Universities paid off to make their students learn Ayn Rand's "philosophy"
This story http://www.alternet.org/module/print...es/1168680/%22 about the Koch brothers buying teaching slots at public universities for conservative ideologues is shocking, but only [for the] crudeness [of the Kochs' approach]. The wealthy have endowed universities for years for their own purposes, although I doubt many of them had the nerve to totally flout the normal academic conventions by insisting that they get to appoint their own people. And universities normally would not have allowed such strings to be attached because they cared about their academic integrity.
But a subtler approach has been used for quite some time. I wrote about this one three years ago at Our Future:
Paul Krugman points to an article that should send chills down the backs of good progressives everywhere:
Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.
The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel ``Atlas Shrugged" would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.
I have written about the pernicious effect of Rand before, and noted that the Ayn Rand Institute provides nearly half a million free copies to American high schools to indoctrinate teen-agers into romantic selfishness (thus validating their natural adolescent tendencies as being acceptable adult behavior.) But this is truly beyond the pale.
Corporations, which have very good reasons to train young people into an ethos that extols the alleged virtues of heroic captains of industry and their lonely fight to retain freedom in the face of left wing collectivism, should not be buying academic curriculum of any kind. The very idea of academic freedom is that the academics decide what to teach, not the government or the community or especially some company that wants to promulgate a puerile political philosophy designed to make people believe that selfishness is a virtue. That it's in the form of a very bad romance novel makes it even worse. (To those romance novel aficionados out there, please note that I said "bad" romance novel. It's not a slam at the whole genre.)
The Ayn Rand Institute, ever creative, has come up with a new marketing scheme to promote the book. Sensing a change in the zeitgeist, and seeking to take advantage of what they perceive as this opening in academe, they are pushing the anti-religious side of objectivism.
Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization in Irvine, California, that promotes objectivism, said some professors are re-evaluating Rand.
``We're definitely seeing more of an interest in the academic world," Brook said. He said he senses a softening of opposition from academics and sees more conferences and articles about Rand.
``Ayn Rand has a kind of absolutist ethics," Brook said. ``She believes in right or wrong, good and evil, but based on secular principles, not religious principles, and I think there's an appeal for that now."
Very, very clever. As for its moral dimension, objectivism simply holds that it's moral to be completely selfish and rapacious. Indeed, it is immoral not to be. That would seem to be something of a difficult sell in an age of greedy sub-prime mortgage brokers and billionaire hedge fund operators, but you have to give them credit for perseverance in the face of abject philosophical failure. It's hard to believe that any academic worth his or her salt would take this line of argument seriously, but apparently the lure of big money is enough to make them consider it:
Allison's BB&T, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in March pledged $2 million to establish the first U.S. chair in the study of objectivism, at the University of Texas at Austin.
That school and 27 others have accepted an aggregate $30 million from the bank\'s foundation in the last decade.
``These gifts are really about the study of capitalism from a moral perspective and all we want is to make Rand part of the dialogue," said Bob Denham, a spokesman for BB&T, the parent of Branch Banking & Trust Co.
The BB&T Charitable Foundation made a five-year, $1 million commitment to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in January 2005 after a dinner meeting between Allison and Claude Lilly, then dean of UNC Charlotte's business school.
The grant agreement described ``Atlas Shrugged" as "required reading" in a course about the fundamentals of capitalism.
This is the real agenda. It's not about literature or about philosophy. The point of this is to indoctrinate young business majors into the Rand philosophy, which is a perverted and radical form of capitalism that bears no relationship to the way the world really works. (In fact, it's real agenda may be to indoctrinate young people into believing that overpaid executives actually deserve to make hundreds of times the average worker\'s pay while driving the company into the ground
So now that the plutocrats managed to make taxes the equivalent of the black plague and then produced an economy that only benefits themselves, the starving public beast has no choice but to do whatever they want if it wants to stay alive.
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More attempted brainwashing from conservatives. Ryan, of screw people, let's privatize everything fame, adores Rand. Gives her books to his staff to read. Does the appearance of a baseless, cruel cult involved in our politics bother anyone?
The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities
The real scandal around the endowment by the Koch brothers of two chairs at Florida State University http://www.salon.com/news/politics/w...ofessors_kochs is that state universities now have to seek such outside money and accept strings. The reason they have to do so is that many state legislatures have chosen not to have state universities any more. At many ‘state universities’ the state contribution to the general operating fund is less than 20 percent, falling toward 10 percent.
This abandonment of their responsibilities to higher education on the part of the states hurts students in the first instance. Institutions that used to be affordable to students from working and lower middle class backgrounds are now increasingly out of reach for them. State universities are becoming the new Ivies, a good bargain still for the upper middle class and the wealthy, but a distant dream for the daughter or son of a worker in a fast food restaurant.
This development is also scary because it promotes the corruption of academia. In fact, as Charles Ferguson showed in his film, “Inside Job,” some academic economists are already hopelessly corrupt. The barracuda capitalist system in contemporary America provides many incentives for economists to promote laissez-faire, anti-regulatory ideas of the sort that led to the 2008 collapse of our economy. Endowments with strings attached are just one more.
Starting in the 1980s, state legislatures began putting their money into other things. Some cut taxes for the rich. Some engaged in a vast expansion of the prison system impelled by the phony ‘war on drugs’ that led to a vast increase of inmates guilty of nothing more than toking a little weed. (Getting high off alcohol or prescription drugs is not punished by American society or we’d have tens of millions incarcerated instead of only 2.3 million– though even the two million make the US very peculiar in world terms. Some forty percent of these inmates are incarcerated on non-violent, drug-related offenses. Few other countries are so fixated on maintaining such an archipelago of Gulags. Portugal has decriminalized most drugs, and nothing bad happened as a result).
State universities were designed by far-sighted legislators who believed that it is the duty of a state to provide high-quality, low-cost education to children of working and middle class families. Thomas Jefferson thought that you cannot have a democracy if the “common man” is not educated, and though he is associated with ‘small government’ ideas in some spheres, he thought states should be funding universities.
But the Neoliberal and Neoconservative philosophies that have dominated both parties in the US in recent decades view such a commitment as undesirable. The United States is being refashioned as a plutocracy in which the wealthiest 1 million persons are a new aristocracy and governmental programs that inconvenience them by making them pay their taxes are dismantled.
Positions at state universities ought to be decided upon by the students, faculty, and deans in consultation. They shouldn’t be decided just because a wealthy crank wants us to study X. Along with Koch-funded positions in ‘unregulated capitalism’ of the sort that brought us the 2008 meltdown, we no doubt could have a raft of positions in Atlantis Studies and Post-War Ufology. Rich people are good at making money. They aren’t necessarily good at academic skills. In fact, many are downright hostile to academic knowledge that brings into question their shibboleths. The tenure system was created for academics precisely because one got fired, at the University of Pennsylvania, in the early 20th century, for objecting to child labor. Some of the regents made their money that way and took offense.
We don’t need more positions in economics departments in state universities for ‘free market economics’ of the sort the Koch brothers funded at FSU. Is that what the students there want and need? Is that what the faculty senate would have voted for? Maybe we need some positions in how bad it is for a society to have all its unions gutted or to have its gini coefficient (which measures economic inequality) skyrocket.
The president of FSU, who defended the Koch deal, did not mention that such outside endowments are skewing the curriculum at state universities in unfortunate ways.
