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Monthly Archives: October 2017

Soul of a Nation

22 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry by Rosaliene Bacchus, United States

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

Corporate greed, Economy & Life, Free Market Capitalism, Government, Soul of a Nation Poem by Rosaliene Bacchus

Image property of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.

HE craves adulation
Look only at me, he tweets
I am a billionaire
I am the god you seek

HE makes men great again
White supremacists rise up with glee
All I want is loyalty
Have no other god but me Continue reading →

Conflicts of Interest? NOAA’s Nominees AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers and Dr. Neil Jacobs of Panasonic

15 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in United States

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers, Dr. Neil Jacobs of Panasonic Weather Solutions, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Weather Service (NWS), Public safety, Weather forecasts

NASA satellite image of California wildfires 10 October 2017

 

Imagine a future scenario in Houston, Texas.

Twelve-year-old Rick arrives home, breathless. “Mom, people are evacuating. The hurricane will be worse than Harvey.”

“You sure, Rick? Your father’s boss gets PanasonicWeather Channel. It’ll just be a tropical storm by the time it reaches us.”

“My friend says it’s all over the news on AccuWeather Channel.”

“Don!” Sarah calls out to her husband, tinkering in the garage. “We’ve gotta evacuate.”

Don emerges from the garage, wiping grease from his hands. “Where did you hear that?”

“I told you we should’ve signed up for AccuWeather.” Sarah glared at her husband. “Your stupid Sports Channel is all that matters.” She turned to Rick. “Get your sister. We’re going to your aunt in Austin.”

“You’re being paranoid,” Don told his wife.

 

Such a future becomes possible when Congress approves the latest nominations to the two top positions at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s office of the National Weather Service (NWS) provides us with weather, water, and climate data, forecasts, and warnings vital to the protection of our lives, property, and economy. Six NWS regional offices “manage all operational and scientific meteorological, hydrologic, and oceanographic programs of the region… They monitor these services and adjust resources to provide the most effective weather and warning services possible.”

The nominee for Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans & Atmosphere and Administrator of NOAA is Barry Myers, the CEO of AccuWeather. Using NOAA’s weather data and products, Barry Myers runs a profitable business of delivering them in a proprietary format attractive to its customers. In 2005, with the assistance of their State Senator Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania), AccuWeather sought to pass legislation that would reduce NOAA’s ability to distribute its weather data directly to the public.

In a statement introducing the bill, Santorum said: “It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free.”

Map of Weather Alerts across the USA and Territories

More recently in May 2016, Senator Jim Bridenstine (Oklahoma) proposed legislation that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing any new services that the private commercial weather sector already offers or can potentially offer. At that congressional hearing, AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers joined four other industry representatives to brief Congress on the state of forecasting and technology in the commercial weather sector.

Here enters Panasonic Weather Solutions. Dr. Neil Jacobs—nominee for the second top position as Assistant Secretary for Environmental Observation & Prediction and Assistant Administrator for NOAA Satellite & Information Services—is their Chief Atmospheric Scientist. Like Barry Myers, Jacobs wants a greater role for the private sector in weather forecasting. In November 2015, his company signed an agreement to supply its advanced global aircraft weather data to NOAA with the aim of improving forecasts from models run by the NWS.

Testifying before the House of Science Committee in July 2017, Dr. Jacobs asserted that “a private company like Panasonic can move more quickly than NOAA in improving its models and processes, because it does not have to go through the years of quality and reliability testing that NOAA requires when implementing major model upgrades.”

While we focus on our president’s outrageous tweets and the latest natural disaster or sex abuse scandal, our Negotiator-in-Chief and his corporate-backed team creep forward with their scheme to defund our government, deregulate private industries, and privatize services of our public agencies critical to our health and safety.

To learn more, read the October 12th article “Conflicts of Interest? NOAA’s Nominees AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers and Dr. Neil Jacobs of Panasonic” by Andrew Rosenberg, director of the UCS Center for Science and Democracy and former NOAA scientist and manager.

