Steamboating returns to St. Louis!

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There’s something new at the south leg of the Gateway Arch, and no, it’s not a casino. It’s something much better: The American Queen steamboat. It rolled into town for the first time on July 4, and gave its 400+ passengers a to-die-for view of the riverfront  fireworks show. The next evening, the AQ fired up its steam engine, played its calliope and launched another contingent of steamboaters on its first St. Louis to Louisville cruise.

The AQ is the last steamboat [beautifully refurbished]  in a fleet that once included the Mississippi Queen  [scrapped] and the Delta Queen [now a floating hotel in Chattanooga].

I’m here to wish the new owner great success. St. Louis needs a steamboat, for gawd’s sake. We’re the steamboat capital of America–at least we used to be–and until last week, you couldn’t find a real river-running paddle wheeler anywhere around here. So, it’s about time, and hallelujah.

And, by the way, I can attest to the quality of the boat and the journey, as I’m writing this blog as I sit on the “Front Porch” of the AQ. It’s about 100 degrees here, somewhere between Paducah KY and Hendersonville, IL, the next stop on the way to Louisville. Inside, of course, it’s air-conditioned to a near freeze, but who’s complaining? If you’ve got some cash to spare, a week with no commitments, and the desire to have someone do just about everything else for you–and if you’re not in a hurry and like to read or play cards–the AQ is for you.

But I’m not really here to review the boat–although I will say that the food is very good, the cabins quite nice–with excellent linens, the bathrooms roomy and the staff extremely friendly and helpful.

What I really want to say is that the AQ deserves success, and St. Louis should do its darndest to help it along. Other, much smaller towns have already figured out that a steamboat docking at their port is a big deal. Yesterday, we had a bonus stop in Paducah, KY. Even though the stop wasn’t scheduled until less than 24 hours before we got there, the word got out, and hundreds of people drove down to the levee to see the big steamboat pull in. Some of the museums and shops stayed open late to accommodate [and benefit from the economic potential of] 400 steamboaters with credit cards. As we pulled up the gangplank and steamed away from town, the levee was covered with cars and people who stayed to watch the big boat leave.

The same thing happened in Cave-in-Rock, a tiny town in Kentucky with a population of about 350. And again in Henderson and Owensboro. Clearly, the idea of an old-fashioned [looking] steamboat has fired up the imagination of lots of people. St. Louis needs to make the most of this opportunity.

Pevely pulls tooth-protecting fluoride in budget cuts

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“Adding fluoride to drinking water is among the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century,” says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  The benefit of fluoridated water is one of those issues that, until recently, seemed settled.  But in the right-wing-fomented political free-for-all that is 21st century America, many seemingly long-settled issues [women’s rights, collective bargaining, voting rights] are up for grabs. And fluoridation is one of them.

Pevely, Missouri offers the most recent example. Apparently, the tooth-saving benefits of fluoridation are outweighed by the $8,000 to $10,000 annual cost of adding it to the municipal water system. [Fluoridation costs about $1 per person-year.] According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “the cash-strapped city ran out of fluoride at the end of May 2012, and isn’t buying more.”

That’s sad, because dentists and public health pros can cite decades’ worth of evidence that fluoride saves teeth—resulting in significant savings for families.

Fluoride basics

According to the Centers for Disease Control,

Nearly all naturally occurring water sources contain fluoride—a mineral that has been proven to prevent, and even reverse, tooth decay.  Tooth decay is caused by certain bacteria in the mouth. When a person eats sugar and other refined carbohydrates, these bacteria produce acid that removes minerals from the surface of the tooth. Fluoride helps to remineralize tooth surfaces and prevents cavities from continuing to form.

Water fluoridation prevents tooth decay mainly by providing teeth with frequent contact with low levels of fluoride throughout each day and throughout life. Even today, with other available sources of fluoride, studies show that water fluoridation reduces tooth decay by about 25 percent over a person’s lifetime.

