By Jerry Waxman

As submitted to the Huffington Post

Orlando, FL. Feb. 22 After a sustained two month period of unseasonably cold and damp weather it began to warm up in Central Florida. I thought at times “so, this is what it’s like to live in London.” On the weather front beginning on Sunday the breezes were again balmy and temperatures got to the point that you didn’t need a jacket or sweater to venture out. The power and energy companies have had a good winter so far; many Floridians, not used to such cold weather, had their heat on for weeks at a time and got bills that made their eyes pop. Abnormal weather patterns aside, there is a lot of heat building up among Florida’s labor unions.

Florida’s economy has not fared well during the past two years of recession and leadership in Tallahassee has been nonexistent. Nor has the federal government given Florida more than mere lip service. The work that has been available, such as the new VA hospital in East Orange County was supposed to be built under a Project Labor Agreement. President Obama signed Executive Order 13502 on Feb. 6, 2009 which specified that work on these projects should be done by Veteran owned companies. The companies were supposed to hire veterans under the project known as “Helmets to Hard Hats”, a way of getting veterans back into society with good jobs. Congressional representatives in the immediate area, Alan Grayson, Corrine Brown and Suzanne Kosmas signed letters of support, but virtually to no avail. Don’t ask any of the construction trade unions or veterans looking for work how things fared for them without having earplugs available. The new initiative, Putting Florida Back to Work, will concentrate on getting decent jobs for Florida. Today’s press conference was held on the Orlando City Hall steps specifically to inform Florida’s two senators, Richard Lemieux and Bill Nelson that a robust jobs bill is a vital necessity for Florida. Similar events will be held on Feb 23 in Miami and Jacksonville, leading up to Saturday when the combined unions will hold a “Save Our Space Jobs” rally in Titusville, Florida in order to bring attention to what most Central Florida residents consider a vital industry.

At 12:30 PM as people gathered for the event the sky was sunny and clear. As the 1:00 start time approached the sky became increasingly dark gray, but symbolism and ominous portents notwithstanding, the event was definitely upbeat. Paul Wilson, president of the Central Florida CLC, spoke about Florida’s expected three billion dollar budget shortfall and the economic impact that will follow. “The recession is much deeper than anyone imagined, and unless we act now to stave off our budget shortfalls and get people back to work it is going to start unraveling again,” said Wilson. Wilson also stated that Titusville was selected because it was the “epicenter” of the Florida jobs crisis. Recent decisions by the Obama Administration have left a void in the future of manned space flight turning over many of those components to private contractors. “This is an economic atomic bomb being dropped on Titusville and the rest of the space center that will destroy the community and send shockwaves across the state,” added Wilson.

The next speaker, Joshua Leclair of AFSCME Council 79 said “Some in Congress think the way out of this recession and towards jobs growth in Florida and Orlando is to slash budgets and to lay off public employees like teachers, fire fighters, nurses and transportation workers but this makes no sense; you can’t grow jobs by cutting jobs.”  Leclair also warned that not addressing the budget shortfalls another three million jobs could be lost. Leclair cited economist Mark Zandi, former advisor to John McCain, stating that every dollar invested in the public sector returns 1.4 to the economy.

Jennifer Kenny, Florida field organizer for the Alliance for Retired Americans emphasized that worrying about the cost is not a priority-putting people to work is. She urged everyone to call Senators Nelson and Lemieux to urge them to pass a robust jobs bill that will put Florida back to work. The number is 1-888-460-0813. Here’s the video of the press conference.

A short while afterward Josh Anijar, Central Florida field representative for the AFL-CIO commented that he had just returned from Titusville and it was looking “more and more like a ghost town.” Saving the Space jobs is so important that Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO nationally, as well as other well known national labor leaders will be in attendance. Anijar also stated that for the first time local businessmen and chambers of commerce who have a huge stake in the outcome want to be involved. “Since this is a union event the tea baggers will also be there. It ought to be real interesting to see whom they protest” said Anijar. Douglas De Clue, a currently unemployed aerospace engineer claimed that “The entire Space Coast will be a third world country if we don’t save those jobs. People will continue to be out of work and will continue to lose their homes. Property values will be down to nothing and you can forget about money for education. This isn’t just a Titusville issue-lots of people who depend on NASA live here in Orange, Osceola, Volusia and Seminole counties. How do you replace an entire industry that has so greatly added to our technological superiority and immeasurably enhanced our quality of life? How do you let it go in the first place?”

