WHITE PLAINS CITIZENETREPORTER SETS RECORD VISITS FOR YEAR 7,017,658 VISITS! 2,098,003 VISITORS MADE 6 VISITS A DAY EVERY DAY. 63,330 UNIQUE VISITORS MADE 133,730 VISITS IN DECEMBER. WPCNR AVERAGED 17,284 VISITORS A WEEK, VISITING 31,270 TIMES.

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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. By “Bull” Allen, September 4, 2022 UPDATED SEPTEMBER 5:

Hello there everybody, this is Bull Allen, greeting you from a deserted Yankee Stadium. The old Big Ball Park. Drawing deeply on a White Owl Wallop and sipping a Ballantine Ale in the depressing gathering twilight, watching the greatest collapse in baseball history unfold.

They are on life support in Tampa.

The Bronx Bombers are no longer bombing.

The losing continues.

The lead over Tampa Bay is 5 games after the must win Sunday, 2-1, where Aaron Judge once again with a head first slide into third to set up the winning run in the eighth. A win not even mentioned in this mornings sports section of The Times.

The pitching lasts 4 to 5 innings.

The box scores when you can find them on the internet are pathetic. No hits from the 3rd slot to the 9th slot in the batting order Saturday night. Benching kids who were hitting. Playing hitters who won’t walk and swing .

Batting Aaron Judge, by far their best player and best clutch hitter, as manager should realize first is no longer smart. He has to move The Judge down to third and fourth and Kiner-Felafel 1st. At least there would be somebody on when Judge hits one.

The team has lost its heart.

Meanwhile, in another part of the country in Tampa Bay the Yankees continue their el foldo. They cannot score. A tired overused pitching staff struggles due to Aaron Boone mismanagement and the lead once 13 games is down to 4 games–with 30 to play! 

New York needs to play .500 ball at least to .make the expanded crapshoot of the playoffs

With every loss the Yankee ability to resign Aaron Judge dwindles. Judge is looking at a team that has fallen into a funk. The swagger is gone on this team. The confidence is gone.

The inability of the Yankee hitting instructors and the manager to demand the hitters execute situational hitting has indicated the collapse of the Earl Weaver 3-run homer theory along with the flaws of the Sparky Anderson 4 innings and 5 pitchers daily rotation.

The inability of Aaron Boone to motivate the team is obvious.

You cannot have 5 inning starters because it kills the bullpen. A management change was needed.

Perhaps we can exhume Bob Lemon’s coffin or Billy Martin’s coffin, or Casey Stengel’s coffin and place it in the Yankee dugout and that will inspire the team.

The prospects for the club after this colossal fold from .700 for 81 games to .300 ball since unprecedented in baseball annals.

This streak is worth a book.

But it could shatter the team for years. The Yankee heart is gone.

The team has never collapsed like this ever in their history. Even in the mid-60s, they played with heart. Their mystique brought them back into contention with Bill Virdon almost winning the pennant in 1974 and 1975.

Will Judge want to sign on for big Yankee money with so much having to be fixed? This lineup strategy of free swinging big boppers who can only bop when a pitcher makes a mistake, since they swing at everything and never just make contact. Of course, Judge might go cross town to the Mets and enjoy the same celebrity. This business about him going to the West Coast to play with the Giants, well they are in a fade, too. Los Angeles? They can afford him. So can the Phils, the Braves, the White Sox, the Minnesotas. Lots of contending young clubs. T

The Yankees by this profound structural error have shattered their image.

Nobody fears them any more.

Some one needs to come in and fix it. Bring in Joe Girardi for the stretch run. Joe Girardi never made excuses. He never whined. Or hire Joe Madden.

In the glory days when the Yankees lost, they lost tough. They never whined. the stalked off the field with pride. The Yankees showed you how a winner loses, with class and dignity.

They have lost that heart.

The Yankees now have to play the AL EAST the toughest division in baseball to make sure they make the playoffs, and if they do make it they will face good pitching every game. Without finishing first they could be one and out as a wildcard.

The big story in New York’s lackluster newspaper sports sections is their utter ignoring the baseball season. No box scores.No standings. And absolutely no coverage of the Yankee collapse. The heart is gone out of the sports sections too.

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WPCNR NEWS AND COMMENT. By John F. Bailey. SEPTEMBER 3, 2022. Reprinted from the CitizeNetReporter Archives:

It is Labor Day Weekend 2022.

