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Confronting a Senate Beholden to 'Big Oil' |
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Sunday, 24 March 2013 14:04 |
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McKibben writes: "First and foremost: the oil industry's Senators did not manage to pass legislation that would force President Obama to build Keystone XL."
Environmental activist Bill McKibben. (photo: BillMcKibben.com)
Confronting a Senate Beholden to 'Big Oil'
By Bill McKibben, 350.org
24 March 13
 fter a very chaotic week on Capitol Hill, I wanted to write you with an update on what happened in the Senate on Friday.
First and foremost: the oil industry's Senators did not manage to pass legislation that would force President Obama to build Keystone XL.
Because you - people all across the country - jumped into action this week, they backtracked and instead held a vote on a nonbinding resolution that says it would be nice to build the pipeline, but doesn't actually do much about it. For that vote, they got the stomach-churning number of 62 Senators to vote with them. As usual, the ones who had taken the most money from the fossil fuel industry lined up to cast their votes-the cosponsors of the bill, on average, had taken $807,000 in dirty energy money.
Now, this amounts to symbolic chest thumping by the oil industry: showing just how many Senators they can get to jump when told to. It's not the worst thing that could have happened, but it reminds everyone why, in one recent poll, congress had approval ratings lower than head lice and colonoscopies - even on the symbolic stuff, they can't get it together to stand up to the oil industry guys cutting them checks.
In a certain way though, this vote couldn't come at a better time. Congress is going on break, and for the next two weeks, these 62 Senators will be back in their home states, doing things like meeting with constituents - people like you.
Home states are where some of the most heroic work took place the last week - in Minneapolis, say, where 150 350MN.org activists showed up on very short notice at Sen. Klobuchar's office in a snowstorm to tell her to vote no on Keystone (and she did, it should be added).
If you're interested in following in the fine example of those leaders who held actions at their senators offices, you have a chance in the next two weeks.
We're looking for people who can step up to lead, and then we'll put the 350 network into action to get people to join you. If you want to lead an action, just click here to tell us when you'd like to do so:
Look, there are two ways to react to a democracy for sale. One is to walk away in disgust, which is what the Koch Brothers count on. The other is to stand up and say: no more. If you visit your Senator, take some pictures or some video so we can share them around. It's time to build this broader fossil fuel resistance.
And remember, Capitol Hill is not the center of the world. Around the country last week our friends at Tar Sands Blockade have been actively targeting Keystone investors; faith groups have been hauled off to jail in front of the White House to protest the pipeline; and the divestment campaign has expanded off college campuses and into municipal and state governments.
The movement is doing amazing stuff - we just need more of it. We can't outspend the oil industry, but we can out-organize them. In fact, we have to.
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FOCUS | The GOP Autopsy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=18199"><span class="small">Will Durst, Humor Times</span></a>
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Sunday, 24 March 2013 09:26 |
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Durst writes: "Normally you don't expect to see the words 'Republicans' and 'introspection' right next to each other. Like supermodel and barbecue."
Political satirist Will Durst. (photo: WillDurst.com)
The GOP Autopsy
By Will Durst, Humor Times
24 March 13
 ormally you don't expect to see the words "Republicans" and "introspection" right next to each other. Like supermodel and barbecue. Physicist and polka. Gazelle and ophthalmology. You catch my drift. But that's exactly what happened last week, when the Republican Party released a 100-page report detailing why their last presidential campaign skidded into the emergency room Dead on Arrival.
The findings were compiled through analysis, interviews and feedback from campaign managers, focus groups, and most likely augmented by clandestine hanging out at bars during happy hour in the proximity of graveyards and funeral parlors. Some paint it as a comprehensive post- election review. Others argue it's incomprehensible. The media calls it an autopsy. A self- addressed post-mortem love letter in the spirit of Poe.
Hogwash and flummery could also be thrown into the descriptive mix as the dispatch's theme finds nothing wrong with the party message; the problem is all in the delivery. No need to demonstrate more compassion, the trick is to seem more compassionate. Got to learn how to win Ohio without ticking off Arkansas. In other words, all they need to do is to bleach the leopard's spots.
The study was commissioned by members of the party's hierarchy and given the official title - Growth and Opportunity Project. A GOP for the GOP. Although Grossly Obvious Poppycock fits as well. Claiming party purity trumps electoral victory, there is already heavy pushback from the right. "What good is it to win earthly spoils when you lose your immortal soul and your breath still smells like embalming fluid?"
What this really calls for is an independent perspective. You want an autopsy, we'll give you an autopsy.
Summary Report of Autopsy concerning the corpse of the 2012 Republican campaign. External Examination. Close inspection of the body, an old white billionaire, reveals a serrated knife approximately 9 inches long with the initials, Grover Norquist, engraved on the handle, protruding from under the right side between the 4th & 5th ribs.
