These Are Some Of The Ways We Are Broken
Time to Topple Corporate Dictators By Ralph Nader
The 18 day non-violent Egyptian protests for freedom raise the question: is America next? Were Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine around, they would likely say "what are we waiting for?" They would be appalled by the concentration of economic and political power in such a few hands. Remember how often these two men warned about concentrated power.
Our Declaration of Independence (1776) listed grievances against King George III. A good number of them could have been made against "King" George W. Bush who not only brushed aside Congressional War-making authority under the Constitution but plunged the nation through lies into extended illegal wars which he conducted in violation of international law. Even conservative legal scholars such as Republicans Bruce Fein and former Judge Andrew Napolitano believe he and Dick Cheney still should be prosecuted for war and other related crimes. The conservative American Bar Association sent George W. Bush three "white papers" in 2005-2006 that documented his distinct violations of the Constitution he had sworn to uphold.
Here at home, the political system is a two-party dictatorship whose gerrymandering results in most electoral districts being one-party fiefdoms. The two Parties block the freedom of third parties and independent candidates to have equal access to the ballots and to the debates. Another barrier to competitive democratic elections is big money, largely commercial in source, which marinates most politicians in cowardliness and sinecurism.
Our legislative and executive branches, at the federal and state levels, can fairly be called corporate regimes. This is corporatism where government is controlled by private economic power. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called this grip "fascism" in a formal message to Congress in 1938.
Corporatism shuts out the people and opens governmental largesse paid for by taxpayers to insatiable corporations.
Notice how each decade the bailouts, subsidies, hand-outs, giveaways, and tax escapes for big business grow larger. The word "trillions" is increasingly used, as in the magnitude of the rescue by Washington of the Wall Street crooks and speculators who looted the peoples' pensions and savings.
It is not as if these giant companies demonstrate any gratitude to the people who save them again and again. Instead, U.S. companies are fast quitting the country in which they were chartered and prospered. These corporations, which were built on the backs of American workers, are shipping millions of jobs and whole industries to repressive foreign regimes abroad, such as China.
Over 70 percent of Americans in a September 2000 Business Week poll said corporations had "too much control over their lives." It's gotten worse with the last decade's corporate corruption and crime wave.
Wal-Mart imports over $20 billion a year in products from sweatshops in China. About a million Wal-Mart workers make under $10.50 per hour before deductions--many in the $8 an hour range. While Wal-Mart's CEO makes about $11,000 a hour plus benefits and perks.
This scenario has metastasized through the economy. One in three workers in the U.S. makes Wal-Mart level wages. Fifty million people have no health insurance and every year about 45,000 die because they cannot afford diagnosis or treatment. Child poverty is climbing as household income falls. Unemployment and underemployment are near 20% levels. The federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation since 1968, would be $10.00 per hour now. Instead, it is $7.25.
Yet one percent of the richest Americans have financial wealth equivalent to the bottom ninety-five percent of the people. Corporate profits and compensation of corporate bosses are at record levels. While companies, excluding financial firms, are sitting on two trillion dollars in cash.
On February 7, President Obama showed us where the power is by walking across LaFayette Park from the White House to the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before a large audience of CEOs, he pleaded for them to invest more in jobs in America. Imagine, CEOs of pampered, privileged mega-companies often on welfare and in trouble with the law sitting there while the President curtsied.
With Bill Clinton in the Nineties, corporate lobbies tightened their grip on our country by greasing through Congress both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization agreements that subordinated our sovereignty and workers to the global government of corporations.
All this adds to the growing sense of powerlessness by the citizenry. They experience hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and many more injuries every year in the workplace, the environment, and the marketplace. Massive budgets and technologies do not go to reduce these costly casualties, instead they go to the big business of exaggerated security threats.
While the ObamaBush deficit-financed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been destroying those nations, our public works here, such as mass transit, schools and clincs crumble for lack of repairs. Foreclosures keep rising.
The debt servitude of consumers is stripping them of control of their own money as fine print contracts, credit ratings and credit scores tighten the noose on family budgets.
Half of democracy is showing up. Too many Americans, despairingly, are not "showing up" at the polls, at rallies, marches, courtrooms or city council meetings. If "we the people" want to reassert our proper constitutional sovereignty over our country--we can start by amassing ourselves in public squares and around the giant buildings of our rulers.
In a country that has so many problems it doesn't deserve and so many solutions that it doesn't apply; all things are possible when people begin looking at themselves for the necessary power to produce a just society.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tim...10219-904.html
More Ways We Are Broken - And Guess Who's Responsible
We're All Mad Here
Sunday 20 February 2011
by: Brian Moench, MD, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
As Alice (in Wonderland) stumbles upon the Matter Hatter's tea party, the Cheshire Cat greets her with, "Come on in, we're all mad here." The Cheshire Cat should be posted at the door of the new House of Representatives. With the Republicans turning Congress into a Mad Hatter's Tea Party, first in line to receive the sentence of "off with their heads" are environmental regulations and the scientific community, if not the scientific method itself.
