The morning of September 1, 2001, I was in Lower Manhattan.  My colleague Jeffrey Lerner and I had just finished a short walk and were about to join a friend of his for breakfast when the doorman at the Gramercy Park Hotel told us an airplane had accidently flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers.  We were gorging on eggs and has browns when our server brought  the news that a second plane had hit another tower.  We rushed up to my room to watch Aaron Brown deliver the awful truth on CNN.  Jefffrey and his friend, a young cinematographer, headed for what would become known as “Ground Zero” to videotape what they could.  I stayed in my room, fantasizing a nuclear attack while frantically trying to reach my daughter, who lived in the City, and my wife, whose office overlooks the White House.

Thousands of police officers, firefighters, construction workers and medical personnel weren’t so self-absorbed or fearful: they picked up their tools and rushed downtown to help with rescue efforts, many of them losing their lives as a result.  A few months later, the actor (and trade unionist) Richard Masur and I visited Ground Zero and videotaped interviews with a dozen construction workers who were still working 24/7 in the recovery effort.  We used the material gathered to produce a video for the Building Trades Department, AFL-CIO, and I later created some composite characters and fiction work from what I’d learned.  My first piece was inspired by the fire fighters and police officers who go there first.  I told a part of their story through the words of a  of a restaurant worker from “Windows on the World’ who managed to escape before the twin towers collapsed.  I tried to confront the horror as well as my own failings of that day by melding her voice into a short poem:

                                                                     Body Parts

A hand lies trembling in the street.

             It has no mouth, it cannot speak;

             It cannot run, it has no feet.

Up they went,   hats and boots and legs and heads.

             Down they came, no shouts or screams, already dead.

Bodies was dropping everywhere, Daria said.

Me and someone else saw a shoe under a piece of car,

so we lifted it up  and there was a leg with nothing else attached..

There were strollers with babies in them, turned on their side.

I saw a rescue worker with his arm and shoulder blown off.

He was screaming and running and the policeman

was trying to stop him to help him, but he was panicked

because the blood was coming out of him.

I saw so many people jumping and falling out the building.

One couple took each other’s hands as they jumped..

Up they went, young and strong and full of heart.

             Down they came, broken picks and body parts.

A hand lies decomposing in the street.

            The living stare, but do not weep;

            The dead look down, but do not sleep.

-end-

Sunday, August 1.  The Washington Post ignores the serial ethical transgressions of DC Mayor-for-Hype Adrian Fenty, endorses him for re-election, and assures us that City Council Chair Vince Gray will be elected in November to replace him.  Goodbye insouciant adolescence, hello mature moxie.

Monday, August 2.  Elena Kagan pounds up through the marble floor to become the third woman to gain a seat on the United States Supreme Court, with Al Franken presiding over the Senate and announcing the vote count.  President Barack Obama kisses her on the forehead.

 Tuesday, August 3. Wyclef Jean’s campaign for President of Haiti opens to a driving beat, despite a mountain of media mangling ( no, he’s not a hip-hop artist, he’s a world music artist; yes, he left Haiti when he was 8, but he’s spent more time there than Michael Bloomberg spends in New York City; no, his charitable works aren’t suspect, his Yele Foundation has long-since been cleared of an earthquake-ily serendipitous right-wing smear job).

 Also on Tuesday. New York Congressman Anthony “The gentleman will sit down” Weiner tells the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union,  “I think the problem is that we’re not yelling enough,” and says of his Democratic colleagues, “We sometimes come into knife fights carrying library books.”

 Wednesday, August 4.  The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission infuriates Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the morally-challenged Anti-Defamation League by approving the demolition of an old building to make way for construction of a $100 million Muslim community center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. /On a down note, Weiner joins Gingrich and Palin. The NYC Building Trades Council is silent./

 Also on Wednesday. Kamal Abu ‘Eita and Kamal ‘Abbas receive the AFL-CIO George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award on behalf of the Egyptian independent workers movement.

 Thursday, August 5.  Medicare trustees issue a new report saying that because of cost controls in President Obama’s health care reform legislation, Medicare will stay solvent without any adjustments until 2029, 12 years longer than previously projected.  

