We are Robert and Jenn Meeropol, son and granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. We are acutely aware of the political lessons to be drawn from the conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs (60 years ago today) at the height of the McCarthy period. The charge was conspiracy to commit espionage, but our family members were presented as traitors who gave the Soviet Union the secret of the atomic bomb.

The Rosenberg Foundation tries to give activists’ children a better future than the offspring of the famous couple.

The US government used the Rosenberg case to attempt to prove to the public that the international communist conspiracy threatened the American way of life, and claimed fighting communism required that human rights and civil liberties take a back seat to national security (more information about the case is available).

Today, the US government asserts that danger from the international terrorist conspiracy and their weapons of mass destruction justifies massive surveillance, indefinite detention and even torture. Authorities say we must guard national secrets even more securely to avoid destruction. Today, the issues raised by the Rosenberg case resonate from the Oval Office of the White House to Bradley Manning, who is being tried under the Espionage Act of 1917, as were Ethel and Julius.

But there are other, more personal, lessons to draw as well.

From the ages of three to seven, I, Robert, lived a nightmare. After my parents’ arrest, relatives were too frightened to take my brother Michael and me into their homes, so we were dumped in a shelter. After the executions, we were thrown out of the New Jersey state school system when local residents found out about our parentage.

In 1954, in a politically motivated attempt to separate us from Rosenberg supporters, Michael and I were seized by New York City police from the home of our prospective adoptive parents and placed in an orphanage. But Abel and Anne Meeropol won the ensuing custody battle, our last name was changed to theirs, and we dropped from public sight for almost two decades. During those growing-up years, I dreamed of revenge.

I, Jenn, was two years old when my father and uncle decided to reclaim their heritage by mounting a public campaign to force the US government to release secret files relating to the Rosenbergs case. My dad worried that his actions might expose me to trauma and fear, similarly to his childhood experience. I was safe in my family but profoundly aware of what had happened to my grandparents. I grew up with sadness and anger about what was done to Ethel and Julius, as well as a fierce pride in who they were and what they stood for.

As I entered college in 1990, my father started the Rosenberg Fund for Children (RFC, www.rfc.org), a public foundation to help children who are experiencing similar nightmares to what he lived through as a child. The RFC is a way to transform the destruction placed on his family into a positive force to benefit a new generation of families, the way a community of support rallied to aid him and his brother after their parents were killed.

As a young adult, I watched the RFC help hundreds of children who grew up with political targeting in their families. I realized that they probably endured a similar stew of emotions – sorrow and anger, pride and obligation – to my dad’s, and my own. Growing up, I also dreamed of getting retribution from the forces that killed my grandparents before I could know them.

I joined the RFC’s staff in 2007 as granting coordinator. Now, during this 60th anniversary year of my grandparents’ execution, my father will retire as executive director and I will take over the helm of the organization he founded.

We both think of the RFC as our revenge – our constructive revenge. When bad things happen to people, to families and communities, it is natural to want to strike back, to settle the score. The wish to avoid being a passive victim is healthy, but revenge itself is usually destructive. For us, harnessing our desire to strike back and focusing it on creating a positive response is personally satisfying, and our contribution to making a positive difference in the world.

Rendering of Hanford Double Shell Tank by RiverProtection on flickr

Newly appointed US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz is scheduled to be in southeastern Washington State today, for his first visit to the Hanford site. During his April confirmation hearing he told Oregon Senator Ron Wyden that it would be “unacceptable” to maintain the status quo regarding cleanup, at Hanford. With what has come to light only recently about various government contractors pissing up a rope while collecting bonuses as the tanks leak, this is a massive understatement.

Hanford weapons production reactors produced the plutonium for the Trinity implosion-design device fission test in the desert, the Fat Man atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki in 1945, and a nuclear arsenal that includes tens of thousands of warheads. Today, Hanford is home to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, stored in 177 underground tanks, in sets of tank farms. The amount of waste at Hanford represents two thirds of the nuclear waste in the entire US.