Disappointing news

I received an email on Friday from Florida Attorney General Candidate, Dave Aronberg via Avery Salkey who was the subject of an earlier Huffington Post article under Arthur Delaney’s byline which I had also contributed to. Avery had been fighting off foreclosure since before February of 2009 from Yale Mortgage, a hard equity lender. She’s received a 24 hour notice to vacate, and there is such bad blood between her and Woody Kahn, the president of Yale, that there is no way the two of them can work things out. Now that ACORN has lost its impact there is no one to fight for her, certainly not Bill McCollum, Florida’s current Attorney General. He’s too busy trying to indict every Democrat in Broward County while sweeping his own Republican Party’s corruption under the rug. I’ve tried to get in touch with Avery but as of this posting she has not returned my calls.

as submitted to the Huffing Post

By Jerry Waxman

These are the people who make 85 year old grandparents using walkers take off their shoes before walking through the airport security posts. They also make sure that you don’t have shampoo or medications in containers over 3 ounces or nail clippers going through these points as well. Stupid little stuff like that. They don’t make the policy, but it’s their job to enforce it. These are the Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) and they are on duty at every U.S. airport seven days a week, twenty four hours a day, three hundred sixty five days a year. Their job and mission is to protect you as part of Homeland Security, but who protects them?

Eight years ago when the Bush Administration and Congress formed the Department of Homeland Security the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) worked hard to establish a federalized system of passenger and baggage screening instead of the old patchwork system of private companies. This resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Agency, which administers screening throughout the country. In stark contrast to other employees at the Department of Homeland Security, and most other federal employees, TSOs are denied the basic workplace rights such as collective bargaining. AFGE has worked for eight years to have these rights restored. It’s been a long battle, and candidate Barack Obama promised (in writing) to AFGE that during his administration TSOs would gain those rights.

AFGE Local 556 represents TSOs in Tampa, Stanford, Dayton, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Panama City, Pensacola, Sarasota, Clearwater and Orlando, Florida. AFGE has represented the TSA workforce since the agency was created in 2001. The union currently has approximately 12,000 dues-paying TSA members at more than 100 airports in 36 union Locals nationwide. AFGE is the largest federal employee union representing 600,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia, including tens of thousands of DHS employees.

On December 17 AFGE members, supported by Central Florida members of the AFL-CIO held a Solidarity Day at the Orlando International Airport in support of TSOs. All present signed statements in support. The statement reads, in part, “[TSOs] are the front line of homeland security. Just as you work hard every day to protect us, and everyone who utilizes our nation’s airlines, we will support you in your struggle for justice on the job.” The statements are being signed in conjunction with the American Federation of Government Employees and the AFL-CIO’s National TSO Solidarity Week, with events being held in more than 30 cities nationwide. Donald Thomas, head of local AFGE local 556 spoke about the difficulties of dealing with the Transportation Security Agency and the agency’s unwillingness to cooperate. Thomas cited managers with the agency who impede his security people while they are on the job, noting that some of the managers have records of alleged sexual harassment but are still on the agency’s payroll.

