Happy New Year

Have a happy and healthy New Year. 

May 2013 bring the world closer to peace!

     

Jan Barry and Paula Rogovin

These peace cranes were made by Paula’s grand-niece, Hoshea Rogovin. They were made from Combat Paper made from the fibers of a military uniform blended with the fibers of a Marine Mom T-shirt. These cranes were donated to a Combat Paper crane project inspired by Tina Drakulich whose son, David, was killed in the war in Afghanistan.

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a young child named Sadako contracted leukemia. As she lay dying in the hospital, she tried to make 1,000 paper cranes. She died before she finished. People in Japan and around the world continue to make paper cranes to symbolize our yearning for world peace.

The red cloth is from a blouse made in a special program in Vietnam for teenagers with leg deformities from Agent Orange or other chemicals dropped by the US during the Vietnam War. It is another way of making use of art to help heal the wounds of war.

Making a Killing

Another Kind of Bottom Line
(graph/Mother Jones)

Until apple-cheeked school children and beloved teachers died in a blizzard of bullets in Newtown, Connecticut, pension fund managers, Wall Street hedge fund owners and other investors were looking for another kind of killing—a financial one—from their considerable shares in gun manufacturing firms.

Now a shocked news media is rushing to unveil the long hidden shadow behind the long string of massacres by homegrown gunmen armed with military assault weapons aimed at fellow citizens.

“Pension giant California State Teachers' Retirement System, or Calstrs, is reviewing a $500 million investment commitment to Cerberus Capital Management LP because of the private-equity firm's ownership of the maker of a weapon used in Friday's school shooting in Newtown, Conn,” the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday morning.

The New York Times reported more details in a business column: “It is often overlooked, but some of the biggest gun makers in the nation are owned by private equity funds run by Wall Street titans. The .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle that was used on Friday by Adam Lanza to massacre 20 schoolchildren was manufactured by the Freedom Group, a gun behemoth controlled by Cerberus Capital Management, named after the three-headed dog of Greek myth that guarded the gates of Hades. Its founder, Stephen A. Feinberg, hunts regularly on the weekends with a Remington Model 700.”

Within hours of these news reports, Cerberus Capital Management, based in New York City, announced that it is selling its stake in the company that makes Bushmaster rifles. But news reporters across the nation were now on the trail like baying hounds hot on the heels of the usually wily foxes of Wall Street. Bloomberg News tracked down Feinberg’s father at his retirement home in, of all places, Newtown, Connecticut and asked for a comment on the shooting rampage that tore up the heart of a community school, an outrage committed by a local boy with the loaded Bushmaster belonging to his mother, who was also killed reportedly by one of her collection of semi-automatic guns.

Then the business news company owned by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg dropped the boom on the cozy relationship between assault weapons-makers and public pension funds.

“The New York State Common Retirement Fund, which manages $150 billion, is also reviewing its investments in gunmakers, according to Eric Sumberg, a spokesman for State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli,” Bloomberg News reported. “As investors, we support Cerberus Capital Management for taking action today to sell its stake in the Freedom Group,” Sumberg said today in an e-mail.

“New York City pension funds are reconsidering about $18 million in the stocks of Smith & Wesson, Sturm Ruger and two other companies whose businesses include gun manufacturing. ‘We are currently conducting a review of our holdings and aggressively exploring all options, including divestment,’ Matthew Sweeney, a spokesman for Comptroller John C. Liu, said in an e-mailed statement.”

Until Friday, the gun manufacturing parent company had a good year, Reuters reported: “Cerberus bought firearms maker Bushmaster in 2006 and later merged it with other gun companies to create Freedom Group, which reported net sales of $677 million for the nine months ended September, up from $565 million the same time a year ago.”

Other reporters tracked down the financial link between the gun manufacturer and the California teachers pension fund, which quickly announced it was reviewing its massive investment in the Cerberus hedge fund.

“The California teachers' retirement fund is also ‘reviewing’ its multimillion-dollar investments in two publicly traded firearms manufacturers, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm, Ruger, another fund spokesman, Ricardo Duran, told The Huffington Post.

“Smith & Wesson manufactured the assault weapon used by James Holmes during the Aurora, Colo., rampage that killed 12 and injured 58. Sturm, Ruger made the assault weapon used by Anders Breivik during the killing spree that left 77 people, mostly teenagers, dead in Norway in July 2011.

“California's teacher retirement system owns hundreds of thousands of shares in the two publicly traded gun corporations according to the system's equities documents, for a total worth of approximately $6 million…

“As sales of traditional hunting rifles and shotguns have declined in recent decades, sales of military-style assault weapons to civilians have become a major profit-driver for gun companies,” The Huffington Post noted, “making any new gun control regulations a major financial threat for the entire industry, analysts said.”

