Category Archives: US History

We’re Number One! We’re Number One!

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Here in Rhode Island, the littlest state in the nation, we don’t get to say we’re number one very often. But here’s our chance: right now it appears that we’re number one in the country for screwing the public sector worker out of long-term financial security. From the Associated Press:

Despite jeers and the threat of a lawsuit from public workers, Rhode Island lawmakers on Thursday night approved one of the most far-reaching overhauls to a public pension system in the nation.

The proposal is intended to save billions of dollars in future years by backing away from promised benefits to state and municipal workers in the state-run pension plan. Lawmakers called Thursday’s vote one of the most wrenching they’ve had to cast, though the fight may not be over if unions follow through with promised lawsuits.

When I look around the street I live on, which is a modest street in its home values, I see a lot of my neighbors who are going to be impacted by this. The cumulative loss of the additional cost-of-living increase might well cost some of these individuals their homes someday. These are teachers, administrative workers, and security workers for the state, just to name a few.

Treasurer Raimondo’s response for why EngageRI, the organization that supports her agenda, does not need to disclose its financial backers is because pension reform “benefits everyone.” This is just a bald-faced lie. A large percentage of our state’s workers just lost a big piece of long-term income security. They are now going to have to clamp down on spending and save more to fund their own retirements. These are people who will not be able to give to nonprofits or support that local band fundraiser or go out to eat but once in a blue moon to save the extra money.

If we want to benefit everyone, we need to take from those who have too much. The “too much” line in my mind gets drawn when we are talking millions and billions in income and assets. When enough people finally realize what is going on and the top 5% start to pay their share again, we might have enough money to rebuild our country. But by then, we may be too far gone.

David Korten Frames the Issues for Occupy Wall Street

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

This is an excellent video from an erudite scholar of our economy.  David Korten is the author of When Corporations Rule the World and is here to tell us that we don’t need Wall Street in its current form.  It is just messing up the economy with corruption and financial warrior tactics to protect and further enrich the elite.  We need local banks and local economies.  The notion is radical — what will we all do with our 401K’s if there is no Wall Street?  Go back to having a savings account and earning 3% interest a year. Actually that doesn’t sound half bad.  The problem is banks are paying less than 1% interest right now.

Spared by Fate on 9/11

Posted on by ninjanurse

Denise Oliver Velez at Daily Kos has a powerful 9/11 story.

I was working in the World Trade Center when we decided to move upstate, from our home in Astoria Queens, NY. We wanted more space, I wanted to garden and grow veggies, and we couldn’t afford to buy a house in the city. So we searched for an affordable home and found a fixer-upper for sale–cheap-two hours away from Manhattan. My husband was able to change jobs to a place nearer to the new house, but I didn’t have that luxury. After relocating I continued to commute to work early in the morning to make it in to my office, located on the 16th floor of 4 World Trade Center.

One morning, in September of 2001, I got up at 4:30 AM to get ready for the long 2 hour drive in. Before leaving I heard a strange grinding sound from our cellar. County homes often don’t have basements; ours had a cellar with a sump pump. For those of you not familiar with sump pumps–they are used to pump out ground water that accumulates under the house. I investigated and saw smoke; the grinding noises were the sump pump burning itself out. I figured out how to shut it down, but water started to flood over the boundaries of the sump hole and flood the cellar. I woke up my husband and told him to call a plumber. I had to leave or I’d be late for an early morning meeting with my boss.

The Velez family found themselves in a changed America, where race and religion took on new and ominous meanings, and Ms.Velez’ father’s American flag from his service with the Tuskegee Airmen became a shield against suspicion.

Read the rest here– After the Towers Fell.

September 11 After 10 Years

Posted on by ninjanurse

Wall of Peace Tiles

Last night I went to Waterfire, beautiful cool night with a full moon and our own unique civic festival in full swing.

Since September 11, 2001, I never go to a large public gathering without a small feeling of defying fear. We hear reports of credible threats, but that has been the background of the last ten years. So many parts of the world– Kenya, Northern Ireland, Chechnya– have suffered violence at the hands of organized religious and political fanatics. When that violence invaded our nation it brought into focus what had been on the margins of our national consciousness.