But here is the objectionable thing, which he admits, about the way the search for the positions was conducted:
‘ These 50 applications were sent for input to an advisory board approved by the Koch Foundation. The advisory board, formed in 2008, consisted of two FSU faculty members, both Eminent Scholars in Economics, and a Ph.D. economist appointed by the Koch Foundation. (It is not unusual for a donor to have representation in an advisory capacity.) ‘
This allegation is simply untrue. It is not the case that academic institutions routinely insert an outside advisory board into the middle of the search process. In fact, this way of proceeding is absolutely outrageous, more particularly because one of the members of the advisory board was not even on the faculty! Moreover, it is invidious for the Kochs to give some FSU faculty more of a voice in hiring than others.
The only legitimate academic endowment is one with no strings attached. The money should go into the endowment up front. And then the university procedures should be followed in making hires. The endower is owed profuse and frequent thanks and can come hear the public lectures given by those hired with their money, but they absolutely should not have their thumbs on the till in the hiring.
But ideally state universities should be funded by state legislatures, and should have charters of academic and curricular independence from those legislatures. State universities should be for the people. We already have elite universities for the elite.
Our Congress has already largely been bought by the corporations it is supposed to be regulating and by a raft of special interests, from the National Rifle Association to the Israel lobbies. Now if our state universities are to be bought, even our academic knowledge will be corrupt.
And, it won’t be long before the BP Chair in How there is No Climate Change, and the Saudi Arabian Chair in the Necessity of Beheading Adulterers, and the Avigdor Lieberman Chair in Ethnic Cleansing Solutions, and the Communist Party of China Chair in Google Censorship crowd onto our campuses along with a host of other junky positions.
Are Americans doomed to have both their minds and their bodies enslaved by cranky rich people, and how can we hope to remain globally competitive if so?
http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/the-...versities.html
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Yep. Money can buy anything, anytime it wants. That's why its power has to be controlled, and in certain cases, stopped.
Our Government Is Corrupt Through and Through -- Where's the Outrage?
By Joshua Holland / AlterNet
When politicians get caught taking bribes, it's big news, but most people take the usual legal corruption for granted.
Last week, jurors in a federal bribery case got a taste of good, old-fashioned corruption as New Orleans' former chief technology officer, Greg Mefford, offered the prurient details of how one vendor, Mark St. Pierre, plied city officials with almost $900,000 in bribes and kickbacks that included luxurious travel, the use of a yacht and boozy, good-old-boy poker parties complete with the requisite hookers.
The story represents the kind of corruption that makes splashy headlines, and of course, rightly outrages people. But the impact of this kind of criminality on our governance pales beside that of the everyday, entirely legal kind of corruption most people seem to take more or less for granted.
Consider just a few items "ripped from the headlines" during the past few weeks.
On Monday, Politico reported that almost a third of the “blue dog” Democrats who left office or were defeated in last year's midterms are now working as corporate lobbyists. “The conservative Blue Dogs formed a key voting bloc for much of the last congressional session,” reporter Aaren Mehta noted, “drawing impressive fundraising from the energy, financial services and health care industries.” The blue dogs were instrumental in watering down or blocking key Democratic legislation in both the House and the Senate. With their mission accomplished on everything from health-care reform to financial regulation, Politico notes that “industry groups [then] abandoned the pro-business coalition in favor of its GOP opponents.”
An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that “House members who defeated a measure to...end certain subsidies for oil companies received five times more in campaign contributions, on average, from the oil and gas industry in the 2010 election cycle than those who voted to proceed with the motion.”
House members who voted to continue the subsidies received, on average, five times more money in 2010 from oil and gas interests. Those voting to block debate received $36,066, on average, in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests. Those who voted to begin debate received, on average, $7,192 in campaign contributions from the industry.
Overall, members who voted to continue the subsidies received more than $8.7 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas interests in 2010 while those opposed raised just $1.2 million.
16 of the 18 U.S. House members who received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from the industry in 2010 voted to block debate. One voted to proceed and a second did not vote.
Last week, in a move that would prove eye-opening for even the most cynical good-government types, FCC Commissioner Meredith Atwell Baker announced that she would be leaving her position early to take a cushy lobbying job for Comcast just months after approving its controversial merger with NBC. As Free Press director Timothy Karr noted, she wasn't the first: “Many have found the FCC to be a particularly lucrative launching pad,” he wrote. “Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell now earns millions as the top lobbyist for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group that lobbies for the industry he was tasked to regulate.”
Even those supposedly neutral arbiters in the courts aren't standing above the political fray when big money is concerned. American University legal scholar Herman Schwartz noted last week that Justice Sam Alito attended a series of pricey fundraisers held by the right-wing American Spectator, and Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have both “allowed their names and office to be used for fundraising and other partisan activities.”
Each has attended big strategy and fundraising meetings held semiannually by brothers Charles and David Koch, among the wealthiest and most active of all Tea Party and right-wing financiers....
What seems beyond dispute is that all three justices engaged in conduct inconsistent with the Code of Conduct for United States judges, which requires that a judge “not personally participate in fundraising activities; or use or permit the use of the prestige of judicial office for that purpose … make speeches for a political organization or attend or purchase a ticket for a dinner or other event sponsored by … an entity whose principal purpose is to advocate for or against political candidates.”
This kind of ubiquitous, legal corruption raises occasional eyebrows, but it doesn't result in the kind of outrage it deserves. Most people simply take it for granted that moneyed interests get their way in a democracy, and indeed, a series of studies have found that politicians are far more sensitive to the interests of wealthy constituents than those of the poor, at both the federal and state levels.
But it's important to recognize that this kind of moneyed influence is not evident in all wealthy democracies, or at least not to the same degree it is in the U.S., with its world-leading level of economic inequality. Political scientists call it “state capture” -- private interests effectively gaining control of one or more organs of state and using the power vested in those institutions—publicly financed and ostensibly serving the greater good—to feather their own nests. Usually, the term is applied to banana republics, and the means of capture are nefarious: corruption, threats and even violence.
We do it differently. We have a private campaign finance system that requires members of Congress to start raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to get reelected the moment they take office; a government overrun with well-heeled lobbyists, many of whom are ex-staffers visiting offices in which they once worked to call on former bosses; and a well-oiled revolving door between regulatory agencies and the industries they’re supposed to be watching.
The result is that Corporate America does more than merely fend for itself on Capitol Hill. Its efforts amount to state capture, even if subtle in form, and that has a measurable impact.
In my book, I discuss what forensic economists—the CSIs of the dismal science, people who follow economic clues to unearth crimes—have to tell us about the relationship between corporate profits and the political fortunes of the politicians close to those companies.
In their book Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, scholars Raymond Fishman and Edward Miguel noted that forensic economists look carefully at how ups and downs in the careers of government officials impact the stock prices of firms to which they’re connected. They consider it to be among the more methodologically sound ways of rooting out government corruption.
In an article for Foreign Policy magazine, Fishman and Miguel laid out the rationale behind the approach:
Whether through hefty campaign contributions or cushy jobs for former politicians, corporations are constantly accused of trying to profit through political ties. (Just think Halliburton or Russia’s Gazprom.) But what’s the real value of these companies’ connections? If you ask politicians or investors, you’re likely to hear a lot of denials. To get the truth, we could ask insiders to put some money where their mouths are, making them bet some of their own cash on whether particular companies are making back-alley deals with politicians to increase their profits. In this political betting pool, raw financial self-interest would lead bettors in the know to reveal their true beliefs about corruption.
