Today this badass woman is asking for your indulgence.  Recently we said our last goodbyes to my brother on a hilltop in Washington.

If you have read my personal profile on womensvoicesmedia.org, you know that my passion for much of my life has been feminist causes.  One of my major frustrations was the lack of ability to reach more people and be a part of building a coalition large enough to make a difference in this country.

My brother, Reid Cornwell, gave me the opportunity – the tool – to address my frustration.  Because of his knowledge and skills and his desire to help me make my dream come true, www.womensvoicesmedia.org became a reality.  Without him, it would have never happened.  He not only provided hundreds of hours of work, he provided them with a passion while continually encouraging me.  I will be eternally grateful for all he did.

I am not sure, without him, I can meet the high bar he set but I am going to keep trying.

For those of you who indulged me by reading this tribute to the end, I hope you are fortunate enough to have someone like Reid in your life.

COMMENTARY FROM A BADASS WOMAN 

I seems like Mother Nature had plans for us and it didn't include posting to websites and social media.  The situation, while consuming several days of our time, fortunately ended very well for us.  No wind damage, no flooding.

But, of course that has not been the case for many thousands of other people and the storm continues to cause problems for many more.

It seems there isn't a day that goes by that doesn't include weather disasters and/or gun violence or both.  How much more bodily harm and destruction and how many more deaths must occur before Congress comes together and agrees on ways to stop it?  Disaster is knocking on our door.  We can either take action to bar it or we can sit and wait to be destroyed. Hey guys, thoughts and prayers don't cut it anymore.

Even if you agree something must be done, if you do nothing, you are contributing to the problem.  There is strength in numbers which cannot be denied.  But time for action is running out.  Let's stop p------ Mother Nature off and get gun controls!  NOW!

COMMENTARY  FROM  A  BADASS   WOMAN

The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote nationally on August 18, 1920, so why is Women’s Equality Day on August 26th each year?

The simple answer is that even when a constitutional amendment has been ratified it’s not official until it has been certified by the correct government official. In 1920, that official was U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby. On August 26, 1920, Colby signed a proclamation behind closed doors at 8 a.m. at his own house in Washington, D.C, ending a struggle for the vote that started a century earlier.

In 1971, Representative Bella Abzug championed a bill in the U.S. Congress to designate August 26 as “Women’s Equality Day.” The bill says that “the President is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation annually in commemoration of that day in 1920, on which the women of America were first given the right to vote.”

BUT THE UGLY TRUTH IS THAT, 123 YEARS SINCE WOMEN GAINED THE RIGHT TO VOTE, WE STILL DO NOT HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. 

Needless to say the constant work, over 123 years, to pass the ERA creates a rather long narrative but one worth reading, particularly since there are still more than a few people who believe the ERA is already a part of the Constitution.

The Brennan Center For Justice has an excellent "Explainer" post by Alex Cohen and Wilfred U. Codrington III which provides, not only the historical facts of the ERA, but many of the legal aspects as well. 

Here is the current status on efforts in Congress.

WASHINGTON – Today, January 31, 2023, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) and Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), along with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Congresswomen Madeleine Dean (PA-04), Sylvia Garcia (TX-29), Abigail Spanberger (VA-07), Cori Bush (MO 01), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37), and Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), unveiled a bicameral, joint resolution to affirm the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and take a critical step toward enshrining equality for women in the United States Constitution. The lawmakers’ resolution removes the arbitrary deadline for ratification of the ERA and recognizes the amendment as a valid part of the Constitution, with the 38-state threshold needed for ratification of the ERA having been met.

The lawmakers’ resolution is endorsed by nearly 300 grassroots and national organizations.

A summary of the ERA resolution is available here.

NOW HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO TO JOIN THE FIGHT FOR RATIFICATION OF THE ERA.

Here are four choices for tools you can use to contact your representatives.  Each has different approaches but all are quite helpful and easy to use.

(1) Rogan's List <susanrogan@substack.com>   All the information for various ways to contact federal office holders and agencies.

