VRWC news: gonna be a long thread

[boutons_deux]

Dirty Hands: 77 ALEC Bills in 2013 Advance a Big Oil, Big Ag Agenda

ALEC, Fueled by Fossil Fuel Industry, Pursues Retrograde Energy Agenda



For decades, ALEC has been a favored conduit for some of the worlds largest polluters, like Koch Industries, BP, S , Chevron, and Exxon Mobil, and for decades has promoted less environmental regulation and more drilling and fracking.

ALEC bills in recent years have pulled states out of regional climate initiatives, opposed carbon dioxide emission standards, created hurdles for state agencies attempting to regulate pollution, and tried to stop the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The legislation introduced in 2013 carries on this legacy. ALEC bills favor the fossil fuel barons and promote a retrograde energy agenda that pollutes our air and water and is slowly cooking the planet to what may soon be devastating temperatures.

"Disregarding science at every turn, ALEC is willing to simply serve as a front for the fossil fuel industry," says Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. "Given the stakes--the earth's climate--that's shabby and sad."

ALEC Tours the Tar Sands


2012 ALEC Academy attendees (Photo via Twitter)

In October of 2012, ALEC organized an "Oil Sands Academy" where nine ALEC member politicians were given an all-expenses-paid trip to Calgary and flown on a tour of the Alberta tarsands while accompanied by oil industry lobbyists. The trip was sponsored by pipeline operator TransCanada and the oil-industry funded American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, and email records obtained by CMD show that after the trip, ALEC urged legislators to send "thank you" notes to corporate lobbyists for their generosity.

At least ten states in 2013 have introduced variations on the ALEC "Resolution in Support of the Keystone XL Pipeline," calling on the president and Congress to approve the controversial project. Environmentalists oppose the pipeline because extracting oil from Canadian tar sands would unlock huge amounts of carbon, increasing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Despite being promoted as a "job creator," the pipeline would only create between 50 and 100 permanent positions in an economy of over 150 million working people.

In Nebraska, CMD filed an ethics complaint against state senator Jim Smith, the ALEC State Chair for Nebraska, who never revealed to his cons uents that he had gone on the "Oil Sands Academy," and failed to disclose over a thousand dollars of travel expenses paid for by the Government of Alberta, Canada. Sen. Smith has been exceptionally vocal when it comes to his support for the Keystone XL pipeline. For example, he sponsored a 2012 Nebraska law that would -- if it survives a continuing legal challenge -- bypass the U.S. State Department and allow TransCanada to start building the Nebraska part of the pipeline right away, regardless of any future decision by the federal government.

ALEC Partners with Heartland Ins ute for Rollback of Renewables

Even more extraordinary is ALEC's push this year to repeal Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), which require that utility companies provide a certain amount of their total energy from renewable sources like wind.

"ALEC's long time role in denying the science and policy solutions to climate change is shifting into an evolving roadblock on state and federal clean energy incentives, a necessary part of global warming mitigation," says Connor Gibson, a Research Associate at Greenpeace.

In Germany, where the nation has set a goal of getting 35% of its energy from renewables by 2020, public committment to clean energy technologies is transforming markets, driving innovation and generating huge numbers of jobs. Even in the U.S., where there has been less public investment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 3.1 million clean energy jobs have been created in recent years.

Perhaps because of RPS' job-creating qualities, ALEC's bill to repeal renewable standards, the "Electricity Freedom Act," was too much even for the most conservative legislatures. It failed to pass in every state where it was introduced -- even in North Carolina, where it had the backing of Grover Norquist, and whose Republican-dominated
legislature has been rolling multiple ALEC bills into law in 2013

It may be little surprise that ALEC's attack on renewables was spearheaded by one of its looniest members: the bill was brought to ALEC in May 2012 by the Illinois-based Heartland Ins ute, a group best known for billboards comparing people who believe in climate change to mass murderers like the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

ALEC is usually very secretive about its model legislation and its efforts in the states, but ALEC did not disguise the fact that it had made the Electricity Freedom Act a priority for the 2013 session. ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force Director Todd Wynn published blog posts on the topic and was quoted in the press discussing how ALEC was working with Heartland to promote the repeal bills.

In many of the states that have proposed versions of the Electricity Freedom Act, the right-wing infrastructure has sprung into action, almost according to a script. The Beacon Hill Ins ute publishes a study (using discredited analysis) claiming that a state's renewable standards lead to higher energy costs, as it did in states like Maine and Ohio and Wisconsin and Arizona. The David Koch-founded and-led Americans for Prosperity organizes an event to "educate" its members about how renewables are "punishing" consumers, as they did in Nebraska, and perhaps invite a guest from the Heartland Ins ute to make similar claims, as they did in Kansas.

ALEC, the Heartland Ins ute, and the Beacon Hill Ins ute all have received money from foundations associated with Charles and David Koch, and each are also part of the State Policy Network, an umbrella group of right-wing organizations that claim adherence to the free market. SPN has received at least $10 million in the past five years from the mysterious Donors Trust, which funnels money from the Kochs and other conservative funders. SPN was also a "Chairman" level sponsor of ALEC's 2011 Annual Conference and ALEC is an Associate Member of SPN.

But even though the ALEC/Heartland anti-renewable energy fight found little success in 2013, the group is not giving up.