 Friday, August 6.  For the first time in history, the United States files a complaint against a trading partner, accusing Guatemala of failing to ensure workers of the freedom of assembly, the right to form and join unions and collectively bargain, and safe working conditions. Steelworkers’ union president Leo Gerard kisses Barack Obama on the forehead.

 Saturday, August 7.  Nationals pitcher Levan Hernandez, who fled Cuba in 1995 at age 20, retires the first 10 batters he faces and goes seven innings, only to see the Dodgers win 3-2 in the tenth; Cuban president and big-time baseball fan Fidel Castro surfaces publicly for the first time in months; sales of Subway Cuban Pulled Pork Sandwiches skyrocket in the U.S.

 Sunday, August 8. Charles M. Blow, art director of National Geographic and former graphics editor of the New York Times decides he’s qualified to pen a NYT political op-ed proclaiming world music artist Wyclef Jean isn’t qualified to be president of Haiti.  Thus assured of election, Clef does not raise the question, “Why do brothers who reach the top of the ladder turn and pee on the head of brothers still trying to climb the ladder?” 

 Also on Sunday. We celebrate the 36^th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation as the second most pathetic president of the United States in history; George W. Bush does not issue a statement.

 Monday, August 8.  Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater lands a blow for workers everywhere by upbraiding an asinine passenger, delivering a purple intercom address to the rest of his charges, swiping a beer from a serving cart without paying for it, triggering an evacuation chute, and sliding into infamy. /Disclosure: I am a proud Honorary Member of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) for helping them with their successful strike against American Airlines some years ago./

 Tuesday, August 9.  Nancy Pelosi’s approval rating with her House colleagues goes in the toilet as she calls them away from their campaign trails and back into session to pass a $26 billion bill providing state aid to keep teachers, firefighters, nurses and police officers on the job.  Her approval rating with voters goes up when they discover she’s forcing corporations who are sending jobs overseas to pick up the tab.

When I read yesterday in an NBC Washington story that the District of Columbia had agreed to settle out with Omar Karim for $550,000, I thought, “Holy moly, not only is this dude not going to jail for opening a brand-new bag of buddy corruption, he’s getting paid for doing nothing.”

 Karim, you’ll remember (or maybe you won’t) is one of a gaggle of fortunate fraternity brothers Mayor Fenty acquired as he was matriculating (yes, matriculating, and in public) at Howard University.  Actually, they were extremely fortunate because after they supported Fenty in his run for mayor in 2006, he introduced them to the deep green waters that flow through the District’s leaky bidding process, where they’ve been drinking their fill ever since.

 Fenty ran as a fresh-faced reformer and took his landslide victory over Linda Cropp in the Democratic Primary as a mandate.  Since he took office in 2002, Fenty’s been doing what he pleases, vacationing with his family in Dubai at the expense of the United Arab Emirates, skipping DC saint Abe Pollin’s funeral to soak up the Thanksgiving sun in South Beach, fibbing about his involvement in a traffic accident, and jumping the Que at Lafayette Elementary to get his kids into one of the few public schools in the District that isn’t crumbling into the ground.

 /A note:  if Marion Barry or Tony Williams had pulled such a stunt when they were in office, the lions and lionesses of the Lafayette PTA would have given the kids Metro cards and dumped them at the Friendship Heights Metro.  But I digress./

Early in the Fenty Administration, Mr. Karim and Sinclair Skinner, another Fenty brother in the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity, set up shop in and around City Hall.  Mr. Skinner formed two new companies, Liberty Engineering and Design and Liberty Law Group.  Mr. Karim’s firm, Banneker Ventures, quickly scored a huge deal with the city to tear down a couple of awful housing projects and replace them with a mixed-use development called Northwest One.  He stuck to his Kappa Psi vows by sub-contracting some of the work to brother Skinner.  The Northwest contract was followed by a pair of agreements with the city to manage the rebuilding a school and a recreation center. Total at that point: $1.8 million. Then came a $2.3 million agreement to oversee construction of recreation centers and ball fields across the city.