Gunshot residue found covering the right hand in excess of ½ inch depth, which considering the holes in the right temple exhibiting upward trajectories, is consistent with what can only be described as a series of self- inflicted gunshot wounds. DNA tests reveal skin samples found under the broken nails of both hands are indicative of numerous encounters between the victim and an unknown woman or perhaps group of women.
The nose is missing which corresponds to the victim's recent recurring publicized bout of TeaPartyitis, a disease which causes the sufferer to cut off his nose to spite his face. In the rectum, what appears to be a wooden stick 6 inches long and ¾ inch in diameter, has been lodged for quite some time causing a critical backup of feces.
Pending toxicology results from the lab, internal examination reveals organs in a state consistent with the victim's age, with two conspicuous anomalies. A steady diet of bunk and bamboozle has dulled the senses creating a milky film that covers the retinas. Most exceptional was the astonishing discovery of the total absence of a heart.
It is the opinion of this office the cause of death was this myocardial void along with the aforementioned complications from various acute traumas. In other words, the victim was probably dead for a long time, just didn't know it.
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North Dakota's Fetal Personhood Amendment |
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Sunday, 24 March 2013 08:14 |
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Hawken writes: "North Dakota does not have a primary seatbelt law, but we are in the midst of the most invasive attack on women’s health anywhere."
Pro-life and pro-choice activists argue in front of the US Supreme Court, 01/25/13. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
North Dakota's Fetal Personhood Amendment
By Rep. Kathy Hawken, The Daily Beast
24 March 13
North Dakota's State House passed a fetal personhood amendment, which would effectively ban abortion. Rep. Kathy Hawken explains why she voted against it - even though she's pro-life.
orth Dakota does not have a primary seatbelt law, but we are in the midst of the most invasive attack on women's health anywhere. On Friday, our state House of Representatives passed a fetal personhood amendment, which would grant legal personhood rights to embryos at the moment of fertilization. If voters approve the measure, perhaps in 2014, it will effectively outlaw abortion in the state.
We have stepped over the line - and it's time to walk it back.
Like many of my Republican colleagues, I personally am pro-life. But I vote pro-choice, because decisions about pregnancy are complex and personal. I can't make that decision for anyone else. No legislator should.
So far this year, we have taken up six different bills to end safe and legal abortion in our state. Some are the broad, so-called "personhood" amendments that could also interfere with personal, private medical decisions ranging from abortion to fertility treatment; others ban abortion at different stages in pregnancy. One would effectively ban abortion in the state with overregulation that local doctors have said is medically unnecessary.
One abortion ban was even amended to include a ban on funding for programs like the one that provides sex education to at-risk teens in Fargo, a partnership between North Dakota State University and Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is a trusted leader in teen-pregnancy prevention, providing sex education to over one million people each year. These are the very types of programs that help prevent unintended pregnancy, and the need for abortion, in the first place.
Indeed, my home state is poised to win the state-by-state race to the bottom on women's health. That my fellow Republicans have paved the way for this distinction is such a disappointment
In my 17 years in the state legislature, I've introduced pro-life, pro-women's health, fiscally responsible legislation such as a prenatal care for minors bill and a bill ensuring quality child care for single moms.
Instead, we have passed the nation's most restrictive abortion ban in years - a bill that is sure to cost taxpayers money to defend in court - yet we haven't stuck to our campaign promises to relieve property taxes, protect higher education funding, or fix the roads.
This agenda is completely contrary to the principles of fiscal conservatism and personal responsibility that have made our party so great. Unintended pregnancies cost U.S. taxpayers $11 billion a year. According to a report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, if those giving birth during their teen years instead had their children during adulthood, U.S. taxpayers would save about $1,600 per person annually. For every dollar invested in publicly funded family planning programs, the government saves approximately $4.
I call on my colleagues in North Dakota and in statehouses around the country to re-attune their focus to the fiscal and economic benefits of making sure every American woman has access to the preventive health care she needs, including birth control, so she can avoid an unintended pregnancy and stay healthy. This is a policy priority that that unites, rather than divides, Americans. And this is the policy priority that aligns with my Grand Old Party.
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Getting Tough on Devastating Corporate Crime |
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Saturday, 23 March 2013 12:50 |
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Nader writes: "Anyone who has ever seen an old western knows that the bandits in the black hats are bad and the lawmen in the white hats are good. Consequently, many elected officials, desperate to be perceived as white-hatters, carry the 'tough on crime' banner."
Ralph Nader being interviewed during his 2008 presidential campaign, 08/01/08. (photo: Scrape TV)
Getting Tough on Devastating Corporate Crime
By Ralph Nader, Reader Supported News
23 March 13
 oliticians looking to bolster their appeal to voters like to talk about being "tough on crime." They think this creates a winning public image. And why wouldn't it? Anyone who has ever seen an old western knows that the bandits in the black hats are bad and the lawmen in the white hats are good. Consequently, many elected officials, desperate to be perceived as white-hatters, carry the "tough on crime" banner. A result is the United States now has more incarcerated people than any other country in the world, including China and Russia. Imagine - over 2 million Americans are currently serving time in prison.
