CARL GIBSON, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: Here is an excellent assessment of how the corruption that is eating away our democracy like a cancer operates.
The following is an excerpt from Shut the Chamber’s new 28-page report, ‘Bagful of Cash: How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Orchestrated a Corporate Takeover of Government.’ My goal when writing the report was to publish a one-stop-shop for everything relating to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s domination of all institutions of merit, from Congress to the courts, to the election cycles. This report also shows how the U.S. Chamber has invested millions of corporate dollars into opposing all legislation relating to healthcare, financial reform, closing corporate tax loopholes, and climate change. The report also highlights the U.S. Chamber’s support of austerity, fracking, the Keystone XL pipeline, and mostly Republican pro-corporate candidates running for Congress. You can read the full report at bit.ly/bagfulofcash.
Part III: The Corporate Takeover
People seem to listen to you more when you’ve got a bagful of cash.
– U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, The New York Times
According to Donohue, the Chamber raises $5 million per week to keep its operations running. Most of this money, however, comes from billion-dollar corporations, not small businesses. The U.S. Chamber has spent $983 million on lobbying since 1998, and has already spent […]
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Saturday, July 20th, 2013
SAM PIZZIGATI, - Institute for Policy Studies
Stephan: Our passive servitude to the Non-geographical Corporate States and their minions is literally costing us years off our lives. And, not surprisingly, life is even shorter in Red value states as compared to Blue value states. Read this carefully and note, particularly, the observations about inequality and stress.
Let’s talk life expectancy.
The stats first. They tell a clear story: Americans now live shorter lives than men and women in most of the rest of the developed world. And that gap is growing.
Back in 1990, shouts a new study published last week in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, the United States ranked just 20th on life expectancy among the world’s 34 industrial nations. The United States now ranks 27th – despite spending much more on health care than any other nation.
Americans, notes an editorial the journal ran to accompany the study, are losing ground globally ‘by every
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Saturday, July 20th, 2013
ELLIOTT NEGIN, Director of News and Commentary at the Union of Concerned Scientists - The Huffington Post
Stephan: Here is the latest on the Koch brother trend to corrupt government, and cloud its judgment in policy making. These people are evil, the equivalent to war criminals in my view.
With Congress about to head out of town for its summer recess, a Washington-based think tank is ramping up a campaign to foil any attempts to institute a tax on carbon emissions, The Hill, a Washington political trade publication, reported this week.
‘We’re hoping to put the final nail in the coffin of the carbon tax,’ said Benjamin Cole, the communications director for the Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance (AEA). ‘The proposal should be dead on arrival by the time lawmakers come back from August recess.’
IER’s campaign includes a survey of American attitudes about such a tax and a $120,000 to $150,000 radio ad buy targeting a handful of House members who, according to Cole, ‘are soft on the carbon tax issue.’
The Hill story, however, merely described IER as a ‘conservative’ group. That doesn’t explain why a think tank named the Institute for Energy Research is so dead set against a carbon tax, given the initiative would certainly help some energy technologies, especially wind, solar and other renewables.
So why is IER so down on cutting carbon?
Because it’s backed by the fossil fuel industry, that’s why.
The Koch Connection
Over the last decade or so, IER […]
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Saturday, July 20th, 2013
, - Agence France-Presse/The Raw Story
Stephan: Here is some good news about the line of research which is going to profoundly change medicine, taking it into a new era. A shame the Theocratic Right blocked American science in this area of research. There will be a big price to pay for that self-imposed castration of science to fit a religious agenda.
Japan’s government on Friday gave its seal of approval to the world’s first clinical trials using stem cells harvested from a patient’s own body.
Health Minister Norihisa Tamura signed off on a proposal by two research institutes that will allow them to begin tests aimed at treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a common medical condition that causes blindness in older people, using ‘induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells
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Saturday, July 20th, 2013
Stephan: Here is the latest, and it is good news about GMOs -- for some people at least. It can be done. Monsanto and the other corporations can be stopped. Europe has done it. We could do it here if we could just marshal enough political will. But Americans are so passive the probability is not good that it will ever happen.
The world’s largest seed corporation says it has dropped its bid to get more genetically modified crops onto the European market due to the wide-spread popular opposition. The biotech giant says it will expand its share of the natural seed market instead.
‘We will no longer be pursuing approvals for cultivation of new biotech crops in Europe. Instead, we will focus on enabling imports of biotech crops into the EU and the growth of our current business there,
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