Taking into account direct contributions to individuals and groups, spending on television ads and lobbying, the energy industry spent more than $721 million during the 2014 election cycle, according to an analysis released Monday by the Center for American Progress.
That analysis — conducted with data from the Center for Responsive Politics and Kantar Media Intelligence — found that the industry as a whole gave $84 million to candidates, political parties and Political Action Committees (PACs), spent $163 million on television ads, and paid nearly $500 million to Washington lobbyists in the two years leading up the elections.
Environmental organizations also spent a great deal of money during the 2014 midterm elections. However, the money was spent differently, and altogether amounted to a fraction of energy industry contributions.
According to […]
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich.
Credit: Richard Morgenstein
Some believe the central political issue of our era is the size of the government. They’re wrong. The central issue is whom the government is for.
Consider the new spending bill Congress and the President agreed to a few weeks ago.
It’s not especially large by historic standards. Under the $1.1 trillion measure, government spending doesn’t rise as a percent of the total economy. In fact, if the economy grows as expected, government spending will actually shrink over the next year.
The problem with the legislation is who gets the goodies and who’s stuck with the tab.
For example, it repeals part of the Dodd-Frank Act designed to stop Wall Street from using other peoples’ money to support its gambling addiction, as the Street did before the near-meltdown of 2008.
Dodd-Frank had barred banks from using commercial deposits that belong to you and me and other people, and which are insured by the government, […]
Credit: blog.bookrix.com
Recently, I found out that my work is mentioned in a book that has been banned, in effect, from the schools in Tucson, Arizona. The anti-ethnic studies law passed by the state prohibits teachings that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and/or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” I invite you to read the book in question, titled Critical Race Theory: An Introduction [3], so that you can decide for yourselves whether it qualifies.
In fact, I invite you to take on as your summer reading the astonishingly lengthy list of books that have been removed from the Tucson public school system as part of this wholesale elimination of the Mexican-American studies curriculum. The authors and editors include Isabel Allende, Junot Díaz, Jonathan Kozol, Rudolfo Anaya, bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Howard […]
No one is about to claim that quantum physics is now easy to understand, but maybe it’s not quite as devilishly complicated as we thought.
New research suggests that two of the quantum world’s most mysterious features–the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality–are simply two sides of a single coin.
“The connection between uncertainty and wave-particle duality comes out very naturally when you consider them as questions about what information you can gain about a system,” Dr. Stephanie Wehner, an associate professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and one of the scientists behind the research, said in a written statement. “Our result highlights the power of thinking about physics from the perspective of information.”
Wave-particle duality is the idea that elementary particles can exhibit wave-like behavior–for example, as seen in the classic double-slit experiment. The uncertainty principle holds that it’s impossible to know both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time.
The proposed unification of the two features may bring new advances in cryptography, Dr. Patrick Coles, a postdoctoral […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