New Avenue Sought to Rollback Renewables

“I expect that North Carolina and Kansas will probably pick up this issue again in 2014 and lead the charge across the country once again,” Wynn said.
ALEC now appears to be modifying its strategy to find a more palatable way to attack renewable standards.

At its August 2013 meeting, ALEC will consider a watered-down version of the Electricity Freedom Act with a bill called the "Market Power Renewables Act." That legislation would phase-out a state's Renewable Portfolio Standards and instead create a renewable "market" where consumers can choose to pay for renewable energy, and allow utilities to purchase energy credits from outside the state. This thwarts the purpose of RPS policies, which help create the baseline demand for renewables that will spur the clean energy investment necessary to continue developing the technology and infrastructure that will drive costs down.

But, it would satisfy ALEC's goal of preserving reliance on dirty energy from fossil fuels.

ALEC Bills Undermine Environmental Regulations, First Amendment


ALEC energy, environment, and agriculture bills moving in the first six months of 2013 include:

...

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/08/...-big-ag-agenda

[boutons_deux]

Carl Gibson | How the ALEC Agenda Forced Chicago's School Closings

Earlier this year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the closing of 50 public schools, the vast majority of which serve low-income children in high-poverty neighborhoods. While the unelected Chicago Board of Education slashed school budgets and forced the firing of thousands of school employees and educators, Mayor Emanuel gave out millions in tax breaks to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange - his top campaign contributor - a new stadium for DePaul University, and possibly even more for Wrigley Field. The city isn't broke, but rather has simply made clear that corporate profits are a higher priority than public education.

The situation in Chicago is not unlike the situation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the city council has ordered the closing of 23 public schools, also in impoverished neighborhoods. Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett slashed $1 billion from public education while simultaneously handing out $800 million in corporate tax breaks across the state, meaning a direct transfer of wealth from schools to the pockets of corporate CEOs. If one connects the dots, it's easy to trace all of this back to ALEC. Here's how ALEC's agenda is harming schools like those in the city hosting their annual conference.

Mayor Emanuel cites Chicago Public Schools' $1 billion deficit as a cause for his closing of 50 public schools. But Chicago is far from broke – the money is simply being given away to other non-educational ventures. The ALEC agenda operates the same way.

The Center for Media and Democracy's "ALEC Exposed" wiki has published an exhaustive database of ALEC's model legislation sorted by category. ALEC's 1995 "Sound Federal Fiscal Policy Resolution" blames higher deficits on higher taxes, rather than ALEC's other model bills aimed at repealing estate taxes and capital gains taxes, which generate significant tax revenues and are overwhelmingly paid by the super-rich. By systematically starving states of revenue by cutting taxes for the rich, a revenue crisis is created with budget cuts presented as the only solution.

Redirecting Public Funds to Privately-Run Charter Schools

Chicago Public Schools estimates that Rahm Emanuel's budget cuts are affecting classrooms to the tune of $68 million this year alone. But the Raise Your Hand Coalition puts that number closer to $162 millionwhen accounting for the money given to privately-run charter schools. Those cuts have led to over 2,000 layoffs in the CPS system, of which approximately 1,300 are teachers.

But studies have consistently shown that public school students do better than their charter school counterparts. The Ohio Department of Education released a study last year showing that, among other results, public schools graduated 90% of their students, while charter schools only graduated 30%, even linking proficiencies with poverty levels in every instance. The real reason is cities like Chicago and Philadelphia are instead diverting public funds from public schools to charter schools at the insistence of millionaire charter school backers. This is simply one step toward privatizing more schools, thus widening the opportunity chasm between the sons and daughters of privilege and those living in poverty.

"Groups like ALEC, StudentsFirst, Democrats for Education Reform— in order for them to function and raise money and get private contributions, they have to show that schools are failing," Cantor said. "Schools in the US aren't failing. Schools with lower income kids have lower test scores, but that's a failure of society … We have to catch up with all those difficulties with no resources."

Busting Teachers' Unions

Mic e Rhee of StudentsFirst is one of the most outspoken detractors of teachers' unions. She quit her job as DC's chancellor of schools after firing roughly 200 teachers and putting another 700 on notice based on student test scores. Since then, her StudentsFirst organization has become a nationwide effort funded by millions from big finance and has recently dumped considerable sums into union-busting efforts inOhio and Michigan.

A 2002 study by Arizona State University found that students learning from unionized educators statistically achieved more than those learning from teachers who didn't have a union. This could be because unionized teachers can advocate for students openly without fear of retribution from principals or school boards. It could also mean that unions like the CTU tend to be some of the only groups that advocate for equity in school districts.

"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Schools in high value areas and wealthy suburbs do really well in terms of test scores. Their parents pay a lower property tax rate than we do in Chicago because the property is worth so much more," Cantor said. "They constantly raise taxes for schools and they don't mind, because those are their kids. But we don't yet have the political will in this country to do that on a massive scale. The people in power want to educate their kids, not all kids."

http://readersupportednews.org/opini...chool-closings

[boutons_deux]

The Political Calculations Behind Growing Inequality

Fifty years ago, average Americans lived in a society where less than $10 of every $100 in personal income went to the nation’s richest 1 percent.

Our top 1 percent are now grabbing just under 20 percent of America’s income, double the 1963 level.

How did this happen? We Americans certainly never voted for this upward redistribution. In all the years since Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, no candidates ever campaigned on a platform that called for enriching America’s already rich.