On that day, I was working as the Health Program Facilitator at the Providence Housing Authority. All day we stood in the community room in front of the large TV’s, or went into the apartments where the TV’s all showed the towers falling over and over. I stayed at work, glad that I believed my work mattered, but worried about my family and what might happen next. That night I couldn’t bear to be alone, and walked from Benefit Street to Rochambeau, stopping at three churches that kindly opened their doors to the lost and traumatized.

For the first time, I looked at people on the street and saw not Black and White, young and old, but simply, Americans.

In the days immediately following, the national mood was one of unity, coming together to help one another. An intern we worked with had started nursing school in NYC, and the student nurses were mobilized to assist with the wounded. There was no influx of survivors, the devastation was so complete.

There was, for a time, such a sense of selflessness. The anger, inevitable, had not yet set in. President Bush made a point of leading us away from prejudice against our Muslim citizens, though he failed to seize the moment of a national desire to serve and heal. Some of that spirit is captured in the tiles that line the walls of the peace walk at Waterplace Park.

Ten years on, our divisions are deep and painful. ‘Muslim’ has become a slur thrown at the president. Though this president succeeded in killing Osama Bin Laden, the enemy was never one man, or one organization. You can’t stop an idea with bullets, if that idea has power in the minds and hearts of people. Religious extremism flourishes when people despair of justice in this world. Angry people look for an enemy, or a scapegoat, as the terrible history of the last century shows.

Peace is not just the absence of war, it is a way of life built by work and sacrifice. War may temporarily stop an aggressor, but it cannot create a world we can live in. That is the work of the peacemakers.

I wish in this tenth year after the terrible attacks that took more than 3,000 innocent lives, and the even more terrible and costly wars that followed, that we can again find our commonality as Americans, and work in the world to stop conflict before it becomes war.

I hope that we can heal our own divisions, to make our society safe and welcoming to the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, free and just to people of all religions, and an example to the world that our American values of liberty and justice cannot be shaken by violence from without or fear from within.

Obituary for My Mother, Ann Marie (Nancy) Stoppleworth

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Ann Marie (Nancy) Stoppleworth passed away on July 22, 2011 in Providence, RI. She was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on August 3, 1925, the oldest daughter of Mary and William Dwyer. Nancy was a graduate of Saint Francis Nursing School for her RN, Georgetown University for her Bachelors degree in Nursing, and The University of Connecticut for her Masters degree in Anthropology. She joined the convent twice as a young woman before choosing to live the secular life. She married Leland J. Stoppleworth on July 5, 1958, and was the mother of seven children.

Nancy led a successful career as a nurse and nursing administrator, serving as a nurse in many hospitals, visiting nursing services, and finally as the Chief of Nursing for the State of Connecticut Mental Health Services. Nancy was a devout lifelong Catholic who carried out the church’s mission of charity in myriad ways including serving the homeless in soup kitchens and shelters, caring for poor families in the community, participating in prayer groups and prayer lines for the sick, traveling to Haiti for charitable mission work, and establishing charitable annuities for medical and educational purposes with Maryknoll Sisters and Salesian missions.

In 2004, Nancy donated 55 acres of land to the town of Tolland, Connecticut in order to create the Stoppleworth Conservation area, a pristine and beautiful open space for all to enjoy. Nancy was a lifelong journal-writer, who left behind scores of honest and brave reflections on her many life dilemmas, successes, and concerns. She loved reading and knowledge, swimming in Bolton Lake, going to the beach, and spending time with her children and grandchildren.

She is survived by two sisters, Helen Stephenson and Lyn Jacoby, who reside in California, and six of her seven children: Laura Reave and husband Robert Reave of London, Ontario; Amalia Delorenzo of Guerneville, California; Anne Weber and husband Garry Weber of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Maria Dugan and husband Douglas Dugan of Brooklyn, New York; John Stoppleworth and wife Janice Kloo of Manchester, Connecticut; and Kiersten Marek and husband Kevin Marek of Cranston, Rhode Island. Her youngest child, Angela, died in childhood due to a muscular disease. She is also survived by grandchildren Melanie Reave; Seth Martel; Bryan, Paul, and Charles Weber; Elena, Avra, Isaiah and Patrick Dugan; and Katrina and Kalliana Marek.

Services for Nancy will take place at Church of the Ascension, 390 Pontiac Avenue, Cranston at 10 am on Wednesday, July 27, with reception to follow. Donations in lieu of flowers may be made to Maryknoll Sisters, P.O. Box 311, Maryknoll NY 10545.

