Monday, February 9th, 2015
Thom Hartmann, - Alternet (U.S.)
Stephan: I think this essay by Thom Hartmann is dead-on. I agree with all of it, and it is what concerns me so much about the country. Our social policies, and our financial policies, or lack thereof, are literally destroying our world. Any yet the country is turning rightward, asking for more.
Credit: chriskresser.com
As the American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
Well, it it may well on our doorstep. And the oligarchs are plotting their final takeover by using their economic dominance to capture governmental power – specifically, the governmental power which sets the rules for the very marketplace that provides the oligarchs with such massive wealth.
Once the American corporate barons own the institutions that are meant to regulate them, it’s game-over for both rational capitalism (including competition) and for democracy.
Last week, at David and Charles Koch’s annual winter meeting near Palm Springs, California, it was announced that the Koch Brothers’ political organization would spend close to $900 million on the 2016 election. If this goal is met, the group of corporate leaders will spend far more than the Republican Party and its congressional campaign committees spent, combined, in the 2012 campaign.
Once upon a time, it would have been illegal for the Koch Brothers and their fellow oligarchs to buy […]
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Monday, February 9th, 2015
Stephan: It is very naive to think that carbon energy is going to go quietly off stage. This kind of behavior industry is anti-life, and I think the tipping point has been reached. What ALEC and the state legislators are doing is morally evil because it is anti-life. That they succeeded in West Virginia is a measure of a society that is not structured in its own best interests.
Credit: Shutterstock
This week, West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) signed a bill repealing the state’s renewable energy standard, which would have required major utilities to get at least 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2025.
It’s a clear win for right-wing activists, led by the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). They’ve been campaigning for years to roll back state-level renewable standards, mostly without success. But last year, they managed to freeze Ohio’s renewable standard at a less-than-ambitious level. And now they’ve had their first total success — a complete rollback of a renewable portfolio standard.
Ironically, it was under Tomblin’s tenure as Senate president that the standard was first passed. The West Virginia Coal Association, an industry trade group, also supported the legislation back in 2009 — and even helped write it — but has since turned against it, citing increased regulation of the coal industry. “We understand economic drivers and factors change over time, and the Act as it was passed in 2009 is no longer beneficial for […]
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Sunday, February 8th, 2015
Steven Rosenfeld, - Alternet/Daily Kos
Stephan: I found this Gallup survey very depressing. People in fear become more conservative, and fear, uncertainty, and insecurity are becoming the dominate psycho-dynamics in our politics. We are the problem, and we are the solution, if, and only if, we can overcome fear and begin to make compassionate life-affirming decisions.
Partisan winds blowing across America are pushing the country to the political right.
That’s the sobering conclusion of the annual “State of the States” report by Gallup, one of the country’s most reputable pollsters, based on interviewing 177,000 people across the U.S. in 2014. The report concludes that Democrats still have an edge when it comes to presidential elections, but also explains why congressional gridlock endures.
“Since 2008, there has been a significant movement away from the Democratic Party both at the national level and in many states,” Gallup reports. (emphasis added) “Democrats still maintain a modest advantage in national partisanship, partly because they have an advantage in some of the most highly populated states such as California, New York and Illinois. At the same time, other large states like Florida and Texas are competitive, with Florida showing a slight Democratic edge and Texas a slight Republican one.”
“The GOP’s inability to dominate in many high population, electoral vote-rich states underscores the challenges it faces in presidential elections based on the winner-take-all electoral vote system,” Gallup explained. “The GOP […]
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Sunday, February 8th, 2015
CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, - The New York Times
Stephan: As America has moved rightward, and Randian hyper-individualism has increased as a cultural imperative one of the consequences has been the election of increasingly ambitious, self-absorbed corrupt politicians who know how to manipulate fear to their personal advantage. Bobbie Jindal is a classic example of the type. The legislation these politicians espouse, and that is being passed by their crowd, is slowly degrading life in the Red value states where they are in power. The data is incontrovertible on this. Yet because fear has become so dominant the citizens of those states continue to vote these people into office. You can look at the re-election of Brownback in Kansas, or Walker in Wisconsin to see the process playing out.
This is part of the Great Schism Trend. As the crises of climate change occur with greater and greater intensity and frequency the fabric of the country is going to fray. Some states, the Blue value ones principally, will come to recognize that the only way through is a society in which wellness for all is the priority. To anyone who cares about facts it is increasingly obvious that by any social metric you care to choose the wellness model -- happiness, life span, health, elder care, child care, environmentally apprpropriate -- is superior. Norway is an example of how to do this.
Mr. Jindal spoke in Washington on Thursday. He withdrew a tax overhaul plan for Louisiana after widespread criticism.
Credit: Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
BATON ROUGE, La. — In recent weeks, the office of Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has issued news releases about the “mindless naïveté” of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the folly of opening diplomatic relations with Cuba and the threat of radical Islam in Europe, prompting a flurry of commentary about what it all might mean to Republican voters in Iowa and South Carolina should Mr. Jindal decide, as has long been expected, to run for president.
But here in the Louisiana capital, there is mostly one topic on everyone’s mind these days, and it is quite distressingly close to home: the fiscal reckoning the state is facing for next year and perhaps for multiple budgets to […]
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Sunday, February 8th, 2015
Travis Gettys, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Three or four times a year I get an impassioned email from a reader, or someone posts a comment adjuring me to publish something on chemtrails. I don't because I think chemtrails are nonsense in the conspiracy sense in which they are presented. No question that jet fuel exhaust is going into the atmosphere. But that is not what is meant by chemtrails. Here's is the story of one television stations attempt to sort things out.
Credit: Shutterstock
A conspiracy theorist convinced a Las Vegas TV station to look into chemtrails for an investigative report, which aired during February sweeps month.
Malcolm Harris showed some photographs he took to KLAS-TV that showed what he believes are chemtrails – manmade formations that some suspect are created by the government to control the weather or population.
“You could see the very beginning and the end, and it was very clean and it stood by itself,” Harris said. “There wasn’t anything else around it. I’ve seen clouds being made out here in the desert. All of a sudden you see a cloud being made, and that is not what was going on.”
He said the formation was clearly manmade and unnatural, and aviation writer Bill Sweetman doesn’t disagree.
However, after reviewing the photos, he isn’t convinced they’re chemtrails.
The aviation expert said he spoke to defense industry colleagues and suggested the formations were caused by advanced pyrotechnics – or flares used by fast jets to confuse enemy forces.
George Barnes, producer of the chemtrails […]
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