Yet the rich have been enriched. And they keep getting even richer while America’s 99 percent face an economic insecurity that never lets up.

This doesn’t make sense. Americans, after all, live amid democratic ins utions. Why haven’t the American people, through these ins utions, been able to undo the public policies that squeeze the bottom 99 percent and lavishly reward the crew at the top?

Why, in other words, hasn’t democracy slowed rising inequality?

Societies that let wealth concentrate at enormously intense levels, the four show, will quite predictably end up with a wealthy class who can concentrate enormous resources on getting their way.

These wealthy underwrite political campaigns. They spend fortunes on lobbying. They keep politicians and bureaucrats “friendly” to their interests with a revolving door that promises lucrative employment in the private sector.

Just how deeply have America’s super-rich come to dominate our political process? Bonica and his co-authors offer up a revealing anecdote: Back in 1980, no American gave out more in federal election contributions than Cecil Haden, the owner of a tugboat company. Haden contributed what would, in today’s dollars, amount to about $1.72 million, almost six times more than any other political contributor in 1980.

In the 2012 election cycle, by contrast, just one deep-pocket couple alone, gaming industry giant Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, together s ed out $103.4 million to bend politics in their favored wealth-concentrating direction.

Both “Democrats as well as Republicans,” the four analysts observe, have come to “rely on big donors.”

What has this reliance produced? Nothing good for average Americans. Back in the 1930s, for instance, Democrats championed the financial industry regulations that helped create a more equal mid-20th century America. In our time, significant numbers of Democrats have joined with Republicans to undo these regulations.

too many lawmakers and other elected leaders can’t see that “public interest.” Cascades of cash — from America’s super rich — have them conveniently blinded.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18...ing-inequality

iow, the 99% America is ed and un able. The rising tide (GDP) the used to lift all boats (after the progressive reforms of the 1930s, so hated by 1%/conservatives) has been rigged to lift only the the 1%/corporate boats, leaving the 99% foundering in the muck and stink of low tide, a tide that only goes out.

btw, it's the 1% and MIC corps agitating for (profiting from the) war with Syria, not the 99% that will pay for it. War is wealth transfer / redistribution-upward racket.

[boutons_deux]

global capitalists preparing their coup de grace on the world's 99%

"Trade" Deal Would Mean a Pay Cut for 90% of U.S. Workers

The verdict is in: most U.S. workers would see wage losses as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping U.S. "free trade" deal under negotiation with 11 Pacific Rim countries. That's the conclusion of a report just released by the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

TPP's corporate proponents have tried to sell the NAFTA-style deal to the U.S. public and policymakers by claiming that it will result in gains for the U.S. economy. They often cite a study from the Peterson Ins ute for International Economics that used sweeping assumptions to project a tiny benefit from the TPP. We brought that study down to size back in January, showing that, even if one accepts the pro-TPP authors' litany of optimistic assumptions, the much-touted "benefit" from the TPP would amount to an extra quarter per person per day.

As this week's CEPR report points out, the pro-TPP study projected a meager 0.13 percent increase to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 2025 if the controversial TPP would be signed, passed, and implemented. By comparison, economists have estimated that Apple's iPhone 5 contributed a 0.25 - 0.5 percent increase to U.S. GDP.

That is, the TPP's total contribution to the U.S. economy is expected, by TPP proponents, to be about one half to one fourth of the contribution of the latest iPhone version.

Well, you might say, a nearly invisible blip in GDP is better than no blip in GDP. (You might say this if you ignore the host of dubious assumptions used to project said blip, and ignore the TPP's expected threats to medicines affordability, environmental protections, food safety, Internet freedom, and financial stability.)

But what would such a paltry GDP rise mean for your pocket? Answering that requires taking into account the increase in income inequality that typically results from such "free trade" deals. The author of the CEPR report, economist David Rosnick, explains, "There are winners and losers from trade, and research has shown that trade contributes to inequality. In fact, it would take only a very small contribution to inequality due to trade to wipe out all of the gains that most workers would get from this agreement." Rosnick then uses the empirical evidence on the trade-inequality relationship and shows that even taking the most conservative estimate of trade's contribution to inequality (that trade is responsible for just 10% of the rise in inequality), the losses from projected TPP-produced inequality indeed would "wipe out" the tiny projected gains for the median U.S. worker.

That is, as a result of the TPP, the median U.S. income would fall. It would not just fall in comparison to the incomes of the wealthy (which would rise). It would fall in absolute terms, forcing middle-class U.S. workers to take home less in 2025 than they earn today.

Such wage losses would afflict most U.S. workers. Rosnick shows that if we assume that trade has contributed just 15% of the recent rise in inequality (a still conservative estimate), then the TPP would mean wage losses for all but the richest 10% of U.S. workers. So if you're making less than $87,000 per year (the current 90th percentile wage), the TPP would mean a pay cut. And if you're making more than $87,000 per year, you may still be a tad concerned about how the deal could jeopardize the safety of your food, threaten clean water protections, roll back Wall Street reforms, etc.

Click here for the disturbing report from CEPR.


http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2013/09/the-verdict-is-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-a-sweeping-free-trade-deal-under-negotiation-with-11-pacific-rim-coun.html


fast-tracked TTP remains hidden from Congress but available to 100s of US corporations

Can the capitalists of United Corporations of American buy enough Dem senators to win approval?

