Feds Wisely Delay Iowa’s Medicaid Privatization‏

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Dave Bradley

Courtney Report

The decision by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) last week to delay privatization of Iowa’s Medicaid program is a victory for Medicaid recipients and providers.

Thousands of Iowans have been telling us this for months: the Branstad/Reynolds privatization plan attempts to do too much, too fast, and fails to protect vulnerable Iowans.

A letter from CMS Director Vikki Wachino states: “CMS previously outlined the requirements to provide high quality, accessible care to Medicaid beneficiaries, and Iowa has not yet met those requirements, meaning that a transition on January 1 would risk serious disruptions in care for Iowa Medicaid beneficiaries.”

Specific concerns raised by CMS include:

* Arbitrary and unrealistic implementation timeline
* Failure to establish adequate provider networks in advance
* Disruptions of longstanding patient-provider relationships
* Diminished quality and access to health care services
* Compromised patient care
* Inadequate communication with patients and providers

Despite the 60-day delay, the fight is not over. Hundreds of thousands of Iowans and their providers are still struggling to make sense of the changes the Governor is making to their health care. We must find a way to minimize the harm being imposed on Iowa families and health care providers.

Read the complete letter from CMS here.
Comment:

Sadly this is only a delay. The CMS is disposed toward eventually approving this plan. Therefore please contact any Iowa Senate Democrat to let them know you stand behind their opposition.

Posted in Courtney, Courtney Report, medicaid expansion | Tagged , | Comments Off on Feds Wisely Delay Iowa’s Medicaid Privatization‏

Branstad’s Record: Broken Promises and Handouts To Buddies

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Dave Bradley
Gano holds Branstad accountable

Gano holds Branstad accountable

A few days back, Terry Branstad became America’s longest serving governor. But that certainly does not imply that he has in any way been the most consequential governor in America nor in Iowa. What it does say is that the vaunted, highly educated Iowa electorate tends to reelect candidates no matter what they do, especially if they are Republican.

Branstad’s recent terms have been exercises in taking our tax money and handing it over to his donors. Nothing could be more illustrative of this than the fiasco his administration has created in his haste to reward corporate donors from the insurance world with lucrative no-bid contracts to run Iowa’s Medicaid system. But here are many other examples from Orascom to his administrations ‘reinterpretation’ of tax laws to greatly benefit businesses.

Progress Iowa has created a website to keep track of Branstad’s broken promises. We can fully expect the millions of dollars in savings that Branstad promised that profitizing Medicaid would create will be on that list next year.

In a press release announcing their new website to track Branstad’s record of broken promises Matt Sinovic stated:

“Unfortunately, simply serving in office longer than any other governor in our country’s history is by far the most notable achievement of this governor’s administration,” said Matt Sinovic, Progress Iowa Executive Director. “They failed to keep a number of promises, from failing to create jobs to letting Iowa fall behind the rest of the country when it comes to supporting our students. They’ve done a good job staying in office, but a poor job serving their constituents.”

We echo Mr. Sinovic’s sentiments.

Posted in Branstad, medicaid expansion, Progress Iowa, Republicn Policy | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Branstad’s Record: Broken Promises and Handouts To Buddies

Some Pictorial Memories Of 2015

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Dave Bradley

Sorry folks, no quiz today. The old quizmaster has been making rather merry this week.

But lets take a slow walk through some illustrations from the past year:

And Happy Holidays To All

And Happy Holidays To All

starbucks cup

Lawrence eviscerates Republicans

fugelsang republicans love government

This Changes Everything

Hillary Clinton Walking to the Stage at S.T. Morrison Park, Coralville, Iowa, Nov. 3, 2015

Hillary Clinton Walking to the Stage at S.T. Morrison Park, Coralville, Iowa, Nov. 3, 2015

let'sbeclear

Fallon Hrdina

Demonstrators Filing into Rep. Dave Loebsack's Iowa City Office

Demonstrators Filing into Rep. Dave Loebsack’s Iowa City Office

five stages of conservative grief

five stages of conservative grief

Bernie on the economy

State Senator Joe Bolkcom (D-Iowa City)

