Legalectric

From Sue Moravec, a fellow Mpls. Central grad, sending a couple of references to “a story you won’t hear or read about,” a story about a guy who just did the right thing at the right time because he could while the other guy with the “mandate” did… did exactly what???

Al Gore blasts Bush; personally airlifted Katrina victims

From San Jose Mercury News
Terence Chea – Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – Former Vice President Al Gore urged Americans on Friday to hold the Bush administration accountable for failing to adequately prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina.

“When the corpses of American citizens are floating in toxic flood waters five days after a hurricane struck, it is time not only to respond directly to the victims of the catastrophe, but to hold … the leaders of our nation accountable,” Gore told environmentalists at the Sierra Club’s national convention.

Gore had been scheduled to give a speech to state insurance commissioners in New Orleans this weekend about the likelihood that global warming will spawn increasingly deadly hurricanes. He decided to take his speech to San Francisco after that conference was canceled.

“The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis, it is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences,” Gore said.

Bush administration officials have said Katrina’s damage could not have been anticipated, but Gore rejected that.

“What happened was not only knowable, it was known in advance, in great and painstaking detail. They did tabletop planning exercises. They identified exactly what the scientific evidence showed would take place,” Gore said.

In his Sierra Club speech, the former senator from Tennessee didn’t mention an act of mercy that he was personally involved in – his help airlifting some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans to Tennessee on Sept. 3 and 4. He did that at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of his son years earlier.

Dr. Anderson Spickard, who is Gore’s personal physician and accompanied him on the flights, told The Associated Press that “Gore told me he wanted to do this because like all of us he wanted to seize the opportunity to do what one guy can do, given the assets that he has.”

An account of the flights was posted this week on a Democratic Party Web page. It was written by Greg Simon, president of the Washington-based activist group FasterCures. Simon, who helped put together the mission, also declined an interview.

On Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Simon learned that Dr. David Kline, a neurosurgeon who operated on Gore’s son, Albert, after a life-threatening auto accident in 1989, was trying to get in touch with Gore. Kline was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

“The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute – food and water running out, no power, 4 feet of water surrounding the hospital and … corpses outside,” Simon wrote.

Gore responded immediately, telephoning Kline and agreeing to underwrite the $50,000 each for the two flights, although Larry Flax, founder of California Pizza Kitchens, later pledged to pay for one of them.

“None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews,” Simon wrote of the American Airlines flights. “One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them.”

He also recruited two doctors, Spickard and Gore’s cousin, retired Col. Dar LaFon, a specialist in internal medicine who once ran the military hospital in Baghdad.

Most critically, Gore worked to cut through government red tape, personally calling Gov. Phil Bredesen to get Tennessee’s support and U.S. Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta to secure landing rights in New Orleans.

About 140 people, many of them sick, landed in Knoxville on Sept. 3. The second flight, with 130 evacuees, landed the next day in Chattanooga.
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Associated Press Writer Duncan Mansfield in Nashville contributed to this report.

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This article is also at CNN – same AP article.

Here’s Al Gore’s speech to the 2005 Sierra Summit

And again, for those like G.W. who say it couldn’t have been predicted, here’s that Scientific American article, “Drowning New Orleans” which does exactly that. That was in October, 2001.

Interesting… within a couple hours of when I was gifted with a link to this IntellectualTakeout site, it disappeared, or was disappeared! Here’s the disappearing link:

http://www.intellectualtakeout.com/campusnetwork/displayDish.asp?yd=2005&id=11

What’s up?