(2)  Resistbot        Instructions for contacting multiple representatives at one time.

(3)  Common Cause     Put in your complete address and access a catalog of your federal, state and local representatives.

(4)  Jessica Craven from Chop Wood, Carry Water   Sign up and you will receive regular emails containing action items, a script to use along with a link to your legislators contact information.

What I hope you will do is put the information for your two Senators and one Congressperson in a handy place to access daily.  Then everyday contact them that  "it is way past time for the ERA to be added to the Constitution.  Women deserve to have equal rights NOW!"

If enough of us tell them everyday, how can they refuse?

Now don't stop there.  Save the information for the next time you need to contact your representatives on other matters.  AND if you are really fired up about being an activist, share the information and your enthusiasm with friends and relatives.  Yeh!

jj

 

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer examines the origins, rise and dominance of a billionaire class to whom money is no object when it comes to buying power

By Charles Kaiser   

Lots of American industrialists have skeletons in the family closet. Charles and David Koch, however, are in a league of their own.

The father of these famous rightwing billionaires was Fred Koch, who started his fortune with $500,000 received from Stalin for his assistance constructing 15 oil refineries in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. A couple of years later, his company, Winkler-Koch, helped the Nazis complete their third-largest oil refinery. The facility produced hundreds of thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel for the Luftwaffe, until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944.

In 1938, the patriarch wrote that “the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy and Japan”. To make sure his children got the right ideas, he hired a German nanny. The nanny was such a fervent Nazi that when France fell in 1940, she resigned and returned to Germany. After that, Fred became the main disciplinarian, whipping his children with belts and tree branches.

These are just a handful of the many bombshells exploded in the pages of Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s indispensable new history “of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right” in the US.

A veteran investigative reporter and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Mayer has combined her own research with the work of scores of other investigators, to describe how the Kochs and fellow billionaires like Richard Scaife have spent hundreds of millions to “move their political ideas from the fringe to the center of American political life”.

Twenty years after collaborating with the Nazis, Fred Koch had lost none of his taste for extremism. In 1958, he was one of the 11 original members of the John Birch Society, an organization which accused scores of prominent Americans, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of communist sympathies.

In 1960, Koch wrote: “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America.” He strongly supported the movement to impeach chief justice Earl Warren, after the supreme court voted to desegregate public schools in Brown v Board of Education. His sons became Birchers too, although Charles was more enamored of “antigovernment economic writers” than communist conspiracies.

After their father died, Charles and David bought out their brothers’ shares in the family company, then built it into the second largest privately held corporation in America.

“As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hardline libertarian politics in America,” Mayer writes. Charles’s goal was to “tear the government out ‘at the root’.”

Another man who studied Charles thought “he was driven by some deeper urge to smash the one thing left in the world that could discipline him: the government”.

Much of what the American right has accomplished can be seen as a reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s, when big corporations like Dow Chemical (which manufactured napalm for the Vietnam War) reached the nadir of their popularity.

In 1971, corporate lawyer (and future supreme court justice) Lewis Powell wrote a 5,000-word memo that was a blueprint for a broad attack on the liberal establishment. The real enemies, Powell wrote, “were the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences”, and “politicians”.

He argued that conservatives should control the political debate at its source by demanding “balance” in textbooks, television shows and news coverage – themes that were echoed in inflammatory speeches by Richard Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew.

The war on liberals was so effective that practically everyone reacted to it: from the New York Times, which hired ex-Nixon speechwriter Bill Safire to “balance” its op-ed page, to the Ford Foundation, which gave $300,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 1972. The impact was cumulative: almost four decades later, Barack Obama was astonished by one of the first questions asked to him, by a New York Times reporter, after he became president: “Are you a socialist?”