Confronting the War at Home

State police arriving at school shooting in Newtown, CT
(photo/The Hour)

As US military forces roam the world in search of enemies to fight, folks back home are under assault by suicidal, mayhem-bent sons and neighbors wielding military assault weapons. America’s relentless war on terrorism—i.e., on people using mass violence against the globally expansive American way of life—has come home in terrifying, terrible ways.

Gunmen from our own communities have turned urban neighborhoods, suburban shopping malls, college campuses and small town schools into war zones.

“We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end,” President Obama said Sunday at a prayer vigil in Newtown, Connecticut, where a 20-year-old local resident killed 20 school children, six teachers and administrators, his mother and himself in volleys of shots in a war on the community where he was raised.

The military solution would be to declare martial law, station troops at every school, shopping center and every other public gathering place, marshal special operations teams to break down doors at every home and apartment that military-intelligence found reason to believe may harbor hidden weapons of mass destruction.

That’s been the American way of war for the past decade and more in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s been very popular in American video games, movies, TV shows. And it’s been a fatal attraction for many young men in American communities whose minds became unhinged in a society that apparently worships military-style violence.

“We have to change,” our commander-in-chief said in Newton. Obama could lead off by ending the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Americans are dying across America of the consequences of waging such violence abroad.

The rest of us will have to decide if we have the courage of the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown who died confronting a hometown gunman wielding a military-style arsenal made in America.

Green Businesses: Redefining the Bottom Line

 2013 Chevy Volt      (photo/chevrolet.com)

 General Motors has set a different kind of bottom line for car companies, reducing and reusing waste material to zero at more than half of its manufacturing plants around the world.

PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay is taking similar action in food manufacturing, building what it calls a “netzero” plant in Arizona designed to operate on recycled water, solar-panel energy, biomass fuel and cutting edge waste reduction.

“This is an investment in our future. This is an investment in environmental sustainability,” Al Halvorsen, a Frito-Lay executive, said during a panel discussion at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference recently. “For businesses to succeed, societies must succeed as well,” he added in a rare discussion with a roomful of journalists about corporate moves to reduce their impact on the natural environment.

GM showcased its “green business” stance by displaying its newest Chevy Volt hybrid-electric car at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Lubbock, Texas in October. While many conference participants were drawn to test-drive the Volt, my attention was hooked by large posters highlighting GM’s “landfill free” actions at scores of facilities. The posters flanked a literature table headed by the company’s environment and energy communications manager, Sharon K. Basel. 

"If you put a bag of trash on the curb each week," Basel told the Detroit News in April, "you're putting more trash on the curb than our 99 (landfill-free) facilities combined."

This is an astounding development, given the massive flow of industrial debris dumped by auto manufacturers over decades that created toxic waste sites across the US. How did GM do this? Creative step by step, the Detroit News reported. “For example, engineers converted Chevrolet Volt battery-pack covers that were scrapped during the development process into wood-duck nesting boxes at the Wildlife Habitat Council-certified grounds of GM's Customer Care & Aftersales Center in Grand Blanc.

"’A lot of the stuff we've incorporated has come from employee ideas,’ Basel said. For GM, recycling means dollars, too. The company has recorded about $2.5 billion in revenue since 2007 by selling recycled materials.”

This is a business-oriented environmental story I don’t recall seeing reported previously. It gets more interesting the further I dug into it when I got home from the conference.    

“In a sustainability report published last January … GM said its number of landfill-free facilities rose from 0 in 2000 and 1 in 2005 to 76 in 2010, and in that year its facilities recycled 92 percent of the waste they generated. In the report, GM committed to achieve 25 more landfill-free sites and reduce total waste by an additional 10 percent by 2020,” Environmental Leader website reported in June.

Among GM’s innovative actions, the environmental and energy management news site noted, are these: “The company has been re-purposing a wide variety of material. In conjunction with its suppliers, GM recycles scrap cardboard from various plants into a sound absorber on the Buick Lacrosse and Verano interior roof. Air deflectors on the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks are made with used tires from the automaker’s proving ground.”

In a business culture that traditionally emphasizes trade secrets, GM executives decided to tell other companies how they managed these improvements. “GM is sharing the lessons it's learned with other corporations, such as PepsiCo's Frito-Lay,” The Detroit News reported. "’That is a big focus for us, to help mentor and train and share our best practices with other companies,’ Basel said.”

GM created a blueprint for landfill-free waste reduction and posted it on its website. “In the blueprint, GM gives nine steps on how to make plants and facilities landfill free such as tracking waste data, defining zero waste, prioritizing waste-reduction activities, engaging employees and building a sustainability culture, strengthening supplier partnerships, and resolving regulatory challenges,” Waste & Recycling News reported last month.

Why are big corporations like GM and Frito-Lay acting like environmental activists?