Paul Wilson, president of the AFL-CIO Central Florida Labor Council spoke in support, as well as Denise Diaz of Central Florida Jobs With Justice. Florida State House District 35 candidate Amy Mercado spoke in support as well as Debra M. Booth, District Director for Congressman Alan Grayson (D. FL). Orlando Int’l Airport is in Grayson’s district and Ms. Booth spoke for Grayson, saying that he supports their efforts, also mentioning that  the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will be brought up in 2010 and its passage should ease the burdens immensely.  Machinists union people also spoke in support.  Marita Palmer of AFGE and Josh Leclair of AFSCME among others met the employee shuttle buses as they arrived with literature for both arriving and departing employees. The Solidarity Support lasted from 10: AM through 2:00 PM.

as submitted to the Huffington Post

By Jerry Waxman

Friday the 13^th could possibly turn out to be a very unlucky day for Representative Suzanne Kosmas. A large group of activists, each with numbers from 1 to 126, in support of the public option on health care reform assembled for the second time in front of her Orlando office at 122424 Research Parkway on the UCF Campus and for the second time her office staff was not there to meet with them. The number 126 represents the amount of people in Congressional District 24 who will die this year because they lack health insurance. Although no one would speak for the record, there was a consensus among union members at the protest that the Central Florida unions would cut off all future funding for Kosmas due to her no vote on HB3962, The Affordable Health Care for America Act.

First, the assembled, many dressed in black, held a signing ceremony on the 126 sheet. Then the sheet was delivered to the office with the help of the grim reaper, but there was no one in the office to receive it. The office staff had left early again. Someone in the crowd remarked “Do you think we’re getting our money’s worth out of this office?” Community activist Stephanie Porta questioned Rep Kosmas votes not only on health care reform but also on her financial regulation votes, pointing out that Kosmas took considerable sums of money from the banking and credit card industry and has been voting in their favor.

Tony Scelzo from AFSCME lectured the crowd on how Kosmas betrayed the labor unions whose support she eagerly sought during the last election. He also did not accept her published reasons for voting no. The crowd voted to continue to put pressure on her and will return on Nov. 20^th.

As submitted to the Huffington Post

By Jerry Waxman

The Arts have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to social awareness. As far back as the sixteenth century William Shakespeare took on social injustice in many of his plays, including Romeo and Juliet, in which he chastised the church for always screwing things up, as well as parents using daughters for property and profit. In the modern era novelists such as Edna Ferber and Fanny Hurst explored race issues including miscegenation, which was a capital crime in many states until the twentieth century. Jazz artists Fats Waller and Andy Razaff penned the lament Black and Blue-made famous by Waller, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. In 1939 Billie Holliday recorded the remarkable Strange Fruit, a dirge about a lynching in the South which she had witnessed as a teenager  On the stage Oscar Hammerstein wrote lyrics that dealt with these issues in Showboat (a novel written by Ferber) and South Pacific (Based on James Michener’s novel). In the story Joe Cable, a marine officer from the Philadelphia Main Line falls in love with an island girl, Liat. Cable knows that his proper society folks would never accept Liat and he reluctantly refuses to marry her. “You’ve Got to be Taught” is his lament about his predicament. The third stanza of the song sums it all up:

“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

So far all of these details are about white-nonwhite issues. Those issues still exist; however, race is only one of several hate issues. Under the guise of being a church, The Westboro Baptist Church, founded by Fred Phelps, travels around the country protesting gays and lesbians, other organized religions and, in general, any individuals or groups that don’t think and act exactly like them. Here’s the Wikipedia link to them and it’s rather extensive.

Yesterday, they came to Orlando. Their website’s daily schedule showed that they were going to picket the Jewish Community Center in Maitland in the morning, a high school in the area in the early afternoon and the Hillel group at the University of Central Florida. A local activist, Anthony Fulginity, along with two of his associates, Josh Knight and Valeria Serna, got the word out through networks of email and Facebook and organized a counter protest for the 3:30 event at UCF. Ninety people replied and about sixty actually showed up with hastily made signs of opposition. Here’s a link to the invite page and it worked very effectively. Westboro had all of three people protesting, two of them underage children bearing hate signs. Here’s the video. The first part shows the picketers and the big noise is made by the counter group. This lasted about less than ten minutes and the Westboro people beat a hasty retreat, not allowing interviews or allowing themselves to be photographed from the front. This next video shows the counter group using Westboro’s tactics against them and this third video features the organizers being interviewed. As of this writing, no one from the JCC has returned calls, so the extent of that protest is as yet unknown.