The toxicity of the waste in Hanford tanks is such that the amount of sludge that fits onto the leg of a fruit fly is considered toxic. In fact, dozens of acres of the site have been shut down because fruit flies that first visited some sludge then went to the workers’ dining areas to dine on the food and so, the fruit flies had to be killed.

Hanford has two types of waste storage tanks: single shell and double shell. The single shell tanks that were designed to last twenty years are the oldest; they were mostly made in the 1940s and 1950s. They are made of an inner lining of steel surrounded by concrete, and 149 of them are in trouble. Half have failed and leaked upwards of a million gallons of radioactive liquid into the groundwater that leads to the Columbia River. There is no way to get to a leak underneath one of these giant tanks other than to remove it, and since the government has not shown a whole lot of excitement about doing this, these tanks are being monitored. There are currently six leakers among the single hull tanks.

Besides, it has come to the public’s attention recently, through this government report that a newer double shell tank designed in the late 1960s to last much longer than the single shell tanks, tank AY-102, in the AY double shell tank farm, is leaking to the annulus. The leak is likely due to some corrosion involving an enormous heat load at the bottom of this particular tank. The leak has escaped the inner wall of its thousand degree home, and now challenges the outer wall of this tank. The annulus is the two-foot hollow space between the layers, and the outer wall is also the last wall. Tank AY-102 has been triaged to importance, because it was supposed to be a feeder tank that held a collection of toxic waste from other tanks, and then piped it to the Waste Treatment Plant for vitrification (processed into a solid and stable glass). AY-102 already holds more than 800,000 gallons of mixed liquid toxic waste.

The problems at the moment are 1) the Waste Treatment Plant does not exactly exist due to multiple design and technical problems and 2) It did not occur to anyone that AY-102, the feeder tank, would ever leak, but it did. Now, the government is saying that it will be another six years or so, before AY-102 can be pumped out. In October of 2011, leak detection instruments showed evidence of a leak, and an alarm went off. The government contractor had no plan in place for this. AY-102 contains, among other things, more of the byproduct Strontium-90 than any other tank at Hanford, and this byproduct has a tendency to sink to the bottom of the tank and then boil everything around it. There was no Alarm Response Procedure (ARP) in place, as the video here explains:

Not only was there no ARP in place from the contractor, the same contractor also spent millions of dollars for futile work to the tank, preparing it for being the ultimate feeder tank that it can never be. Both some of the workers for the contractor as well as the Department of Energy knew this, but the contractor pressed on with unnecessary work anyway. One can not help but assume that it was lucrative in this situation to fiddle while Rome burns.

While Dr. Moniz visits Hanford for the first time and the finger pointing begins, the Hanford ‘downwinders’ with cancer fight for reasonable settlements through the courts, but there is also this:

Written by Adele Stan for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

As the House of Representatives gears up for Tuesday’s debate on HR 1797, a bill that would outlaw virtually all abortions 20 weeks post fertilization, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) argued in favor of banning abortions even earlier in pregnancy because, he said, male fetuses that age were already, shall we say, spanking the monkey.

“Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful,” said Burgess, a former OB/GYN. “They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?”

That observation led Burgess to say he had argued for the abortion ban to start at a much earlier stage of gestation, 15 or 16 weeks. (This is less than halfway through a pregnancy.) He appeared to liken Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, to the 1893 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that formally legalized racial segregation, and was not fully reversed until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The rationale for the Republican bill, which advanced through the House Judiciary last week on a near-total party-line vote, is one scientifically disputed study, touted by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) in his opening remarks at today’s Rules Committee hearing, that asserts fetuses can feel pain as early as 20 weeks after sperm meets egg.

“Well, I think all the members are cognizant of the fact that this is not a Congress that cares much about science,” said Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), the Rules Committee’s ranking member, in her questioning of Goodlatte, who refuted that claim by saying that since 1973, the year when the Supreme Court legalized abortion, much more had been learned about fetal development.