(update – as of Tuesday afternoon, it’s baaaaaaack, and it looks a lot different than it did before! A little birdie from St. Olaf told me that the Center for American Experiment held a press conference at the capitol today, where they spread the word that “We’re trying to present fair and balanced opinions.” Uh-huh… right… please refer to the G.W. photo posted 9/13)

Well, it seems that the Center of the American Experiment does not agree with the St. Olaf theme of “sustainability” for this academic year. OK, 1, 2, 3… AAAAAAAWWWWWWWW… So what’s the bee up their bonnet? The burr under their saddle? It’s a big “so what” yawn kind of thing… It seems their biggest bitch is that St. Olaf didn’t learn from their reactionary tirade some time back. Once more with feeling… AAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW…

The short version:

Here’s the real poop of it in its entirety from another site, its parent “Center of the American Experiment,” where the horse’s apple doesn’t fall far from the horse — it’s hard to get worked up into a response. But here is their complaint, see for yourself, and keep checking to see if that link ever comes back:

Yawn… more diddling while New Orleans is flooding… Get a grip, folks, there’s “important issues of the day” to deal with!

That’s the headline in the Sunday Times – Britian. It’s about time that another government acknowledged what a friend in reinsurance calls “the next asbestos.”

(And a translation for those of us on this side of the pond — pylons are transmission line structures, and masts are the cellular towers!)

Electrical fields can make you sick

Sarah-Kate Templeton, Medical Correspondent

A GOVERNMENT agency has acknowledged for the first time that people can suffer nausea, headaches and muscle pains when exposed to electromagnetic fields from mobile phones, electricity pylons and computer screens.

The condition known as electrosensitivity, a heightened reaction to electrical energy, will be recognised as a physical impairment.

A report by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), to be published next month, will state that increasing numbers of British people are suffering from the syndrome. While the total figure is not known, thousands are believed to be affected to some extent.

The report, by the agency?s radiation protection division, is expected to say that GPs do not know how to treat sufferers and that more research is needed to find cures. It will give a full list of the symptoms, which can include dizziness, irregular heartbeat and loss of memory.

Although most European countries do not recognise the condition, Britain will follow Sweden where electrosensitivity was recognised as a physical impairment in 2000. About 300,000 Swedish men and women are sufferers.

The acknowledgement may fuel legal action by sufferers who claim mobile phone masts have made them ill.

In January Sir William Stewart, chairman of the HPA and the government?s adviser on mobile phones, warned that a small proportion of the population could be harmed by exposure to electromagnetic fields, and called for careful examination of the problem.

The HPA has now reviewed all scientific literature on electrosensitivity and concluded that it is a real syndrome. The condition had previously been dismissed as psychological.

The findings should lead to better treatment for sufferers. In Sweden people who are allergic to electrical energy receive government support to reduce exposure in their homes and workplaces.

Special cables are installed in sufferers? homes while electric cookers are replaced with gas stoves. Walls, roofs, floors and windows can be covered with a thin aluminium foil to keep out the electromagnetic field ? the area of energy that occurs round any electrically conductive item.

British campaigners believe electrical devices in the home and the workplace, as well as mobile phones emitting microwave radiation, have created an environmental trigger for the syndrome.

There is particular concern about exposure to emissions from mobile phone masts or base stations, often located near schools or hospitals.

In January Stewart also called for a national review of planning rules for masts. The review was launched by the government in April.

British sufferers report feeling they are being ?zapped? by electromagnetic fields from appliances and go out of their way to avoid them.

Some have moved to remote areas where electromagnetic pollution is lower.

The HPA report is eagerly awaited by campaigners. Alasdair Philips, director of the campaign group Powerwatch, said: ?This will help the increasing number of people who tell us their GPs do not know how to treat them.?

Rod Read, chairman of Electrosensitivity UK, added: ?This will be the beginning of an awareness of a new form of pollution from electrical energy.?

DIANE AND BERT SCHOU – ON THE FRONT LINE OF ELECTRICAL SENSITIVITY

This is the issue for my clients, Diane and Bert Schou, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, who are battling Cedar Falls Utilities and the Iowa Utilities Board, working toward having the permit denied or the transmission line rerouted. It’s important to put a face on electrical sensistivity — this is very real. Diane Schou is very real, her injuries are real.