State Senator Joe Bolkcom (D-Iowa City)

apathy quote

Posted in Blog for Iowa | Tagged | Comments Off on Some Pictorial Memories Of 2015

McConnell: We Will Do Nothing Next Year

Posted on December 26, 2015 by Dave Bradley
not working for most Iowans

not working for most Iowans

Grassley Expected To Do Nothing Next Year Either

From Dailykos:

“Don’t expect much from Congress in 2016. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the Republicans who control what Congress does: Don’t expect much. They have their reasons:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) says he wants to continue finding agreements where he can, but he is making clear the chamber’s agenda will be driven partly by his members’ political needs.

“What we decide to allocate floor time to in the Senate, to be quite candid with you, is going to be to some extent…dictated by concerns I have about places like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Wisconsin and Illinois,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview Thursday, referring to states with competitive Senate races.


At least he’s honest. Not that we can expect most reporters to remember this quote when McConnell and the Senate Republicans bring up nakedly partisan bills intended to boost the chances of those Republican senators facing tough races, or when talking about why Congress is so useless.

Of course, if you were expecting a lot from Congress in 2016, I have some bad news about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.”

With Chuck Grassley up for re-election next year Iowans should look forward to Grassley’s office sending out a few press releases on how vigorous Grassley is at 83. We can expected some time around the beginning of the campaign next summer that Grassley will go after some charity or other hobgoblin that he will accuse of bilking the public. This will be good for a couple weeks of fawning headlines in Iowa’s compliant press.

We can also expect Grassley to continue clogging up the judicial system by using his position as chair of the Senate Judicial Committee to continue his refusal to schedule any hearings for Obama appointees. Why? Because Obama, dammit. Can’t let Obama win anything! He will also do nothing to schedule hearings for key personnel at the State Department at a time when diplomacy is critical to world peace.

Thus our Chuck will look statesman like as he does nothing and we pay him $174,000 a year.

Always remember, in this age of electronic media perception is reality and the appearance of doing something often trumps actually doing work.

Posted in 2016 Election Campaign, Charles Grassley, Republican Obstruction, Republicn Policy | Tagged , | Comments Off on McConnell: We Will Do Nothing Next Year

Republicans Stand For What?

Posted on December 26, 2015 by Dave Bradley

clown bus 2

Let’s just cut to the chase – Iowans are now slightly over a month from their respective party caucuses. If I were a Republican looking at the prospect of going out on a cold winter’s night to vote for one of the dozen candidates that are still standing, I would simply opt for choice ‘B’ – that is stay home and watch some TV. Even better, I think I would go with the intent of having “NONE” as the caucus winner.

True, I am partisan. But overriding that is the deepest desire for our country to live up to the ideals set forth by our Founding Fathers. Knowing full well that no humans are perfect they set up a system of government that would work if those involved worked together to solve problems. They gave power to different branches of government but also to those not in government so that all power would not be versed in one human or even in a small select group of humans no matter how they were selected.

The current Republican Party currently has two major goals. The first is to stop any actions that will move the country forward. Whether it be getting health care to the sick, keeping us out of wars, repairing aging roads and infrastructure or preparing the country for the future with new infrastructure, Republicans have stepped in to stop cold any repairs or improvements with a resounding “NO” across the country.

Their second major goal is to bankrupt the government through a borrow and spend policy while enriching their friends and donors with wealth beyond the imagination of any historical emperor. This is being accomplished through tax cute, tax loopholes, government giveaways and lack of enforcement of regulations and tax laws. The Republican Party is less of a party anymore and more of a company that has an incredible return on investment for the wealthy.

Let’s just take a look at the policies that Republican candidates espouse as they trek around Iowa and the country trying to succeed Barack Obama. Then ask yourself, do they reflect your own ideals or that of the founders?

* More war, less diplomacy

* Making higher education available only to those who can afford it.