Several members of the Phelps family are lawyers and they stretch the limits of free speech to outrageous boundaries, using young children as a protective shield whenever possible. This is an unconscionable act-using small, easily influenced and indoctrinated children to promote your agenda and they have been successfully prosecuted in the past for their activities. The following is a direct quote from Wikipedia:

“The pickets have resulted in several lawsuits. In 1995 Phelps Sr.’s eldest grandson, Benjamin Phelps, was convicted of assault and disorderly conduct after spitting into the face of a passerby during a picket.[10] In the 1990s the church won a series of lawsuits against the City of Topeka and Shawnee County for efforts taken to prevent or hinder WBC picketing, and was awarded approximately $200,000 in attorney’s fees and costs associated with the litigation. In 2004, Margie Phelps and her son Jacob were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct and failure to obey after disregarding a police officer’s order during an attempted protest.[11] In response to pickets at funerals Kansas passed a law prohibiting picketing at such events. In the autumn of 2007 the father of a Marine whose funeral was picketed by the WBC was awarded $5 million in damages.[12][13] In June 2007 Shirley Phelps-Roper was arrested in Nebraska and charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The arrest resulted from her allowing her eight-year-old son to step on the American flag during the demonstration, an act which is illegal under Nebraska law. The defense contends that the child’s actions were protected speech, and that the state law is unconstitutional. The prosecution claims that the demonstration was not intended as political speech, but as an incitement to violence, and that Phelps-Roper’s conduct may also constitute child abuse.[14] All the principals of the Phelps Chartered law firm,[15] a firm founded by WBC founder Fred Phelps, are members of WBC. Phelps Chartered handles most of WBC’s legal work.[16] “

This kind of hate is generational and people like the Phelps family pass it on from parent to child to grandchild, etc…etc…etc. They can be successfully outgunned as yesterday’s counter protest showed. They can also be easily defeated in debates. A while back an old friend debated Shirley Phelps-Roper on an internet radio show and she hung up on him due to a challenging question he posed to her. Here’s the e-mail he just sent me:

“Hi!

I’d have to call to find out, but I know that it was an internet station out of New Jersey.

She hung up when I asked her if she was a Christian or a Calvinist…as she and her church believe that they are predestined for heaven…and the rest of us are just going to hell. I asked why any of us should bother…and why it was so important for her church to bully and picket when her family was so obviously the “chosen people” of the world…and it apparently doesn’t matter what the rest of us do.

…click…dial tone.

That’s my story…I’ll try to find out the name of the show I was on.”

In addition to being bullies The Westboro Baptist Church members show themselves to be extreme cowards when faced with willful opposition. Heroes like the counter protest organizers and my friend the phone debater prove everyday that exposing these groups for what they are lessens their impact, and that’s important when you’ve got to be carefully taught.

As submitted to the Huffington Post

By Jerry Waxman

It was a weather perfect Friday afternoon when Suzanne Kosmas’s entire office staff at 12424 Research Parkway on the UCF campus decided to take the afternoon off. The kind of afternoon where you would not work up a real sweat on the tennis court or golf course, however, the staff took the afternoon off because they knew what was coming: a 4:30 protest of her position on the Health Care bill. The rally, organized by Tony Scelzo of AFSCME  and Jennifer Kenny of FLARA focused on Kosmas betrayal of the supporters who actually worked hard for her election in 2008. On Wednesday Scelzo and Kenny and AFSCME president Gerald Mc Entee met with Kosmas Port Orange office staff and were assured that the congresswoman had not made her decision, while at the same time Kosmas was telling the Orlando Sentinel’s Washington reporter that she would vote no on the bill.

Because there was no staff at the office the feeling among the eighty plus assembled was that she was, in addition to being a turncoat, both a liar and a coward. Calls to her Washington office were not getting through and although her personal cell phone (386 689-2147) was published and available she wasn’t answering. The crowd was urged to text her as many times as possible. All of the union people declared that their members feel betrayed by Kosmas and that she sold out to her big insurance and real estate friends, Specifically Brown and Brown, one of the largest insurance bundlers in the country. In an earlier article of mine about the enigma of Bill Nelson, Brown and Brown figured significantly in his funding efforts.

