PECO is planning a $12 million investment in Swarthmore as part of a larger statewide electricity initiative that calls for removing lots of trees.
You can call the plan “We Kill Trees To Go Green”
The current utility poles are 35 feet tall, and PECO wants to replace them with fifty footers.
The assessment at the Nov. 15 borough council is that 124 trees must go, most of which are decades old. PECO promises to replace them with 2-and-a-half-foot saplings
PECO refuses to use underground electrical lines it was revealed despite their use in Springfield and at Swarthmore College.
PECO cites higher costs as among the reasons they don’t want to tunnel in the dirt in the borough.
Swarthmore Borough Council has been in negotiations with PECO, but has not found a way forward as of last night’s meeting.
In keeping with our tradition, Swarthmore residents are beginning to organize, with letters and phone calls as the first salvo in the battle.
While PECO has not approached my block yet, but we don’t know that they won’t. To be clear, my household is not involved with the organizing.
There are numerous other examples of PECO’s attempts to destroy trees in a similar fashion. A few are listed below.
Delco GOP Chair Blames Trump, LOLs Keep Coming — Outgoing Delaware County (Pa) Chair Tom McGarrigle blamed his party’s poor showing on Donald Trump in an interview with Channel 10.
“It’s time for the Republican Party to move beyond Donald Trump,” McGarrigle said. “. . . Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and in Delaware County we started losing elections you know in 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21.”
And you started losing because you began putting up crap candidates, laughing at the wishes of your constituents and ignoring the county’s changing demographics.
A lot of those Blacks moving into Upper Darby think more like Trump voters than Radnorites. Where was the outreach?
Look in the mirror, man
It’s called lazy, Tom. And stupid.
You didn’t need to get them all to make a difference.
And why the silence on the very real concerns about vote fraud in Delco?
You issued a release on Oct. 31, 2020 that at least two duly elected Judges of Election found their voter books had been given to others by the County Election Board and the Election Board couldn’t say who. It’s a rather serious violation, you would think. Good for you for pointing it out. We were kind of expecting a little bit more though. The matter sort of disappeared. You gonna blame Trump for that?
Delco has become a national scandal with regard to elections. It’s the subject of YouTube videos and best-selling books. We get why you might not want to sign onto the claims completely but there’s nothing wrong with asking questions and expressing warranted skepticism at the county’s lame counter-claims.
You can rip Trump but not Jack Stollsteimer? No wonder why the Democrats like you.
We see Channel 10 did not call you chairman or boss but chair. As in something you sit on.
McGarrigle is stepping down Nov. 29 and an election is scheduled that day to replace him. We hear Dave White is the guy tapped. We don’t expect much to change.
Delco Ballots Allegedly Detoured From Counting Center — A emergency motion for a temporary restraining order to delay the certifying of Delaware County, Pa. results of the Nov. 8 election was filed, yesterday, Nov. 15, in Common Pleas Court.
Plaintiffs Leah Hoopes, Gregory Stenstrom and Nicole Missino would like the certification stopped until a hearing at which they would present evidence that the county detoured the election-night journey of the county’s physical ballots and v-drives for six hours into a closed building — which poll watchers were prohibited from entering — before taking them to the centralized counting center at the Wharf Building in Chester.
Read that again.
Physical ballots and v-drives were reportedly taken to a closed building without observers present and kept there for six hours before being taken to the counting center. This would shatter the chain of custody along with breaking the law that the ballots go directly to the counting center.
The plaintiffs say they can further show the county mailed official ballots to unverified voters and deleted at least 2,778 records of requests for mail-in ballots.
Also, the plaintiffs say they can show that the county deleted at least 194 voter registration records after Election Day of individuals whose mail-in ballots were counted in the vote totals, and permitted a partisan third-party to control and tabulate mail-in ballots.
Mrs. Hoopes and Stenstrom are poll watchers, while Mrs. Missino was the Republican candidate for the 165th District in the State House.
The establishment types that hold positions of power in Pennsylvania must start taking the concerns of election integrity seriously if they want citizenry that accepts the results.
Require voting machine makers to waive all rights to intellectual property secrets when selling a machine. Why should the IP concerns of private corporations take precedence over election transparency?
Restrict ballot drop boxes to monitored places inside public buildings like police stations and libraries. Do we seriously need then to be available 24/7 especially with the laughable claims that the cameras provide security?
Anyone not willing to make these mild reforms has an agenda other than an honest and trusted election.
Hating Kanye And Kyrie But Not Al And Louie — Dave Chappelle’s Saturday Night Live monologue regarding rapper Ye — formerly know as Kanye West — and Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving has gone viral.
Ye and Irving are taking heat for bizarre comments made over the last month that caused Jewish leaders to take great umbrage and react.
Ye has lost millions including a sponsorship with Adidas. Irving was forced to grovel in apology and give $500,000 to organizations connected to the Anti-defamation League (ADL) which is little more than an extortion agency.
You guys really can’t see the potential for a backlash?
Ye, a guy known for his lack of stability, tweets crazy stuff and must be destroyed.