* Choking public education in favor of some form of privatized education.

* Denying science in general and the science of climate change in particular.

* Reliance on prayer and divine intervention as a method to solve problems.

* Vilification of the poor due to their economic status.

* Rigging systems (economic, education, legal and social) to keep the poor, poor.

* Selling influence in public office to the highest bidder.

* Stopping the repair of physical infrastructure such as sewer, water, roads and the electric grid.

* Choking the economic system.

* Hindering development of future infrastructure such as internet and renewable energy to maintain huge profits for their donors.

* Creating and fostering divisions within this country based on wealth, on skin color and on religion.

* Grinding the infrastructure of government to a halt – such as the judicial system being greatly slowed by Senator Grassley.

* Demagoguing on issues such as immigration.

Is this what Americans want? It is hard to believe that an American who has had the advantages of a system that created for them the highest standard of living ever would choose a party or a leader whose goal is to completely turn such achievements around in order to make a small group within society wealthier and more powerful. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and the other Founding Fathers had faith that education and a full airing of issues would lead this country to ever greater heights of governance, not down into an oligarchy based on fear, distrust and personal greed.

Posted in 2016 Election Campaign, Republican Obstruction, Republicn Policy | Comments Off on Republicans Stand For What?

Merry Christmas Progressives, Nation Is Turning Left

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Trish Nelson

christmas-present-zuswt0nf The nation may be moving to the left, but we need more people to vote because the money and the rules currently favor the right.   How did this happen?  See the entire must-read article at Nationofchange.org.

by Dave Johnson

It might not seem so in the middle of a day’s news cycle, especially with that news always being about Donald Trump, but 2015 marked a year of change in a progressive direction. And the country is solidly behind this move.

The Democratic primaries reflect this progressive direction. If you watched Saturday’s Democratic debate you saw a solid, substance-filled progressive discussion of the country’s problems offering progressive solutions.  Democratic candidates by and large line up with a progressive agenda that would be unheard of in previous election cycles. That’s progress.

Think Progress cites The 7 Most Important Progressive Victories Of 2015:

1) A growing number of workers are earning more – thanks to local and state progressive-pushed initiatives to raise the minimum wage and new overtime rules.

2) Same-sex marriage is legal. People can marry who they want now.

3) Health insurance, The Supreme Court didn’t back conservative efforts to kill Obamacare.(So now we push on toward a public option or Medicare-for-All.)

4) Some states have been able to push out gerrymandering, and a few places were able to pass measures fighting back against money in politics.

5) The world finally came together to begin to fight climate change. (Even if the timing has been compared to starting your Christmas shopping an hour before the stores close on Christmas Eve,) President Obama has introduced his Clean Power Plan.

6) Successfully replacing No Child Left Behind and historic graduation rates.

7) Historic Iran nuclear deal.

There are many other good examples of progressive progress in 2015.

Polling numbers at the Populist Majority website show that the public supports the progressive position on the issues. Money in politics, education, trade, inequality, Social Security and Medicare, taking on the big banks, you name it, across the board the public sees things the way progressives, not conservatives and their corporate/billionaire funders do.

Peter Beinart writes about the country’s leftward shift at The Atlantic, in Why America Is Moving Left. He writes that in the 60s and 70s “leftist” ideas faced a popular backlash, but now the country is embracing the ideas of a new progressive movement.

Beinart rites about the differences between today’s Democrats and those of the previous decade, “In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing.” As Beinart sees it, Howard Dean began the revolt of the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”

The Occupy Wall St. movement led to Elizabeth Warren’s election, Warren’s voice helped propel the Sanders candidacy. And Sanders has pushed Clinton left,

Today, all of the three democratic candidates are singing the same song: That economic inequality, the 30-year downward spiral of the middle class and the corruption of the campaign finance laws — Occupy Wall St.’s main themes — are the most important domestic threats to the American way of life.

Click here to read more about how money has put Republicans into power in the states, the effects of gerrymandering, obliteration of campaign finance laws and voter disenfranchisement.

