More in-depth report in the works.

Whirlpool, recipient of federal stimulus “smart grid” dollars, is closing an Evansville, Indiana freezer-topped refrigerator and icemaker production plant and moving the 1,100 jobs to Mexico.

Whirlpool knows that taxpayers will shoulder the unemployment and other costs. Closing a plant like this also means all the supplier, transportation and other third-party jobs go away. For example, 100+ Disabled Workers Could Lose Jobs.

Read rest of Johnson’s blog here.

It was one year ago that this week that President Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus package. It’s the biggest investment in our country since the Great Depression, but in this commentary I show how for most of us, a year of stimulus is not enough.

It’s been a year since President Barack Obama signed the $787 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus package. The largest public investment in America’s infrastructure since the Great Depression, Obama called it “the most sweeping economic recovery bill in our history.”

But a year later, many Americans are still hurting. And while the Labor Department reports the unemployment rate for whites has begun to fall (to 8.4 percent in January), it continues to rise for ethnic minorities. For African Americans, it is 16.5 percent and for Latinos unemployment is 12.6 percent.

And the reasons for these disparities lie at least in part in the unfair and unjust way the stimulus package has been implemented.

Read rest here.

[The WORD is a member of the NAM Ethnic Media Association]

An experiment with this WORD project requires adding as many new friends as possible. But Facebook Big Brother disagrees.

These – left, right – were popping up soooooo fast and were sooooo intimidating that I … caved into the threat and signed off  (for that late night and early morning session).

Reports on New Nuclear Plant Leave Key Questions Unasked

On February 16, ABC World News and NBC Nightly News aired incomplete and unbalanced reports following Barack Obama’s announcement of $8 billion in new loan guarantees for a nuclear power plant in Georgia.

ABC reporter Jake Tapper announced that “for years leading Democrats and liberals opposed nuclear energy. No new nukes was the cry. So some may have been surprised to hear President Obama say today, essentially, yes, new nukes.”

But after that nod, nuclear opponents mostly disappeared from the piece, which showed Tapper stressing industry claims about job creation for this new plant (”3,500 on-site construction jobs and 800 permanent operations jobs”) and the amount of energy the plant will generate–enough “for 550,000 homes, 2,200 megawatts worth of electricity that would offset about 30 million barrels of oil.” He also quoted two anonymous Georgia residents saying their town needs the jobs.

One critic – Greenpeace’s Jim Riccio – made a short comment about safety concerns, but was countered by Tapper: “Nuclear power advocates say since then plant design and equipment requirements have been upgraded.” Tapper then quoted nuclear industry lobbyist Patrick Moore, introducing him with his past credentials: “Back then, he was an anti-nuclear power activist and a founder of Greenpeace. Today, he lobbies for nuclear energy.” After Moore claimed that “nuclear industry is generally one of the safest industries we have,” Tapper concluded that “he’s not the only one who’s changed his mind.”

Moore’s former Greenpeace ties make him a media favorite, but he wasn’t actually a founder, just an early activist – Extra!, 1-2/08 – and it’s worth noting that, as PR Watch pointed out (3/14/07), “Moore has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries…than he did as an environmental activist.”

The report by NBC Nightly News suffered from some of the same problems: Three sources are quoted supporting the nuclear plan, with only one critic (Erich Pica of Friends of the Earth). In attempting to discuss safety concerns, NBC mentioned Chernobyl and the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island (Extra!, 7-8/93). Neither network mentioned the current problems with nuclear reactors; the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, for example, is leaking radioactive tritium into the groundwater, a safety hazard that is being documented at other nuclear sites around the country (Associated Press, 2/2/10; Greenpeace Blog, 1/28/10).

NBC also has bigger issues: its parent company General Electric is a major player in the industry, and has done business with the company planning to build the Georgia plant (southerncompany.com)–a major fact NBC neglected to mention in its report.

While both reports mentioned that the Georgia plant would be the first built in the U.S. in three decades, neither gave much of an explanation as to why this would be the case. But as nuclear power critics have documented for years, the plants have proven to be financial disasters, with severe cost overruns and a general reluctance among investors to foot the bill for projects that are unlikely to be profitable (Greenpeace, 10/15/08). Obama’s pledge of multi-billion dollar loan guarantees should have caused reporters to wonder why the industry, after decades of experience, needs so much government assistance in the first place.

ACTION: Please ask ABC and NBC why their reporting on the White House’s nuclear power plans omitted important facts about nuclear power in favor of the optimistic projections of the nuclear industry. And, in NBC’s case, why the report failed to disclose its parent company’s financial ties to the nuclear industry.

CONTACT:
NBC Nightly News
nightly@nbc.com

ABC World News with Diane Sawyer
Web Form:
Click here.

Again, 6 p.m.

More later.

So …

… it’s good to recall that moment when D:F/M Colleagues, working in hand with members of the ersatz Student Liberation Action Movement, which had been running student government for several years at Hunter, collaborated to take over the WORD.

The signature event took place at a department meeting. Stuart Ewen was the chair then. Tami Gold, on the D:F/M Policy and Budget Committee, was actively involved in the moment. Because of her influence in D:F/M, she was AKA the shadow chair. The purported takeover failed, of course, but the initiative plus the failure glaringly exposed the ethos of the department.