Irving, a babbling athlete, babbles. The response to it is only making many who had been ignoring it, start going hmmmm.
Dave Chappell on Saturday Night Live, Nov. 12
Chappelle, on Nov. 12, brought sanity to the discussion leavened with humor .
Really Jewish leaders, lighten up. Pretend Kanye and Kyrie are Nazis marching in Skokie even though none of their comments come close to Nazi hate.
Hey, better yet, pretend they are Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. Has Louie or Al ever been “cancelled”? Has a corporation ever publicly rebuked them? These guys actually want to get Jews killed. In Sharpton’s case he has.
Chappell’s monologue was criticism from kindness. Every sane Jew should shake his hand.
Promise of greater freedom William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 11-15-22
Nenw cqn frwwna xo j fja bdoonab oaxv ujlt xo kanjm.
Linlq Yaxenak
Answer to yesterday’s William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit quote puzzle: The promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda . . . what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude.
Friedrich von Hayek
Promise of greater freedom William Lawrence Sr Cryptowit 11-15-22
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new chief executive officer, and the firings he immediately called for that included H-1B visa holders, as well as the tech industry’s mass, across-the-board layoffs, raise a three-decade-old question: should the H-1B visa be eliminated, and should U.S. tech workers be put first in line for the white-collar, well-paid jobs?
Musk, who completed his $44 billion Twitter takeover last month, declared that he would end lifetime bans from his platform and tweeted that diverse viewpoints would be welcome. He has a golden opportunity not only to end censorship and restore free speech as he’s promised, but to also hire U.S. tech workers when workforce needs again grow.
Going forward, Musk would have a chance to replace the Twitter employees that he’s fired with U.S. tech workers. The firings – about half the Twitter staff, or around 3,700 employees – are allegedly a cost-cutting measure. He summarily dismissed big earners like CEO Parag Agrawal, $30 million annually; Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, $18.9 million; Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, $17 million; and General Counsel Sean Edgett, whose salary is unknown, but likely in the same range as his peers. A class action lawsuit was filed against Twitter in San Francisco federal court claiming that the employees were not given the mandatory 60-day notice prior to the layoffs.
Many of the fired Twitter workers may be in the double-whammy vortex. As H-1B employees, unless they find another job within 60 days or successfully change their immigration status, they must leave the U.S. or risk deportation. H-1B holders who are legally required to leave must depart and not overstay their visas which the federal government clearly identifies as temporary. The U.S. Immigration and Immigration Services estimates that about 8 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, between 625 and 670, have H-1B visas.
Tech and social media are either laying off workers by the thousands or imposing hiring freezes. With Intel’s 20 percent slash, Snapchat’s 20 percent cut and hiring freezes at Amazon and Apple, H-1B holders are on edge. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs, 13 percent of its staff, after Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his so-called metaverse project was a $15 billion bomb. Meta/Facebook is in a tough spotvis-à-vis its H-1B layoffs. Per the Department of Labor classification, this means 15 percent or more of Meta’s full-time employees are H-1B nonimmigrant workers.
For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley and other employers have falsely claimed that without nonimmigrant H-1B visa employees, their businesses would suffer. Yet now, with widespread tech layoffs that include H-1B holders, admitting 85,000 international workers in 2023, the visa’s annual cap, would further hurt U.S. tech workers who are either displaced and forced to train their replacements or denied interviews. Because H-1B employees are cheaper to hire than U.S. tech graduates, the corporate elite prefer them over more skilled, more well-educated Americans.
The Wall Street Journal hosted a panel discussion that featured two advocates who favor expanding the H-1B program and one critic who urges major reforms. The advocates, David Bier, the Cato Institute’s immigration studies associate director, and Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s managing director of immigration and cross-border policy, argued that the H-1B visa cap should be increased and that their labor market presence makes America a more prosperous place.
The critic, Dr. Ron Hira, Howard University, political science associate professor and Economic Policy Institute research associate, countered that the rigged H-1B system is a transfer-of-wealth scam that makes the employers wealthy winners, and the workers, low-wage losers. Dr. Hira added that employers aren’t required to prove that a U.S. worker shortage exists before hiring an H-1B, that H-1B workers’ wages are set too low, and that the compliance system doesn’t hold employers accountable. “Guest-worker programs are supposed to fill domestic labor shortages. The H-1B program does not fill shortages,” Dr. Hira said.
The Journal debate represents the challenge that H-1B critics face. No matter how many H-1B visa holders lose their jobs, or how economically depressed the tech sector is, the demand for more visas will remain. Pro-immigration media supporters like the Journal, immigration advocacy groups, lawyers, corporate America and the powerful Chamber of Commerce will incessantly lobby Congress for more, more, more H-1B visas.
Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary and University of Texas Professor Emeritus, gave a no-frills summary of the H-1B that its advocates should heed: “One of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems…H-1B pays below market rate. If you’ve got H-1B workers, you don’t have to do training or pay good wages.” Musk has an opportunity to set an example for Meta and others to follow: hire U.S. tech workers.
Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