In the early years of water fluoridation, studies showed that adding fluoride led to reductions of 50–60% in childhood cavities.  More recent studies show lower reductions (18–40%), likely due to increasing use of fluoride from other sources, notably toothpaste, and also to the halo effect of food and drink made in fluoridated areas and consumed in areas where there was no fluoridation.

Fluoridation became an official policy of the U.S. Public Health Service by 1951, and by 1960 water fluoridation had become widely used in the U.S., reaching about 50 million people. By 2006, 69.2% of the U.S. population using public water systems were receiving fluoridated water, amounting to 61.5% of the total U.S. population.

Throughout its history, though, fluoridation has met opposition—typically from anti-government activists who call it “forced medication,” conspiracy theorists, and people who doubt the validity of science and medical research. The reasons to oppose fluoridation seem to match the political climate—as exemplified by the Cold War meme that fluoridation was part of a world-wide Communist plot to control America.

Today, the conspiracy theorists are still out there, as are ideologically driven anti-government, anti-science activists. And they’ve won in many towns. Fluoride Action Network, an anti-fluoridation group, lists more than 100 towns in North America [interestingly, many of them are in Nebraska] that have voted to end fluoridation since 1990.

You can’t help but feel sympathetic to city councils whose revenues have tanked in recent years and who are looking for ways to balance their local budgets. It’s also a fact that, with the availability of fluoride toothpastes and mouthwashes, many people are getting some fluoride benefits from sources other than their drinking water. And both CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services have recently revised downward their recommendations for the most effective levels of fluoride in public water sources. But it just doesn’t seem right to balance a government’s budget on the dental health of the citizens it serves. Maybe fluoridation is low-hanging budget fruit that’s out of sight and easily cut—especially if you’re under pressure from local people with an anti-fluoridation agenda.  One can’t help but notice, though, that when the budget axe falls, it rarely chops publicly financed sports stadiums or tax-increment financing bribes to corporations and developers.

 

 

 

President of Common Cause to speak in St. Louis

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The Missouri Progressive Action Group and Ethical Society of St. Louis are bringing Bob Edgar, President of Common Cause, to St. Louis on June 8thto discuss the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Missouri’s legislative process.

The spotlight has been on ALEC in recent months because of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida and the controversy over that state’s “stand your ground” law. Coke, Pepsi, and Kraft have recently withdrawn their support of ALEC, which was founded in 1973 by conservative leaders to bring state legislators and corporate lobbyists together to write model bills that reflect ALEC’s principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.

Common Cause has been in the forefront of the national effort to call attention to the negative effects of some of the laws being passed at the state level aimed at weakening workers’ rights, denying citizens the benefits of health care reform, dismantling the system of public education, and gutting environmental protections.

Dr. Edgar will discuss how Common Cause is challenging ALEC’s non-profit status with the IRS and explain the long term implications of a government controlled by corporate interests at the expense of the common good. A former member of Congress, Dr. Edgar also served for seven years as the general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

Following his presentation, a panel of local advocates for public education, workers’ rights, environmental protections, and unfettered access to the ballot box will discuss ALEC’s influence in Missouri politics. Moderator will be Don Marsh, host of “St. Louis on the Air” on KWMU 90.7 FM.

Panelists include:

Denise Lieberman, Senior Attorney, Advancement Project;

Chris Guinther, President, Missouri National Education Association;
Byron Clemens, Regional VP, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO;

John Hickey, Executive Director, Sierra Club Missouri Chapter;
David Cook, President, Local 655 United Food and Commercial Workers.

Doors open at 6:15 PM on Friday, June 8th and program begins at 7 PM. The Ethical Society is located at 9001 Clayton Road. There is no charge for the program. More detailed information about ALEC can be found at www.alec.org and about Common Cause at www.commoncause.org.


Local media contact is Harvey Ferdman (314) 469-0595.

Do we really want to let casinos become loan sharks?