That betting pool is, of course, the stock market. The scholars wrote, “If connections buy tax breaks, valuable licenses, and advantages in bidding for government contracts, then strengthening political ties should boost profits. These higher profits translate directly into higher stock prices, and conversely, removing those ties should send profits—and stock prices—tumbling.”
Purdue University economist Mara Faccio studied those ties in every country that had a functional stock market. Not surprisingly, Faccio found strong connections between business and government across the board, but she also noted that the value of those connections in terms of stock prices varied greatly. In the United Kingdom, for example, stock prices don’t move at all when a firm’s political ties wax or wane. When Rolls-Royce chairman John Moore was appointed to the House of Lords, Rolls-Royce’s stock price remained unchanged. But in Italy, the picture is quite different. When Fiat chief Giovanni Agnelli was appointed to the Italian Senate, the automaker’s stock soared by 3.4 percent, adding millions of dollars in value to the company in a single day.
We’re a lot closer to Italy’s infamous level of public corruption than we are to that of our British cousins. And, as Fishman and Miguel noted, that’s already been pretty well established in this country:
Numerous studies have found that the economic fortunes of well-connected U.S. companies mirror the political fortunes of their connections. When U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords defected from the Republican Party and handed Senate Democrats a slim majority in 2001, Democratically connected companies benefited in the immediate aftermath. Similarly, the stock value of companies with former Republican lawmakers on their boards increased an average of 4 percent when the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush, while companies with former Democratic politicians on their boards declined.
Turning the Camera: Why Are Cops Allowed to Film Citizens, But Citizens Not Allowed
to Film Police Brutality?
As more police officers use cameras to monitor our every move, they're discovering the power of video -- and they don't want it turned against them.
What's good for the police apparently isn't good for the people -- or so the law enforcement community would have us believe when it comes to surveillance.
That's a concise summary of a new trend noted by National Public Radio last week -- the trend whereby law enforcement officials have been trying to prevent civilians from using cellphone cameras in public places as a means of deterring police brutality.
Oddly, the effort -- which employs both forcible arrests of videographers and legal proceedings against them -- comes at a time when the American Civil Liberties Union reports that "an increasing number of American cities and towns are investing millions of taxpayer dollars in surveillance camera systems."
Then again, maybe it's not odd that the two trends are happening simultaneously. Maybe they go hand in hand. Perhaps as more police officers use cameras to monitor every move we make, they are discovering the true power of video to independently document events. And as they see that power, they don't want it turned against them.
But wait -- why not?
Though you'd expect that uncomfortable question to evoke dissembling, Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Jim Pasco was quite straightforward about it.
Police officers, he told NPR, "need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be." He added that law enforcement authorities believe "that anything that's going to have a chilling effect on an officer moving -- an apprehension that he's being videotaped and may be made to look bad -- could cost him or some citizen their life."
Obviously, nobody wants to stop officers from doing their much-needed job (well, nobody other than budget-cutting politicians who are slashing police forces). In fact, organizations such as the NAACP have urged citizens to videotape police precisely to make sure police are doing ALL of their job -- including protecting individuals' civil liberties.
This is not some academic or theoretical concern, and video recording is not a needless exercise in Bill of Rights zealotry. The assault on civil liberties in America is a very real problem and monitoring police is absolutely required in light of recent data.
As USA Today reported under the headline "Police brutality cases on rise since 9/11," situations "in which police, prison guards and other law enforcement authorities have used excessive force or other tactics to violate victims' civil rights increased 25 percent" between 2001 and 2007. Last year alone, more than 1,500 officers were involved in excessive force complaints, according to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project.
Considering this, Pasco has it exactly wrong. We should want more officers feeling "apprehension" about breaking civil liberties laws, we should hope more of them "give a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences" will be if they trample someone's rights and we should crave an immediate "chilling effect" on such violations.
That's what the practice of cellphone recording is supposed to do -- not mimic the national security state's Big Brother culture, but prevent that security state from trampling our freedoms.
Law enforcement officials, of course, don't like the cellphone cameras because they don't want any check on police power. So they've resorted to fearmongering allegations about lost lives. But the only police officers who are threatened by cellphone cameras are those who want to break civil liberties laws with impunity. The rest have nothing to worry about and everything to gain from a practice that simply asks them to remember the all-too-forgotten part of their "protect and serve" motto -- the part about protecting the public's civil rights.
David Sirota http://act.alternet.org/go/7480?akid...018.d7cyPb&t=9
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For years, people peaceably protesting at political events (and others) have been arrested and harassed. We are very close to a police state already.
Dissent is no longer tolerated. Guess who likes it that way? The powerful. That's why they have to be fought - no matter who they are.
Eric Cantor Promises Oil Speculators That Republicans Will Block Financial Regulation
Lee Fang, ThinkProgress http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/18/...l-speculators/
Yesterday morning, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) visited the Chicago headquarters of the CME Group, “the world’slargest owner and operator” of private exchanges for derivatives products. CME Group specializes in a number of markets, including trading futures contracts for various blends of crude oil and food commodities. Cantor met with executives, and at one point, gave brief remarks before CME Group employees and various commodity speculators.
Cantor told the audience of speculators that his Republican caucus would “do our part” to block the implementation of financial reforms passed last year as part of the sweeping Dodd-Frank law. He even called out the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulators in charge of overseeing derivatives and energy speculation, and promised to stop regulations from going online:
CANTOR: And you’ve managed to be able to serve that function in the CME Group for so much of this country and the world, and you’ve also managed to position as a true world leader. We want that in every arena. We want to help you continue to lead for America, that means we gotta do our part when you see the implementation of Dodd-Frank coming at you like a barreling train. We want to help control that so that we can get some sensible, sensible follow up to that legislation. [...] Whether it’s the EPA, the FDA, the FCC, the SEC, the CFTC, you name it, there is an acronym for a federal agency causing harm right now. We’re trying to pull that in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcXJR...layer_embedded
Currently, energy speculation is at an all time record high. In 2008, according to many analysts, oil speculation — which took place on unregulated private exchanges owned by the CME Group and a set of international exchanges — spiked gas prices to unprecedented levels. Now, excessive oil speculation is again driving the pain at the pump. While Goldman Sachs has claimed that at least $25 of the current price of crude oil is due to speculation, financial experts contacted by ThinkProgress say the Goldman Sachs number is probably very conservative.
Although the Dodd-Frank reforms passed last year included a new mandate for regulators to curb rampant oil speculation, these regulations have not yet been implemented. Republicans, under Cantor’s leadership, are working furiously to ensure that they never will be. For instance, Cantor’s caucus has proposed massive budget cuts to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the regulatory body charged with overseeing oil speculators at the CME Group. As the New York Times has reported, CFTC regulators literally do not have enough money even for staplers, and can barely enforce laws on the books before even getting to new Dodd-Frank rules. In addition, Republicans are also pushing a separate bill to delay Dodd-Frank derivatives reforms for at least eighteen months.