[THEGOAT]

So this thread is like the Boutons version of drudge report?

Why not just make a blog?

[boutons_deux]

Secret Quarter-Billion-Dollar Koch Brothers Political Operation Revealed

Politico.com, the Washington insider website, has the money-in-politics scoop of the year: It has unmasked a previously unknown political money laundering operation, set up by the energy billionaires and libertarian Koch brothers, that raised $256 million and secretly spent almost all of it last year against Democrats.

“The filing offers a rare tour of the conservative movement and how it gets its funds,” Politico said:

• Center to Protect Patient Rights, a group that vehemently opposes Obamacare: a total of $115 million, from three grants.
• Americans for Prosperity, an organizing and advocacy group that is courted by Republican presidential candidates: $32.3 million.
• The 60 Plus Association, a free-market seniors group that also opposes Obamacare: $15.7 million.
• American Future Fund, an Iowa group that spent a lot of money on ads in 2012, many for Mitt Romney: $13.6 million.
• Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, which gets involved in a number of social policy debates: $8.2 million.
• Themis Trust, a Koch-based voter database that is made available to other conservative organizations: $5.8 million.
• Public Notice, a fiscal policy think tank: $5.5 million.
• Generation Opportunity, a group for “liberty-loving” young people: $5 million.
• The LIBRE Initiative, which targets a free-market message to Hispanic immigrants: $3.1 million.
• The National Rifle Association: $3.5 million.
• The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: $2 million.
• American Energy Alliance: $1.5 million.
• And several groups — including the State Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots and Heritage Action for America — got less than $1 million each.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-an...led?paging=off

[boutons_deux]

The Latest Trend in Trade Secrets

The Obama administration is quietly forging two deals that are being written by and for the benefit of corporations, to the detriment of workers and consumers.

Neither the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nor the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) have scary-sounding names. But these pacts will hurt millions of people while making the world much safer for corporations. So far, and only under great pressure, has Obama reluctantly let some of our own lawmakers glimpse certain sections.

This secrecy exists for good reason. If normal citizens or rank-and-file members of Congress got the drift of what is going on there’d be a revolt. To say the least, these dealsaren’t designed for our benefit.

Quite the contrary. They’re being written by and for the benefit of corporations, to the detriment of workers and consumers. This follows the baleful path of our earlier trade and investment deals, including NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, and the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement.

The big winners in all these pacts are the companies that conjure them up: huge banks, PhRMA members, mining conglomerates, tobacco giants, Big Ag’s denizens, and every other pillar of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Mining companies are already taking full advantage of these pacts. Foreign companies can challenge national rulesrestricting arsenic, cyanide, and other forms of pollution in global trade panels, and governments have been forced to pay up for enforcing their own laws. As El Salvador has learned through its attempt to outlaw gold-mining over the objections of Canada’s Pacific Rim Mining Corp., the litigation process is long, convoluted, and expensive.

The new trade deals Obama is championing would make it even easier for global corporations to override national laws that get in their way. For one thing, they may override our Dodd-Frank Law on financial regulation. That would allow international banks to “streamline” regulations and once again create reckless new securities. PhRMA, too, is looking for friendlier international regulations, even though it already uses NAFTA and other accords to challenge patent laws it finds inconvenient.

This corporate quest to “harmonize” national rules would mean oversight would sink to the lower common denominator around the world. No wonder these deals are being forged in secret.

http://otherwords.org/latest-trend-trade-secrets/

[boutons_deux]

In the Kock Bros fully owned subsidiary of Wisconsin

Wisconsin Attorney General Seeks to Vitiate Open Records Law to Protect ALEC’s National Treasurer

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has taken the unprecedented step of asserting that a state legislator cannot be held accountable for refusing to disclose public records in response to a lawful open records request by the Center for Media and Democracy.

Van Hollen’s department asserted in court filings that Wisconsin Senator -- and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) national treasurer -- Leah Vukmir cannot be served with a court order demanding that she comply with her legal responsibilities under the open records law.

This novel legal argument reverses the policy and practice of prior Attorneys General and would make any state legislator immune from enforcement of the state open records law and any other civil matter.

“Because the current practice of the legislature is never to be out of session, the Attorney General’s position means that state legislators can’t be held accountable for refusing to comply with their duties under the open records law. This is a radical departure from the clear language of the law, from the position taken by previous Attorneys General, and from Wisconsin’s long, proud history of transparency and commitment to open government,”


http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2013/09/13

"We Don't Need No Steenkin' Laws"

[boutons_deux]

5 Depressing Ways That 1%'s Huge Profits Have Broken the Back of America


1. Income Redistribution is Worse than Usually Reported

2. Wealth Redistribution is Even Worse than Income Redistribution

3. The Redistribution of Productivity: Boosting Profits rather than Wages

4. Finance is Outrunning Society, and Taking the Money with Them

5. Redistribution through Government Manipulation

http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-de...tter906249&t=5

[boutons_deux]

The Radical Christian Right and the War on Government

There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America. Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undo ented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all ins utions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.


U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism.

The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.

The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and sexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless.

It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.