Look back at the history of the labor movement, workers have always had to fight and die to make progress.

Because management is not fair, equitable, or humane. They don’t care about you as a person. They use you up. Use you. And when you get hurt. Too bad.

Business and government “internships” today are a nice word for slavery without whips.

Labor Day first made its appearance when low wages and long hours were protested against in the mid-nineteenth century during the American Industrial Revolution.

Management works for themselves, always.

Oregon instituted the first Labor Day in the 1870s, and New York in the 1880s.

The National Labor Day Holiday came about because of national outrage over two violent strikes that were ended by armed intervention by the military and private detectives, the notorious “Pinkertons.”

Let’s go back to the 1890s and learn what Labor Day is all about. It’s not about a day off. It is a memorial day. It’s not about “good job.”

The gay 90s were not so gay if you were a worker.

They were a time when the so-called robber barons thought nothing of bringing out private security forces to shoot strikers. They  lowered wages with no mercy. It was all about them, their mansions, their fortunes, their tax-free profits. (No income tax before 1913, folks).

In the Homestead, Pennsylvania steel factory strike in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, wanted to lower wages to make the Homestead factory  more profitable. And the big robber barons of 2022 are doing it to us today, 122 years later.

(Instead of pulling down statues, they should change the name of the Carnegie Institute. Mr. Carnegie was no saint.)

Steelworkers in Homestead Pennsylvania, made $10 a week, working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, as much as  84 hours a week.

Carnegie’s Deputy  Chairman Henry Frick wanted to pay them less, and attempted to bring in non-union laborers to replace them.

Two thousand union workers barricaded the plant.

Frick hired Pinkerton Detectives to disperse them. On June 29, 1892, “Pinkertons” killed 7 union workers with gunfire, and injured “countless” others and three Pinkertons were killed.

The Governor called in the National Guard to restore order. The armed intervention broke the Amalgamated Association union.

After this, according to “Steelworkers in America” by David Brody, wages of steelworkers at Homestead declined 20% from 1892 to 1907 and workshifts went up from 8 hours to 12 hours (96 hours a week). 

What a great fellow, Carnegie. What a humanitarian! That’s your robber baron. He’d fit right in with today’s Wolves of Wall Street, the college high interest loans, the foreclosurists, and our national leadership wouldn’t he?

This union-killing in Pennysylvania was followed by the 1894 Pullman Strike in Pullman Illinois.

George M. Pullman, the creator of the sleeper car, housed his workers in Pullman City, Illinois, and charged them rent. 

In the depression of the early 1890s, in 1893 wages at the Pullman Palace Factory fell  25%, but Pullman did not lower his rents to his workers.

The rent, if not met, was deducted from worker pay.

Pullman was a garbage person.

A nice guy, George Pullman.  He could run a bank today, couldn’t he? He could run an airline and an airliner manufacturing company (3 crashes killing a thousand people because Boeing was cheap on inspections, please.)

On May 11, 1894 workers with the American Railroad Union under the leadership of the great  Eugene V.  Debs, started a wildcat (unauthorized) strike in protest of Pullman’s policies.

On June 26, 1894, union members refused to service trains with Pullman Cars in their consist, to leave Chicago, delaying the U.S. Mail.

Twenty-four railroads in an organization called the General Managers Association announced that any switchman who refused to move rail cars would be fired.

Mr. Debs and his union stood their ground.

Debs said if any switchman was fired for not moving Pullman Cars, the union would walk off their jobs. On June 29, 50,000 union men quit.

Union supporters stopped trains on rails West of Chicago.

President Grover Cleveland was asked by the railroads to use federal troops to stop the strike.

(Does all this sound familiar? Right out of today’s political rhetoric.)

When Debs went to Blue Island to ask railroad workers there to support the strike, rioting broke out, tracks were torn up. Railroad cars were burned.

The Attorney General of the United States Richard Olney, at the urging of the railroad owners, obtained an injunction July 2 that declared the strike illegal.

When Debs’ union members did not return to work, when they did not return to work—-

President Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago.

Troops opened fire on strikers  attempting to stop a train traveling through downtown Chicago.

Debs and his union leaders were arrested for disrupting the delivery of mail.

Twenty-six civilians were killed for disrupting the mail.