Disdain for climate science has become obligatory for Republican politicians and even a few Democrats. Former believers like Sens. John McCain (R-Arizona) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) (Tweedledee and Tweedledum) have disappeared into the Republican global warming witness protection program. Every single Republican presidential hopeful is making the March Hare look sane by proudly standing up for scientific illiteracy.
The impetus for this antiscience rumpus is not that the scientific evidence has been repudiated, or even lost its shine. Quite the opposite. The research, the scientific conclusions and the warnings of the scientists have only become steadily stronger. This year's catastrophic worldwide weather extremes add further urgency to their warnings. The world's largest insurance companies and even our Defense Department believe strongly in the science. The supposed "climate-gate" email scandal that made headlines last year and was recited relentlessly by climate deniers has been thoroughly debunked by multiple independent investigations.
Nonetheless, House conservatives are serving up a brew of political ideology, theology and electoral expediency they believe has created a new truth, making rationality, empiricism and science irrelevant. They have even threatened that the scientists themselves may become targets of criminal investigations, kind of like mixing Orwell's "1984" with the Salem witch trials.
And the new intoxication with antiregulation goes far beyond climate science. Many Republicans are calling for a "full offensive" against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcing the Clean Air Act, declaring it "job-killing" federal regulation. Many Tea Party victors proudly profess their desire to abolish the EPA altogether, a move that would no doubt hasten their version of Nirvana - a brutal corporate free-for-all and everyone for themselves.
Though suspicion of science has always been part of conservatives' DNA, it is their carrying water for corporations that has dragged the country down the rabbit hole many times before. When scientists declared that cigarettes were deadly and manipulated to be addictive and that we should regulate them, big tobacco screamed "junk science." When it became obvious that automobiles were unsafe gas hogs, the Big Three whined that seatbelts, then nonexploding gas tanks, then air bags, then catalytic converters and, finally, increased fuel efficiency would all be job-killers and would put them out of business.
When it was proven that asbestos and leaded gasoline were killing us and eating away our children's IQ's, corporations hollered, "anti-business, job-killing regulations." When air pollution was proven to be deadly, industry wailed that the research was flawed, that the scientists were just tree-huggers and that they couldn't afford scrubbers on smokestacks. When Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire, manufacturers claimed that if they couldn't use the nation's waterways as open sewers, they would have to lay everyone off. These tactics worked and delayed public protection for decades, but it was nonsense then, and it's nonsense now.
The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, enforced by the EPA, have arguably provided the greatest economic and quality of life benefits of any federal legislation ever passed, adding literally trillions of dollars of economic value to our economy, adding millions of jobs and enabling all of us to live longer, healthier and more productive lives. A landmark study demonstrated that just the first 20 years of the Clean Air Act added five months to the life expectancy of the average American.[1]
In fact, the societal benefits have been monetized in many studies and were demonstrated to pay back a return on investment anywhere from ten to 40 times the cost of controlling the pollution.[2] And all the research indicates that even cleaner air and water would be equally good investments. If the EPA is successful in reducing the nation's greenhouse emissions, the outcomes of that reduction will far exceed even these benefits.
At the Mad Hatter's tea party, reality is turned upside down in a frenzy of nonsense. But this antiscience, antiregulation nonsense will create a world more like J.R.R. Tolkien's hideous industrial wasteland of Mordor, hardly a Wonderland with silly white rabbits.
1. Pope, C. A. III, Ezzati, M., Dockery, D.W. "Fine-Particulate Air Pollution and Life Expectancy in the United States." New England Journal of Medicine. Vol. 360:376-386 Jan. 22, 2009 Num
The Media's Broken Too - This Is Only One Of The Ways!
Playing Politics With Mr. Market
A WSJ columnist slaps Obama for “his” seven-week bear market two years ago
By Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review
There’s a long and boring history of hacks, typically on the right, blaming or crediting presidents for whatever the stock market happens to be doing at the moment. The press falls for it, too, sometimes.
But the mark of a real hack is to blame your political opponent for the bear markets but somehow forget all about him when the bulls are on the march.
Consider The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Newmark, who writes about the current bull market today, noting that lots of investors panicked and missed out on a 98 percent surge in less than two years. Not Newmark, though. He stayed the course, as they say:
By early 2009, my investment portfolio had plummeted nearly 50% from its 2007 peak. That meant half of my life’s savings gone - at least on paper.