Extended transcript:
CANTOR: Now the grow piece, it comes back to what you do here. You provide the center, it’s almost like the center of the universe for liquidity. It is ultimately providing a service to investors and to small business owners at the end to control and predict their risk and try to minimize the cost of goods that they buy and ultimately to lower their costs of operating so that there can be a cheaper outcome whether it is good and capital or what have you. And you’ve managed to be able to serve that function in the CME Group for so much of this country and the world and you’ve also managed to position as a true world leader. We want that in every arena. We want to help you continue to lead for America, that means we gotta do our part when you see the implementation of Dodd-Frank coming at you like a barreling train. We want to help control that so that we can get some sensible, sensible follow up to that legislation. It’s very troubling. But we’ve got similar instances in much of, a lot of other areas. It’s not just financial services where federal bureaucracy has rum amok. So the Republicans and our growth agenda are very focused on stopping regulations that negatively impact people who want to create growth and value. Whether it’s the EPA, the FDA, the FCC, the SEC, the CFTC, you name it, there’s an acronym for a federal agency causing harm right now. We’re trying to pull that in.
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Yep! That's who they work for. Money and power. F... everyone else.
We don't need any regulations for ANYTHING, apparently. You get sick, you die, you are defrauded, cheated in any way - YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN!
Be very afraid. This is who they are.
Jon Stewart Obliterates Ben Stein's DSK Defense:
"Economists Are the Rapiest Profession"
Ben Stein is a prominent conservative mouthpiece. Listen to this cretin's comments regarding an alleged sexual assault.
http://act.alternet.org/go/7458?akid...018.kEPAgi&t=3
Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9/11 'Defense' Spending'
May 28, 2011 Joshua Holland, AlterNet
This week, the National Priorities Project (NPP) released a snapshot of U.S. “defense” spending since September 11, 2001. The eye-popping figures lend credence to the theory that al Qaeda's attacks were a form of economic warfare – that they hoped for a massive overreaction that would entangle us in costly foreign wars that would ultimately drain away our national wealth.
They didn't bankrupt us the same way the Mujahadeen helped bring down the Soviet Union decades before, because our economy was much stronger. But they did succeed in putting us deep into the red – with an assist, of course, from Bush's ideologically driven tax cuts for the wealthy.
The topline number is this: we have spent $7.6 trillion on the military and homeland security since 9/11. The Pentagon's base budget – which doesn't include the costs of fighting our wars – has increased by 81 percent during that time (43 percent when adjusted for inflation). The costs of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have now reached $1.26 trillion. But that only scratches the surface; it doesn't include the long-term costs of caring for badly wounded soldiers, for example.
One line-item suggests that 9/11 has been used to justify greater military spending across the board; the nuclear weapons budget has shot up by more than a fifth after adjusting for inflation. How intercontinental ballistic missiles that can vaporize whole cities are useful in a “war on terror” is anybody's guess.
The Pentagon itself acknowledges these dollars haven't all been spent effectively – there is certainly plenty of waste. According to the Washington Post, the DoD has blown $32 billion (enough to offer free, universal college tuition for a year) on canceled weapons programs since 1997. According to the Post story, which is based on an unreleased Pentagon report, “For almost a decade, the Defense Department saw its budgets boom — but didn’t make the kind of technological strides that seemed possible.”
"Since 9/11, a near doubling of the Pentagon’s modernization accounts — more than $700 billion over 10 years in new spending on procurement, research and development — has resulted in relatively modest gains in actual military capability,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an address last week.
He called that outcome both “vexing and disturbing.” Some might find the relentless focus on cutting benefits for vulnerable Americans "vexing and disturbing" in light of this profligate spending. Budgets, after all, are a reflection of our priorities.
Toward that end, let's put these numbers in perspective by looking at some of the other things we might be doing with those dollars. Because a buck spent on guns is one less for butter.
1. Post-9/11 Defense Hikes Equal Five Times the “Medicare Gap”
Economist Dean Baker notes that “the projections in the Medicare Trustees report, as well as the CBO baseline budget, show that the program faces a relatively modest long-term shortfall.” The amount of money needed to balance the program's finances over its 75-year horizon, he adds, “is less than 0.3 percent of GDP, approximately one-fifth of the increase in the rate annual defense spending between 2000 and 2011.”
2. Afghanistan Costs Alone Could Pay for 15.6 Years of Head Start
Head Start provides education, health, nutrition, and parenting services to low-income children and their families. It's an incredibly successful, effective and popular program, but there are only 900,000 places in the program for more than 2.5 million eligible kids. According to the National Priorities Project, what we've spent on the Afghanistan war so far could fund Head Start for all eligible children for the next 15.6 years.
3. Covering the Uninsured
A 2007 study conducted by researchers at Harvard University estimated that 45,000 people die every year in the United States from problems associated with lack of coverage. The study found that “uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts,” even “after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health.”
According to NPP's analysis, the costs of the Afghanistan conflict alone could cover every uninsured American for 1.7 years.
4. Closing State Budget Gaps
Forty-six states face budget shortfalls in this fiscal year, totaling $130 billion nationwide. The supplemental requests for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan this year add up to $170 billion – that doesn't include the Pentagon's base budget, nukes or Homeland Security.
5. Iraq, Just in 2011
Iraq is still a bloody mess, with an insurgency still underway. But our politicians have declared vistory and the media have largely moved on. That doesn't mean we won't spend almost $50 billion on those "non-combat troops" which remain, however. What else could we do with that kind of scratch if we just brought them home? NPP tells us it would buy:
24.3 million children receiving low-income health care for one year, OR
726,044 elementary school teachers for one year, OR
829,946 firefighters for one year, OR
6.2 million Head Start slots for children for one year, OR
10.7 million households with renewable electricity -- solar photovoltaic for one year, OR
28.6 million households with renewable electricity-wind power for one year, OR
6.1 million military veterans receiving VA medical care for one year, OR
9.8 million people receiving low-income health care for one year, OR
718,208 police or sheriff's patrol officers for one year, OR
6.0 million scholarships for university students for one year, OR
8.5 million students receiving Pell grants of $5,550
The Big Picture
It's a tragic irony that so much of the discussion surrounding the public debt centers on “entitlements” like Social Security (which hasn't added a penny to the national debt) when we're still paying for Korea and Vietnam and Grenada and Panama and the first Gulf War and Somalia and the Balkans and on and on.
Estimates of just how much of our national debt payments are from past military spending vary wildly. In 2007, economist Robert Higgs calculated it like this:
I added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year's ratio of narrowly defined national security spending--military, veterans, and international affairs--to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 91.2 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2006. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government's net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending.
When Higgs did that analysis four years ago, he came up with a figure of $206.7 billion just in interest payments on our past military adventures.
http://www.alternet.org/story/151119/
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Budget deficit, huh? BS. This is what has to be cut. What cons are doing is using phiony numbers as an excuse to kill programs they don't want.
Be informed.
www.ProtectOurElections.org Calls for Investigations Into Justice Thomas in Light of
Disclosures
New Information Reveals Thomas Invested In Lobbying Firm Tied To Tea Party and Engaged In "Judicial Insider Trading" To Enrich His Wife.
WASHINGTON, June 1, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- ProtectOurElections.org, a campaign finance watchdog, has asked the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas for financial and judicial corruption partly based on the Justice's newest financial disclosures.
First, the organization alleges, Justice Thomas falsified 20 years of judicial financial disclosure forms by denying that his wife had income sources; second, he engaged in judicial corruption by receiving $100,000 in support from Citizens United during his nomination and then ruling in favor of Citizens United in 2010 without disclosing that fact or disqualifying himself; and third, he apparently conspired with his wife in a form of "judicial insider trading" by providing her with information about the result of the Court's decision in Citizens United prior to its issuance, which she then used to launch a new company to take financial advantage of that decision to benefit her and her husband.