Posted in 2016 Election Campaign | Tagged , | Comments Off on Merry Christmas Progressives, Nation Is Turning Left

SILT: How Budget Bill Benefits Iowa Landowners

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Trish Nelson

SILT

Update from Sustainable Iowa Land Trust (SILT):

The spending bill just signed by President Obama contains a huge benefit for Iowa landowners who want to protect their land to grow healthy food for good. It also creates a permanent IRA benefit that can help get SILT off the ground.

Long-term Tax Benefits for Conservation Gifts – gifts of land for conservation – including to SILT – now benefit from increased deduction limits. The normal 30% limit for property gifts is increased to 50% for landowners and 100% for eligible farmers and you can carry that deduction forward for 15 years (up to the value of the donation).

IRA Charitable Rollover – IRA owners may transfer up to $100,000 per year to a qualified charity (like SILT!) These IRA charitable rollovers are tax-free and are not included in adjusted gross income.

Why is this so big? Because a young, small but scrappy land trust like SILT doesn’t have a wad of cash to pull out of our back pockets to pay anyone for their land, no matter how much we love them or their farm. Yet we are facing the farm crisis of our day. This new provision allows landowners who otherwise couldn’t afford it to donate land or an easement receive, over time, a large portion of the value of that land back in tax benefits.

(Thank you Gordon Fischer, estate planning attorney in Iowa City, and Michele Traver at Thrivent Financial Services for this info and to the Land Trust Alliance for its 10-year effort to get these passed and made permanent). Landowners and donors should talk to your tax and legal experts for details.

Now more Iowans can take that big step that will bring young people back to Iowa and rebuild diversity in our countryside and our economy with family-size farms growing fruits, vegetables and small livestock. Contact us today for details.

Ben Prostine grew up in Cedar Falls. He'd like to move back to Iowa and grow small livestock on a SILT farm. Can you help?

Ben Prostine grew up in Cedar Falls. He’d like to move back to Iowa and grow small livestock on a SILT farm. Can you help?

The waiting list is growing of young farmers who want to work SILT land. They trust SILT to provide them a farm they can live on for the rest of their lives, free of mortgage debt, so long as they raise good food in a nature-friendly way.

Don’t own a farm or acreage? Not quite ready to pull your IRA out of Wall Street? We understand! You can still make a difference by becoming a SILT charter member by Dec. 31, 2015. Your tax-deductible donation of any size will make you one of a select group of people who supported SILT’s vision in its first year. What a legacy!

SILT charter members will be listed alongside the group’s founders in our first annual report expected out in early 2016. We’ll send every charter member a print copy for being a part of the place where conservation, food and farming meet – truly sustainable food farms for Iowa. (If you’ve already sent in your donation, thank you very, very much!)

Kenn and Ashly Jenkins want to farm in Ashly's home state of Iowa. (She a Priestly from Belmond IA). Kenn is from Colorado and finishing up his agronomy degree at ISU. Your support can help people like Kenn and Ashly stay in Iowa to grow healthy food for good.

Kenn and Ashly Jenkins want to farm in Ashly’s home state of Iowa. (She a Priestly from Belmond IA). Kenn is from Colorado and finishing up his agronomy degree at ISU. Your support can help people like Kenn and Ashly stay in Iowa to grow healthy food for good.

It is the season to be thankful for those who’ve been so generous with their time as well as their money. So we’re sending a special thanks to SILT’s leaders who have donated so much effort to this new endeavor this year.

We also thank our business and nonprofit partners for their advice and support in our first year – Slow Money, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Equity Trust, Cienega Capital, Green Light Renewable Services, Thrivent Financial, the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, Goodfellow Printing, Benson and Hepker Design, Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, Bailey Leadership Initiative, AgArts, Bur Oak Land Trust, Omaha Community Foundation, RSF Social Finance, Schumacher Center for New Economics, Maharishi University School of Management, the Vermont Land Trust, Land Trust Alliance and American Farmland Trust. (Let us know if we missed you! It’s been a massive collective undertaking.)

