Thursday, October 31, 2013
North Dakota Lawmakers Want To Make All Oil Spills Public
North Dakota Lawmakers Want To Make All Oil Spills Public: Right now, the state is under no obligation to report spills to the public. North Dakota Democrats want to change that.
The Deficit Is Less Than Half What It Was In 2009
The Deficit Is Less Than Half What It Was In 2009: The deficit fell below $1 trillion for the first time in five years.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Finally Some Action Against Corrupt SCOTUS Justices!
Democrats Introduce Bill that Could Lead to Impeachment for Justices Thomas and Scalia
Saturday, August, 3rd, 2013, 3:11 pm Visited 26,903 times
On Thursday, a group of Democratic lawmakers proposed a law to establish a Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court.
It’s surely to have Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Scalia quaking in their Tea Party boots because it would mean they would actually have to be independent of political and other influences. They would also have to have the appearance of independence. They would have to stay away from political activity. That part would be really hard.
As it stands, this law would help guarantee that Supreme Court Justices are held to the same ethical standards we expect of other judges.
Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, joined by Senators Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced the bill. It would make ethics mandatory, rather than an option left to the discretion of Justices like Thomas and Scalia. It would mean all the Justices would have to live by the sort of ethical standards that Justice Kagan applied when she recused herself from Arizona’s ”papers please” law because she was Solicitor General at the time the Federal government filed suit. She did the same thing in 24 other cases on the same grounds.
As Senator Blumenthal said:
This legislation’s goal is to preserve public trust and confidence – the lifeblood of the Supreme Court – after claims of questionable conduct by some Justices, No Justice, any more than a judge, should advance a partisan cause or sit on a case involving a personal friend or interest. There is no persuasive reason in law or logic why Supreme Court Justices should not be held to the same high standard as other federal judges.The proposed law holds the Supreme Court to the same standards required of judges in the federal court system. Currently, Justices on the Supreme Court decide for themselves if they should recuse themselves from cases in which they may have a personal stake or in Thomas’ case, his wife has a political or financial stake as a holy roller in the Tea Party.Justices Thomas and Scalia who attended a few partisan fundraisers also ruled in favor of the conservatives raising questions about their independence. This was especially true in Citizens United because that ruling undid decades of established law.
Both of these actions violate the code of conduct already in place for Federal court judges.
We saw how well leaving Supreme court Justices to their own devices worked out when Justice Thomas ruled on the Affordable Care act, while his wife Ginni was paid to lobby against the law. The fact that Thomas “forgot” , to disclose Ginni’s income from lobbying against healthcare – even after she supposedly ceased lobbying against healthcare doesn’t help. That would have been more than just an oops moment had there been a code of conduct for the Supreme Court. Thomas’ conflict of interest problmes are not restricted to benefits to Ginni.
Questions about Thomas and Scalia’s judicial independence are nothing new. We saw it when both Supreme Court Justices attended a Koch Brothers fundraiser in 2010 and the Federalist Society fundraiser they attended in 2011, Thomas’ failure to disclose the sources Ginni’s income for six years also came out in 2011. A code of ethics for the Supreme Court is a bill whose time came a few years ago and has increasing importance given Ginni Thomas’s involvement with Groundswell.
As noted by Media Matters,
The recent Groundswell memoranda obtained by David Corn of Mother Jones reveal that these conflicts are getting worse.Had Federal Court judges been as ethically challenged as Clarence Thomas, they would have been forced to resign. Considering that the Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, it seems the bar for ethical standards should be the same as those for lower courts – if not higher.
Ginni Thomas was the founder and leader of Liberty Central, a political nonprofit “dedicated to opposing what she characterizes as the leftist ‘tyranny’ of President Obama and Democrats in Congress.” The group was funded by Harlan Crow, frequent patron of the Thomas’ projects and causes and a financial supporter of right-wing campaigns such as the “swift boat” attacks on then-presidential candidate John Kerry and the advertising push to confirm President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees. Crow also serves on the board of the American Enterprise Institute, whose Edward Blum brought the two most recent attacks on the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action before the Supreme Court. Justice Thomas favored Blum’s positions against progressive precedent on both civil rights issues.
If the Supreme Court had a code of conduct, Thomas would have had to recuse himself on several cases in which his wife’s high profile within the Tea Party would scream of bias. Had he failed to do so, there would be a legal basis with teeth to seek Thomas’ resignation. For Thomas and Scalia defenders tempted to question the constitutionality of holding Supreme Court Justices to ethics, Article 3 of the constitution says justices “shall hold their offices during good behaviour. If independence from pillow talk with a political lobbyist isn’t good behavior, I don’t know what is.