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Ever since casinos became legal in Missouri, we’ve seen one broken promise after another, and now the gambling-industrial complex is doing it again. They’ve convinced at least one Missouri legislator [I wonder how they did that?] to sponsor a bill that would let them loan money to tapped-out gamblers.

How did we get to this particularly unhealthy and unhelpful idea? Let’s see: We went from gambling only on cruising riverboats, to boats in pretend moats; from a $500 one-time gambling-loss limit to lose whatever you lose; from a lifetime ban on compulsive gamblers to an open-door policy. One after another, restrictions on casinos have been lobbied and legislated into oblivion.

And now, under the pretense of helping hapless, high-roller professional athletes, we’re on the verge of turning casinos into loan sharks. Gambling [I refuse to use the term “gaming”] industry lobbyists and their paid employees—Missouri legislators—want us to believe that millionaire professional athletes who roll into town need loans for their high-stakes gambling entertainment. [Some of these people, apparently, gamble with as much as $30,000 in an evening.] We can’t expect them to carry that much cash around, argue the lobbyists, so we need to allow casinos to loan them the money to piss away at the craps tables.

That’s a very clever cover story, but it doesn’t hold enough water to float a toy boat in a fake moat. Do they want us to believe that athletes with huge salaries and financial advisors to manage them don’t have high-limit credit cards to tap into? Really?

No, loans to gamblers are not really for already-well-staked athletes. They’re a great way for casinos to rake in even more money—through a new revenue stream of interest payments–from everybody, particularly the average person who gets in over his or her head and needs just a little more to win it all back. What a great strategy for the casinos—keep customers gambling longer, losing more money, and then paying it back with interest.

They’d like us to believe gambling loans will be innocuous and that applicants will be carefully screened. If you want an instant casino loan, you’ll have to show that you qualify for a $5,000 line of credit. That sounds reasonable enough, until you find out that the casinos will be using criteria similar to those employed by furniture stores and used-car dealers—and they’re widely known as some of America’s most discriminating bankers, right?

And, by the way, does anyone know what the interest rates on gambling loans will be? Missouri already permits exorbitant interest rates on payday loans. Will borrowers do any better with a loan from a casino? Isn’t this what used to be called, in the old-time gangster days, “vig?”

Instant loans to gamblers is a lousy idea with no redeeming value, except for the added value it provides to casino operators.  Even casino operators themselves know this. A recent Post-Dispatch editorial notes that some of the operators’ own websites offer links to tool kits that help people identify their own problem gambling.

The kit opens with 10 questions, a “yes” answer to any of which indicates a gambling problem. Question 7: “Have you ever borrowed money to pay for your gambling?”

[Another website] lists 10 statements under “How do you know if you have a gambling problem? One says, “You have borrowed money to finance your gambling.”

None of this subterfuge and cynical exploitation should come as a surprise. This history of the gambling industry in Missouri and elsewhere is a story of backroom deals and deliberate, patient, incremental erosion of the limitations initially promised by casinos and legislators to protect customers from themselves.

State-sanctioned gambling—under the pretext of helping to fund education—is already a giveaway to corporations whose product is designed to do nothing except empty its customers’ pockets. Do we really need to give the gambling industry another way to skim money from Missouri’s citizens?

Where’s the T word?

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I’ve read and re-read the April 23, 2012 Post-Dispatch lead article, “I-70 toll proposal hits Senate roadblock,” but I can’t find a single occurrence of the word “taxes.”

The article focuses on a bill in the Missouri Senate that would have authorized tolls as part of a public-private partnership to rebuild a 200-mile stretch of I-70 across the middle of the state. The proposal, it appears, is dead for 2012—killed by the trucking industry, gas station owners, and operators of convenience stores. [I don't blame them, by the way. But that's another post.]

The problem is that just about everyone—even the proposal’s strongest opponents—agree that something needs to be done to keep Missouri’s highway infrastructure up to par. But everyone dances around the real solution: increasing state revenue by taxing everyone a little bit more, perhaps, even via a higher tax on every gallon of gas.