Finally, we wish you a wonderful, joyful and healthy holiday season. Most of the volunteer corps that runs SILT are taking time off for the first half of January. We’ll see you in 2016!

Suzan Erem
President – Sustainable Iowa Land Trust
(319) 774-3496

Sustainable Iowa Land Trust

You can also keep up with Sustainable Iowa Land Trust on Twitter or Facebook

Posted in Budget, Farming | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on SILT: How Budget Bill Benefits Iowa Landowners

GUI Exposes Corporate Control Of Our Political System

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Trish Nelson

GUI LogoGoverning Under the Influence is a a Project of
American Friends Service Committee
4211 Grand Ave, Des Moines, IA 50312
http://gui.afsc.org/

It’s been an exciting month of December for us with AFSC’s Governing Under the Influence project to expose corporate control over our political system. As we prepare for the last month before the Iowa Caucus on February 1, here’s a quick recap.

Iowa Starting Line just published an article titled The Top Issue Groups Organizing in the Iowa Caucus and included a profile about GUI with a picture of our banners at the top!

Thank you to our co-sponsors and everybody who attended our recent Iowa speaking tour entitled “Who Profits from Immigrant Detention and Mass Incarceration?” We averaged about 40 people attending events in Cedar Falls, Marshalltown, Des Moines, and Ames. Check out our newsroom for media coverage. Here’s an excerpt from my latest blog post covering the tour – For-Profit Prisons, a Field of Nightmares:

“If you build it, they will come,” said Caroline Isaacs, AFSC Arizona Program Director, quoting a famous line from the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” which was filmed in Iowa. But Caroline wasn’t talking about baseball, she was talking about the growth of private prisons in her home state of Arizona. It’s just not right to get paid for depriving human beings of their liberty.”

During the tour, we also introduced our two new GUI caucus resolutions found on our new GUI resource page. One calls to end the daily 34,000 immigrant detention quota, the other for transparency and disclosure of corporate spending in elections and lobbying. If you’d like to introduce these resolutions on February 1, please contact me at krutledge@afsc.org or 515-274-4851 ext. 23 for more details.

Last week, we bird-dogged Senator Marco Rubio three times in Ankeny. Senator Rubio didn’t take questions from the audience and, while waiting in line, he ignored our question on immigrant detention…twice. We asked him about supporting the $1 trillion nuclear weapons plan, and Rubio expressed his support, stating, “No country in the world faces the threats America faces…the bottom line is that deterrence is a friend of peace.”   We asked Governor John Kasich about why he hasn’t been answering the question on immigrant detention and said, “This seems as though this is a program that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Governor Jeb Bush is the first Republican candidate to tell us he does not support the detention quota. However, when we asked Gov. Bush about the detention quota in Newton, he said “I’m not sure if that is true, but if it is true, we shouldn’t have it.” We will continue to educate Gov. Bush on specifics about the quota and the federal budget to further his understanding of the problem.

At the same event, I questioned Gov. Jeb Bush about corporate lobbyists contributing to wasteful spending in the military, including the $1.5 trillion F-35 fighter jets and $1 trillion nuclear weapons plan. While agreeing on the waste and expressing the need for military procurement reform, Bush believes more competition will lower these costs and called defense contractors “aggregators.” “You can’t have just three defense contractors basically doing all the major weapons systems,” he told me.

Our New Hampshire GUI squad has been doing great work lately, too. Outside the Democratic Debate in New Hampshire on December 19, our GUI staff and volunteers were “shining the light” on the military-industrial complex and corporate money in politics – and they made the NH Labor News.

Our NH intern spoke with Governor Chris Christie about ending the immigrant detention quota. Unfortunately, Gov. Christie responded with a quick “No,” and continued “…We should be detaining a lot more people than what we are doing…What we are doing is not nearly detaining enough, and not removing enough people.”