Major medical bodies in the United States and the United Kingdom have refuted the claim of fetal pain before the third trimester.

The 20-week abortion ban, if passed into law, would set up a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, which allows abortion up to the point of fetal viability outside the womb, and mandates exceptions for abortions in the case of pregnancies that threaten the life or health of the woman.

When first drafted, the 20-week ban was meant to apply only to the District of Columbia, over which Congress has a great deal of control. But with the arrest and murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell, who ran an illegal abortion clinic in Philadelphia, right-wing forces have sought to use justifiable public revulsion at Gosnell’s actions to further restrict women’s rights—and in contradiction to the common right-wing assertion of state sovereignty.

By Tory Field and Beverly Bell

Part 19 of the Harvesting Justice series

Behind The Kitchen Door follows the lives of several restaurant workers.

“This is a muddler,” said Danielle, grinding mint into the bottom of a metal cup. With the straightforward demeanor of a good bartender, Danielle was explaining how to make a mojito. But this was not just a fancy drink demo. After the cocktail, she talked with the audience about her working life at an upscale steakhouse chain restaurant, including the steady sexual harassment and the uneasy feeling of being viewed by management as a number more than a person.

The two dozen folks listening to Danielle were part of a trial run “eat-up,” an event that some food movement organizers hope will soon crop up in homes, restaurants, and bars around the country. The events are part of a new push by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and others. (See our previous article for more about these organizations.) The goal is to bring awareness and action for workers’ rights, wages, and conditions into the heart of the food movement.

“We are trying to have workers become as trendy as local and organic has become in the industry,” Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of ROC, told us. “It’s going to take the three stakeholders – workers, good employers, and consumers – working together to actually change things. Any one of those things, if it’s missing, it’s not going to work. Which is why the consumer piece is so critical, and it’s been missing. We’ve actually organized the workers and we’ve organized the employers. We’ve never organized the consumers. There’s a diners’ club that’s basically a credit card, but there’s no organized voice of restaurant consumers demanding change.”

ROC’s efforts to change conditions in the restaurant industry include campaigns to get basic benefits such as paid sick days, and to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers. The group and their allies are gathering signatures and raising support for the Miller-Harkin Fair Minimum Wage Act. If passed, the law would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 and the tipped minimum wage from $2.13 to 70% of the regular minimum wage.

ROC also aims to fundamentally shift the power structures that allow the inequities to exist in the first place. “In the long run, it’s really about having a powerful voice of restaurant workers that can counterbalance the power of the National Restaurant Association,” said Jayaraman. “Because these two issues, low wages and lack of paid sick days, are symptoms of the bigger problem of an imbalance of power between this huge powerful industry lobby and restaurant workers. The long-term vision is an industry where workers have an equal voice to employers, have dignity and respect on the job, and have the ability to move up to livable wage jobs regardless of the color of their skin or their gender.”

In order to shift this power, ROC says, consumers must join forces with workers.Throughout the country, ROC is helping restaurant diners understand the reality behind their meals. “Say you’re a waitress at an IHOP in Texas, and you’re working a graveyard shift,” Jayaraman said. “Maybe sometimes you get tips, maybe sometimes you don’t. Which means you may be earning $2.13 per hour, the federal minimum wage for tipped workers.

“That means maybe sometimes you can pay the rent, maybe sometimes you can’t. And 70% of the people earning this wage are women. They’re not these wealthy steakhouse servers you might think about in a large urban city. They’re women with children working at Denny’s, Applebee’s, Olive Garden. And a lot of times they struggle to put food on the table. The people who put food on our tables cannot afford to feed themselves.

“It’s super important for us to expand the definition of sustainability and sustainable food,” she said. “Sustainability has to include taking care of everybody who is a part of the food system, who picks, plants, processes, prepares it, and the people who consume it. We all need to be connected and understand our interconnectivity.”