But no one even utters the word “tax.” Not even the press. Here are some examples, from the P-D article:

…something needs to be done to shore up funding for Missouri’s transportation needs, and [he] predicted that a solution will emerge in the upcoming years.

Something. Not taxes. Just something, plus a solution that dare not speak its name.

This summer and fall, Missouri lawmakers will convene interim hearings on transportation needs and funding.

Could “funding” mean taxes? In reality, it probably should. But you can’t say that in America today.

One goal…is to increase public awareness of the transportation funding need and ways to pay for them.

What might those “ways to pay for them” be, I wonder? Certainly, not increased taxes, right?

Without a new funding source…the state will not be able to reconstruct I-70—a project that many believe is needed.

A new funding source? I guess that means that the old funding source—taxes that everyone chips in to—is not on the table. Whatever happened to everyone pitching in their fair share, for the general public good? We all use the roads and derive economic and social benefits from them.

I find the absence of the “t” word very disturbing. Our political dialogue has been hijacked by anti-tax conservatives. We live in a tax-free-discussion zone, and the media—as exemplified by this P-D article—are complicit, un-indicted co-conspirators.

I suspect that every politician in America—including the anti-tax ideologues—knows that he or she—and the lobbyists they work for—benefit every day from the services that are funded by taxes, and that they all know that, in the end, fair taxation is essential to maintaining the quality of American life that they hold so dear. [Even St. Ronald Reagan raised taxes.]  But until we all get real about these conversations—and until the media stops parroting conservative anti-tax themes—we’re going nowhere fast.

 

Bill Maher brings the f word to St. Charles Family Arena

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Bill Maher at the St. Charles Family Arena is about as oxymoronic as it gets. As a member of the audience [April 15, 2012], I dug his irreverent, cynical, no-holds-barred take on American life and politics. But I must say that I was puzzled by the choice of venue. I didn’t know they allowed anyone to use the “f” word in the Family Arena even once—let alone the dozens of times Maher said it and graphically described the act itself. I guess the booking fee and the prospect of a profitable show [tickets started at about $40 and went way up from there] can help one get over one’s objections to objectionable material, eh?

And there was plenty to object to, if you’re a churchgoer, or any kind of Republican —which obviously I’m not–or even someone who can find no fault with President Obama.

In his trademark, drippingly sarcastic tone, Maher took on Mitt Romney [“He wants to run government like a business? Does he know that most businesses fail in the first four years?”], Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and the entire spectrum of Republican candidates and voters [“know-nothings, many of whom think Darwin was the husband on Bewitched”]. His well-known anti-religion views were on full display, too. He savaged the Catholic church, the Pope and the Bishops [“men who go to work in dunce caps and dresses] and religion in general. [“My main question to believers is, ‘How do you know?’Christians believe that when you die, you’ll go to Heaven, and Jesus will be sitting on the right side of God. Of course, we know this because we have the seating chart, right? And about those 72 virgins for Islamic suicide bombers: why not 73 or 71? How do you know?’”]

I wasn’t surprised by Maher’s style, or his topics, or his views. What surprised me was that about 2,500 Maher sympathizers came to the show. Obviously, Maher’s management team knows its market, and they had already figured out that there would be an audience. But I’m sure that a lot of the audience must have come from zip codes other than those in the St. Charles area [although the biggest cheer of the evening came in response to Maher’s comments about meth labs—a generally exurban pursuit.] And I must say that I was pleasantly surprised that leftie-type Maher enthusiasts—many of whom reside in zip codes closer to St. Louis’ “divine spine”—were actually willing to venture not just west of Lindbergh Blvd., but also west of I-270 and across the Missouri River. I guess, in a not-funny-at-all, Fox News-dominated world, we’re so starved for comedic balance that we’ll drive right out of our comfort zones to find it.