Because the mail could not be delivered. Because the mail could not be delivered…how pathetic.

Debs, the union leader, stopped the strike.

Debs was sentenced to six months in jail and the union was disbanded. To my knowledge no federal troops who killed civilians were prosecuted.

A number of railroad workers were blacklisted and could not get a job on a railroad in the United States.

It was the first time federal troops were used to break up a strike.

Pullman workers were forced to sign a pledge they would never strike again.

The threat of the federal government stopping strikes lead to an end of strikes for at least 8 years.

President Cleveland, though, was facing reelection in 1894.

And, here’s how Labor Day became a national holiday.

Union leaders and citizens were alarmed at his handling of the strike.

As PBS put it in a documentary in 2001:

“But now, protests against President Cleveland’s harsh methods made the appeasement (italics WPCNR) of the nation’s workers a top political priority. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived on President Cleveland’s desk just six days after his troops had broken the Pullman strike.

1894 was an election year.

President Cleveland seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day was born. William Jennings Bryant ran for the Democratic Party and the Populist Party in 1896, losing to  Republican William McKinley.

Then came a sea change in the great coal strike of 1902, when another “exemplary” capitalist J. P. Morgan fought the coal workers.

It happened in the coal fields of Easton, Pennsylvania, when the United Mine Workers headed by John Mitchell struck the coal operators  pushing for an 8-hour day.

The coal operators employed private police and the Pennsylvania National Guard to protect non-union workers.

President Theodore Roosevelt summoned the parties to the White House to bring settlement of the dispute by arbitration. After 6 months, the coal miners won a 9-hour day and a 10% increase in wages.

T.R.’s personal intervention lead to Selig Perlman, economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, saying “this was perhaps the first time in history a labor organization tied up for months a strategic industry without being condemned as a revolutionary menace.’

The 1902 leadership of the great President Teddy Roosevelt resulted in elimination of private police forces long used  by management to combat workers.

When Governor Samuel Pennypacker became Governor of Pennsylvania, Pennypacker created the Pennsylvania State Police in 1903, the first in the nation to supplant the independent organizations hired by management that were little more than strong-arm boys.

The lesson of Labor Day is to remember the bravery of the union leaders who put their members first, did not make deals, did not sell out their members,(and I might add, succomb to politicians’ whining) and held out for the good against managements that were neither kind, humane, fair, or appreciative of their workers’ contribution to their corporate success.

Management never  is.

They talk a good game but it’s all talk.

Look at the Covid firings. Look at the owners of Purdue Pharma, killing 500,000 with their hideous painkillers and not being jailed for it. And they get to keep their blood money.

There was a remembrance this week in White Plains for the thousands of young people who have overdosed on opioids and fentanyl . They should call for punishment of the greedy who profit from these dangerous distributions of drugs.

So American workers should remember the struggles and the leadership of Debs and Mitchell. And the strikers and civilians who were shot down in the street for stopping delivery of mail, for God’s sake!

They introduced a new era of workers’ rights at the costs of their lives.

The battle against worker exploitation never ends. It’s still happening today.

Let’s stop it. Let’s fight it. Let’s boycott the robber barons, and vote out the scalywags in Washington, D.C. All of them.

While it is in mind, could congress pass the Voting Rights Bill. Do something to reverse the feckless prejudice of the sophist Supreme Court and the gutless, heartless support of landlords and refusal to throw out the Texas abortion vigilante legislation.

The Supreme Court now aligns itself with the pre Civil War Dred Scott decision which ruled slaves were property, not people. They have ruled that women are not entitled to their own destinies.

The Supreme Court failed again just as it did on Dred Scott.

Now women are property.

Thanks to the Supreme Court Pontious Pilot attitude of not striking down the Texas “Vigilante ” Abortion Law.

When you have self-important judges on the Supreme Court embracing laws that take away freedom and condone violence, you have a kangaroo court, not “Supreme” in any way, but a “Superior” Court-ideology-driven, not “Guardians” of the people in any way.

Pass the legislation, congress.

Do something.

No more talk.

Action!

What would Socrates say?

What would Jesus do?

Judge Francis Nicolai said in court during the Hockley-Delgado legal proceedings twenty years ago in White Plains, NY, USA– the Judge pointed to his black judge’s sleeve and said ” I wear these robes to right wrongs.”