Will you help us ask Gov. Christie about detaining and deporting immigrants in Iowa next week?

Gov. Chris Christie will be in Iowa on Monday, Dec. 28 through Wednesday, Dec. 30 in Dubuque, Davenport, Muscatine, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Marshalltown, and Waukee.

Here is our Iowa candidate calendar to see when other candidates are making the rounds in Iowa over the holidays. Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders are making many appearances across the state this week.

Still unsure about asking questions to presidential candidates? Watch this video  from a GUI activist about why she bird dogs candidates in New Hampshire. People like her are changing the conversation of our political leaders to make peace, justice and democracy a priority.

Onward through the holidays,
Kevin
krutledge@afsc.org

515-402-5992

Posted in 2016 Election Campaign, Iowa Caucuses | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on GUI Exposes Corporate Control Of Our Political System

Death Of A Legend

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Trish Nelson
Prairie Dog

Prairie Dog

Reprinted with permission from the January 2016 issue of  The Prairie Progressive, Iowa’s oldest progressive newsletter, available only in hard copy for $12/yr.!!  Send check to PP, Box 1945, Iowa City 52244.

 

If that ____-sucking mother-_____ tries to bust my _____, I’ll ______tear him a new _____. –Mark Smith

At the end of November, a check for a subscription renewal and sustaining fund contribution arrived in the Prairie Progressive mailbox from Mark Smith, former president of the Iowa Federation of Labor. Smith died a week later at his home in Des Moines. He was 71.

Smith was many things: labor activist, former school board member, disability rights advocate, co-founder of the Iowa Policy Project, member of the American Federation of Teachers, provocateur, watchdog, bulldog, conscience, Chicago Cubs fan.  He perfected the popular image of a labor thug, cramming as many obscenities into his sentences as was linguistically possible. But his letters-to-the-editor were concise gems, skewering the venalities and hypocrisies of politicians and
corporations without wasting a word.

Over the years, Mark picked the right fights: Ipsco, right-to-work, Equal Rights Amendment, scope of bargaining, fair share. In the mid-nineties, David Stanley’s Iowans for Tax Relief was at its most powerful.  Stanley engineered a measure on the statewide ballot for a constitutional amendment that would require any tax increase proposed by the General Assembly to pass with a 60% majority.  Smith rallied the troops against what looked like a landslide. He won. So did the people of Iowa.

Smith knew that smaller fights were necessary, too. With his passing, who will make sure that elected officials, candidates, and publications (including the Prairie Progressive) who profess to be pro-labor always use union printers?

Smith was no saint. He wasn’t always right, and he could be a bully who brooked no dissent, but his legacy as a champion for working people is unassailable.

####

When the Obama administration rolled out healthcare.gov for the Affordable Care Act more than two years ago, the web site was widely mocked and panned as “botched,” boneheaded,” and “a disaster.” The Government Accountability Office concluded that the administration failed to provide “effective planning or oversight practices.”  In comparison, the Branstad administration’s attempt to move Iowa’s Medicaid program into private hands makes the ACA roll-out look like a masterpiece of flawless execution.

Contracts between the state’s chosen managed care organizations and local care providers haven’t been signed. Medicaid recipients have only received confusing information packets since Thanksgiving, with just a few weeks to pick a new MCO for services. Families, especially those with adult children who have received stable support for years, can’t get answers from the MCOs, the state, or their legislators, who have been frozen out of the process by an increasingly intransigent and dictatorial Governor who dismisses their concerns as “fear of change.”

560,000 Iowans and their families will be drastically affected by this massive privatization that Branstad announced less than a year ago, after never mentioning it during his re-election campaign. The Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services has to approve the state’s plan. Everyone from the Iowa Hospital Association, Iowa’s Democratic state senators, and Congressman Loebsack, to thousands of Medicaid recipients in Iowa, have written to CMS, urging them to stop this plan or at least slow it down to give families a chance to figure it out.

There is still time to add your voice by emailing andy.slavitt@cms.hhs.gov.