When it got out that that more than $80 million worth of city contracts had been awarded to friends and fraternity brothers of Mayor Fenty, the city council launched an investigation (not exactly timely, but what the hey).  Karim’s response to the Washington City Paper’s Loose Lips columnist, Mike Dubois was, “God wants us to live well.”  When a lawyer for Omar and Sinclair was asked about the propriety of it all, he told Washingtonian Magazine, “If your friends are qualified and they share your view of the city, why should they not get contracts?  That’s not unheard of in DC.”

Turns out that under oath before the City Council in April, Mr. Skinner admitted that he was not certified to perform $900,000 worth of work that Mr. Karim’s firm had subcontracted to him.  After the Council terminated the original contract awarded to Mr. Karim because it violated a law requiring Council approval of deals over $1 million, Mr. Karim sued.  Yesterday, he won a settlement of $550,000 for doing nothing, except, of course successfully to trading on his relationship with Mayor-for-hype Fenty.

How did all this happen, and will it make a difference come election time this Fall?  It happened because  the District of Columbia government is a crazy quilt of responsibilities and authorities. And I doubt it will make a difference in the election, because DC voters have such bad powers of deduction. (When Mayor Barry said, “Mitch set me up,” I wanted to believe him. But who was Mitch?)

Try putting this on a post-it on your refrigerator door.  “Who’s Adrian?  Who had the city install a $75,000 water warmer in the public pool where he trained for the triatholon he just won?  Whose fraternity brother got caught circulating a flyer with a cartoon depicting white council member (and Fenty opponent) Jim Graham as a plantation boss overseeing a black man being lynched?  Who tried to keep all the freebie Washington Nationals baseball tickets for himself? (Yikes, who wanted them?)  Who used city police to create traffic jams by blocking off streets for his bike rides?  Who fired the DC Housing Authority Board Chair who tried to blow the whistle on Mr. Karim and Mr. Skinner?  Indeed, who hired Michelle Rhee?”

A hint: it wasn’t Mitch who set us up.  It was Adrian.

To begin it all, she kidnaped me during an AFSCME convention in Anaheim, then forced me to drive to Tijuana and submit to nuptials presided over by someone named “Mr. Martin.”

After the wedding ceremony, she taught me how to drink Margaritas at the nearby Caesar Hotel, home of the Caesar Salad.

When my thoroughly unlikeable mother visited us for the first time, my nameless mate was so nice to mumsy there has never been a second visit.

She gently helped me quit smoking by saying, “If you don’t quit sucking on those filthy, stinking weeds, I am leaving you.”

When I tried to apologize for forgetting our first anniversary, she reminded me that “all women marry beneath themselves.”

She taught me that sexist remarks, like racist remarks, are determined to be so not by the remarker, but by the remarkee.

After we moved to Washington, she took over our checkbook, like totally.

When my second set of grandchildren (her first set) came along, she taught me that real men really do change diapers.

She insist that we keep lists, that we have a place for everything and everything in place, and that I pick up my own underwear.

When I complain about my work, my health, or my age, she always responds, “It’s really all about you, isn’t it?”

When I don’t complain, she rewards me by telling me I’m handsome, or that my hair looks nice, or that I’m looking very skinny.

She refuses to laugh at my thrice-told stories and jokes, but chuckles appreciatively when reading my pathetic attempts at creative writing.

All told, this nameless person lights my way, holds my hand, picks me up when I stumble, hardly ever calls me by my mother’s name, and serves up a feast of devotion every day.  For my part, I sneakily offer up little side dishes of love, affection and hero worship, never enough, but enough to get me by.

 My dearest, the past thirty years have been like catching fireflies in a jar, shaking them up, then letting them scoot back  out to light up the night.  Thank you for always reminding me to unscrew the lid.

 I’ll leave Rand Paul’s record as a racist wing-nut to The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who writes, “From all evidence, Paul lives in a Libertarian La-La Land, where purist philosophy leads people to believe in purist nonsense.”  For my part, I’ll probe Mr. Paul’s errant worship of so-called private enterprise.      

 Maddow’s opening question to Dr. Paul was whether he believed private businesses should be able to discriminate against black people, gays and the disabled.  The myopic opthamologist responded: “I oppose efforts to impose Washington’s will on states and private institutions.  As a student of the history of segregation and slavery, however, I would have made an exception for the Civil Rights Act.” After Maddow pushed him again and again for a response, Rand replied he supported nine of the ten basic provisions of the Act, would have “marched with Dr, King,” and then launched into an out-of-context spate of stories about the City of Boston passing anti-discrimination laws in 1840 (you could have fooled me and 90 percent of the residents of Southie) and William Lloyd Garrison going to jail for his abolitionist preaching. 