KMOV’s Larry Conners’ gratuitous attack on President Obama

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Granted a brief interview with President Obama earlier this week, KMOV’s Larry Conners used the opportunity to attack the President on…what?…His family vacations?  I’m an unashamed supporter of the President, but even I have a few questions about his policies. So, if I had a few minutes in which to sit face-to-face with the man, I certainly wouldn’t use them to question the cost and frequency of the vacations he takes with his family. And neither should Conners. His out-of-right-field sneak attack seemed more like an attempt to create a sensational lead-in headline for his news show and to score points with Obama-hating viewers than a serious journalistic effort.

The President was clearly taken aback by Conners’ inappropriate and gratuitous attack focused on a non-issue. Conners actually implied that the President was inappropriately using taxpayers’ money for his personal entertainment. Here’s what he said:

“…viewers are complaining … they get frustrated and even angered when they see the First Family jetting around different vacations and so forth, sometimes maybe they think under the color of state business and that you’re out of touch, you really don’t know what they’re experiencing right now.”

And in his follow-up commentary, Conners pounced on the President for “dodging the question.”  Of course he dodged it: the question didn’t deserve an answer, as it’s based on a false premise and flies in the face of the facts. Ask a serious question, and you’ll get a serious answer. This question didn’t qualify.

Don’t get me wrong: I want to see journalists asking tough questions and challenging politicians when they make false claims. They don’t do enough of that, and they let too many politicians get away with statements that are unfounded in reality. But Conners wasn’t acting as a journalist here: He was serving as a right-wing attack dog–portraying President Obama as out of touch with “real” Americans, perhaps as a way of deflecting attention from Mitt Romney’s own detachment from the day-to-day concerns of people with far less money than he has. It’s the 2012 version of swiftboating. Maybe Conners was taking this talking point on a test flight, to see if it would fly as a Republican campaign issue for the November election. Whatever he was doing,  Conners’ employers at KMOV should be embarrassed.

Searching like it’s 1999

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What do Charter Communications and the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners have in common? They both offer maddeningly inefficient, technologically backward search functions.

On April 3, 2012—election night for St. Louis municipalities and school districts—I had a couple of skins in the game, and I planned my evening around following the returns. My plan was to go to the source—the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners—where I figured I’d get the most up-to-date and accurate results as they were tabulated at commission headquarters. What I found there was a shockingly poor reporting system.

Rather than a searchable database, or even an Excel spreadsheet in, perhaps, PDF form, where one might search for the elective races one was most interested in, I found a list, which you can see here. It’s printed in a very antiquated typeface—I think it’s  Courier—something we used to use on our IBM selectric typewriters in the 1980s. It’s just a list. No database. No search function at all. To find the race you want to know about, you have to scroll down through the alphabetical list—which, by the way, is “alphabetized” by municipality somewhat like this: “Alderman, Bel-Nor,” “City Council, Creve Coeur,” etc. And if you wanted an update on election night, the only way to get it was to refresh every few minutes and hope you hit the right moment, because no information as to the next update was made available on the site.

This frustrating system is very similar in its technological 1999-ishness to Charter Communications’ “On Demand” system, which also has no search function and forces you to scroll down through the alphabetical list of movie titles until you find one you might like. But don’t pause, because if you step away from the remote for more than a minute or two, Charter reverts back to the main menu, and your search must begin again from the top.

Why? With regard to Charter—which is a technology company—I have no freakin’ idea, except that installing a decent search system might cost them money and cut into the take-home pay of the top executive staff.

With regard to St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners, I can only speculate. Perhaps a continuously refreshing, online database of election returns is insecure. Maybe it could be corrupted by mischief-makers and hackers. So, perhaps, an old-fashioned, uneditable list is, in fact, better. [If that’s the case, it would be nice if the Board paid as much attention to possible vote-count corruption that could take place with its easily hackable DRE voting machines. But that’s another post.] In defense of the Board, I did check to see how results were being reported in Kansas City, and the system was alarmingly similar. Maybe this is a statewide policy?