The general tone from all of the speakers was that there will be no future support for Kosmas unless she changes her position and votes for the reform. One speaker, Steve Hall of IUPAT, demanded all of the money back that he and his union had given her in 2008. Ben King of the College Democrats spoke passionately about how betrayed the students at all the colleges in her district feel.  Most of the speakers were captured on video and here they are:

Suzanne Kosmas 11/06/09 Protest Rally Part 1

Suzanne Kosmas 11/06/09 Protest Rally Part2

Suzanne Kosmas 11/06/09 Protest Rally Part 3

Suzanne Kosmas 11/06/09 Protest Rally Part 4

Suzanne Kosmas 11/06/09 Protest Rally Part 5

Suzanne Kosmas is at a crossroads in her career. Which road will she take?

By Jerry Waxman

as submitted to the Huffington Post 10/22/09

Members of Health Care for America Now, a coalition of diverse civic groups and labor unions including AFSCME, SEIU, Alliance for Retired Americans, Jobs With Justice and other community organizations called on Representative Suzanne Kosmas’s (D. FL.) Orlando office on Tuesday at 12:00 PM and presented a letter urging that the Congresswoman endorse real Health Care Reform. The text of the letter reads:

“Dear Congresswoman Kosmas, the citizens present in your office today are asking for a commitment from you to endorse and vote for real Health Care Reform. The following Bullet points reflect the priorities of our coalition partners and should be included in all Health Care Reform legislation that is being considered.

• Public Option—This inclusion alone in any bill will guarantee Americans access to more affordable health insurance plans by creating competition. It will also drive quality improvements within the health care system.
• Do not allow health care benefits to be taxed. Taxing benefits could cause reductions in coverage and would penalize employers, workers and retirees.
• Allow 55 to 64 year old retirees to buy into Medicare at affordable premiums. Five million Americans in this age group need health care coverage right now!
• Close the Medicare donut hole. Seniors need a drug plan that works all year long.
• Eliminate Medicare Advantage overpayments. All Americans pay this overcharge, retired or not, Medicare Advantage members or not. It must be stopped to realize real savings to traditional Medicare.

Respectfully submitted,

Central Florida Health Care for America Now Coalition”

The congresswoman’s staff met in the office with members of the coalition and promised to forward the letter to Congresswoman in Washington D.C. Jennifer Kenny, an organizer with the Alliance for Retired Americans, acting as spokesperson for the group stated that it is imperative that congress pass real health care reform, including a strong public option, and that Congresswoman Kosmas has not been on record as a supporter. Others in the group agreed including Sarah Jones, a Volusia County civic activist who has been following Kosmas speeches and votes closely on the issue. Jones stated that “She (Kosmas) has never stated that she supports the public option in any of her speeches. She has only said that the bill would most likely pass.” All the assembled agreed that Kosmas has displayed a “lack of leadership” on this issue.

Kenny tried to make an appointment to see the Congresswoman in person and was told to get in touch with her scheduler in Washington. Once the meeting was over both Kenny and Jones gave interviews to the local press repeating the same statements about the state of health care and the need for Congresswoman Kosmas to get on board and support the public option. A video of the meeting is available here.

 Afterwards, in the parking lot, Kenny said that she will keep on pushing Florida members of congress on these issues until the bill is passed. She then got in her car and headed for Sarasota where she was staging another event.

Kosmas’s position on Health Care Reform has created concern among area Democrats. According to HCAN her town hall meetings have been mostly over the phone and when she does meet with constituents it’s usually in a merchant association or chamber of commerce atmosphere. She recently interviewed with the editorial staff of the Orlando Sentinel and did not get high marks from them, and in August she addressed the monthly membership meeting of IUPAT, where she did her best to avoid talking about the public option.