“What we have here is our core values as Americans and Christians slipping away into this facade where we should take care of our poor, sick, and disabled,” Ted Cruz said in the Senate last month during a 21-hour speech that he gave in an attempt to block the funding of Obamacare. “It is disheartening to know that the nation our forefathers built is no longer of importance to our president and his Democratic counterparts. Not only that, we are falling away from core Christian values. I don’t know about you, but I believe in the Jesus who died to save himself, not enable lazy followers to be dependent on him. He didn’t walk around all willy-nilly just passing out free health care to those who were sick, or food to those who were hungry, or clothes to those in need. No, he said get up, brush yourself off, go into town and get a job, and as he hung on the cross he said, ‘I died so that I may live in eternity with my Father. If you want to join us you can die for yourself and your own sins. What do I look like, your savior or something?’ That’s the Jesus I want to see brought back into our core values as a nation. That’s why we need to repeal Obamacare.”

etc, etc.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...nment_20131006

[ElNono]

Hey boutons... can you keep all your trash in here?

This whole spamming business is re ed, plus nobody is reading pages and pages of crap.

Thanks

[boutons_deux]

Hey boutons... can you keep all your trash in here?

This whole spamming business is re ed, plus nobody is reading pages and pages of crap.

Thanks

GFY

[boutons_deux]

“We have a radical philosophy:” The right-wing plot to stop the public option


The Rise of the Kochtopus



The Koch Brothers have been behind mind-boggling amounts of political spending.

Koch Industries itself has spent more than $50 million lobbying since 1998. But Jane Mayer, with The New Yorker, cautions, “Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics.”

According to tax records, between 1998 and 2008, the Kochs have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars through charitable organizations, with much of that money winding up in the hands of political organizations, too.

Mayer writes, “The three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists.”

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy produced a report in 2004 questioning the charitable nature of the Kochs’ donations. Their report concludes that the Kochs aren’t actually making charitable contributions; they’re making investments in ideas that will eventually lead to higher profits. According to the report, Koch foundations “give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

The International Forum on Globalization has mapped the various organizations and individuals that make up the tentacles of the Kochtopus.

They include media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Think tanks beyond CATO, including the American Enterprise Ins ute, which has received nearly $2 million in Koch cash, and the Heritage Foundation, which has received more than $4 million. Also benefitting from the Kochs are lobbying organizations such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

And the Kochs provided nearly $6 million in funding for Americans for Prosperity, one of those organizations that split off from CSE’s tobacco Tea Party in the first decade of the twenty-first century to form the new Royalist-tinged Tea Party after Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

It takes a lot of money to get the entire political and economic class to buy into an ideology that has repeatedly caused massive economic crashes—especially since the last crash was still fresh in everyone’s mind.

As Charles Koch told Doherty, “We have a radical philosophy.”

The Tea Party, even if birthed by the tobacco companies, was nurtured by multimillionaire Royalists and billionaires such as Charles and David Koch. They spent millions to set up and promote Tea Party organizations, fund rallies, and charter buses to carry people from all around the country to boost participation.

And by the summer of 2009, what appeared to be a full‑on grass‑roots movement, but in the background was a well-oiled, corporate-funded anti-Obama PR machine, had developed all around the country, complete with mostly elderly white Americans shouting down their congressmen and congresswomen, accusing them of being socialists and pushing secret agendas to raise everybody’s taxes and destroy democracy.

But the Kochs weren’t operating alone. Born out of the Ailes memo for GOP TV in the 1970s, Fox News was now the most watched cable news network in America. And they did their part to squash any sort of Progressive Revolution, and ensure that the Royalists’ counterrevolution succeeds.

Fox News Gets in the Game

Bill Sammon got the memo.

On the morning of October 27, 2009, staffers at Fox News received an urgent message from their boss, the Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon. It had to do with certain wording to be used by Fox anchors when reporting on the health reform debate—in particular, the wording to be used to describe the “Public Option.”
Ten months had passed since Barack Obama and a slew of progressive Democrats in Congress were sworn in, promising to break up the Royalists’ stronghold in our democracy and economy.

First up was the Royalist dominance in our health care system—the only one in the entire developed world that does not offer health care as a basic human right.
The Royalists knew their grip on our nation’s health care system was in danger, so they grabbed ahold of their megaphone to spew disinformation—namely, Roger Ailes.
Fear of “death panels” was one of several myths spun out of the right-wing messaging campaign funded by big for-profit health insurance corporations opposed to any sort of health reform. It was given credence by Sarah Palin in an August 2009 Facebook post in which she wrote, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

The ironic thing about Palin’s message was that so‑called death panels were actually a very real thing in America. Every single day, death panels at for-profit health insurance corporations determine whether or not it’s worth paying out a certain claim or signing on to a certain lifesaving medical procedure. In those cases, a “subjective judgment” is made on how a cancer patient’s chemotherapy will affect the corporation’s bottom line.

It was exactly this sort of abuse that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was trying to curb. But in the perversion of the health reform debate, somehow that message got reversed. And even though there was no such thing as a “death panels” provision in the health reform bill, it was an issue that dominated much of the health care debate in the summer of 2009.

Another myth was that the president’s health reform would amount to a government takeover of the private health insurance industry. Given the antigovernment fervor sweeping the nation after thirty years of bad government under Royalist Republicans, this myth gained a lot of traction.