 Even with his evasions, it was clear that Paul, and presumably a good many of his fellow teabaggers would turn back the clock and grant “privately-owned” businesses the right to  do operate without regulation of any kind from government.

 Rand’s reasoning ignores the reality that all “privately-owned” businesses in our country are in fact private-public partnerships.  Corporations like Wal-Mart, Burger King, General Electric and Denny’s are certainly those kinds of joint endeavors — the “owners” are the public.  That’s why we call them publicly-held corporations, charter them to operate in the public interest and subject them to regulations (not enough) protecting the owners.

 However, the practice of public-private partnership goes much deeper, all the way down to the mom-and-pop level of entrepreneurship.  There isn’t a business in America, large or small, that could survive, much less make a profit, without public investment and public infrastructure support.  Who supplies the clean water, electricity and the sanitation services that allow Joe’s Grill to open its doors in the morning?  Who makes sure thieves don’t sashay in at closing time and steal the day’s receipts?  Who rumbles up to put out the fire when the grill itself catches fire?

 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know: private businesses pay taxes (at least some of them or) or contract for the services they consume.  But there’s not a business in our country that could afford to set up its own fire or police department, or its own sanitation department or electric or water co-op (and that includes doctors, lawyers and lobbying firms).  And how about the postal service we supply business at a fraction of what it costs? The local and federal regulatory agencies that make sure “privately owned” restaurants can buy the meat and produce they need without worrying about consumer lawsuits breaking their bankbooks?  The streetlights, traffic signals, paved roads and subway systems that bring customers to their doors?

 The American public co-owns “private business” lock, stock and barrel, not only by virtue of our patronage, but through our tax dollars and our collective economic organizing.  We have every right to demand and enforce our standards of ethical and moral behavior in return.  “Blurring the division” between public and private ownership?  It’s the way we do business.

I thought MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell was going to collapse from apoplexy as she reported her old  friend Sen. Spector had been taken off life support, victim of a vicious media mugging by Congressman Joe Sestak and left for dead by his friends in the White House.  Truth is, Spector took himself out over a year ago when he became America’s all-time maximum political chameleon by switching parties for the second time in his lengthy career.

 The Obama Administration and the unions stuck by Spector despite long-time affections for Sestak because they had to in order to preserve their deal-making integrity with other members of Congress.  The ultimate old boy had delivered on health care reform and the Recovery Act and was about to reverse field and once again support Employee Free Choice, which is still at the top of labor’s must-list. 

 The voters of Pennsylvania harbored no similar respect for or obligation to Spector.  All they saw was a man who’d changed his coat from blue to red in order to get elected in the first place, then changed it back in a grasping late-life exhibition of situational ethics. Dem voters wanted a donkey they could ride, not one they could count on just to carry occasionally odiferous baggage. This was a definite case of fool me once, fool me twice.

 Blanche Lincoln isn’t down for the count yet — she goes into a primary runoff with Arkansas Lieutenant Gov. Bill Halter with a 45-44 lead.  But she can’t buck the proven political axiom that incumbents max out the first time around.  She’ll lose not because she changed the color of her coat, but because she rotated the baffling ante bellum hats she wears one too many times.  She was elected as a moderate democrat with liberal leanings.  She took early positions in favor of a brand of  health care that included a public option and she co-sponsored Employee Free Choice.  But as barriers to her e-election began to look like giant Jersey Walls, she abandoned her commitments to both.

 The labor unions have less tolerance for lackluster lackeys than voters do, and they are savaging Lincoln on the doors and on television.  And conservative Dems aren’t likely to forgive her for one last ideological pirouette in favor of tougher Wall Street reform.  She loses 60-40.

 New lessons for the mid-term elections?  Not many.  But for candidates, old ones re-learned may include “dance with the one than brung you” and “hell hath no fury.”