On Friday, May 27, 2011, Clarence Thomas' 2010 Financial Disclosure Forms were released showing that he had invested thousands of dollars in Liberty Consulting Inc. a lobbying and consulting firm founded by his wife to cater to the "tea party." The disclosure also revealed that his wife received "salary and benefits" from Liberty Consulting and Liberty Central.
Today, ProtectOurElections.org is calling on the DOJ's Public Integrity Section and the FBI to consider this new information in their investigation of Justice Thomas and his wife.
"Justice Thomas' newest disclosures provide powerful evidence that he engaged in official corruption by investing in Liberty Consulting and by conspiring with his wife to enrich themselves from the Citizens United decision through Liberty Consulting and Liberty Central," said ProtectOurElections.org attorney and spokesman Kevin Zeese. "As we have previously pointed out, Liberty Consulting and Liberty Central Justice are linked and appear to be AstroTurf scams meant to take advantage of the Citizens United decision and defraud donors. Now, it is clear that Justice Thomas invested in Liberty Consulting, which was founded by his wife shortly after she was forced by scandal to resign from Liberty Central."
A few days after the release of our February 8, 2011 Liberty Consulting expose' on YouTube, the website was deleted from the Internet and it remains offline today. This raises more questions about its legitimacy.
In its May 22, 2011 letter to the FBI, ProtectOurElections.org asked the agency to investigate the timing of the founding of Liberty Central because it appears to be a case of judicial insider trading by the Thomas family to enrich themselves through the Citizens United decision. Now, the ProtectOurElections.org is calling on the FBI to also investigate Liberty Consulting since it appears that Justice Thomas and his wife created the company to raise funds and pay Mrs. Thomas a salary and benefits, and then shut the doors with no explanation or accounting of the budget.
Zeese continued, "This entire affair has all the appearances of corruption and cover up. Only a full scale federal investigation will uncover the facts."
Timeline:
Sept 9, 2009: Citizens United argued.
Nov 6, 2009: Virginia Thomas launches her new Liberty Central 501(c)(4) organization, which raises 550K in 2009.
Jan 21, 2010: Citizens United decided.
Virginia Thomas announces that Liberty Central would "accept donations from various sources — including corporations — as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court."
November 14, 2010: Liberty Central announces that Virginia Thomas would be leaving the organization.
November 16, 2010: Liberty Consulting incorporated in the state of Virginia.
February 4, 2011: Politico reports that Virginia Thomas had launched Liberty Consulting.
February 8, 2011: ProtectOurElections.org releases its expose of Liberty Consulting
February 12, 2011: Liberty Consulting website is deleted
February 23, 2011: ProtectOurElections.org files a formal bar complaint against Clarence Thomas requesting that he be disbarred on various grounds.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...122936083.html
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Another conservative lying crook - and a Supreme Court Justice! Repulsive cretins.
GOP Obstructionism Reaches New Heights
On May 19th, Senate Republicans successfully filibustered the nomination of Goodwin Liu for the Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. Under the deal reached by the “Gang of 14” in 2005, senators agreed not to filibuster judicial nominees except under “extraordinary circumstances.” Republicans used that exemption to block Liu’s nomination, even though the Berkeley law professor is widely regarded as one of the sharpest constitutional scholars in the country, earned praise from conservatives like Ken Starr and John Yoo, and was named “unanimously well-qualified,” by the American Bar Association.
The very Republican senators who filibustered Liu’s nomination once decried the tactic. “I would never filibuster any President’s judicial nominee, period,” said Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) in 2005. But under the Obama Administration, Alexander and his ilk have had a change of heart. Their level of obstructionism keeps reaching new heights.
According to a report [pdf] from the Alliance for Justice:
Of the 105 nominations submitted by President Obama during the first two years of his term, only 62—2 Supreme Court justices, plus 16 courts of appeals and 44 district court judges—were confirmed. That is the smallest percentage of judicial confirmations over the first two years of any presidency in American history.
Judicial vacancies increased from 55 to 97 during President Obama’s first two years, whereas under both President’s Bush and Clinton, vacancies declined.
Senate Republicans used every parliamentary tool they could to obstruct and delay President Obama’s nominees, including placing secret holds on each judicial nominee who reached the Senate floor, even those that had the support of Republican home-state senators. They also denied votes on 13 nominees at the end of the 111th Congress who received no Republican opposition in committee.
Today 53 Obama judicial nominees still have yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Of the 1132 executive and judicial branch nominations submitted to the Senate by President Obama, 223 nominees have yet to receive a vote on the Senate floor, according to White House data. That means that nearly 20 percent of Obama nominees have been blocked by Senate Republicans.
In response to this obstruction, Obama has filled 28 vacant positions via recess appointments. President Bush, in contrast, made 171 recess appointments during his presidency, including John Bolton for UN ambassador and two controversial judicial nominations, Charles Pickering and William Pryor, to the US Court of Appeals. To catch up with Bush, Obama would have to make roughly twenty-eight recess appointment per year until the end of his presidency, assuming he wins a second term and governs for eight years.
To fill these vacancies, the Obama administration must move aggressively to challenge GOP obstructionism, which is something they've been slow to do. According to a new Alliance for Justice report [pdf] on judicial nominations in the 112th Congress:
President Obama still badly trails his two predecessors in terms of nominations. At the end of the 111th Congress, the President was 27 nominations behind President Bush and 37 nominations behind President Clinton at a similar point in their presidencies, and there were enough vacancies open for him to keep pace with either of them. Instead of catching up, President Obama has slipped further behind President Bush (now 51 nominations behind), and has barely made a dent in the gap with President Clinton (now 34 nominations behind), at the comparable point in their presidencies.
Yet Republicans, in another stunning act of hypocrisy, are determined not to let Obama make any recess appointments for the foreseeable future. The Senate stayed in pro-forma session over the Memorial Day break, instead of adjourning for its usual recess, in part to prevent Obama from appointing Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A dozen Senate Republicans have asked House Speaker John Boehner “to try to block President Obama from making recess appointments for the remainder of his presidency,” according to Politico.
At the beginning of the 112th Congress, a trio of Senate Democrats—Tom Harkin, Jeff Merkley and Tom Udall—tried to reform the Senate rules to prevent such rampant abuse of the filibuster and nomination process. But they were stymied by the leadership of both parties, who made sure the new rules did not pass. Sitting side-by-side at the State of the Union evidently took precedence. As a result, the absurd dysfunction of the contemporary US Senate continues unabated.
http://www.elabs10.com/c.html?rtr=on...dhxp,j980,gjd0
The Wild War to Protect Bluefin Tuna In Libyan Waters, and Obama's Troubling Role
The waters off Libya are a NATO no-fly zone, which is good news to poachers: No inspectors. No surveillance.
A war is raging in Libya, but it's not the one in the news.
Its battles are set in the dazzling Mediterranean offshore. Its warriors are foreign, their motives mostly mercenary.
Their casualties? Atlantic bluefin tuna. Although it's not an officially endangered species — with help from the Obama administration — overfishing has reduced bluefin populations by 80 percent since 1970. A single bluefin typically sells for $75,000, and that's what will happen to those caught off Libya, unless Captain Paul Watson, armed with international law and big serrated knives, wins this war.