Jayaraman has just published a book Behind the Kitchen Door, which follows the lives of more than a dozen restaurant workers. The book exposes conditions in the industry, such as the facts that 90% of restaurant workers don’t have paid sick leave, restaurant jobs make up seven of the 10 lowest paying occupations in the US, and restaurant workers are twice as likely as the rest of the workforce to be on food stamps.

New Stats on W-2 Participation Contradict Rosy Assumptions in JFC Budget

Will Wisconsin legislators help the people or the wealthy?

When legislators take floor votes this week, they will decide whether and how much to cut spending for the Wisconsin Works (W-2) program, which aids unemployed low-income families, and whether they divert the savings to use for things like tax cuts for the wealthy.  The arguments that state budget writers have used to support a W-2 cut are running up against some very inconvenient facts that contradict the Joint Finance Committee’s assumptions.

As I’ve written on other occasions (such as this blog post), the budget bill’s cut in W-2 spending is part of a strategy that siphons off money intended for low-income families – in order to free up General Fund dollars to use for other purposes, such as the proposed income tax cut.

The spending cut was based on the assumption that W-2 participation would decline steadily, beginning well before the start of the new biennium.  Sometime in the last few days, DCF posted data online that contradict the rosy assumptions about declining W-2 participation.  When the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) acted, we only had W-2 data through March.  Now we have two more months of data, and here’s a synopsis of the gap between the rosy assumptions and reality:

• The budget proposed by the Governor assumed that W-2 participation would decline by 1% every month, starting in January 2013.
• By the time JFC reviewed the funding for W-2 and other TANF-funded parts of the budget, W-2 participation had climbed by 7.2% relative to the December 2012 level, and the average cost per case was also higher.
• Those facts prompted JFC to reduce the cut in TANF funding for W-2 to $13.4 million, instead of the $31.7 million cut recommended by the Governor.  However, the reduced cut is based on the very optimistic assumption that the number of families receiving W-2 benefits would decline by 1% every month, starting in April.
• New data for April and May show that W-2 participation did not decline by 2% during that period, it rose by more than 6% – putting the May W-2 participation 8.4% higher than the level that the JFC budget assumes!

A new Wisconsin Budget Project issue brief explains the widening gap between budget reality and the overly optimistic assumptions about W-2 participation.  It analyzes the very substantial fiscal consequences of several somewhat less optimistic scenarios.  Here are two of those alternative scenarios, which might still overestimate the change in the current upward trend:

• Even if W-2 spending drops by 1% per month – but that decline starts in July from the current, increased level – W-2 spending would be almost $15 million higher in 2013-15 than the JFC budgeted for W-2.
• In the more likely event that the participation is essentially flat (or gradually levels off before eventually declining to a point where the 2013-15 average is equivalent to the May figure), W-2 spending would be nearly $37 million higher in 2013-15 than the committee proposed.

The fiscal problem this creates could be resolved very easily by not siphoning off TANF block grant funding to free up General Fund dollars for purposes such as tax cuts.  The budget increases that diversion of TANF funding by almost $19 million per year (on top of a $27 million per year increase in the previous biennium).

Legislators have a fundamental choice to make.  Are they going to use TANF funding for the purposes for which that block grant is intended, or are they going to divert as much as possible to maximize the size of income tax cuts that predominately benefit people making more than $100,000 per year?

Editor’s Note: This book was featured May 12, 2013 in FDL’s Book Salon with Mr. Alperovitz, hosted by David Dayen.

If you’re like me you’ve read several books that list inspiring examples of worker owned businesses and co-ops, suggesting that expanding on such models might begin to right the wrongs of an incredibly unequal society that is growing even more unequal by the day.

Gar Alperowitz’s What Then Must We Do?