Calling Hours will be from 6 – 8 PM at our home at 109 Waterman Avenue on Tuesday evening. Please send an email to me if you are planning to come.

Agent Orange

Posted on by ninjanurse

From Yahoo News…

HANOI, Vietnam – Vietnam on Friday started the first phase of a joint plan with former enemy the United States to clean up environmental damage leftover from the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, a lasting legacy from the Vietnam War.

The work concentrates on a former U.S. military base in central Vietnam where the herbicide was stored during the war that ended more than three decades ago. It marks the first time the two sides will work together on the ground to clean up contamination.

The comments section has passionate and informed opinions from American veterans and families who also deal with the effects of dioxin, the known poison that magnified the lethality of Agent Orange.

Can we learn anything from this terrible history? Can we do justice today, and consider future generations who pay so dearly for our wars and greed? Can we do right by our own veterans and let all of us pay the price when we put our youth in harm’s way?

So far we have not learned. Depleted uranium left behind in Iraq is blamed for a rise in birth defects and childhood cancers, our troops were also exposed. Eventually the denials won’t hold up. This history is one reason the public is sceptical when scientists, politicians and corporations share a common interest in damage control.

Memorial Day

Posted on by ninjanurse

There’s a house on my street with two flagpoles in the yard, an American flag and a POW/MIA flag. The Vietnam War had all the boys in my high-school class wondering what their draft number would be. The rich always had a way out, but that war reaped the young men of the middle and working class.

Now, not so much shared sacrifice. How volunteer is our military when so many young people can’t find a job or afford college? What should we give up before we put the first soldier in harm’s way? Cheap gas? Defense jobs? Tax cuts?

Every soldier lost leaves a space in the place they should have been. A parent, a child, a brother or sister, a friend or lover.

When soldiers come home, they need support. Not as troops, but as citizens. Jobs, health care, housing, safety, respect– what we all need.

Keeping the peace happens here.

Greater City:Providence has a tribute to all the Rhode Islanders who died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rhode Island’s Nuclear Fatality–Part I

Posted on by ninjanurse

This is in memory of Robert Peabody, a husband and father working a second job to support his family, assigned to a dangerous task in an unsafe workplace, poisoned by a nuclear reaction. There are lessons to learn, may we not forget them.

It’s been almost thirty years since the Three Mile Island disaster put a halt to the expansion of nuclear power in the US. Public opinion was already turning against the industry. Once promising cheap, clean electricity, the power plants in fact required massive taxpayer subsidies to build and a special exemption from liability in case the worst happened.

The worst almost happened at Three Mile Island …

Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the Three Mile Island accident.

The worst-case accident occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl.

Today, a generation after the gas lines and bitter winters of the 1970′s, we’re again caught unprepared. We still depend on foreign oil and large, centralized power plants. Investment in alternative energy has been cut to a trickle since Ronald Reagan. The nuclear industry is portraying itself as a clean, green savior. Safety concerns are dismissed as a superstitious fear of radioactivity…

In more than 500 reactor years of service in the United States, there has never been a death or a serious injury to plant employees or to the public caused by a commercial reactor accident or radiation exposure. Says Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences: “Nuclear power is the safest major technology ever introduced into the United States.” link

In fact, a Rhode Island man was killed on the job by radiation exposure. In 1964 in Charlestown, Rhode Island, Robert Peabody was working the second shift at the United Nuclear waste processing plant. The training was minimal, supervision lax and written policies inadequate. Peabody, a Navy vet and mechanic, had picked up a second job to support his large family. When he came on the evening shift, no one warned him that a container full of radioactive water was more concentrated than what he usually handled. When he emptied it into a larger tank the highly concentrated sludge set off a fission reaction…

A blue glow filled the small room as the radiation charged the air with electricity. Peabody was blown flat on his back. The force of the blast also sprayed radioactive solution onto the tower ceiling, 12 feet above. Some of the volatile fluid gushed over the tank lip and onto the floor. The entire plant was instantly filled with the sound of screaming sirens.(Providence Journal, Sunday Journal Magazine ‘Chain Reaction’ 3/11/90)

[ 'Chain Reaction' is not available online free of charge. Yankee Magazine has an online article that covers the same incident, with more technical detail. This is some buried history that the Journal should re-publish.]

Two other workers who responded to the accident were exposed to a second, smaller fission reaction.