The AEI was one of dozens of the new thinktanks bankrolled by hundreds of millions from the Kochs and their allies. Sold to the public as quasi-scholarly organizations, their real function was to legitimize the right to pollute for oil, gas and coal companies, and to argue for ever more tax cuts for the people who created them. Richard Scaife, an heir to the Mellon fortune, gave $23m over 23 years to the Heritage Foundation, after having been the largest single donor to AEI.

 Continue reading:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/17/dark-money-review-nazi-oil-the-koch-brothers-and-a-rightwing-revolution

• Charles Kaiser is a writer based in New York. He is the author of 1968 in America, The Gay Metropolis and The Cost of Courage.

 

Editors Note: This article was printed in The Guardian in January, 2016, but the information it provides is as relevant today as it was in 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Guardian                Jan, 2016

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the common root causes of (and solutions to) worker exploitation and climate change.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record. In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.” What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions. Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.” The Times story quoted R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist, who was concerned that workers’ “performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” and therefore “hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy.” How inconvenient the corporate-induced climate crisis has been to the performance standards of corporate-driven worker exploitation! We oughtn’t to be surprised that in an economy designed to see workers as units of production for a profit-driven top-down system of exploitation, corporate media coverage would spout such callous narratives based on internalized capitalist values. President Joe Biden’s administration, on the surface at least, appears to be centering worker safety and well-being. In late July the president asked the Department of Labor to “issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat,” and to increase enforcement of heat-related worker protections. “The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law,” announced the White House. The Biden administration pointed out proudly that it “has continued to deliver on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history,” and that, in contrast, “many Republicans in Congress continue to deny the very existence of climate change.” Yet, in its first two years, the Biden administration actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits than in the first two years of the previous Republican administration of Donald Trump. A 21-year-old climate activist, Elise Joshi, confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in late July 2023, saying, “A million young people wrote to the administration pleading [for it] not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska and we were ignored.” The video of Joshi’s brave action has gone viral. If Biden truly cares about the health and safety of working people in a warming climate, and about the future of young people like Joshi, he has the power to do much more than merely enforce safety standards—which is a band-aid solution and won’t do anything to stop global warming. The Center for Biological Diversity has devoted an entire website, BidensClimatePowers.org, explaining what the president could do immediately, without needing congressional approval. The recommendations include refusing permits for fossil fuel projects, as Joshi pleaded for him to do. Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the intersection of worker exploitation and climate change. They neither pinpoint the common cause—corporate greed—nor do they identify the common solution—ending corporate greed. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a practice run for what is currently transpiring with the climate catastrophe enveloping the planet. Even those who had the luxury of working from home during the lockdowns were measured by their productivity. At first corporate America celebrated because people worked harder from home than from their workplace, freed from time-consuming commutes and the distractions of in-person camaraderie. Now, as many workers are realizing they don’t want to be cogs in someone else’s wheel, Fortune.com blared the headline, “American Worker Productivity Is Declining at the Fastest Rate in 75 Years—and It Could See CEOs Go to War Against WFH [Work From Home].” Meanwhile, those whose labor our society relies on were labeled “essential” and sent off to work, braving a killer virus, often without adequate safety measures in place. Even working in a grocery store during the lockdowns cost people their lives. A third of all workers in the U.S. were deemed essential. Unsurprisingly, they were disproportionately low-income and people of color. We can expect the same to transpire in a warming climate as people like Daniel Rivera, the Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, toil in the burning heat in order to keep the wheels of productivity turning. Just as corporations care little for worker lives, the climate crisis is the predictable outcome of an economy designed to maximize shareholder profit, not ensure a viable planet for future generations. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson connected the dots in his novel New York 2140. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who make the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth,” said Robinson. We cannot rely on fiction writers painting dystopian futures to be the only ones identifying the common root causes of climate change and labor abuse. The current design of our economic system privileges the well-being of only 1 percent of all humans. Whether it’s a deadly virus or the deadly climate, unless we clearly identify the systemic problems and redesign our economic system to center the well-being of all human beings, the future will not be livable, rendering discussions of “productivity” moot in the deadliest possible way. Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.  This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.