Dan Gordon REMOVED from GOP Caucus by a majority vote
From Kathy Gregg @ Projo:
“PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The tiny House Republican caucus has voted to “expel” one of its members: freshman Rep. Daniel P. Gordon Jr. of Portsmouth.
House Minority Leader Brian Newberry confirmed Wednesday that 6 of the 10 House Republicans voted Tuesday afternoon to expel Gordon, at a caucus held at the State House. The meeting was held an hour before the full House and Senate gathered, for the first time in months, for a briefing on the state’s looming pension-crisis.
The reasons for this rare act are not yet entirely clear and Gordon, who describes himself as a self-employed contractor, was not immediately available for comment.”
Not available for comment? Grow a pair Danny Boy!
“But in response to an inquiry, Newberry made public the letter he sent Gordon on Wednesday, and an earlier letter in which he took Gordon to task for making derogatory comments about his Republican colleagues in various online forums.
In a September 2 warning letter, Newberry said: “Many, many of the comments I have seen have crossed the line into personal invective and attack … It is simply not permissible for you to launch personal attacks against your colleagues. Disagreement is fine and no one is required to like any other member of the House on a personal level.”
But “none of that excuses your conduct or lack of decorum. Your actions are unbecoming of someone holding your office. If they do not cease immediately, I will have no choice but to take the necessary steps to impose appropriate sanctions up to and including possible expulsion as a member of the House Republican Caucus.”
His letter to Gordon on Wednesday began: “I write on behalf of the House Republican Caucus in follow-up to recent conversations and to my letter of September 2nd to inform you that the Caucus met last night and voted to expel you as a member. ”
I said from about a month after he was elected that Dan Gordon was no good. He is a racist, a homophobe, and a low-life. I couldnt be happier that this happened to him. Now he can know once and for all that he IS NOT welcome. You keep heading up to the State House to play Representative Big Dan, no one needs or wants you there though…
Looks like an easy win for this seat next year…
They Are Not Starving, They Are BEING Starved!
Like a banal refrain in American discourse on Africa they ring out: death, disease, war torn, drought, famine, starvation, etc. The list could go on but it would not matter. Like the white noise of a humming fan on a hot summer day, we hear the Western refrain on Africa, yet, somehow we do not. That Africans starve, that they experience famine is common “knowledge”. But what if something is true at the very moment that it is untrue?
This is exactly the case with current mainstream reporting on the so-called drought induced famine in the Horn of Africa, which is threatening the starvation of millions of Africans. We are led to believe that the current drought (which many specialist attribute to climate change) and enduring “tribal” [“ethnic” is the appropriate term] conflicts are the root causes of food shortages in the horn of Africa. Nothing could farther from the truth!
There is a single country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has enough arable land to feed the entire rest of the Continent with food left to spare. Africa is the most resource rich land mass on the planet. Western nations (and increasingly China) have thrived off of the stolen natural and human resources of Africa for Centuries. From the extraction of coltan (a metallic mineral which allows cell phone batteries to retain a charge), to the displacement of Africa’s best prepared minds (brain drain) through Western neo/colonialism; from the guinea pig testing ground for pharmaceutical companies, to the dumping ground for weapons manufactures; from the illegal fishing off the Somali coast, to the unethical influence peddling of Uncle Tom African leaders, Africa is exploited, and that, unabated and without interruption.
Foreign nations, US colleges (Harvard, Vanderbilt, and many others), and private corporations are partnering with so-called African leaders in parasitic relationships to lease or buy vast areas (more than twice the size of Montana and counting) of the most fertile farmland throughout the African Continent. This land is being used to grow food and ship it back to their respective countries. Nikhil Aziz, executive director of Grassroots International, a human rights and international development organization that supports community-led sustainable development projects, sums it up this way:
African land is being sought in 90-year leases either to grow food crops for export to those countries with scarce arable land or to grow fuel crops like jatropha and palm oil for ethanol, even as almost 300 million Africans are hungry. Or, the land is sometimes being snapped up simply for speculative purposes.
We must come to understand that, technically, there is no actual food shortage in Africa. The Continent is producing sufficient quantities of food, even in the midst of drought stricken regions. But the food is not used to feed Africans. This is why we need to complete the revolutionary struggles that began so many years ago by the likes of Cabral, Biko, and Lumumba. Africa is not yet free.
What we find is that many of the nations which experience food shortages actually produce large amounts of food on land which they’ve either leased or sold to foreign nations or US and Indian corporations. The shocking irony is that many of these African countries have come to rely on food aid imports from Western NGOs at the precise moment that they’re exporting food grown on their own soil for other wealthier nations — indeed, some of the very same nations which run those NGO’s. It’s quite appalling!
Imagine that you discovered that a family whom you firmly believed was starving, actually owned many acres of prime farmland, but had leased it out to an out-of-state food corporation. You then learned that the food corp. was growing food on this SAME land and shipping it back to their home state to sell to others. What advise could be offered to this family? Should they expect to survive they’d do well to terminate the suicidal lease they’ve signed with the food corp, take their land back, and grow food to feed THEMSELVES.
This is the context of the so-called food shortages experienced in Africa. The “drought” argument is a red herring, a mass mediated perspective tendentious in its ignoring of the political economy of famine in Africa. Actual shortages of rainfall are clearly realities, but rainfall has less to do with the relationship of crop production to feeding hungry people as does intelligent economic and political decisions by the people’s alleged political leaders which ensure self-preservation.