– Prairie Dog

Posted in Blog for Iowa | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Death Of A Legend

Will The Texas Rich Get Richer And Iowans Get The Shaft?

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Trish Nelson

Bakken Pipeline Proposed RouteThis article by Elaine Tweedy Foley was published on the Opinion page of the Daily Gate City, serving the Keokuk area since 1847.

dailygate.com/opinion/

“I don’t have millions of dollars to print half-truths in Iowa newspapers. But to the Texas billionaires, spending millions of tax-deductible dollars is simply the cost of doing business. It’s a win-win for them. And for the Iowa property owners it’s lose-lose.”

Friday, December 18, 2015

by Elaine Tweedy Foley

I am so tired of the lies. It is time for some truth.

“We’re signing easements with landowners.”

Truth: About 25 percent of landowners have not sold out.

“Fifty percent of all labor will be sourced from union halls in states along the route.”

Truth: Experienced oil field workers are in the Dakotas’ union halls.

“D.A. [Dakota Access] is committed to benefiting Midwestern communities.”

Truth: Ask my friend in Valley City, N.D., how they have been affected. Besides, we’re not talking about communities, we’re talking about rural fields and woodlands. Ask the resistors how this lunacy is benefiting us. Ask us about the threats, the lies, to get us to sign away our rights.

“D.A. will bring our country closer to energy independence.”

Truth: D.A. has not denied that the oil will flow into huge tank ships bound for China and India.

“It takes … decades of experience to safely source, construct and operate a buried pipeline.”

Truth: At the Nov. 23 Iowa Utilities Board hearing, D.A. admitted they have never constructed or operated a buried pipeline.

“Long-Term Commitments to Iowa.”

Truth: D.A. will provide a mere $250,000 bond in Iowa to “help” with oil clean up when a pipe leaks, a clean up costing Iowa taxpayers millions more. They are Dakota Access, LLC. That means Limited Liability Corporation. When, not if, a pipe leaks it’s on us not them. So I guess the “long-term commitment” means watching us for as long as it takes to clean up after them: Energy Transfer Partners, LP, dba Bakken Pipeline, LLC, dba Dakota Access, LLC.

I don’t have millions of dollars to print half-truths in Iowa newspapers. But to the Texas billionaires, spending millions of tax-deductible dollars is simply the cost of doing business. It’s a win-win for them. And for the Iowa property owners it’s lose-lose. Kelcy Warren assumes Iowa rubes will grab his money. He expects the Iowa Utilities Board will rubber-stamp his plan to bend the intent of eminent domain – not to provide a public service to Iowa – but to increase his corporate profits.

The Iowa flag boasts, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.” But I am fearful how this struggle will play out. If the IUB betrays us, maybe our flag should read, “The Texas rich get richer and Iowans get the shaft.”

In the Monday DGC, Dakota Access bought a colored 2/3 page feel-good ad suggesting their proposed crude oil pipeline under Iowa is a good thing.

They claimed: D.A. is coming to Iowa “to deliver domestically extracted energy.”

Truth: Read that “North Dakota fracked oil” through Iowa soil to Illinois.

#####

You can help. Here is an Action Alert from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is considering a Sovereign Lands Permit for the Bakken Pipeline, which includes the crossings of the Big Sioux, Des Moines, and Mississippi Rivers, as well as the Big Sioux Wildlife Management Area.

Tell the DNR they have to deny this permit to protect our land and water!

Iowa DNR Director Chuck Gipp has the authority to deny this permit to protect our state from the proposed Bakken Pipeline. The public comment period ends January 5, so tell Director Gipp and Iowa DNR to reject the permit today!

Add your voice to the one hundred Iowans who stood up for a Clean Energy Iowa on Wednesday night at DNR’s public hearing on this permit. We know the DNR has a poor record of protecting our water and they must be held accountable.

 

Posted in Climate Action, Climate Change, Corporate Greed | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Will The Texas Rich Get Richer And Iowans Get The Shaft?