Showing posts with label platform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label platform. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Saturday, October 27, 2012
The Republican Rape Embarrassment
In an election cycle in which the Republicans have been plagued by gaffs of their own making, this has to be their most ridiculous moment: their stance on rape. It is a complete embarrassment on any of them who actually believe this total bullshit. I know there are rational Republicans out there--a few are family and friends. I wish they would be more vocal at condemning this heinous and insipid view, but they just shake their heads and I can see that they just wish it would go away.
And in an election year in which the incumbant president is so clearly beatable based on the issues, all the Republicans can come up with to oppose Obama is Mitt Romney? GOP, how thou doth falter! It's ridiculous but not so much that it's funny, just troubling.
And in an election year in which the incumbant president is so clearly beatable based on the issues, all the Republicans can come up with to oppose Obama is Mitt Romney? GOP, how thou doth falter! It's ridiculous but not so much that it's funny, just troubling.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
2012 Texas GOP Platform: Turning Back the Clock
Click here for our analysis of the party’s platform, but following is a sampling of the extremism promoted by Texas Republicans at their convention this month in Fort Worth. That platform:
Alarmingly, the party platform also seeks to increase the authority of the highly politicized and dysfunctional State Board of Education over what Texas students learn in their public schools.
- Declares separation of church and state is a “myth” and calls for Congress to withdraw federal court jurisdiction over cases involving religious freedom and the Bill of Rights
- Calls for teaching creationist arguments in public school science classrooms
- Opposes the sale and use of emergency contraception and backs the Legislature’s war on women’s health programs
- Rejects “any sex education other than abstinence until marriage” in public schools
- Adopts a radical position that would essentially bar abortion even in cases of rape, of incest or to save a woman’s life
- Advocates for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act, minimum wage laws and the Endangered Species Act as well as the abolishment of the Environmental Protection Agency
- Attacks LGBT Texans as a threat to families and objects to laws that would protect them from job discrimination and hate crimes
- Calls for further funding cuts for public schools following draconian cuts by lawmakers in 2011
- Seeks to change the 14th Amendment to limit citizenship by birth only to those born to a U.S. citizen
- Threatens federal judges with impeachment if they don’t toe the far right’s line in controversial court cases
TFN’s analysis of the 2012 platform as well as the 2010 and 2008 platforms are here.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Whistleblower: BP Oil Platform Faces 'Present and Imminent Danger'
Saturday, March 17, 2012 by Common Dreams
Whistleblower claims about BP's Atlantis filed this week argue against Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's claims platform is safe
A whistleblower who has a standing lawsuit against BP has argued this week that the company's Atlantis Project, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, faces "present and imminent danger."
The whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott, is a former BP contractor on the Atlantis. His lawsuit says that BP failed to keep required records of the safety systems for the Atlantis.
Back in 2010, Food & Water Watch, which joined Abbott's lawsuit, warned that the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster foreshadowed another Gulf of Mexico disaster caused by BP's Atlantis platform. At that time, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said, “We have evidence that Atlantis is unsafe and is in danger of creating an even worse spill than the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion.”
The Times-Picayune: BP Atlantis whistleblower alleges imminent safety threat for first time
Whistleblower claims about BP's Atlantis filed this week argue against Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's claims platform is safe
A whistleblower who has a standing lawsuit against BP has argued this week that the company's Atlantis Project, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, faces "present and imminent danger."
The whistleblower, Kenneth Abbott, is a former BP contractor on the Atlantis. His lawsuit says that BP failed to keep required records of the safety systems for the Atlantis.
Back in 2010, Food & Water Watch, which joined Abbott's lawsuit, warned that the massive Deepwater Horizon oil disaster foreshadowed another Gulf of Mexico disaster caused by BP's Atlantis platform. At that time, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, said, “We have evidence that Atlantis is unsafe and is in danger of creating an even worse spill than the one caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion.”
* * *
The Times-Picayune: BP Atlantis whistleblower alleges imminent safety threat for first time
 |
| BP Atlantis in 2006 (photo: munchicken) |
A whistleblower is alleging for the first time in a yearslong lawsuit against BP that its massive Atlantis oil platform operation off the Louisiana coast faces present and imminent danger.
Kenneth Abbott first complained in 2009 that BP had failed to keep required records of the design of pressure-relief systems and other safety mechanisms onboard the Atlantis. [...]
[T]he U.S. government joined in some of his claims when an independent reviewer justified many of Abbott's complaints. But BP, and later the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, determined that the lack of safety records did not pose any imminent threat.
Abbott's latest filing in the Houston court this week argues otherwise. [...]
[T]he Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released a report in March 2011 that declared the Atlantis rig safe, in spite of its failure to maintain proper records on board.
* * *
Food & Water Watch: Deepwater Horizon Accident Foreshadows a Potential Disaster Waiting to Happen in the Gulf
WASHINGTON - April 22 - Following Tuesday's explosion on the Deepwater Horizon Platform, leased and operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico, the national consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch is warning of the possibility of a similarly tragic disaster involving the company's Atlantis Project- one of the world's deepest semi-submersible oil and natural gas platforms, located 150 miles south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico.