Diane has developed electrical sensitivity, and it has made life very, very difficult. Every day, she must take extreme precautions to protect herself from the signals emitting from a local cell tower. There is a LOT of information out there on EMF, electrical sensitivity, biological impacts, and precautions that should be taken, including:

EMF-RAPID report
A pooled analysis of magnetic fields and childhood leukaemia
Black on White, just published in English, the experiences of hundreds of people suffering from electric sensitivity. This is the site with the entire book, available for downloading. It’s BIG, be prepared.

Here are a couple of general sites with a LOT of information:
The Swedish Association for the Electrically Sensitive
The Power Line Task Force’s www.powerlinefacts.com

Now, to add injury to Diane’s electrical injury, Cedar Falls Utilities wants to put a transmission line 70 feet from her home, located directly on the other side of the road. And the Iowa Code requires that lines be sited only where it will not “inconvenience or cause undue injury” to affected property owners. The Administrative Law Judge of the Iowa Utilities Board did not take Diane Schou or Iowa law into account.

The route that Cedar Falls Utilities has chosen as their “preferred” route is odd, in that it doesn’t utilize already existing transmission corridors through the area, and that it goes right past a registered landing strip and the Schous’ home. It is carefully routed around all the new development in the area, development that equals the new residential load growth! The new substation is going up about a mile east on Ridgeway, the same road that Schous live on.

The new substation is located near the John Deere factory, but a look at the map shows that there are at least four substations named for Deere facilities — that’s the main load in the area. Deere seems to be the primary benefactor of this line.

Here’s the Des Moines Register article about their case:

Cedar Falls woman loses bid to block power line extension

Things have changed a bit since that article! Since the last blog report, when the Iowa Utility Board approved seven issues for appeal, a VERY favorable Order (here’s that Order), we’ve submitted our Initial Brief, as did Cedar Falls Utilities and the Office of the Consumer Advocate, and we submitted Reply Briefs as well. Cedar Falls Utilities has made three Motions to Strike, to strike me as their attorney, to strike Exhibits and to strike me as their attorney and my brief again! It’s been a legal marathon. We’ve replied to their Motions with a legal “pffffffffbbbbbbbbt!” and we’ll see how the Iowa Utiltiies Board rules.

Could any warning have been more specific?
Drowning New Orleans from the Scientific American

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Many people are uncomfortable with the class issues that were stirred up by the wind and water of Katrina. People are talking about the deathly impact of class in a way rarely heard in the U.S. It’s a raw and festering truth that doesn’t set well in the SUV McMansion world.

Usually we focus on the visible identifiers and distinctions of race, gender, and as a capitalist nation, we rarely discuss class, as taboo a topic as any in our culture. We try to ignore the growing gulf between those who have and those who have much much less, but that gulf is growing larger through horribly regressive tax policy at state and federal levels. Yes, Melissa, that is a fact, the very richest people pay a far lower percentage of taxes than the middle class or poor. Reality bites, and it bites the poor hardest of all — we cannot retain the illusion of equitable policy.

Katrina blew that away. We got the story of what is really happening in the United States right between the eyes. We got the story of how poor people live and are treated in this country by watching them suffer and die. We got the story because it happened so fast, and right in front of our faces, and no one could put a spin on it quickly enough. We got the story because television reporters were openly outraged on camera. We got the story because reporters asked real questions and demanded real answers, rather than throwing softballs and settling for the fluff and the spin that pass for news. It was raw, it was awful, and it slid under the skin of our sleepy, numb, feel-good lives.

Midweek, a guy working out next to me at the gym leaned over and said, “Can you believe this?” I only shook my head, but what I wanted to say was, yes, I can. Because here, finally, was the truth. Unavoidable. On TV. Later, I felt so anxious and miserable, I started to cry on the street.

From Nora Gallagher: Katrina blew away the gloss of business as usual on TV (link added).

ANN McFEATTERS: The lessons of Hurricane Katrina

One more thing: No more across-the-board tax cuts. We need to get rid of the deficit and put aside money for the next catastrophe.

Hope is not enough.

