Thursday, September 5th, 2013
BILL MOYERS & COMPANY, - Truthout
Stephan: Bill Moyers speaks the truth. The only people capable to changing this trend -- ourselves. But can we develop the political will to do so?
Bill Moyers: We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it’s as if we are leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon and all that’s needed is a swift kick in the pants. Look out below.
The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government. They have bought the political system, lock, stock and pork barrel, making change from within impossible. That’s the real joke.
Sometimes I long for the wit of a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. They treat this town as burlesque, and with satire and parody show it the disrespect it deserves. We laugh, and punch each other on the arm, and tweet that the rascals got their just dessert. Still, the last laugh always seems to go to the boldface names that populate this town. To them belong the spoils of a looted city. They get the tax breaks, the loopholes, the contracts, the payoffs.
They fix the system so multimillionaire hedge fund managers and private equity tycoons pay less of a tax rate on their income than school teachers, police and fire fighters, secretaries and janitors. They give subsidies to rich corporate farms and cut food stamps […]
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Thursday, September 5th, 2013
DAVID FIRESTONE, - The New York Times
Stephan: We have endless money for war, and spend more each year for military-intelligence activities than the rest of the world combined. But, because facts do not matter to the Theocratic Right, we are cutting science. This trend, which is gaining momentum, has painful long range consequences.
Two years after House Republicans threatened not to raise the government’s debt ceiling, the full brunt of that once-unthinkable offense is now hitting the National Institutes of Health. As Annie Lowrey reported in The Times this morning, 2013 has been the ‘darkest ever
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Thursday, September 5th, 2013
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: There is a toxic strain of willful ignorance running through American society. Click through to see the actual video. It is this divorcement from facts that is such a threat to our national wellness.
In the clip below from ‘Creation Today,
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Thursday, September 5th, 2013
Stephan: Water is destiny. This report about China should be taken as a cautionary tale of what happens when that is not properly recognized.
With its successful bid to purchase the U.S. pork giant Smithfield, which is pending U.S. governmental approval, China has revealed its major vulnerability-that of feeding its own people. Its race to get to the top of global manufacturing has extracted the heavy cost of fouling its water, land and air so that it must look outside its boundaries to keep its increasingly unsustainable growth on track.
In a stunning piece, Bloomberg details China’s predicament as a coal/water dilemma. In order to continue its manufacturing miracle unabated, China must rely on the use of coal, its number one energy source. Coal requires a massive use of water both in mining and in burning. Coal industries and power stations use as much as 17 percent of China’s water.
About half of China’s rivers have dried up since 1990 and those that remain are mostly contaminated. Without enough water, coal can’t be mined, new power stations can’t run and the economy can’t grow. At least 80 percent of the nation’s coal comes from regions where the United Nations says water supplies are either ‘stressed
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Thursday, September 5th, 2013
DAVID FERGUSON, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is the level of corruption that infects our entire government from the Federal to the local level. And it is all legal. Governor Nathan Deal is a Republican, of course.
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R)’s family and business partner have been receiving payments from a secret Political Action Committee called Real PAC. Half a million dollars of the money donated to the PAC has come from corporate health care interests which - like the governor and Georgia state Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens - oppose the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as ‘Obamacare.
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