The Royalists warned that President Obama was taking over the American health care system with all its advanced MRI machines and laser surgeries and cutting-edge medication, and transforming it into a socialized, rationed health care system like the ones that were killing off millions of people in “Communist Europe.” It was a myth that everyone who lives outside the United States, in particular in Canada and Europe, regarded as patently absurd. Europeans have far better health care results than Americans, and nearly every single person I’ve talked to from a nation that has a single-payer system told me they prefer their health care system to mine any day of the week, thank you very much.

But Royalists were able to find a handful of Canadians who’d had a bad experience with their home health care system and paraded them around as victims of “socialized medicine.” Eventually, like the “death panels” myth, the government takeover myth stuck, too.

It grew out of the Public Option component of the health reform law.

In some parts of the country there was only one health insurance choice for consumers. One big for-profit health insurance corporation held a monopoly over the local market and could therefore charge whatever they liked and treat their customers however they liked. To inject some compe ion (the stuff Royalists claim to love) into the market, a government health insurance program was conceived that would serve as a more efficient and compassionate alternative to private health insurance plans. In the proposed health reform legislation, this alternative was known as the Public Option. The idea is simple, give people a choice and let the free market decide.

The Public Option was a far cry from what progressives wanted, which was a single-payer system. But if private health insurance corporations suddenly had to compete, then at least prices would get lower and quality would get better. Royalists hated the idea, as you would expect, since their corporate donors knew that more compe ion in the markets meant that less money could be diverted to the bonuses of health insurance executives such as “Dollar” Bill McGuire, who made a billion dollars working at United Healthcare.

So Fox News took up the cause. The subject of the Bill Sammons October 27, 2009, e‑mail was: “Friendly reminder: let’s not slip back into calling it the ‘public option.’”
This e‑mail was later obtained by the media-watchdog group Media Matters. It read in full:

1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option,” whenever possible.

2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon), use the qualifier “so‑called,” as in “the so‑called public option.”

The e‑mail continued with two more “reminders” from Sammon about how to talk about the Public Option:

3) Here’s another way to phrase it: “The public option, which is the government- run plan.”

4) When newsmakers and sources use the term “public option” in our stories, there’s not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

Fox anchors did as they were told, and suddenly the phrase “Public Option” vanished from the Fox News airwaves.

Why the name change? Why call it a “government option” rather than its legal name, the “Public Option”?

The answer: polling.

About two months earlier, on the same airwaves, Republican pollster Frank Luntz went on The Sean Hannity Show and let slip a critical Republican messaging strategy. In regard to the Public Option, Luntz told Hannity, “If you call it a ‘public option,’ the American people are split . . . [but] if you call it the ‘government option,’ the public is overwhelmingly against it.” After all, a “government option” implied a government takeover of health care, which meant socialized medicine.

Hannity himself was blown away and immediately noted that Luntz made “a great point” and that from then on Hannity himself would use the term “government option.”
A new message was born.

Here was the Washington managing editor of Fox News, Bill Sammon, instructing his news anchors to use poll-tested terms that would help Republicans sway the public’s opinion against President Obama’s health reform law. It was plain-and-simple propaganda.

A few months later, Fox News’s manufactured fear of a “government takeover of health care” successfully forced Democrats to drop the Public Option from the health reform law.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/10/%E2%...public_option/

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War on Employees:

Wage theft outstrips bank, gas station and convenience store robberies




Fully 64 percent of low-wage workers have some amount of pay stolen out of their paychecks by their employers every week, including 26 percent who are effectively paid less than minimum wage. Fully three-quarters of workers who are due overtime have part or all of their earned overtime wages stolen by their employer. In total, the average low-wage worker loses a stunning $2,634 per year in unpaid wages, representing 15 percent of their earned income.

And enforcement? Forget about it. At the federal level, there's just one agent enforcing wage laws for every 141,000 workers. More than half of the states have cut wage enforcement staff in recent years, and some states have tried to eliminate those positions entirely. For instance,

In 2010, Missouri’s labor department collected $200,000 in res ution for minimum-wage violations and $500,000 for prevailing-wage violations, and issued 1,714 citations for child-labor violations. Yet [Republican state House Speaker Steven] Tilley charged that investigators were being “overzealous,” particularly in prosecuting complaints of employers cheating on prevailing wages.

For many Republican politicians, crimes committed by employers against workers don't really register as crimes at all in our political environment. And while the Obama administration has cracked down, the back pay it's collected is just a drop in the bucket of what workers have earned that their employers have taken.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...ore-robberies#

and

IRS Warns Businesses, Individuals to Watch for Questionable Employment Tax Practices


The Internal Revenue Service issued a consumer alert today for eight schemes where federal employment taxes are not properly withheld or paid by employers from their employees’ paychecks. The IRS alert to business owners and other taxpayers follows a string of recent convictions and court rulings involving employment tax schemes.

“Failure to pay employment taxes is stealing from the employees of the business,” said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. “The IRS pursues business owners who don’t follow the law, and those who embrace these schemes face civil or criminal sanctions.”

There are many reasons employers don’t withhold or pay employment taxes. For some, it may be an attempt to use the government as a bank to 'borrow the money for a short while' with good intentions to pay it back later. For others, it may be a situation where an employer collects the taxes and elects to keep it during a period of financial difficulty rather than pay it to the IRS. For a small number, it involves philosophical differences with the tax law of the United States that courts consistently reject. Regardless of the reason, federal law requires employment tax withholding and payment by employers.

http://www.irs.gov/uac/IRS-Warns-Bus...-Tax-Practices

Missouri "1,714 citations for child-labor violations" had the candidate or politician who proposed repealing all child labor laws.