“Sustainability really isn’t a choice any more,” Sharlene Leurig, senior manager of water and insurance programs at Ceres, said during the SEJ panel discussion on “Green Businesses.”  Ceres is a coalition focused on sustainable business practices.  What got business executives’ attention, she said, is “the scale of disruptions” in doing business because of water shortages in drought areas and “extreme weather events” erupting around the world.

“The climate is changing,” Leurig said. “Companies are noticing.”

 Halvorsen, the Frito-Lay executive, said multinational companies take supply disruptions from weather-related disasters very seriously—such as floods in Thailand that closed manufacturing supply plants. Many businesses now work with conservation groups on issues such as deforestation that contribute to more severe floods, for instance.

“We are active with about 400 corporations to try to improve sustainability in the world,” he said.

Halvorsen said his company and others are looking to change what goes on in agricultural and other practices in their supply chain that impact the environment. “There’s some dramatic things we can do,” he said. 

   

For more information:

www.freep.com/article/20120429/BUSINESS06/204290506/More-GM-plants-go-landfill-free

www.wasterecyclingnews.com/article/20121022/NEWS03/121029982/gm-offers-blueprint-for-others-to-achieve-landfill-free-status

Election Day USA

Voters in Rockaway, NY     (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The young woman walked up to the closed, dark community center and burst into tears. “Where can I vote?” she said to an older woman standing in the virtually empty parking lot. “This is my first time.”

And so began a conversation among strangers that led to my being asked to drive the young woman to an elementary school across town where the voting districts that usually set up in the community center had been moved in the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s swath of destruction across New Jersey. When she came out of the elementary school, the young woman, a high school senior juggling a job at a fast food restaurant and unsure what she wants to do in life, burst into a big smile. “I feel empowered,” she said of her vote.

Hours later, a forlorn figure came striding across the dark parking lot to two people standing by a car. “Where can I vote?” said the well-dressed woman toting a large bag. “I just got off the bus from work.” I dropped her off in front of the school in a far corner of Teaneck, NJ with ten minutes to spare before the polls closed.

Earlier in the day, I gave a ride to two older men speaking Russian and a woman with a Caribbean accent. The neighborhood around the community center is a sometimes uneasy mixture of middle class African-Americans, conservative Orthodox Jews and liberal Manhattan transplants. The most divisive selection on the ballot was perhaps the local school board race, certainly right up there with the contest for president of the US.  

Residents of this suburban neighborhood anxiously coped with the frustrations of leaving a home without electricity—or which had only recently gotten it back after a week without power—to find their polling place closed by the storm. They coped by cooperating with strangers offering directions or a ride to an unfamiliar part of town.

Some who stopped by looking to vote came back from the polls and joined the tiny band of volunteers. “This is the best thing I could do today,” said a tall, distinguished-looking hospital administrator. A former youth league basketball coach, he connected with many of the confused voters by recalling coaching their kids.

The woman with a Caribbean accent returned in her husband’s pickup truck with a magic marker. She was upset that when she had walked over to vote, a sign directed voters to go to Hawthorne Elementary School. “I’m not going to drive to Hawthorne, NJ!” she said angrily. She hand-wrote under the name of the school: “Teaneck.”

And then she settled in to spend the rest of the day helping reassure voters anxious about gasoline supplies that they didn’t have to drive to a polling place in a distant town in the next county. Hour after hour, she greeted confused drivers and walkers, handing out copies of Google map directions and organizing car pools to the school. “I’m a state supervisor,” she said, referring to her job as a medical supervisor at a state retirement home for military veterans. “I feel this is what I should be doing today.”

Meanwhile, my partner alternated greeting lost voters and calling election and municipal officials on her cell phone for assistance. She pressed the municipal manager to provide copies of map directions and an emergency light for the parking lot when evening approached. A DPW worker stopped by, assessed the situation and said he’d see what could be done. Two National Guard trucks arrived and their crews unloaded boxes of emergency shelter beds. “That’s for the next storm,” someone said, referring to the Nor’easter predicted to whip in off the ocean on top of the hurricane damage.

Shortly before sunset, the municipal manager strode out of the building and announced that the lights had been restored. Then the municipal workers and the National Guard drove off.

The parking lot grew dark and lonely, even with the newly restored lights. A woman who had stopped by earlier in the day drove in and parked. “I’m back to help,” she said. As they waited for voters to swing in and abruptly stop, stunned to see the community center closed, the latest volunteer and my partner suddenly started whooping. They discovered they had both been at the same New York City public school years ago, as a teacher and student in another class.    

A car drove in. The driver was a college student still wearing his cooking uniform from a culinary institute up the Hudson River. “Hurry up,” my partner said, giving directions to the school. “You can still make it to vote.” 