Two ships from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a nonprofit Watson founded in 1978, nine years after cofounding Greenpeace, are now speeding toward Libyan seas. French, Spanish, German, Italian and Maltese poachers ply these waters with impunity, although the EU has outlawed all fishing here due to Libya's civil war. It's a NATO no-fly zone, which is good news to poachers: No inspectors. No surveillance.
Except, that is, for the Sea Shepherd's 60-foot helicopter-mounted flagship Steve Irwin and its small, swift scout vessel.
"Any boat we find will be an illegal boat," warns Watson, who says he liberated 800 tuna off Libya last year.
Bluefin are not killed upon being caught, but hauled live in huge underwater nets to shore stations "where they can be fattened up" like feedlot steers, Watson explains. Sea Shepherd divers slit those nets with knives.
It's the latest in a long series of rip-roaring and highly controversial rescue missions involving blades and ballistics, fire and ice, stink-bombs and blood. Sea Shepherd vessels ram Japanese whalers, get rammed back, and rock wildly under water-cannon fire on Animal Planet's Whale Wars and in Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist, a new documentary directed by SSCS veteran Peter Brown.
Sea Shepherd crews have scuttled — that is, sunk — at least 10 whaling vessels. Sea Shepherd ships ram whalers, foul their propellers, intercept their harpoons, block their slipways to prevent loading, and barrage them with bottles of foul-smelling butyric acid. In return, Sea Shepherd vessels have been rammed, burned, flash-grenaded, fired upon, and depth-charged — including by a Norwegian naval vessel.
Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist calls Sea Shepherd a "vigilante organization," its members "a band of pirates" and "the world's most wanted environmental heroes." Watson's many honors include the Amazon Peace Prize and inclusion among the Guardian's "50 People Who Could Save the Planet." He has been beaten, suffocated, immersed in icy seas, and even shot in the chest by opponents, he says. He's been arrested in many countries and charged with many crimes, including attempted murder, but never convicted.
"We don't do anything illegal. We target illegal operations. Everybody's so concerned about private property. They think private property is sacred." But if that private property is being used to flout conservation codes, all deals are apparently off.
"We're an interventionist organization fighting against poaching on the high seas."
Recently, Watson was appalled to learn — from Wikileaks, of all places — that Barack Obama colluded with the Japanese government to disempower the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
In a confidential November 2009 cable Wikileaks released this year, the Japanese government asked the US government to revoke SSCS' tax-exempt status. This cable cited the head of Japan's fisheries agency as saying that US action against SSCS would "positively influence Japan's negotiating position" regarding future negotiations over the number of whales legally killed every year. Monica Medina, the Obama administration's representative to the International Whaling Commission, replied promptly that "the USG" — United States government — "can demonstrate the group does not deserve tax exempt status based on their aggressive and harmful actions."
It's illegal for the US to use the IRS as a weapon against an organization in collusion with a foreign government," says Watson, whose group has maintained tax-exempt status since 1981. "Obama was making secret deals with Japan. No other president has done this. Every president since Reagan has stood fast on the whaling issue. This is the first administration to swerve. This president has reneged on every offer he ever made for us. I voted for him. That's what really gets me," says Watson, who was a Green Party candidate in Vancouver's 1995 mayoral race.
After last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Watson "wanted to go to the gulf with a boat and clean animals. We were told, 'If you so much as touch an animal that's covered with oil, you'll go to jail.' So we couldn't rescue a single animal, because BP owns Obama. He's an industry guy."
On May 27 of this year, the Obama administration officially declined to grant endangered species status to the Atlantic bluefin.
"At least Republicans are honest," Watson says.
So he battles for tuna, cod, salmon, dolphins and the heavily overfished Chilean seabass, which Watson insists cannot be caught sustainably, no matter what their packaging says at Whole Foods. (He says the word "sustainable" is a euphemism for "business as usual.") He battles for sea cucumbers, whose population has been decimated in the breathtakingly beautiful, mercilessly poached South Pacific. He fights for sharks, as detailed in the gory 2006 documentary Sharkwater. He fights for fur seals, although "I think we won this one. We got the EU to ban seal pelts. Seal pelts are now worthless in Europe."
And because he fights for whales, "Japan treats Sea Shepherd like we're a nation they're at war with. It's sheer arrogance. They think nobody can tell them what to do."
In 2009, SSCS insiders went undercover at a trendy California sushi restaurant they'd heard served whale to trusted customers. Sneaked-out samples were DNA-identified as whale. The restaurant closed, its owner and chef slammed with federal charges. Last week, a Los Angeles seafood dealer pled guilty to providing the meat.
"But we know there's still a large distribution in whale meat among sushi restaurants in America," Watson says.
"A small group of people will pay a lot of money to eat endangered species. There's a special thrill in ordering something it's a federal crime to eat."
That thrill is alive and well. Mitsubishi Corporation hoards massive quantities of frozen bluefin, hoping to cash in on the species' collapse.
"Mitsubishi has a five-year supply of bluefin," Watson explains. "They'd like to get a ten-year supply, because diminishment translates to scarcity and scarcity translates to higher prices. If they drive the bluefin into extinction, we're looking at a million-dollar fish. So there's no interest in conserving them.
"I call it the economy of extinction."
Whale Wars' fourth season, which starts this Friday, "will hopefully be our last, because we've succeeded in driving the Japanese whaling fleet out of the Southern Ocean. They can move, but they know we will find them."
So it's on to Libya — and then the Faroe Islands, a North Sea Danish protectorate where thousands of pilot whales are slaughtered every year for sport. In a tradition known as "the Grind," massive quantities of whales — entire pods at a time — are corraled into shallow bays, gaffed, slashed, and slain. The sea turns Clamato-red. The crowds rejoice.
"It's barbaric, a big orgy of slaughter. We've got pictures of people ripping fetuses out of pregnant females for fun."
Five-time Faroese prime minister Atli Dam told Watson "that it's part of their culture and that God gave this to them. Well, you can't use culture as a justification for destroying the planet."
Last fall, he placed a dead baby pilot whale before the Danish Embassy in Paris. The carcass lay in a coffin, atop a European Union flag. Noting that Norway and Iceland can't join the EU because both kill whales, yet the Faroes enjoy EU benefits through Danish subsidies, Watson demanded that Denmark stop supporting the Faroes until they outlaw the Grind.
"We speak the one language everyone understands: economics," Watson says. "We don't try appealing to these people's morals or ethics, because I don't believe they have any."
http://act.alternet.org/go/7824?akid...018.d7dP6b&t=2
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Another example of corporate greed. (Mitsubishi)
And human indifference to animal suffering.
Animals are nicer than humans.
Notice the deal-making I put in bold. That's the way the world works, folks. Nothing is as it seems, which is why I post some of this information.
Be informed.
With No Middle Class Left, Ad Age Says Top 10% Dominates Purchasing Power
Wow. Via Wonkette, here's a report that's provides capitalism based proof of what we at AlterNet have been saying for a long time about the eroding middle class.
It's a report from Ad Age magazine declaring the "era of mass affluence" to be "over" and pinpointing the purchasing power of the tippy-top of the class pyramid--leaving the rest of us out in the cold.
The report,as the below article from "Too Much" magazine notes, is simply "following the money:"
The Mad Men 1960s America — where average families dominated the consumer market — has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on — to where the money sits. And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”
Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”
The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.