[boutons_deux]

ALEC Floats Legislation Chipping Away At The 17th Amendment

The bill would significantly increase the role of the state legislature in the election of U.S. senators, inching back toward the process used prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. The 17th Amendment established the direct election of U.S. senators. Before this amendment, senators were chosen by state legislators.

Under the draft measure, a plurality of the state legislature would be able to nominate a candidate to appear on the ballot, alongside candidates nominated by the parties through the convention or primary process.

"It's an attempt to blunt the effects of the 17th Amendment by reinserting the state legislature and their views back into the process of electing U.S. senators," said UC-Davis School of Law Professor Vikram Amar, stressing that it was just his first "gut reaction" to seeing the bill. "By itself, it's not a full-fledged repeal or cir vention of the 17th Amendment ... but it's kind of an encroachment of the vision of the 17th Amendment."

The ALEC measure is not coming out of thin air. For years, some Republican politicians have called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment, and that effort has picked up steam with the rise of the tea party movement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...p_ref=politics

The ed up, anachronistic, dysfunctional Senate isn't already non-representative enough for these right-wing extremists.

Same electoral objective of Repug states planning to award electoral votes proporationally by number of districts won instead of Pres winner take all.

The Repugs know they are screwed demographically, so ing democracy, voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, Cons utional and electoral changes is the only way they can win.

[boutons_deux]

Is IKEA the New Model for the Conservative Movement? State Policy Network

In every state in the country, there is at least one ostensibly independent “free-market” think tank that is part of something called the State Policy Network— there are sixty-four in all, ranging from the Pelican Ins ute, in Louisiana, to the Freedom Foundation, in Washington State. According to a new investigative report by the Center for Media and Democracy, a liberal watchdog group, however, the think tanks are less free actors than a coördinated collection of corporate front groups—branch stores, so to speak—funded and steered by cash from undisclosed conservative and corporate players. Although the think tanks have largely operated under the radar, the ulative enterprise is impressively large, according to the report. In 2011, the network funnelled seventy-nine million dollars into promoting conservative policies at the state level.

Tracie Sharp, the president of the S.P.N., promptly dismissed the report as “baseless allegations.” She told Politico, “There is no governing organization dictating what free market think tanks research or how they educate the public about good public policy.”

But notes provided to The New Yorker on what was said during the S.P.N.’s recent twenty-first-annual meeting raise doubts about Sharp’s insistence that each of the think tanks is, as she told me, “fiercely independent.”

That agenda includes opposing President Obama’s health-care program and climate-change regulations, reducing union protections and minimum wages, cutting taxes and business regulations, tightening voting restrictions, and privatizing education.

Sharp also acknowledged privately to the members that the organization’s often anonymous donors frequently shape the agenda. “The grants are driven by donor intent,” she told the gathered think-tank heads. She added that, often, “the donors have a very specific idea of what they want to happen.” She said that the donors also sometimes determined in which states their money would be spent.

The S.P.N. operates as a tax-exempt nonprofit, allowing it to take tax-deductible contributions that it does not have to publicly disclose. According to the study by the Center for Media and Democracy, the donations include more than a million dollars run through the organizations DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, which serve to erase the donors’ names, operating, as Mother Jones put it, like a “dark-money ATM for the conservative movement.”

according to the Center for Media and Democracy study, corporate donors to the S.P.N. have included many of America’s largest companies, such as Facebook, Microsoft, A.T. & T., Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Philip Morris and Altria Client Services (both subsidiaries of Altria), GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft, and funds from various en ies linked to the fossil-fuel billionaires Charles and David Koch.

states’ think tanks are independent is true as a legal matter.” Still, she said, “in practical terms, the Center for Media and Democracy has do ented how these groups have promoted … carbon-copy claims, identical language, and distorted statistics, differing only through the state label placed at the top of a particular report.”

Far from being independent, “they are intensely subservient to the wishes of the most powerful few.”

But she did draw one distinction between S.P.N. and IKEA. Because, she contends, the bills that S.P.N. backs divert millions of taxpayer dollars from government to the private sector, “they are hardly cheap.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz2krp3TreC

so you right-wing asshole STILL think there is NO VRWC?

[boutons_deux]

[boutons_deux]

here's the kind of trash the VRWC trash hires to do their dirty work

The Corporate Bully Whose Front Groups, Willful Distortions and Hate-Mongering Has Poisoned U.S. Politics
: Meet Richard Berman

Big Food’s top flack has pioneered the worst in our political culture.

Dr. Evil is Richard Berman, a Washington-based lawyer-turned-hitman for Big Food who pioneered and still deploys many of the most intentionally deceptive, inflammatory and anti-democratic tactics used in corporate propaganda campaigns today. For nearly four decades, Berman’s attacks have tried to smear, discredit and destroy public-interest causes and groups by a toxic brew of industry front groups, distortion-filled attacks, ridicule and bullying to stoke prejudice and hatred as a means of turning the public’s attention and regulators away from his paymasters’ business practices.