Robert Peabody was doomed in an instant, but it took him 49 hours to die. Turned away from Westerly Hospital, he was driven at top speed to Rhode Island Hospital by ambulance driver John Shibilio and placed in an isolation room. His widow attributes her cancer to the minutes she held her dying husband’s hand. Everything he touched had to be decontaminated or burned. His remains were cremated. He left nine children.

His death, and the corporate denial afterward, is an example of the weak regulation and lack of accountability that leaves workers unprotected. The danger to the public is not imaginary.

The nuclear industry likes to compare its safety record to coal. But much of the danger of coal mining is a matter of priorities. Worker safety is balanced against profit. A mine accident is a disaster for the miners and their community. A nuclear accident such as Chernobyl sends radioactive particles across national borders. Millions are unaware that they are exposed. These particles contain elements that do not degrade for many thousands of years, that accumulate in our bodies and concentrate up the food chain, capable of causing cancer and birth defects many generations after the accident.

The Peabody family was left bereft and in poverty. Robert Peabody was blamed for the accident that killed him.

EVEN AS PEABODY was admitted to the hospital, United Nuclear was working to discredit him, blaming “human error” and “ineptitude” in newspaper accounts of the accident. In addition to assuring the public that any radiation released into the atmosphere was insignificant, company officials said that Peabody had violated plant safety procedures by pouring the contents of the 11-liter “safe” bottle into the “unsafe” chemical tank. (Providence Journal 3/11/90)

No danger to the public. No blame to the corporation. They say it’s different now. Trust them.

For the aftermath of the accident, see Part II.

What’s Happening to Rhode Island’s White Collar Jobs?

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

Many of us in Rhode Island were glad to hear the news of Senator Whitehouse sponsoring legislation to help keep jobs in America, or at least reduce the monetary incentives for corporations to outsource their jobs to other countries. Senators Gillibrand and Schumer in New York also recently urged National Grid not to outsource IT jobs to other countries. But as I spend time researching and trying to discern how many white collar jobs we have probably already lost in Rhode Island, and how many more we are likely to lose, I have to wonder if these efforts by our elected officials are going to be “too little and too late” to stem the tide of jobs abandoning our state and country.

Pretty much any corporation of any size in Rhode Island has begun to outsource some aspects of their work. Financial businesses in particular, of which we have several in Rhode Island, are heavily into outsourcing their jobs to developing nations, where wages are currently a fraction of what they are in the US. Last time I worked for a non-profit human services agency, they too were outsourcing their IT jobs to India. Anything to save a buck. Probably some of our government agencies are outsourcing their white collar jobs to other countries as well. I don’t have any direct information on that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems to be all the rage these days.

As a therapist, I am well aware of the soaring number of unemployed people in our state. Right now it seems about a third of the people who walk through my door are either directly (they themselves are laid off) or indirectly (their parent or spouse is laid off) impacted by The Great Recession.

It’s not just Rhode Island that is experiencing this enormous job drain as companies set up shop in the developing world. From the AFL-CIO’s research on trends in offshoring:

Goldman Sachs estimates 400,000–600,000 professional services and information sector jobs moved overseas in the past few years, accounting for about half of the total net job loss in the sector over the period. A Deloitte Research survey found one-third of all major financial institutions are already sending work offshore, with 75 percent reporting they would do so within the next 24 months. A U.C. Berkeley study found 25,000 to 30,000 new outsourcing-related jobs advertised in India by U.S. firms in just one month in 2003.

Bank of America, another big Rhode Island employer, has moved a lot of jobs overseas and will continue to do so in 2011 according to this article:

Last year, it [Bank of America] added about 1,000 employees to its Asian, Latin American and African operations, and will continue to shift some of its current U.S. employees overseas in 2011.

I hear anecdotal information about CVS Caremark outsourcing jobs. I’m not sure if any of the layoffs of the last 150 people will result in more hires overseas. Seems likely.

So what can we the people do? If I were the George Soros of Rhode Island (which God knows I’m not) I would start a campaign to help people communicate their frustration about Rhode Island companies moving jobs overseas directly to our state and national delegations, so that these leaders could in turn put pressure on these companies to stop taking away the jobs that provide for Rhode Island’s middle class stability. Perhaps this would be a worthwhile campaign for some of Rhode Island’s labor and progressive nonprofits. Before more jobs are moved away, we have a window of opportunity to use community and government leverage to say, “Save Our Jobs!”