“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”
The story goes on to note that most Americans aren't aware of this growing inequality and still believe in an ideal that remains "egalitarian," a society in which everyone has a shot at attaining a level of luxury and spending power to respond to those ads. But in reality, statistically speaking, we remain very much locked into our stark class divide.
http://act.alternet.org/go/7845?akid...018.kqWxYk&t=6
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Holy Shit!!! Ad Age, an venerable organization devoted to analyzing ways corporations can make money (and helping them do it) says what we have been posting here for some time.
It's mostly over for everyone except the wealthy.
Now this has to be a liberal plot. Liberals have undoubtedly paid off THOUSANDS of people, like academics, organizations, newspapers, and others to say that the middle class is dying. Wow. Liberals are powerful, huh? Impressive!
Oh wait, some say it's not a problem. The wealthy deserve whatever they have; they should have even more; taxes are still too high; government should leave them alone; after all, they are BETTER than everyone else.
Okay - never mind.
Chris Christie: $6,000 a year is too much income to qualify for Medicaid
Let them eat cake."
(Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)
The great white hope of the Iowa Republican party, Governor Chris Cristie of New Jersey, has recently made only bad news for himself: his vicious attacks on public school teachers and other public employees, turning away federal dollars for a critical public transportation program, his propensity for living high on the hog at government expense. All of this has sent his approvals into the tank. His latest isn't going to help him reshape his image as a callous lout sponging off the misery of others. Literally.
Despite recent polls that show Americans are just as protective of Medicaid as they are of Medicare, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) is trying to gut the popular program in his state and prevent 23,000 people from receiving benefits. Christie has proposed cutting Medicaid eligibility to absurdly low levels: from the current maximum income of $24,645 to $5,317 a year for a family of three. Apparently, the governor believes a family of three making $6,000 a year is simply too rich to receive Medicaid. The New Jersey press has reported that the main effect of his proposal would be to slash help for the working poor, tearing a huge hole in the state’s social safety net:
Adults in a family of three that makes as little as $103 a week would earn too much to qualify for health care provided by Medicaid under a sharply curtailed program Gov. Chris Christie wants the federal government to approve this year, according to state officials and advocates briefed on the proposal.[...] The Christie administration is expected to propose cutting the maximum income level of Medicaid from $24,645 to $5,317 a year for a family of three [...“That is about a third of the poverty level,” Castro said. “That means that an uninsured parent working full time at a minimum-wage job wouldn’t be eligible. … A parent who works half-time for minimum wage wouldn’t even qualify.
How do you even parody that level of cruelty? And this is the guy many Republicans see as their 2012 savior?
That's Republican family values, for you.
http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/8DsC_FA2Vsg/-Chris-Christie:-$6,000-a-year-is-too-much-income-to-qualify-for-Medicaid
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Think about this for a minute.
Romney is being pilloried by conservatives for helping people in Massachusetts by enabling healthcare for them.
This a-hole (Christie) is being lauded for his relentless attacks on the needy. As are many other conservative governors.
What the hell is wrong with this picture? Helping people makes you a BAD guy. Are they trying to show who is the nastiest a-hole to the needy? That makes you a winner? WTF?
This is who they are!!!!!!!!
Walker's so "pro-life" he doesn't care if 7,000 poor men in Wisconsin die of
hepatitis C or HIV.
Greg Hartman was waiting tables to support himself through college in the fall of 2010 when his hometown of Manitowoc, Wisc., experienced an outbreak of HIV and the hepatitis C virus. After finding out his best friend had been infected with hepatitis, the uninsured 22-year-old decided he needed to get checked out as well -- but the tests were going to cost him more than $300 out of pocket.
"There's no way I could have afforded it on my own," said Hartman, who brings in only $150 to $200 a week from his restaurant job.
Hartman said he went to the University of Wisconsin's campus health care center and applied for BadgerCare -- the state's Medicaid-funded family planning program, which reimburses low-income men and women for sexually transmitted disease testing, birth control services, cancer screenings and other preventative reproductive care. Through BadgerCare, Hartman was able to afford to get tested for both HIV and hepatitis C -- he tested positive for the latter.
"If I didn't qualify for BadgerCare, I would have just said '**** it' and not gone into the clinic in the first place," he told HuffPost. "I would never have known I had hepatitis."
Although the BadgerCare family planning program doesn’t cover Hartman's treatment, he was able to afford two different HIV tests, a liver panel and potentially life-saving hepatitis tests through the subsidized program.
But the nearly 7,000 other low-income Wisconsin men who use BadgerCare may soon be out of luck. Scott Walker, the state's Republican governor, has proposed eliminating men entirely from the program in his latest budget bill. That move could cost Wisconsin all of its federal family planning funds, policy experts warn.
Wisconsin's Joint Finance Committee is currently finalizing the language of the bill. In addition to cutting men from BadgerCare, it also includes provisions that increase the age restrictions for BadgerCare eligibility, require parental consent for all patients under 18 years old, reduce the eligibility limit down to 200 percent of the federal poverty line and cut more than $1 million dollars in state funds to Planned Parenthood.
The governor's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Pro-Life Wisconsin -- an anti-abortion advocacy group that officially endorsed Walker -- told HuffPost it supports his move to cut men from the BadgerCare family planning program. The group believes that providing men with condoms, testing and sexual counseling doesn't really save the state any money.
"The assumption is that, if you get women on birth control, that would reduce BadgerCare-funded births and save the state money," said Matt Sande, legislative director for Pro-Life Wisconsin. "But how much are men contributing to those purported cost savings? Less than 7,000 men use the program, compared to 50,000 total patients. You're looking at a small percentage of the overall population, so it just seemed to a Republican legislator to be a gratuitous add-on that is not saving the state anything."
Abortion rights advocates in Wisconsin are convinced that Walker and the GOP lawmakers are just looking for underhanded, politically acceptable ways to change the BadgerCare program so significantly that the U.S. government is forced to cut all federal family planning funding to the state.
"Taking men out of the program not only serves to remove critical health care for men, but it puts us out of compliance with our agreement with the federal government and puts the entire BadgerCare program at risk," said Tanya Atkinson, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Wisconsin. "It's a politically palatable way of systematically dismantling Wisconsin's family planning program."
Wisconsin's Department of Health Services confirmed that it cannot remove men from Medicaid eligibility without applying for a waiver from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which would then have to determine whether the state can continue to receive federal funding at all based on the new terms of its family planning program.
BadgerCare currently serves about 57,600 low-income Wisconsinites, according to Planned Parenthood, and the state's health department estimates that it prevented 11,064 unplanned pregnancies in 2008. Family planning advocates argue that, if patients did not have access to preventive care, Wisconsin would see an increase in unintended pregnancies, the spread of STDs and a rise in undetected and untreated cervical and breast cancer cases -- all of which would then cost the state millions of dollars in future medical costs.
But Pro-Life Wisconsin's Sande argues that BadgerCare services actually increase the rate of unintended pregnancies by encouraging teens to have sex.
"Medicaid is a state program providing free state-funded birth control and condoms to 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds, and that's a violation of parental rights," he said. "We oppose the BadgerCare program for that reason, and also because of the fact that government-funded birth control increases pregnancies and promotes promiscuity -- it has the opposite of its intended effect."
While the language of the budget bill has not been finalized, Planned Parenthood said it anticipates that all the pro-life, anti-family-planning provisions in the Wisconsin budget will pass in the State Assembly.