 Here’s a couple of nut graphs on what Blackmon said that night:

 At the end of the Civil War, most of the freed slaves in America stayed that way for less than a heartbeat.  The ever-resourceful white planters and farmers in the black belt quickly flim-flammed or intimidated them into to contracts as sharecroppers and tenants and kept them in involuntary servitude even as they were granted the right to vote and some of their leaders were being appointed or elected to public office.  White county officials and judges throughout the states of the Confederacy supported the new system by hunting down those who tried to escape, and arresting those who weren’t attached to plantations, prosecuting them on trumped up charges, then selling them back into a life of forced labor and brutal punishment, ostensibly to pay off court costs and fines associated with their “criminal” acts.  Their purchasers found ways to prevent them from ever paying off their “debts” and once in the system, you never escaped.

 Over the next forty years, neo-slavery grew and spread and by the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of African American men, and some women, were imprisoned in timber and turpentine camps, coal mines and steel mills, as well as in the cotton fields of the Deep South.  Forced labor, involuntary servitude, and prison labor were the new names for a system that mushroomed as industrial development added to the labor needs of the region.  This “slavery by another name” continued until the 1940s when our federal government found new roles for African American men as cooks, laborers, lackeys (and, eventually, heroes) for our armed forces fighting World War II.

 I’d heard enough from the author to compel me to read the book, and what I discovered was a unimaginable netherworld of human cruelty.  Before the Civil War, slaves were a valuable commodity, and even the most vicious plantation owners normally checked up short of crippling or destroying what was often their biggest wealth.  However, in the neo-slavery system, men and women were bought and sold for $10 or $20, so their owners never hesitated to work them until they expired or beat them to death.

Particularly horrifying were huge, filthy, vermin-infested on-site prisons in the Alabama coalfields, where manacled slaves who seldom saw the sun were fed bread and pork fat rations, whipped morning and night, and buried in mass graves when they died of exhaustion, disease, mine accidents or a pickaxe in the skull ordered by a security guard and delivered by a follow prisoner.  If there wives tried to visit or mourn them, sexual submission was their only gate pass, and the guards were sadistic rapers.

 Blackmon uses narratives of individual slaves and their families to tell his awful story, and he weaves them into a dramatic history of the period — the collapse of reconstruction, the total disenfranchisement of black voters, the failure of the judicial system, the advent of Jim Crow laws, the racism of Woodrow Wilson, the race riots of the 1920s, and the profiteering off slave labor by corporations like U.S. Steel.  But the matrix of this book are his well-documented descriptions of sand -coated leather straps cutting into human flesh, axe blades chopping off human limbs, and bodies of young African American men jerking in nooses tied to tree limbs or writhing in agony in funeral pyres.

 What my wife took away from the book was a strengthening of her belief that where there are no rules, no laws, no enforcement, human beings will always exploit other human beings.

 My final thought is that if every African American in our country were to read this book, we wouldn’t be facing reparations, we’d be looking at a revolution. 

 To purchase this book from America’s only unionized online bookseller, click here

 For more information, visit www.slaverybyanothername.com

Of course, Mr. Big Business Joe Scarborough steered the discussion away from that and turned it towards protecting the border by building a big wall, which Robinson had debunked in his column.  Eventually, the truth “sneaked across the border,” so to speak, when everybody except Joe agreed border security is impossible when drug users need illegals to bring them drugs, businesses and farmers need their cheap labor, the illegals need the crummy jobs they provide, and politicans need Latino votes just as badly as they need corporate campaign contributions.

Speaking of reforms, I was glad to read on your website that Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional oversight panel President Obama appointed to investigate the bank bailouts will be on the show tomorrow..  She’s one of the saner and stronger voices in the debate over new financial regulations, or, as we now more appropriately call them, “Wall Street reform.”  From what I’m reading in our remaining newspapers and seeing on television shows, Senator Chris Dodd’s legislation, which is about to pass the Senate, doesn’t get the job done, and I’m confident Elizabeth Warren will take it apart, even though it means disagreeing with President Obama.

I really like Chairperson Warren because she isn’t afraid to take on her boss.  For the same reason in reverse, I have to admit that I was never really fond of your father, not because he isn’t a nice man, or because he was a chicken-hawk, but because he never spoke up against the atrocities being committed by his President-boss, Jimmy Carter.  I mean, where was your dad when Carter started deregulating the banking industry in the first place?  And where was he when Carter deregulated the airline industry and set the stage for the merger of United and Continental that is about to create an airline truly “too big to fail”?