 

Stormy Weather

Hurricane Sandy, Cape May, NJ  (AP photo/Mel Evans)

Nobody was prepared for the force of Hurricane Sandy when it smacked into the Jersey shore on Monday: Not the barrier island towns turned into miles-long piles of mangled houses, buried cars and burning gas lines, and their dazed, defiant old-timers who’d weathered previous storms, but had to be rescued by police and National Guard units.

   

Not the state of New Jersey, whose Obama-bashing Republican governor was reduced to asking the Democratic president for massive federal aid, as lines of desperate drivers snaked along roads across the state seeking some gasoline from the few service stations that had electricity, and millions of residents shivered in homes with no lights or heat.

Not the city of New York, where the storm surge swamped subway tunnels and car tunnels, flooded power stations that shorted out electric power to large swathes of the city, as winds gusting to 100 miles per hour closed bridges, airports and fanned flames that burned out an entire seaside community.

And not the federal government, which scrambled to mobilize military units to fly in utility crews from other states to help untangle broken power lines and fallen trees, fix or replace exploded transformers and flooded substations; FEMA and other federal agency aid teams faced with millions of increasingly restive people without electricity and heat and running out of food; and logistics teams to organize the movement of gasoline supplies to the region’s thousands of largely darkened service stations.        

In our little corner of Teaneck, NJ, power returned after four days, thanks to a crew of utility workers from Florida who worked long hours to replace a transformer down the street that burst into flames during the hellacious winds that whipped through here on Monday, toppling trees across the region. We celebrated with friends with a potluck supper that was all that remained of a poetry reading we’d planned to hold at a local arts center. Beyond our few, happy blocks of light, most of our town and as far as one could see across Bergen County was still dark Friday night.

Meanwhile, long lines of cars, vans and trucks formed near the few service stations that were open. A long line of people on foot with gas cans waited at a gas station in a neighboring town, hoping to get some fuel for generators or to drive to work even after the station ran out and closed the pumps. The gasoline crisis prompted New Jersey Governor Christie to order odd/even rationing based on the last numeral on one's license plate and the date of the month. Even so, a service station near our home closed this morning after it quickly sold out its supply to a flash-mob of drivers and walkers with gas cans. A worker at the station said he didn’t know when they would get resupplied.

Barry O’Bama, Republicanocrat

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

If Barry O’Bama were a registered Republican, Republicans would be hailing him as a brilliant commander-in-chief who took out Osama bin Laden, sent in the Marines to spearhead a military surge in Afghanistan, saved Wall Street, Main Street and the American automobile-SUV-and-pickup-truck industry from bankruptcy, stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel in the face of threats from Iran, and created an economically sound, bipartisan, public-private partnership based on the pioneering state health care plan formulated by that rock-ribbed compassionate conservative, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

   

The irony of the 2012 presidential election campaign is that Barack Obama’s record as president is more Republican than it is stereotypically Democratic. Like Eisenhower’s pledge to end the stalemated war in Korea, Obama vowed to end the war in Iraq and did so. Like Nixon’s diplomatic coup in traveling to Communist China, Obama deftly undercut dictators in Egypt and Libya. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s nurturing of national forests and national parks while thundering like a bull moose at the rapaciousness of big banks and oil corporations, Obama revived environmental protection and tighter regulations of big financial wheelers and dealers as national priorities.

Like Gerald Ford, Obama dutifully and thanklessly picked up the pieces of a recklessly war-waging, backroom dealmaking, self-serving presidency that crashed in flames—and pardoned the unrepentant crisis-makers, telling the nation, including furious Democrats, let’s move on, clean up the mess and work together to rebuild. Like Lincoln, Obama has tried mightily to hold a fractious republic together in the face of a fiercely anti-federal government, “states’ rights” rebellion on one side and a revolt by disenfranchised students, military veterans and disgruntled armies of the unemployed on the other.

In  contrast, Mitt Romney appears to be running to be CEO of America Inc. The former governor contends that government can’t do anything right including creating jobs, but that he can. In that case, as an experienced business executive, Mitt has a tremendous public spirited opportunity to invest his fortune and that of fellow billionaires to create or expand companies to hire millions of Americans to do good American jobs. With all that money, reportedly sitting in off-shore tax havens, what’s he need the government for to boost the economic engines of the private sector?

Mitt Romney likes to invoke the genial ghost of Ronald Reagan. Unlike Romney’s bellicose stance regarding Iran, however, the former California governor knew how to diffuse an international crisis involving threats and worries over nuclear weapons, reaching out to adversaries. Like Reagan, who went to Moscow to embrace Gorbachev in Red Square and end the Cold War, Obama has traveled far and wide to offer his hand in friendship to nations in turmoil, and also to our tumultuous, politically-divided, culturally warring states. It’s time for Republicans of good will to bury the animosity driving the debilitating Cold War at home that has so disastrously divided Americans.