The best such collection I’ve found is in a new book by Gar Alperovitz called What Then Must We Do?  This book also offers a powerful argument that radical change is needed, albeit an argument with some possible flaws.  First the inspiring examples:

Workers own and run factories in Cleveland, Atlanta, Washington DC, Amarillo, and many other cities.  Labor unions that once opposed worker ownership, including the Steelworkers and several others, now create worker-owned companies.  Forty percent of Americans are members of cooperatives, including credit unions.  People moved hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, from large banks to credit unions and small banks in 2011 and 2012.  (That should continue!)  Then there are community development corporations and land trusts, alive and thriving.  There are even corporations redesigned, and labeled B Corps, chartered under new laws in 12 states to allow them to legally pursue the social good as well as profits.

Employee stock ownership plans make U.S. workers owners of their businesses in great numbers — three million more than are members of unions in the private sector.  Federal tax incentives (don’t tell Congress!) encourage business owners to sell to their employees.  Worker-owned firms are becoming more common.  They are also more profitable than other similar companies.

It occurs to me that we need a Union-Label type operation to label and catalog the products of worker-owned companies so that we can put our support there.

Local governments are investing in local businesses and land development.  A quarter of U.S. electricity comes from publicly owned co-ops.  These power companies are more efficient and tend to be greener.  The model is being followed by public broadband service.  Proposals that meet the textbook definition of socialism are alive and growing in red and blue states alike, and at the local and state levels.

This matters because the national government in the United States is so thoroughly corrupted.  I’m not sure Alperovitz ever directly answers the question of how a national plutocracy will be prevented from halting local and state progress on the ownership question, as it has halted local and state progress on other matters.  If the trend toward democratizing ownership is happening under the radar, how can it possibly be kept there while succeeding on the necessary scale?  If this approach to economic justice is somehow more inherently “American” than other more foreign ideas, how exactly does that protect it?  Weren’t family farms and free elections and the Fourth Amendment deemed very American at one point too?  Alperovitz recommends a state-by-state approach to single-payer healthcare, but the refusal of California legislators to enact it has come at the bidding of those in Washington.  None of which is to suggest that Alperovitz is wrong to promote this strategy — just that it may be very difficult, and some other strategies may help too.

Alperovitz frames his discussion within an understanding of serious systemic failure.  Persistent long-term trends toward income and wealth inequality, monopolized corporate power, mass incarceration, and environmental devastation churn ahead in the face of elections, activism, lobbying, and reform legislation, not to mention flip-flopping between Republican and Democratic so-called “leadership.”  Alperovitz paints these as even longer term trends than we often suppose by dismissing the gains of the middle of the 20th century as an aberration produced by the Great Depression and World War II, and as gains that could not have come without a large labor movement — something he now deems virtually impossible.

Most activist groups, Alperovitz points out, react to cuts in public services by demanding no cuts.  This is purely defensive.  Alperovitz acknowledges that some also advocate for progressive taxation, but deems this “obviously inadequate” although the obviousness of its inadequacy is not apparent to me, except in the sense that (just like the worker-ownership model) it hasn’t succeeded yet on a major scale. Yes, the plutocrats buy the elections.  The system is rigged against tax reform.  But the goal of advancing the taxation (and elimination) of billionaires as power is gradually obtained seems critical.

Alperovitz seems at times to buy into the notion that there just isn’t enough money around, even if the billionaires were to be taxed at 90 percent.  But this is wrong, of course.  The nation is rolling in money, and the money is piled up in the hands of several hundred people.

It’s somewhere else as well, somewhere Alperovitz doesn’t propose to look for it.  President Obama’s proposed budget for 2014 devotes 57% of discretionary spending to an illegal, immoral, counterproductive, and economically destructive operation known as war and preparation for war.  While Alperovitz suggests that World War III could save the U.S. economy (were a new world war possible, which he says it isn’t), economists say military spending as it exists does less for the economy than other public spending and even less than tax cuts for working people; that is to say, it is worse than nothing.