P.S.  I’m thinking about changing the name of this little blog series itself, because I’m falling in love with Elizabeth Warren.  Like most American voters and television viewers, I’m finding myself more fickle by the day.

Teaching and research assistants give New York University an ultimatum:

Voluntarily recognize our union or face a new federal election

Workers confident National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will reverse controversial   anti-union decision

NEW YORK – Encouraged by a new progressive majority on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), teaching assistants, research assistants and graduate assistants at New York University (NYU) are demanding that NYU President John Sexton voluntarily recognize their union for purposes of collective bargaining or face another contentious round in a labor relations battle that has gone on for nearly a decade.

In 2000 the NYU workers won an NLRB union election and became the first private sector teaching and research assistants to unionize. They negotiated a first contract that included a 40 percent wage increase, fully paid health insurance, workload protections, sick leave, bereavement leave and a grievance procedure. Three years later the university took advantage of a controversial ruling by the Bush-appointed NLRB and refused to negotiate a new contract.

The NLRB ruling — popularly called the “Brown Decision” — decreed that teaching and research assistants at private colleges and universities aren’t employees and aren’t entitled under federal law to join unions. The ruling also nullified union authorization elections at Brown, Columbia, Tufts and the University of Pennsylvania.

Yesterday a delegation of NYU student workers, accompanied by NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), visited the office of Sexton to present their demands. Leaders of the Graduate Students Organizing Committee/UAW (GSOC/UAW) said that if the university doesn’t voluntarily recognize their union within a week they will take their case to the NLRB and ask for a new union election.

John Freudenthal, an NYU research assistant in the Chemistry Department and a member of GSOC/UAW, said that “far more” than 50 percent of some 1,800 NYU teaching and research assistants have signed authorization cards asking to be represented by GSOC/UAW Local 2110. He said the highly respected American Arbitration Association verified the signed cards last week.  

“The teaching assistants and research assistants do work that it critical to the success of NYU,” said Bob Madore, director of UAW Region 9A, which includes New York and New England. “All they are asking for is what other workers at NYU have — the right to collective bargaining. We are proud to stand in solidarity with NYU teaching assistants and research assistants.”

UAW Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn said, “Over the last 10 years, a majority of NYU graduate employees have consistently chosen GSOC/UAW for union representation. The university has just as consistently fought their right to join a union.  It’s time for NYU to reject its shameful past and join with us in recognizing workers’ rights are human rights.”

I suppose this has to do with the narrative of the show, but it is certainly not appreciated by the people I heard from.  They think you should stand up more to Joe and interrupt him like when he interrupts you.  I explained that if you did that, MSNBC might send you home the way they sent home the producer of the Donny Deutsch special “America is Angry” (aren’t we all) after he allowed Deutsch to lump in Keith Olberman with Rush and Glenn as people who help create that anger.

And by the way, thank you for having Mr. Deutsch on your show just as your bosses were cancelling his show — I so appreciated his sincerity in what is an otherwise flippant business, and I was certainly pleased to learn that not all advertising executives are stereotypical cheap shot sleazes like the characters on “Mad Men.” (You can tell I’m an ad man, right?)

But back to the emails.  Most of the people who wrote had questions about you and the show, but some others had more profound thoughts.  I submit some of them here for your consideration (you can send me your answers, if you wish, and I’ll forward them to people).

Q.        (From a woman in Peoria) Is it true that Pat Buchanan is allowed to violate the show’s dress code and wear a tie because if he didn’t his head would fall off?

Q.        (From a male admirer in San Antonio) Why do you keep glancing into the camera to your right when other people are talking?  Are you looking at me?

Q.        (A schoolgirl in Chicago) Me and several of my classmates think the boss of Massey Energy should be locked up and charged with murder for killing those coal miner daddies.  What do you think?

Q.        (Anonymous in New Orleans) What do you think would happen if all the newspapers in America went totally online and tens of millions of trees were saved?  (Hint: it has to do with global warming.)

Cheers, and have a good week!