Let’s face it, if you are sleeping with someone within a political party whose agenda is to prevent certain classes of eligible voters from voting, the odds of forgetting that fact while considering the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act are zero – or at least it sure looks that way to any reasonable person. The same holds true when you at least look like you might be having pillow talk with someone with a political stake in the Defense of Marriage Act.
One can point to Justice Kagan’s ethical standards as proof that Supreme Court Justices can and do take principles like judicial independence and the appearance of it seriously. Then one is reminded of Justices Thomas and Scalia.
This law would address one of the many problems created by the sort of corruption that has become synonymous with the Republican Party and its puppet masters. But then, that would mean doing something constructive and it would also mean that the separation of powers are in fact separate, rather than subject to pillow talk between one Supreme Court Justice and one member of the Groundswell propaganda alliance.
Image Mother Jones
Democrats Introduce Bill that Could Lead to Impeachment for Justices Thomas and Scalia was written by Adalia Woodbury for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Sat, Aug 3rd, 2013 — All Rights Reserved
12-yr-old takes on NC Governor on voting rights | Story of America #102
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Bill Parscrell during hearing
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Strip Corporate Power From Our Democracy!
Published: Tuesday 29 October 2013
The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum.
Our Invisible Revolution
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny—as attempted by the book “Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA” and the websitePopular Resistance—is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case free market capitalism and globalization—that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman wrote. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try.
Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.
Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar “I-feel-your-pain” language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power.
The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement—are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.
“... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,” Berkman wrote in his essay. “Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had ‘outlived’ their ‘usefulness’ and therefore they ‘died.’ But how did they ‘outlive’ their ‘usefulness’? To whom were they useful, and how did they ‘die’? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions.”
This article was originally posted on Truthdig.
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Monday, October 28, 2013
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The Tea Party Demagouges
Bravo, Tea Party, Bulwark for Nonstop Demagogues
Yet let us dwell not in easy gloating that patriotic rightwingers didn’t just fail (though the sequester holds) but fell on their smug fat faces, triggering a deluge of disapproval. Instead, behold we see today’s exceptionalism by “true Americans,” with bragging rights unmatched by any other public entity. Who else would have traded mere gridlock (old stuff) for the drama of hostage-taking wherein the thugs, oddly enough, took themselves hostage? Now that’s news, if not humor, even in Washington.
Name another gang that so fluidly uncovers new heroes to replace fallen champions: like Halloween cemetery goblins, an inexhaustible parade of goons and buffoons marches on. Here finally is what the Tea Party does best: pinpointing pinheads of demagogic dogmatism, an army of toy Christian soldiers marching as to war, okay, the wrong time at the wrong time. No one, after all, is perfect, even God’s chosen.
Let us also celebrate, if only for the historic record, the staying power of this temper tantrum. What else caused gobsmacked pundits to scour history for kinship, whether Confederate crusaders for slavery, racists fuming over civil rights, Bible-thumpers furious at gay, minority and women’s right, or simply tin-ear cranks bemoaning Social Security and Medicare? This mayhem, alas, has various silver linings: the extended TP third finger offended both the Union majority and its own party leaders. Bring it on, tea baggers, the sacred gospel of leaping first and having your brains fall out.
Rightwing Messiah Catapult
Of course, success reflects how many swamps the Tea Party dips into, already recruiting Palin and Bachmann, or Trump and Herman Cain. And every one a bona fide know-nothing who instantly turned know-it-all, with unimpeachable skill-sets. True, no Texas yet has dislodged Ms. Palin as the least prepared, most bizarre national nominee ever from a major party. But not from lack of trying. At least Cruz won’t quit early: he’s having such fun discovering how his mischief gets him national coverage.
So far, Cruz falls short in turning his slapstick into Joe McCarthy rampages, in part because the Texan achieved in months what McCarthy took years to accomplish: severe Senate condemnation and national disgrace. However Cruz razzle-dazzled the House, his Senate career as power broker is over before it started, crash-landing after a single launch. His noble sacrifice managed, in fact, to combine three huge negatives without one offsetting positive: No! to government operation, No! to keeping our AAA credit, and No! to Obamacare, not so strangely more popular as a result. Three whiffs are a political strike-out, whatever the TP fundraising gains. That crippled maverick won’t hunt.