The Supreme Court of today obviously does not think this way. I mean, do they think?

The judges of the Supreme Court (because they act on mass) wear their robes to enable unfairness in the name of fairness, wrongs that deny rights, and practices that take away freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Their robes should be white with white hoods.

Welcome back robber barons, we know who you are, what you do, and your perpetual whining about how bad it is for you. You’re not strong you’re weak. You’re not fair you are unfair. You want aid and privileges and amnesty, but are reluctant to give aid, extend privileges or forgive when you are asked to sacrifice.

Labor must always fight management,. Management and ownership always wants breaks but they won’t give the working man a break.

Today’s inflation–completely manufactured by business–shows nothing has changed since 1892.

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See email below from Sustainable Westchester…The Westchester Power Electricity Supply offer in Con Edison territory has been on a temporary hiatus during the summer months, following the expiry of the most recent contract on June 30, 2022. We are pleased to announce that the new supply offer will be available as of November 1, 2022. Yesterday we communicated this information to our municipal contacts in the program’s 24 participating municipalities (except Yonkers, which is on a separate contract). We are making you aware of this activity in the event that your offices receive calls from constituents.  The New ContractThe new contract has been awarded to Constellation New Energy for a two year term beginning November 1, 2022 to October 31, 2024 with rates as follows: 100% Renewable Supply:  15.128 cents/kWh Standard supply:                13.364 cents/kWh  Marketplace conditions, driven by global events (e.g., the war in Ukraine), have resulted in the price of natural gas, the primary driver for the electricity market, more than tripling in just a year and a half. Market volatility and rate uncertainty necessitated a brief pause in the Westchester Power electricity service upon the lapse of the previous contract that expired on June 30, 2022. We went into the bid on 7/20/2022 carrying the collective trepidation of all of our experience with this volatile market over the past year – The first part of the year saw Con Edison utility rates as high as 17 cents and averaging over 11 cents through June. Natural gas prices (the most critical driver for the electricity market) have tripled over the past year, and after taking a tiny breather a couple of weeks back, were starting to push up again.  Market rates for renewable energy from the major ESCOs going into bidding day ranged from a low of 16.12 cents to well over 18 cents. In an environment of rising rates, though high by recent historical standards, these contract rates can be considered to be a cap for your residents to protect them from utility rates that many expect to hit unprecedented highs this winter. As always, residents are free to opt-out or rejoin the program at any time. What’s Next This week we are holding the first round of public Westchester Power information sessions about the resumption of the supply offer. You are welcome to attend or contact us with any questions about the program.  We will hold a session on 9/2 (previous sessions were held on 8/31 and 9/1).   For promotional/organizational purposes these will target regional groupings (Upper Rivertowns, Lower Rivertowns, Sound Shore, Central County), but for participants’ convenience we invite those who can’t make the group sessions associated with their municipality to join any session. Sustainable Westchester has published the zoom links for these sessions on our website and has been posting details today on our social media platforms. Please visit sustainablewestchester.org/wp/conedterritory#events to see the full calendar of sessions.Press outreach is slated for the upcoming week. Further community outreach to continue into September/October during the notification and opt out period, including the receipt of the official notification letter in the mail to eligible participants.  We will be in touch further to share more information on these next steps in the coming week. The program rates of 15.128 cents per kWh for 100% NYS renewable supply and 13.364 cents for standard supply will be fixed from November 1, 2022 until meter read dates in November 2024.  The program notification letter shall be mailed to participating residents later in September. We recognize that the new rates, reflecting changes in the market, are substantially higher than those of the previous contract. While higher electricity rates will be a challenge for many residents, the Westchester Power program’s fixed rates serve as a price cap in these volatile times. Residents may opt out or back in to the supply at any time, as well as select the standard supply if they choose. Sustainable Westchester’s GridRewards™ program provides an opportunity for Con Edison customers to sign up for the free app, connect to their Con Edison accounts and save energy, money and take simple energy actions during demand response events to earn cash reward payments. We’re pleased that we are back on track with the electricity supply offer. This signals the resumption of this important contribution to greenhouse gas mitigation, and also re-establishes this platform for continued advancement of Westchester’s clean energy transition. It also signals our collective readiness for programming and funds which will start to flow out of the new Federal and State budget allocations in this sector.

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