Sunday, November 23rd, 2014
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, - Reader Supported News/Moyers& Company
Stephan: This is an excellent essay on the corruption of American government, but I chose it because it has this: "From 2007 to 2012, the two hundred most politically active corporations in the United States spent almost $6 billion for lobbying and campaign contributions. And they received more than $4 trillion in US government contracts and other forms of assistance. That’s $760 for every dollar spent on influence, a stunning return on investment." This is what Citizens United is really all about. The flood of corrupting money the Supreme Court has allowed is flowing in for one very simple reason: It is a good investment. It is a measure of the corruption of the court (at least the conservative wing of it) that they are "blind" to what a child could see.
Bill Moyers (left) and Michael Winship
Credit: www.cantonrep.com
We’ve been watching Congress since the mid-term elections and reading Zephyr Teachout’s terrific history book, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. That snuff box was a gift from King Louis XVI of France. His Majesty was a good friend of the American Revolution but when he gave Benjamin Franklin the gold box, featuring the monarch’s portrait surrounded with diamonds, some of our Founding Fathers objected. They worried that the gift would corrupt his judgment and unduly bias Franklin in France’s favor.
The framers debated the meaning of corruption at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and Americans have been arguing about it ever since. Today, gifts to politicians that were once called graft or bribes are called contributions. The Supreme Court has granted corporations the rights our founders reserved for people, and told those corporations they can give just about anything they want to elect politicians favorable to their interests. Diamond and gold snuff boxes are as outmoded as the king’s powdered wig. […]
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2014
Stephen Leahy, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is the sad and shabby truth about the climate denier disinformation campaign. This is what history will see as one of the greatest scams ever perpetrated: Getting Americans to vote for their own destruction.
Robert Kenner’s documentary Merchants of Doubt looks at professionals working for the fossil fuel industry to sow doubt in the US climate change debate.
Credit: Sony Pictures Classics
Who remembers that climate change was a top priority early in George W Bush’s first term as US president? Merchants of Doubt, a new documentary film released in US cinemas this week, reminds us that in June 2001 Bush and the Republican party were 100% committed to curbing carbon emissions causing global warming.
Six months later everything changed. The film shows Republican party leader John Boehner calling the idea of global warming “laughable”, said Merchants of Doubt director Robert Kenner.
With the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center occupying attention, Americans For Prosperity, a powerful, fossil-fuel lobby group founded by the billionaire Koch Brothers, launched a decade-long, multi-pronged campaign to sow doubt about the reality of climate change.
By equating […]
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2014
Aaron Blake, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Day after day I track trends and I have become increasingly concerned about the disconnect between what climate change is going to do, and the strange uninterest the subject seems to hold for most Americans. Part of this I ascribe to the massive disinformation campaign being carried out by the carbon industries, and their overwhelming corruption of our democracy. But I also recognized that there was something deeper, and this report describes what I think it is. And once again we can see the toxic effects of fundamentalist religion. Evangelic Christians, Black and particularly White, as the graph shows, are so brainwashed with the nonsensical form of Christianity that has taken over that religion that they literally have lost the ability to think clearly and assess information factually.
If you want to understand how little urgency there is among the American public about climate change, consider this:
A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute asked people about the severity of recent natural disasters. About six in 10 (62 percent) said climate change is at least partly to blame. About half — 49 percent — cited the biblical end times (as in, the apocalypse) for the recent natural disasters. That latter number is up five points from 2011.
(People were allowed to volunteer more than one cause.)Michelle Boorstein has the big run-down of all the numbers from the survey, and we would urge folks to check out her story. The end-times view is held by especially large numbers of white evangelical Christians (77 percent) and black Protestants (74 percent).
The fact that half of Americans cite the end times as a cause of recent severe weather events suggests a kind of fatalism that would certainly lead to less urgency when it comes to issues like climate change. Even many of those who believe in climate change — and about one-quarter of Americans don’t, per the survey — seem to think natural disasters […]
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2014
Stephan: American voters, I believe, voted based on fear, peer group pressure, racism, and fantasy. Here is a comparison of the voters' agenda, and the agenda of the Republican leadership for whom they just voted. It will be interesting to see whether voters even recognize that the Republicans have a completely different agenda than the one voters thought they were supporting. This disconnect is entirely due to the corruption of the Congress, and we are not going to survive as a country in any form any of us would recognize if we do not get special interest money out of politics.
Credit: www.politicspa.com
The new NBC/WSJ poll conducted November 14-17 provides a post election snap shot of American voter expectations, including their priorities for actions Congress should take. Can you guess how they match up with GOP Lawmaker’s priorities? It’s a real shocker folks.
The People’s agenda for Congress:
1. Access to lower cost student loans–80% support.
2. Increase spending on infrastructure–75%
3. Raising the minimum wage–65%
4. Emergency funding for fighting Ebola in Africa–60%
5. Addressing climate change/reducing carbon emissions–59%
6. Building Keystone Pipeline–54%
Agenda items registering below 50% support were: lowering taxes by closing loopholes; approving U.S. troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria; reducing Medicare and Social Security benefits for wealthy retirees; new trade agreements with Asian nations; lowering corporate tax rates; cutting funding for ACA; path to citizenship; and raising Social Security retirement age.
I thought it would be insightful to compare America’s priorities with those of our newly elected Congress. According to PolitiFact.com
House Speaker John Boehner and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have […]
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
Stephan: A reader sent me this and, I confess, I was surprised at how many spills occur with pipelines. The Keystone tar sands pipeline is an even dumber idea than I had realized. I also draw your attention to the fact that the people leading the movement to stop this pipeline are the pre-Columbian peoples (First Nation people in Canada, Native Americans in the U.S.) They are up in arms because the pipeline crosses their lands. Given the number of incidents that occur it is not hard to understand their passion in this issue.
Alberta, Canada is basically a petro state. Oil and gas production rule everything and it’s happening everywhere in the north of the province. Pipelines criss cross most of Alberta. As a result, leaks of wells, facilities and pipelines are a constant thing all over the province.
But we Canadians almost never hear about them. Our main media, CBC, does not provide any coverage of the many, many spills and gas releases that happen every month, nor the efforts to clean up the messes. They’re simply not considered news…at least not on the scale of disasters like some attention grabber showing up at the War Memorial on Remembrance day in uniform and bedecked with medals..none of which (uniform included) belonged to him. The guy is under arrest for impersonating an officer.
But back to the non news. It seems someone is taking notice. West Coast Native News (WCNN) has been quietly keeping tabs on all the spills and leaks. What they have found is shocking!!
More past the toxic orange spill…careful you don’t get any on your shoes!!
The WCNN is reporting on all the spills and natural gas […]
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