Further, if doomed shenanigans put House control at risk, or spur extremist challenges to incumbents, then establishment Rethugs will be forced to pony up unplanned millions for damage control – and that’s just to sustain the status quo. What if Cruz’ fiasco waylays needed funds away from winnable Senate battles? Like Palin, Cruz’ charisma is a double-edge sword: attracting media also means your demise maximizes damage to a fractured, leaderless party. Hammering wedges into already painful splits looks like a permanent minority tactic. Further, a tumult of House misrule not only jeopardizes the GOP majority but sets up what Democrats haven’t done since Truman: win three presidencies in a row, against all odds.
After all, the sweep of Tea Party failures grows by the week: this rump can’t govern, slurs good government, lies with abandon (with crude, instantly-checkable deceit!), won’t compromise with clear majorities, and glories in a Confederate-like, unchristian dives into racism laced with scorn for the downtrodden. Did I forget utter flops at fiscal management, failed foreign affairs support for military nightmares, bloated defense spending and unpopular surveillance of anything that moves. All dished out with the gravy of laughable conspiracy theories on Obama, the dead-end of Benghazi, and my favorite: the hoax of climate change that thunders nearer and threatens all of mankind.
Other than discredited non-ideas (trickle down, taxes are evil, government a menace, especially the EPA and the ACA), what will the TPGOP sell that hasn’t long passed its expiration date? Hatred of Obama willy-nilly fades when the next white candidate surfaces. What benefits acrue from rearguard defiance of gay rights, or women’s rights, or voting rights? Or talking up Romney-friendly tax folly that grows deficits then applied, absurdly, with TP bludgeoning of government when bills come due?
Finally, Cruz isn’t only the latest “phony,” in Catcher in the Rye terms: he’s already drawing unusual slap-downs, as when Harry Reid dismissed this “laughingstock.” Republican Peter King, among many other GOPers, is no less withering: “if you come up with a strategy that’s going to shut down the government of the United States, and you have no way of winning, you’re either a fraud or you’re totally incompetent,” King told CNN, “We are not going to allow Ted Cruz to hijack this party.”
Losing Hand, Bah!
On top of which, this one-horse pony will fall hard by refusing to admit defeat, nor learn from failure: “The American people rose up and spoke with an overwhelming voice,” he bellowed with no link to “outer” reality. Nor will Cruz prosper when all sorts of idiotic threats come forth, such as from the Values Voter Summit: “We’re nearing the edge of a cliff, and our window to turn things around, my friends, I don’t think it is long. I don’t think it is 10 years. We have a couple of years to turn the country around or we go off the cliff to oblivion.” Into oblivion is where Cruz is going headlong as a national leader.
Before oblivion, we shall all be saved, however, according to Cruz’ extremist evangelical pastor-father. That preacher humbly anointed his son the anointed one to redeem America. In his honor, let’s join in, with a stirring anthem in which holy warriors are permanent soldiers, for life is war. Not to worry: victory is assured for “at the sign of triumph” Satan’s host does flee, just like Cruz’ growing troops of enemies.
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe; forward into battle see his banners go! At the sign of triumph Satan's host doth flee;
on then, Christian soldiers, on to victory! Hell's foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
brothers, lift your voices, loud your anthems raise.
Published: Tuesday 22 October 2013
Only the hype of the free-market media keeps much of America believing that "winner-take-all" is preferable to working together as a community.
Public Beats Private: Six Reasons Why
Public systems, when sufficiently supported by taxes, work for everyone in a generally equitable manner. The following are six specific reasons why privatization simply doesn't work.
1. The Profit Motive Moves Most of the Money to the Top
The federal Medicare Administrator made $170,000 in 2010. The president of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas made over ten times as much in 2012. Stephen J. Hemsley, the CEO of United Health Group, made almost 300 times as much in one year, $48 million, most of it from company stock.
In part because of such inequities in compensation, our private health care system is the most expensive system in the developed world. The price of common surgeries is anywhere from three to ten times higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, Canada, France, or Germany. Two of the documented examples: an $8,000 special stress test for which Medicare would have paid $554; and a $60,000 gall bladder operation, for which a private insurance company was willing to pay $2,000.
Medicare, on the other hand, which is largely without the profit motive and the competing sources of billing, is efficiently run, for all eligible Americans. According to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance and other sources, medical administrative costs are much higher for private insurance than for Medicare.
But the privatizers keep encroaching on the public sector. Our government reimburses the CEOs of private contractors at a rate approximately double what we pay the President. Overall, we pay the corporate bosses over $7 billion a year.
Many Americans don't realize that the privatization of Social Security and Medicare would transfer much of our money to yet another group of CEOs.