If you didn’t know me well, you wouldn’t have noticed much angst. I wrote my columns and pestered my colleagues here at the WSJ as I always did.
But these were not fun days. Every evening, I checked my online accounts, screaming silently. Every night in bed, I dreamed up a new bank collapse or Obama pronouncement that would drive the market even lower.
And indeed he did.
Here’s Newmark on March 4, 2009—two days before the bottom hit and the bull market began (criticizing Obama for calling a bottom, of all things):
The day of the election, the Dow was driven to more than 9600. Today, post-release of the Obama budget, it is at 6800, down 30%.
The more investors have learned about the state of the economy and Obama’s plans for it, the less they rate the stock market’s prospects.
Obama’s higher taxes and antibusiness policies have shaken investor confidence.
Two days before that, Newmark said Obama was “killing America”:
So far I’ve lost about 25% on my stock market investments since Obama’s election. Why would I put in any more money when the President and the Congress are at war with Wall Street?
A week earlier Newmark had warned readers about “Obama’s Dow 5000.”
Two years later, “Obama’s Dow”—such that it is—is at 12,233.
(Cough).
So Newmark hangs a falling stock market pricing in apocalypse around the neck of a president in office eight weeks trying to pick up the pieces from a bumbling predecessor. But now, with the hindsight of two years and a roaring stock recovery, he’s not calling it “Obama’s Dow 12,233” and crediting the president for the “sharpest, fastest and greatest bull market run of your investing lifetime.”
No, all the president gets is a slap for how Newmark thought his policies were driving the markets lower two years ago.
Now that’s hacktacular.
Another Big Way We Are Broken - Too Much Power In The Wrong Hands
House votes to prevent reporting system for assault-weapon sales
By James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 19
The House voted overwhelmingly Friday to block the Obama administration from implementing a controversial proposal meant to give federal authorities a new tool to catch gunrunners to Mexico.
The proposed rule was strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association, which praised the House for taking the action.
The measure passed with bipartisan support, 277 to 149, which added it to a massive spending bill that would keep the federal government running through September.
The amendment by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using federal money to require licensed firearm dealers to report multiple sales of assault weapons.
Under the proposed rule, 8,500 gun dealers near the U.S.-Mexico border would be required to alert authorities when they sell within five consecutive business days two or more semiautomatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines.
Semiautomatic rifles such as AK-47s and AR-15s are favored by drug-trafficking organizations fighting the Mexican government.
On his Twitter account, Arturo Sarukhan, Mexican ambassador to the United States, called the vote "unfortunate."
More than 34,000 people have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon took office in late 2006 and launched a sustained effort to eliminate violent drug-trafficking cartels. More than 65,000 guns recovered in Mexico have been traced back to the United States.
But NRA officials said the rule hurt gun rights.
"Any proposal that only burdens law-aiding gun owners and retailers - as this proposal does - is a non-starter with the NRA," said Chris W. Cox, executive director for the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action. "To put it very simply, if someone is breaking the law, go after them full-bore. If they aren't, leave them alone."
Cox praised Boren and Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) for driving the amendment to passage.
To take effect, the spending bill and its amendments must pass the Senate and be signed by President Obama, who has threatened a veto. John Feinblatt, a chief aide to New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I), who has urged more restrictions on gun sales, called
on senators to block the Boren amendment from taking effect, saying it was a "dangerous, anti-police measure."
Nearly 20 senators, including three Democrats from Western states, have written letters opposing the proposed rule.
ATF had asked the White House to approve the rule last month on an emergency basis,
but 17 senators objected to that tactic, saying, "We are especially alarmed by ATF's attempt to regulate the sale of firearms through an emergency notice such as this, which has not been properly vetted by Congress or by the affected public."
Last week, the White House budget office rejected the emergency procedure and said
the proposal would go through the usual process, lasting through March. In the meantime, NRA lobbyists took the battle to Capitol Hill, where in recent decades the NRA has used appropriations bills to prevent increased gun control. In 2003, Congress passed the
Tiahrt amendment to prevent public access to a database of guns used in crimes.
Comments on the proposed rule, which would affect dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, closed Monday.
The reports from dealers were expected to give leads to ATF investigators seeking to catch gunrunners to Mexico. However, the NRA opposed the proposal because "this reporting scheme would create a registry of owners of many of today's most popular
rifles - firearms owned by millions of Americans for self-defense, hunting and other lawful purposes," the NRA said in a statement released Friday night.
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Trying to come up with sensible ways to prevent the bad guys from killing people is apparently a bad idea. It infringes on the "right" to kill anyone using whatever gun you want. How about tanks? They're even better at it. Just a matter of time.