IMAGES:

NASA satellite image of multiple wildfires raging north of San Francisco, California, October 10, 2017
Source: NOAA Climate.gov

Map of Weather Alerts across the USA & Territories
Source: NOAA National Weather Service

“Let Me Try Again” – Poem by Immigrant Salvadoran Poet Javier Zamora

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

"The Dreamers", “Let Me Try Again” by Javier Zamora, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Immigrant Salvadoran Poet, Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Border Wall Nogales Mexico Arizona USA

U.S. Border Wall at Nogales, Mexico

My Poetry Corner October 2017 features the poem “Let Me Try Again” by Javier Zamora, an immigrant Salvadoran poet and educator who lives in Northern California. Born in 1990 in a small fishing town in El Salvador, he was a year old when his eighteen-year-old father fled the Civil War (1980-1992). Four years later, his mother joined his father, leaving him with his grandparents. At nine years old, unaccompanied by a family member and under the charge of other undocumented immigrants, ‘Javiercito’ made the treacherous journey to reunite with his parents in the United States.

In “The Shatter of Birds,” dedicated to Abuelita (granny), Zamora recalls her pain at losing him.

Javiercito, you’re leaving me tomorrow
when our tortilla-and-milk breaths will whisper
te amo. When I’ll pray the sun won’t devour
your northbound steps. I’m giving you this conch
swallowed with this delta’s waves
and the sound of sand absorbing.

[…]

There’s no autumn here. When you mist
into tomorrow’s dawns, at the shore
of somewhere, listen to this conch.
Don’t lose me. 

Zamora’s abuelos (grandparents) warn him not tell anyone of his departure. In “Kite Flying,” his elation overrides their fears.

I’m going to see my parents.
(I’m going to see my parents!)
On the last day of school, I’ll tell
only my closest friends I’m flying
to where people drink cold milk
and put strawberries in their cereal,
I’ll eat strawberries all the time
and get so tall I’ll start playing basketball. 

In addition to letters and phone calls, Zamoro and his parents kept in touch by exchanging cassette-tapes. Listening to their tapes brought heartbreak. His poem “Cassette-tape” recreates the disjointedness of time and his trauma in crossing into Mexico without them. For two months, he lost touch with them.

To cross México we’re packed in boats
20 aboard, 18 hours straight to Oaxaca.
Throw up and gasoline keep us up. At 5 a.m.
we get to shore, we run to the trucks, cops
rob us down the road—without handcuffs,
our guide gets in their Fords and we know
it’s all been planned. Not one peso left
so we get desperate—Diosito, forgive us
for hiding in trailers. We sleep in Nogales till
our third try when finally, I meet Papá Javi.

In the featured poem, “Let Me Try Again,” Zamora relives their first failed attempt to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. By then, their numbers had dwindled. In the desert, even the animals struggle to survive.

I could bore you with the sunset, the way
water tasted after so many days without it,
the trees, the breed of dogs, but I can’t
say there were forty people when we found

the ranch with the thin white man, his dogs,
and his shotgun. Until this 5 a.m., I hadn’t
or couldn’t remember there were only five,
or seven, people—

not forty. We’d separated by the palo verdes.
We meaning: an eighteen-year-old ex-gangster,
a mom with her thirteen-year-old, and me.
Four people. Not forty. The rest . . . the rest,

I don’t know. They weren’t there when
the thin white man let us drink from a hose
while pointing his shotgun. In Spanish
he told us if run away, dogs trained attack
.

In high school, after a visiting poet introduced him to the work of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Zamora found release from his traumatic memories in poetry. By the age of twenty-one, he knew he wanted to be a poet. On completing his BA in history at the University of California, Berkeley, he pursued an MFA at the New York University. A Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University soon followed.

Zamora’s first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, was published this October amid uncertainty about his fate as an alien with Temporary Protected Status which comes up for renewal in 2018. Like the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) “Dreamers,” his future rests in the hands of President Trump.

His status makes it difficult to visit his native land. “It’s traumatic to talk to those left behind,” he confesses in an essay published in Granta Online Edition, December 2016.  “It’s a burden to communicate over the phone. To write. To text. To Facebook message.”

In his poem “El Salvador,” the young poet speaks of the violence that never ended and of his longing to see his grandmother again. 

but if I don’t brush Abuelita’s hair, wash her pots and pans,
I cry. Like tonight, when I wish you made it
easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier
to never have to risk our lives.

To read the complete featured poem and learn more about Javier Zamora, his work, and honors, go to my Poetry Corner October 2017.

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