Yet despite all the tough talk from elected officials, a corporate crime wave has long swept our nation, draining people's hard-earned savings and severely harming the health and safety of millions more. The pin-stripe-suit wearing perpetrators of this spree are, far more often then not, getting away scot-free. Ironically, it's many of the same politicians who say they are "tough on crime" that are collecting millions of dollars in campaign money from the biggest crooks in America. A smart politician looking to win a campaign would never knowingly accept cash from street thugs, muggers and thieves. But corporate thugs, corporate muggers and corporate thieves? No problem! When it comes to corporate crime, where are the heroes in the white hats?
The corporate crime wave is a result of decades of concentrated effort by big business and its lobbyists to weaken and dismantle the policing agencies responsible for keeping watch over them - a tactic that has been cleverly dubbed "deregulation," a term that effectively sidesteps any connotation of blatant wrongdoing. (See the new book Freedom to Harm by Thomas O. McGarity.)
It was the effects of wild "deregulation" that led to the global financial collapse in 2008 and its catastrophic effect on the world economy. In 2011, Charles Ferguson, director of the documentary film Inside Job, took the stage to accept his Academy Award and said: "Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong." It's now two years later, and relatively nothing has changed. By comparison, in the savings and loan crisis 33 years ago, hundreds of S&L officials were convicted and sent to jail.
Grant, JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon are currently in the media spotlight for their questionable dealings, resulting in billions of dollars in easily absorbed losses for the bank, yet none of its executives have been punished or charged with a crime and Dimon remains in his lofty, lucrative position. It's just another chapter in the sordid tale of big banks receiving a slap on the wrist for their excesses. The attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, has publicly admitted that the enormous size of financial institutions has made them too difficult to prosecute. Even conservative columnist George Will wants the big banks broken up.
Once again, where are the heroes in the white hats? One of the primary issues in presenting the seriousness of the corporate crime wave is the perceived lack of physical danger from the public -- after all; corporate criminals do not rob you at knifepoint in a dark alley. But corporate crime does take a physical toll. Roughly 60,000 Americans die every year from workplace related diseases and injuries, hundreds of thousands more from medical malpractice or hospital-induced infections, tens of thousands more from air pollution and from dangerous pharmaceuticals -- much of which is a direct result of corporate wrongdoing and could be prevented.
About 400,000 Americans die each year as a result of smoking-related illness, thanks to the tobacco industry, which for years covered up the harmful effects of its product and hooked youngsters with deliberate marketing. In comparison to the nearly 15,000 yearly homicide deaths in the U.S., the corporate death toll is sky high.
One of the most important tools in battling corporate crime and informing the public about its long ranging and harmful effects would be the creation of comprehensive corporate crime database. Such a database, run by the Justice Department, would compile detailed statistics and data on corporate crime, searchable by name of corporation and crime committed, and produce an annual report. Such a database would make information on corporate crime easily available to both law enforcement and the media, and would place the issue of patterns and costs of corporate crime on the table for national discourse.
So far, all attempts to create such a public record of corporate crime have been met with little enthusiasm or action from the major political parties and successive Attorneys General, including the current AG Eric Holder. In late 2010, as Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and again in 2011, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced The Corporate Crime Database Act which aimed to establish such a database. (Alongside it, Conyers also introduced the Dangerous Products Warning Act, which would make it a crime for a corporate official to knowingly place a dangerous product into the stream of commerce.) Neither bill gained any traction at all in Congress.
Further steps need to be taken as well. There should be more funding for the Justice Department's tiny corporate crime division, so that they have the prosecutorial tools and resources to adequately go after violators. Congress needs to take steps so that companies that commit corporate crime are not on the federal dole - taxpayer money should never be used to buy goods and services from corporate criminals. It's time to crack down on corporate tax avoidance - a worker on the minimum wage should not be paying more in sheer federal tax dollars than a large, very profitable corporation like General Electric. Going further, shareholders should have the final say in corporate governance, with the right to approve major business decisions and executive compensation - similar to the referendum recently passed in Switzerland. After all, it's the shareholders - not the executives - who ultimately pay the fines when wrongdoing is discovered.
Most importantly, the obsolete and weak federal corporate crime laws need to be upgraded for the times, toughened and clearly defined. Congress and President Obama have to seek law and order for crime in the suites. For rampant corporate crime is going to continue unless we start punishing and deterring these violations that devastate so many innocent people.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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ast week, when Hillary Clinton released a video announcing her support for gay marriage, Twitter went wild.