It turns out that the best place to get election results on April 3 was KSDK-TV, which offered a much more user-friendly format—fed, of course, by information given to them by the Board of Election Commissioners. I just think there’s something awry when citizens have to rely on media to get basic information about our democracy [and what’s more basic than election results?] in a transparent and timely way.

“Tax relief” has new meaning this morning

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Tax relief is a phrase that is generally owned by conservatives, who want us to believe that taxes are an undue burden imposed on citizens. This morning, I’m stealing that mantra, and giving it a new spin.

This morning is the morning after reason prevailed in the Ladue School District, where 52% of voters said yes to Proposition 1, which will raise the district’s operating tax levy by $.49. And that outcome has created, for me, a sense of relief—tax relief. I’m relieved that the school district won’t have to lay off teachers. I’m relieved that class sizes will not have to increase and that valuable programs won’t have to be reduced.  I’m relieved that the district won’t have to make an additional $2.1 million in budget cuts for the 2012-13 school year.

I took some heat for previous opinions I published on the subject of Proposition 1. One critic accused me of fomenting “class envy.”  That’s pretty funny, considering the issue we’ve been wrangling over. Ladue School District, with its elevated property values and track record of high per-pupil expenditures, is ranked among the best districts in Missouri. So, I don’t have a problem with the idea that passing Proposition 1 to help maintain the district’s level of excellence makes Ladue’s classes the envy of others.

Voters need protection from self-appointed “voter protectors”

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For now, at least, there’s not going to be a voter “protection” ballot measure on the November 2012 ballot, and that’s good news for voters.

In 2011, the Missouri legislature passed a ballot measure that, if approved by voters, would amend the state constitution to make it easier for lawmakers to make it harder for people to vote. Ostensibly, this measure will “protect” us from voter fraud. Last week [March 11, 2012], a Missouri circuit court judge rejected the ballot measure, which had the Orwellian name of “Voter Protection Act.”

Behind the “protection” subterfuge, of course, is the real motive: an effort to suppress voting by people who Republicans would love to keep away from the polls. The measure would require voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polls. The catch is that not everyone has a driver’s license or state ID, and to get one, you have to present your birth certificate or citizenship documents—and those cost money and time. And who are the people who don’t have these items? Mostly, it’s low-income and minority voters—and those demographic groups tend to vote for Democrats.

But what truly amazes me about this year’s voter suppression bill is who is sponsoring it. It’s State Rep. Shane Schoeller, a Republican from Springfield. Schoeller is currently a candidate for….wait for it…Missouri Secretary of State, and the juxtaposition of his voter suppression bill with his electoral quest is ironic, to say the least. In Missouri, the Secretary of State is in charge of elections. He or she oversees registration, candidate filing, voter registration and elections. You would think that the main missions of that job would be to make sure that everyone who’s eligible to vote can actually vote, to make sure the voting process is fair, transparent and therefore trustworthy, and to enfranchise as many people as possible, as a way of promoting participation in the democratic process. I guess that’s not how Schoeller sees the job. By the looks of the bill he introduced, it seems that he views  becoming Secretary of State as a way of ensuring victories for his fellow Republicans.

The judge who threw out Schoeller’s latest attempt at voter suppression said that the name of the ballot measure, the “Voter Protection Act,” violated truth-in-advertising requirements.The problem is that the wording in the ballot measure doesn’t contain the phrase “voter protection,” and, under Missouri rules, you at least have to show that your law is somehow related to what it’s named for.

This year’s legal setback to the initiative probably won’t stop Schoeller from reintroducing the same thing all over again. Apparently, nothing deters the vote suppressors from their mission: not the fact that photo voter ID was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2006, and not even the fact that that studies of allegations of voter fraud in Missouri have turned up no evidence of fraud that could have been prevented by requiring photo ID.

One can only hope that the courts continue to see through the fraudulent claim of voter fraud and that they and citizens realize the importance, in our increasingly fragile democratic system, of protecting voters from the vote “protectors.”