It’s time to change the face of capitalism as we experience it in this country, recognizing that we are a democracy, which is a different focus than capitalism and its “one dollar = one vote” equation. It’s time make the changes necessary to bring the social and political reality more in line with our country’s grand illusions of equity and justice. My personal optimistic self says that “it’s never too late.”

There goes the neighborhood. Dean Zimmerman (Zimmerperson), my neighbor in Prestigious East Phillips for decades, had the FBI do his housecleaning, and as Doug Grow says, “Nonetheless, the bottom line is this: If this stuff is true, it’s dead-on, off-to-prison-you-go corruption.”

from www.cpinternet.com/~mbayly/icons

Doug Grow: Did Green Dean take the long green?

Council member took bribes, affidavit alleges

Supporters: Accusations don’t fit

Headlines like “Supporters: Accusations don’t fit” are disturbing, because friends would be the last to know — it’s not exactly something you’d advertise! And people in this spot are usually too wrapped up in themselves in “it’s all about ME land” to see the ripple/tsunami effect this has on others around them, their supporters to people dependent and connected to them in one way or another.

What I remember most, aside from the routinely excruciatingly long DFL caucus at Holy Rosary, was his role in the C.O. and “Co-op Wars,” when People’s Warehouse was forcibly taken over. At the time, I was volunteering at Mill City now and then and later worked at Seward Cafe and for D.A.N.C.e Warehouse (which side are you on, girl? no question here), and the “Co-op Wars” remained an abcessing wound for at least a decade…

And in digging around for an article a while back about this, I find that North Country has its records at the Historical Society! Here’s the take from their summary:

1975-1976 brought the turmoil of the the “co-op wars” to North Country Co-op. The Co-op Organization (CO), a radical political group begun by individuals within the co-op movement, began pushing a pro-communist, pro-revolutionary agenda. The CO touted that “middle class hippies” were not able to understand or address the “working class plight” and that co-op organizers were “social elitists.” The CO felt that the co-op community must turn toward a sustained anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggle led by the working class, not by the hippy counter-culture. They also claimed that the co-op community was too disorganized to be effective in pursing this social-political struggle. The CO’s membership was strongest at the Beanery Co-op (Minneapolis) and People’s Warehouse (Minneapolis) but it had members in many co-ops around the metropolitan area and through these members tried to push their political agenda on the management of the co-ops. The CO not only tried to undermine the food policies of the co-ops, but the cooperative element as well, since they felt the members should not have to volunteer at the storefront. Moreover, the CO wanted co-ops to discard their cooperative, democratic management systems and replace them with Democratic Centralism under the CO’s direction. By 1975 the CO had seen moderate success in increasing its following, but was hungry for control. The CO physically took over the People’s Warehouse and tried to occupy several storefronts. At North Country Co-op, six out of nine members of the leadership collective were part of the CO. These six railroaded a vote to lift the boycott of People’s Warehouse. Their vote was overruled by a crowd of angry community residents and co-op members who stormed the store, installed a new cash register, and demanded that CO members leave the store.

The “co-op wars” had a shattering effect on many co-ops, including North Country Co-op. The violence, controversy, and intensity of the political rhetoric scared away casual shoppers and divided the co-op movement between those who felt that a co-op’s purpose was to provide wholesome, natural food and those who felt that co-ops should provide products that appeal to the “working class” at prices cheaper than conventional supermarkets and at the same time deliver a message of revolution. People who stayed within the movement became suspicious of radical politics, preferring to keep the focus on food. At the same time, others had been forced to reexamine what they were trying to do with the co-op, how the co-op was organized, and who they wanted the co-op to serve. As North Country Co-op pulled itself together after 1976 it reorganized its bookkeeping practices and revised its food policy to include canned goods, white bread, and for a short time, refined white sugar. The co-op maintained its collective management practices; decisions were still to be made by consensus of store coordinators, volunteers, and involved community members.

Ahh… I digress… must be the grey hair syndrome again…

So we’ll see what happens in the Dean Zimmerperson saga.