2. Privatization Serves People with Money, the Public Sector Serves Everyone
A good example is the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which is legally required to serve every home in the country. Fedex and United Parcel Service (UPS) can't serve unprofitable locations. Yet the USPS is much cheaper for small packages. An online comparison revealed the following for the two-day shipment of a similarly-sized envelope to another state:
-- FedEx 2-Day $19.28
-- UPS, 2 Day $24.09
USPS is so inexpensive, in fact, that Fedex actually uses the U.S. Post Office for about 30 percent of its ground shipments.
Another example is education. A recent ProPublica report found that in the past twenty years four-year state colleges have been serving a diminishing portion of the country's lowest-income students. At the K-12 level, cost-saving business strategies apply to the privatization of our children's education. Charter schools are less likely to accept students with disabilities. Charter teachers have fewer years of experience and a higher turnover rate. Non-teacher positions have insufficient retirement plans and health insurance, and much lower pay.
3. Privatization Turns Essential Human Needs into Products
Big business would like to privatize our water. A Citigroup economist exulted, "Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals."
They want our federal land. Attempts at privatization were made by the Reagan administration in the 1980s and the Republican-controlled Congress in the 1990s. In 2006, President Bush proposed auctioning off 300,000 acres of national forest in 41 states. Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity was based in part on Republican Jason Chaffetz' "Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act of 2011," which would unload millions of acres of land in America's west.
They want our cities. A privatization expert told the Detroit Free Press that the real money is in urban assets with a "revenue stream." So Detroit's most valuable resource, its Water & Sewerage Department (DWSD), is the collateral for a loan of $350 million to pay off the banks handling the litigation. Bloomberg estimates a cost of almost half a billion dollars, in a city where homeowners can barely afford the water services.
And they want our bodies. One-fifth of the human genome is privately owned through patents. Strains of influenza and hepatitis have been claimed by corporate and university labs, and because of this researchers can't use the patented life forms to perform cancer research.
4. Public Systems Promote a Strong Middle Class
Part of free-market mythology is that public employees and union workers are greedy takers, enjoying benefits that average private sector workers are denied. But the facts show that government and union workers are not overpaid. According to the Census Bureau, state and local government employees make up 14.5% of the U.S. workforce and receive 14.3% of the total compensation. Union members make up about 12% of the workforce, but their total pay amounts to just 10% of adjusted gross income as reported to the IRS.
The average private sector worker makes about the same salary as a state or local government worker. But the median salary for U.S. workers, 83% of whom are in the private sector, was $18,000 less in 2009, at $26,261. Inequality is much more pervasive in the private sector.
5. The Private Sector Has Incentive To Fail, or No Incentive At All
The most obvious incentive to fail is in the private prison industry. One would think it a worthy goal to rehabilitate prisoners and gradually empty the jails. But business is too good. With each prisoner generating up to $40,000 a year in revenue, the number of prisoners in private facilities has increased from 1990 to 2009 by more than 1600%, from about 7,000 to over 125,000 inmates. Corrections Corporation of America recently offered to run the prison system in any state willing to guarantee that jails stay 90% full.
Nor do privatizers have incentive to maintain infrastructure David Cay Johnston describes the deteriorating state of America's structural foundation, with grids and pipelines neglected by monopolistic industries that cut costs rather than provide maintenance. Meanwhile, they achieve profit margins of over 50%, eight times the corporate average.
As for public safety, warning signs about unregulated privatization are becoming clearer and more deadly. The Texas fertilizer plant, where 14 people were killed in an explosion and fire, was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over 25 years ago. The U.S. Forest Service, stunned by the Prescott, Arizona fire that killed 19, was forced by the sequester to cut 500 firefighters. The rail disaster in Lac-Megantic, Quebec followed deregulation of Canadian railways. At the other extreme is the public sector, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which rescued hundreds of people after Hurricane Sandy while serving millions more with meals and water.
The lack of private incentive for human betterment is evident throughout the world. The World Hunger Education Service states that "Harmful economic systems are the principal cause of poverty and hunger." And according to Nicholas Stern, the chief economist for the World Bank, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has seen."
6. With Public Systems, We Don't Have to Listen To "Individual Initiative" Rantings
Back in the Reagan years, a stunning claim was made by Margaret Thatcher: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." More recently, Paul Ryan complained that government support "drains individual initiative and personal responsibility."
That's easy to say for people with good jobs.
Individual initiative? Our publicly supported communications infrastructure allows the richest 10% of Americans to manipulate their 80% share of the stock market. CEOs rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business. Perhaps most important to business, even as it focuses on short-term profits, is the long-term basic research that is largely conducted with government money. As of 2009 universities were still receiving ten times more science & engineering funding from government than from industry.
Public beats private in almost every way. Only the hype of the free-market media keeps much of America believing that "winner-take-all" is preferable to working together as a community.
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