Last year, a whistleblower and former company contractor alleged that the Atlantis platform has been operating without a large percentage of the engineer-approved documents needed for it to operate safely. An independent engineer later substantiated these concerns, concluding that a BP database showed that over 85 percent of the Atlantis Project's Piping and Instrument drawings lacked final engineer-approval, and that the project should be immediately shut down until those documents could be accounted for and are independently verified.
"The tragic explosion on the Deepwater Horizon platform is an urgent reminder of the calamity that could occur if BP's Atlantis platform is operating without the approved documents necessary for ensuring its safety," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "This accident and the recent Massey mine disaster in West Virginia underscore a complete lack of regulatory oversight over the operations of the fossil fuel industry."
BP has denied the whistleblower's assertions regarding Atlantis, going so far as to write a letter to Congressional staff saying that they are "unsubstantiated," even though internal documents show that in August 2008, BP management was aware of the problems and believed that the document deficiencies "could lead to catastrophic Operator error." An investigation conducted by the company's Ombudsman in April 2009 seems to substantiate the charges, although the investigation's results did not become known until this month. BP has never acknowledged that the Ombudsman conducted an investigation of the project's document deficiencies.
"BP's recklessness in regards to the Atlantis project is a clear example of how the company has a pattern of failing to comply with minimum industry standards for worker and environmental safety," said Mike Sawyer, an Engineer at Apex Safety Consultants, who verified the contractor-turned-whistleblower's concerns about the company's lack of proper documents.
In March 2010, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with overseeing the nation's offshore oil and gas platforms, announced that it would investigate these allegations in response to a letter from Representative Raul M. Grijalva (D-AZ) and 18 of his colleagues calling for an investigation and a report on the findings issued to Congress. Food & Water Watch brought the situation to Representative Grijalva's attention in October of 2009.
Last week, Food & Water Watch submitted a letter to MMS detailing the key issues that need to be addressed with MMS's investigation, highlighting the recently-surfaced information about BP's own Ombudsman investigation. The organization called on MMS to conduct a thorough investigation of the situation, including interviewing the contractor-turned whistleblower who unearthed these potential safety hazards, and to penalize BP to the fullest extent of the law.
"The accident on the Horizon platform further highlights the importance of MMS's investigation of the Atlantis Project, as well as its regulation of offshore drilling activities in that area. As energy companies push to open more of the Outer Continental Shelf, MMS needs to make sure that companies like BP are operating safely and adhering to the law. If the agency does not adequately do so with its investigation of the BP Atlantis Project, the House Natural Resources Committee needs to hold oversight hearings and ensure that the explosion and mishap of the Horizon platform is not replicated," said Zach Corrigan, Food & Water Watch's senior staff attorney.
Read Food & Water Watch's full timeline of the problems associated with the BP Atlantis Project here.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Occupy Doesn’t Have a Platform — It is a Platform
by Kevin Carson on Dec 16, 2011
Center for a Stateless Society
The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left & Right (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal & conservative establishments) for not offering a clear list of official demands — for, in other words, not offering a platform.
But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them.
Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.
Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al Qaeda: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.
A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.
A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.
That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.
But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.
Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks. Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making — its own judgment — the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movment in hundreds of cities around the world.
Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.
According to Lester MacGurdy at Oakland Occupier, Occupy Oakland has begun to deal with police evictions by retreating, waiting until the cops are gone, then going back. Police are essentially heavy infantry who move slowly and ponderously into place, and can move only as quickly as their bloated logistical train moves with them. Protestors are light infantry who can disperse and reconcentrate on short notice. ”The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.”
You can bet this will be standard procedure for every Occupy group in America in a week’s time.
The corporate state and its thugs in black uniforms and kevlar are big, impressive, and make lots of loud noise — just like a T. Rex blundering into a tar pit. The resistance is small, agile and resilient — just like a swarm of piranha. And in the end, we’ll hang their bleeding heads on our battlements.
In the immortal words of Bob Marley: “The stone that the builder refused shall be the head cornerstone.”
Center for a Stateless Society
The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left & Right (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal & conservative establishments) for not offering a clear list of official demands — for, in other words, not offering a platform.
But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them.
Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.
Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al Qaeda: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.
A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.
A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.
That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.
But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.
Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks. Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making — its own judgment — the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movment in hundreds of cities around the world.
Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.
According to Lester MacGurdy at Oakland Occupier, Occupy Oakland has begun to deal with police evictions by retreating, waiting until the cops are gone, then going back. Police are essentially heavy infantry who move slowly and ponderously into place, and can move only as quickly as their bloated logistical train moves with them. Protestors are light infantry who can disperse and reconcentrate on short notice. ”The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.”
You can bet this will be standard procedure for every Occupy group in America in a week’s time.
The corporate state and its thugs in black uniforms and kevlar are big, impressive, and make lots of loud noise — just like a T. Rex blundering into a tar pit. The resistance is small, agile and resilient — just like a swarm of piranha. And in the end, we’ll hang their bleeding heads on our battlements.
In the immortal words of Bob Marley: “The stone that the builder refused shall be the head cornerstone.”
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