Alperovitz seems unaware that roughly half of military spending is outside the Pentagon, in Homeland Security, in the CIA, in the State Department, in the Energy Department, etc.  So he uses the Pentagon budget alone to argue that military spending is low as a percentage of GDP.  This does not of course make it low in terms of actual dollars or as a percentage of global military spending or as a percentage of public spending in the United States.  Alperovitz believes there’s little money for spending on human needs, but seems not to notice where 57% of discretionary spending is going.

While Alperovitz raises the topic of healthcare because it takes up, he says, 20 percent of GDP, the war machine that swallows 8 or 9 percent of GDP from U.S. government purchases alone (U.S. companies also dominating international weapons sales) gets no consideration.  Leo Tolstoy, from whom the book’s title is borrowed, would have noticed the existence of the military industrial complex.  He would have considered the possibility of economic conversion.  Connecticut created a commission this month to pursue conversion from war to peace manufacturing.  I suspect Alperovitz would like that model if he took a look at it.

So, here’s where I come down.  We should be pursuing everything Alperovitz recommends, and then some.  We should create worker ownership, tax the rich, cut the military, invest in our society, and act strategically at the local, state, and national levels.  We should take very seriously long-term structural failures and stop imagining that another election will fix anything by itself.  And we should, as Alperovitz wisely recommends, be preparing the ground for the best possible activism when a moment of greater possibilities arrives, or when we have succeeded in creating it.

Posted by greydogg, 99GetSmart

Live streaming from Brussels: http://greenmediabox.eu/live/internet-and-social-media-as-tools-of-freedom

Starts TODAY 16:00

On 18th June in the European Parliament, MEPs Paweł Zalewski and Amelia Andersdotter will host a joint conference on “Internet and Social Media as Tools for Freedom”. The event aims at presenting the role of the internet and social media in building civil society and fighting with oppression.

The conference will focus on the recent events in Turkey, the revolution in Tunisia that was part of the Arab Spring, and mass protests against ACTA in Poland. All of these events have one thing in common – their participants, unhappy with their governments actions decided to act and used the internet to organize themselves.

Idea of using technical tools in spreading ideas is not new. Internet is just the latest, more complex and efficient way of transmitting information and providing access to conversation and thus creating shared awareness. What most important is the internet and social media ability to serve as a space for discussion because this is how civil society and political opinions are formed. This helps to strengthen public sphere, gives more opportunities to engage in public speech and enables to undertake collective actions. Also the coordination role of social media cannot be overestimated.

Using Twitter and Facebook the protesters can organize in a very easy way that does not require any formal organizations, helps to save time, and does not involve big funds.
The basic truth is that communicative freedom is good for political freedom. And the internet provides means to support civil society and the public sphere which will cause change in a long run.

Agenda:

18 June 2013 16:00-18:00 European Parliament, Room ASP A5G3

16:00-16:15 Opening remarks by MEP Paweł Zalewski

16:15-17:30 Panel discussion
Lina Ben Mhenni (blogger Tunisian Girl)
Gürkan Özturan (blogger from Turkey)
Amelia Andersdotter MEP
Katarzyna Szymielewicz (President od Panoptykon Foundation)
Jarosław Lipszyc (President of Nowoczesna Polska Foundation)
Paweł Zalewski MEP

17:30-17:50 Q&A session

17:50-18:00 Conclusion – Paweł Zalewski MEP

18:00-18:30 opening of the exhibition „From samizdat to Internet”

18:30 reception

More information about speakers:

Paweł Zalewski
http://www.pawelzalewski.eu/en/about-me.html

Amelia Andersdottter
http://ameliaandersdotter.eu/about-amelia?language=en

Lina Ben Mhenni
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Ben_Mhenni

Gürkan Özturan

Katarzyna Szymielewicz
http://panoptykon.org/ludzie

Jarosław Lipszyc
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarosław_Lipszyc