Hartman, who is waiting for his next free test to determine which strain of hepatitis C he has, said if the state government kicks him out of BadgerCare, he is going to start looking for a job in Sweden.
"I'm trying to leave the country because I can't afford to live here," he said. "It's like they don't care about the health of low-income men, or they don't care if we die. I don't know what they are thinking, but it feels like an attack."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_870430.html
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Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Just fkng conservatives doing what they do a million times each day.
Republicans Demand Censorship of Progressive Ad Fighting Their Medicare-Destroying
Plan.
Republicans may have passed a plan to end Medicare and replace it with vouchers for private insurance, but apparently they don't want their political opponents to be able to tell anybody about it:
The battle over whether it’s true that the Republican plan would “end Medicare” is about to play out in a critical way in New Hampshire.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.
You can watch the ad, (below) which is being aired by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, at the top of this post, but the thing that has got Republicans all hot and bothered is the ad's assertion that the GOP voted to end Medicare. They say they want television stations to censor the ad because they don't believe their proposal would completely end Medicare...it would only end Medicare as we know it. (This is the same stupid argument Politifact made.)
According to the GOP's logic, if they had proposed eliminating the fire department and replaced it with a program giving you vouchers to purchase firefighting services from a private company, it would unfair to say they had proposed getting rid of the fire department. As if that weren't crazy enough, they want television broadcasters to censor anyone who disagrees with them.
You really couldn't picture a more perfect example of the GOP's hypocrisy on freedom of speech: the party that claims the U.S. Constitution gives corporations political rights also believes those very same corporations should censor grassroots political activists.
http://act.alternet.org/go/7908?akid...018.X9tgoO&t=5
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Yep. Trying to stop an ad that they don't like. What does that tell you about them?
Homeland Security Department curtails home-grown terror analysis
The Department of Homeland Security has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism, according to current and former department officials, even though law enforcement and civil rights experts have warned of rising extremist threats.
The department has cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous state and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups, the officials and others said.
The decision to reduce the department’s role was provoked by conservative criticism of an intelligence report on “Rightwing Extremism” issued four months into the Obama administration, the officials said. The report warned that the poor economy and Obama’s election could stir “violent radicalization,” but it was pilloried as an attack on conservative ideologies, including opponents of abortion and immigration.
In the two years since, the officials said, the analytical unit that produced that report has been effectively eviscerated. Much of its work — including a digest of domestic terror incidents and the distribution of definitions for terms such as “white supremacist” and “Christian Identity” — has been blocked.
Multiple current and former law enforcement officials who have regularly viewed DHS analyses said the department had not reported in depth on any domestic extremist groups since 2009.
“Strategic bulletins have been minimal, since that incident,” said Mike Sena, an intelligence official in California who presides over the National Fusion Center Association, a group of 72 federally chartered institutions in which state, local and federal officials share sensitive information. “Having analytical staff, to educate line officers on the extremists, is critical.…This is definitely one area” where more effort is warranted by DHS.
Similar frustration was expressed in interviews with current and former officials at fusion centers in Missouri, Virginia and Tennessee. Daryl Johnson, formerly the senior domestic terrorism analyst at DHS and a principal author of the disputed report, confirmed in an interview that he left in frustration last year after his office was “gutted” in response to complaints.
“Other reports written by DHS about Muslim extremists … got through without any major problems,” Johnson said. “Ours went through endless reviews and edits, and nothing came out.”
The threat of Islamic-related terrorism in the United States has by all accounts captured the most attention and resources at DHS since it was formed in 2002. But a study conducted for the department last October concluded that a majority of the 86 major foiled and executed terrorist plots in the United States from 1999 to 2009 were unrelated to al-Qaeda and allied movements.
“Do not overlook other types of terrorist groups,” the report warned, noting that five purely domestic groups had considered using weapons of mass destruction in that period. Similar warnings have been issued by the two principal non-government groups that track domestic terrorism: the New York-based Anti-Defamation League and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center.
An annual tally by the latter group of what it calls “Terror From the Right” listed 13 major incidents and arrests last year, nearly double the annual number in previous years; the group also reported the number of hate groups had topped 1,000 in 2010, for the first time in at least two decades.
Citing the complaints that Johnson first made in an SPLC quarterly, the group’s president, J. Richard Cohen, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week requesting a reassessment of resources devoted to “the threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism."
Authorities this year have arrested neo-Nazis who allegedly planted a bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane, Wash.; arrested six members of an Alaska militia who allegedly plotted to kill state troopers; arrested a Wisconsin man for planning to kill Planned Parenthood workers; and on May 29 arrested a Florida man who claimed to be part of the burgeoning “sovereign citizen movement” after he sprayed a market with AK-47 fire.
A spokesman for DHS, Adam Fetcher, declined to say if the department agrees that the threat of domestically inspired terrorism is increasing or how many analysts are presently assigned to the issue, calling that a sensitive intelligence matter. But he said the evolving risk of group or individual violence is “reflected in our briefings and products over the past year.”
A senior department official provided by Fetcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence practices, confirmed that “the number of analysts on a daily basis has decreased somewhat, compared to what it was two years ago.” But the official disputed claims by several current and former DHS officials that only two analysts — including one who is a contract employee — now study the issue full-time.
DHS’s caution or avoidance, as its critics claim, may partly stem from worries that aggressive intelligence operations could be seen as civil liberties violations. A DHS official explained that “unlike international terrorism, there are no designated domestic terrorist groups. Subsequently, all the legal actions of an identified extremist group leading up to an act of violence are constitutionally protected and not reported on by DHS.”
The official added that the FBI — not DHS — is “the primary lead for the federal government” on domestic terrorism. But Johnson, the former DHS analyst, said that if the FBI is the only agency to disseminate detailed reports on domestic extremist groups, “you’ve lost a separate set of eyes that could be looking at this before it develops into a criminal matter.”
When the DHS report on “rightwing extremism” was leaked, Napolitano — who Johnson and other officials say had requested the report and heard a briefing in advance on its conclusions — initially defended it, saying “we must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown.”
But after 20 conservative groups sponsored ads calling for Napolitano’s ouster, she said it was disseminated without regular review, and apologized to the American Legion for its warning that veterans could be targeted by militias for recruitment.
The DHS civil rights office subsequently was granted veto rights over all DHS reports on domestic terrorists, Johnson said.
Johnson and others said intelligence reports on the resurgence of militia groups in Michigan and Kentucky are among those being withheld by the agency, which he said was “screening for politically sensitive phrases or topics that might be objectionable to certain groups.”
Multiple briefings for state and local officials on extremist groups such as the sovereign citizens movement — composed of those who reject American legal supremacy — were also blocked, according to internal DHS messages.
David Hawtin, who retired last month as a domestic terrorism analyst at the Tennessee Fusion Center, said “the pendulum has swung to a point where we are missing nodes of connection because there is no obvious crime on the front end.”
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/di...iDTcoleC0EZiTT
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You want the truth. WELL YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
We can’t let this information about White-Supremacists, Nazis and religious fanatics get any publicity. It will make conservatives look very bad.
These groups are totally composed of our supporters. Not a liberal in any of them. How would that look?
This has to be controlled. Squashed.
But shouldn’t the public be made aware?
Screw them. Protecting our image is more important than ANYTHING!
