million fine - the largest ever against a mining company. In 2009, a judge hiked the fine to $2.5 million after executives pleaded guilty to 10 criminal charges.

Lawyer Bruce Stanley, who won a settlement for the two widows in the Aracoma case, said the number of violations at Upper Big Branch "causes concern."

Mine accidents like the one at Aracoma and the Sago Mine disaster that killed 12 workers in West Virginia in 2006 have led to scrutiny of the federal monitoring agency. An audit by the U.S. Labor Department's found mine safety officials failed to adequately retrain veteran inspectors.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Ghosts of preznits past.....

Spirit of Rove and Dubya Lingers in the Department of Justice

If you live in Alabama and care about justice issues, it's as if George W. Bush and Karl Rove never left the White House.

The latest evidence of that came Thursday when federal investigators met with members of the Alabama Legislature and said they are looking into corruption surrounding an electronic-bingo bill that passed the Senate earlier in the week.

Democrats, who tended to favor the bill, immediately pointed a finger at Republican Governor Bob Riley, who has been using a task force and pre-dawn raids to try to shut down bingo facilities in the state. Democrats say Riley's crusade has been driven by the desires of Mississippi Choctaw gaming interests, who reportedly spent $13 million to help get him elected in 2002.

An FBI agent based in Alabama said the bingo investigation is being driven by prosecutors in Washington. But a close examination of the circumstances surrounding the inquiry indicate that almost certainly isn't true. And it shows that President Barack Obama, now that health-care reform has passed, needs to exert control over a Justice Department that remains alarmingly dysfunctional.

Experts in criminal justice said the meeting on Thursday with legislative officials was "virtually unprecedented" and violated standard FBI procedures. "I can't think of a legitimate law-enforcement purpose to do something like this," one said.

That's because the meeting almost certainly was not held for a legitimate law-enforcement purpose--it was designed to intimidate.

Consider a couple of key factors surrounding the latest bizarre events in Alabama:

* The bingo bill passed on a 21-13 vote in the Alabama Senate on Tuesday;

* Federal investigators arrived at 8 a.m. the following day at the home of Jarrod Massey, a lobbyist for the Country Crossing development near Dothan, which includes an electronic-bingo pavilion. Massey, according to his attorney, was harassed and threatened with arrest and told he had until the end of the day to cooperate and "save" himself.

* The bill is set to go to the Alabama House of Representatives, and if OK'd there, would allow voters to go to the polls in November to decided whether to allow electronic bingo.

* According to press reports, representatives from the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama played a key role in Thursday's meeting. Bush appointee Leura Canary, who oversaw the prosecution of former Democratic governor and Bob Riley opponent Don Siegelman, remains in the charge of that office. Alabama's two Republican U.S. Senators, Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions, have scuttled various Obama nominees for the position, and the White House, so far, has chosen not to fight for the two candidates (Michel Nicrosi and Joseph Van Heest) favored by Democrats.

Canary's lingering presence in office almost certainly is driving the bingo investigation. Angela Tobon, an FBI special agent in Mobile, Alabama, told The Birmingham News that the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Justice Department is leading the inquiry. Tobon refused to elaborate when contacted by a reporter from the Montgomery Advertiser.

PIN was a notorious cesspool during the Bush years, playing key roles in the political prosecutions of Don Siegelman in Alabama and Paul Minor in Mississippi. Six lawyers from PIN have been under investigation for failure to turn over evidence in the prosecution of former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK).

To make matters worse, PIN has been without a permanent leader since last October, when news broke of probable misconduct in the Stevens case. Jack Smith, a career federal prosecutor out of Brooklyn, New York, was named on March 11 to become permanent head of PIN.

News of Smith's appointment drew positive reaction in the justice community. But he has been serving with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, and is not likely to take over full-time at PIN for a while.

Does that mean Leura Canary was able to take advantage of a leaderless organization, contacting "loyal Bushies" still embedded in the Justice Department to help get PIN involved in a bogus Alabama operation?

It sure looks that way.

And that appears to be the thinking of lawyers for Jarrod Massey, the targeted lobbyist. They already have filed a complaint with the Office of Professional Responsibility and asked that Canary be prohibited from taking part in the probe. Reports mainjustice.com:

“We strongly agree that, if there is any evidence of wrongdoing in regards to SB380, then it must be investigated,” Jarrod Massey’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the DOJ, according to The Birmingham News. “However, the investigation should not be performed under the direction of the current U.S. attorney, with her close political ties to Gov. Bob Riley, but rather by Main Justice in order to remove any hint of political influence.”

Let The Sun Shine In......