Take his effort to cripple the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and defame the character of its CEO, Wayne Pacelle. He ran a television ad during the 2013 Academy Awards telling people not to give to HSUS. He created a YouTube video viewed 1.7 million times calling Pacelle “the Bernie Madoff of the charity world.” He set up a non-profit front group called Humane Watch to undermine donations intended for the HSUS and a website attacking its funding. He even threatened the Better Business Bureau to drop HSUS' accreditation under the business group's Wise Giving Alliance, and then attacked BBB when it refused to do so.

Astute observers have concluded that Berman is guilty of the sins he regularly accuses others of. Legitimate watchdog groups, such as CharityNavigator.org, have characterized his web of non-profit front groups, which take in millions in tax-deductible corporate donations, as the fake charities. Tax law experts contacted by Bloomberg.com said his operation was comparable to Madoff’s, a s game of financial transfers enriching Berman that likely violated tax laws. Investigative reporters have even traced e-mails from front groups who deny they’re working with him back to his office.

Can one man really be held responsible for large slices of any era’s excesses, especially in a city as dominated by opportunists as Washington, D.C.? The answer is yes, there are people who are emblematic of political eras. Ronald Reagan was the “Teflon president,” evading criticism that stuck. Lee A er was the dark political operator who revived the GOP’s racist attack machinery for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. In Berman’s case, there is a decades-long record of gleefully taking fights into the gutter.

Why would Berman and his backers go after a group like the Humane Society of the U.S., the nation's most effective animal protection group? Or enviromentalistsconcerned about mercury in tuna? Or nutritionists concerned about trans fat? Or physicians worried about the effect of high-fructose corn syrup on obesity? Or restaurant workers seeking a higher minimum wage and paid sick days? Or liberal foundations funding public-interest advocates?

Because in every one of these examples, their warnings and advocacy threaten how Big Food—the corporate-dominated food and beverage industry paying Berman—makes its fortune.
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-ac...olitics-gutter

[boutons_deux]

Conservative group ALEC pushes stealth tax on homeowners who install solar panels

An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilising to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels – casting them as “freeriders” – in a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.

Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama’s main channel for climate action.

Details of Alec’s strategy to block clean energy development at every stage – from the individual rooftop to the White House – are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.

For 2014, Alec plans to promote a suite of model bills and resolutions aimed at blocking Barack Obama from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and state governments from promoting the expansion of wind and solar power through regulations known as Renewable Portfolio Standards.

Alec wanted to lower the rate electricity companies pay homeowners for direct power generation – and maybe even charge homeowners for feeding power into the grid.

“As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non direct generation customers are being penalised,” he said.

Eick dismissed the suggestion that individuals who buy and install home-based solar panels had made such investments. “How are they going to get that electricity from their solar panel to somebody else’s house?” he said. “They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity.”

The group sponsored at least 77 energy bills in 34 states last year. The measures were aimed at opposing renewable energy standards, pushing through the Keystone XL pipeline project, and barring oversight on fracking

Until now, the biggest target in Alec’s sights were state Renewable Portfolio Standards which require electricity companies to source a share of their power from wind, solar, biomass, or other clean energy. Such measures are seen as critical to reducing America’s use of coal and oil, and to the fight against climate change. RPS are now in force in 30 states.

“Approximately 15 states across the country introduced legislation to reform, freeze or repeal their state’s renewable mandate,”

Three of those states – North Carolina, Ohio, and Kansas – saw strong pushes by conservative groups to reverse clean energy regulations this year.

after its bruising state battles in 2013, Alec was now focused on weakening – rather than seeking outright repeal – of the clean energy standards.

other key agenda item for Alec’s meeting this week is the EPA. The group is looking at two proposals to curb the agency’s powers – one to shut the EPA out of any meaningful oversight of fracking, and the other to block action on climate change.

model bill endorsed by the Alec board of directors last August would strip the EPA of power to shut down a frack site or oil industry facility.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/04/conservative-group-alec-pushes-stealth-tax-on-homeowners-who-install-solar-panels/

ALEC is the concentrated corporate power conspiracy to over America and to protect/enrich corporations.

[boutons_deux]

New Guardian Docs Show ALEC Misled Press, Public

Internal do ents from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) published by The Guardian provide stunning insight into the inner workings of the "corporate bill mill" -- and offer new evidence about how the group has continually misled reporters, the public, and even its own members.

The notoriously secretive ALEC has been thrust into the sunlight in the two years since the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org, analyzed over 800 of ALEC's previously-secret model bills, and do ented the corporations and legislators pushing ALEC's legislative agenda. It now appears that ALEC has been scorched by the sunshine.

According to the new Guardian do ents, which were apparently prepared for ALEC's board in August, over the past two years ALEC has been losing corporate members, suffering from major funding shortfalls, and anticipates legal trouble with ethics rules and its charitable tax status.

ALEC is still supported by tobacco, oil, and pharmaceutical interests, but has lost around 60 corporate members in the fallout over ALEC's role in promoting Stand Your Ground legislation, voter ID, climate change denial, and an array of other controversial, corporate-friendly bills, the do ents show. The leaked do ents outline a "prodigal son" project (misspelled as "prodical son") aimed at luring "lapsed" corporations back into the fold, and describe a $1.4 million budget shortfall that accrued as a result of ALEC's shrinking roster of corporate backers.

ALEC forms 501(c)(4), but previously claimed: "We have no current plans to operate a 501(c)(4) in the near future”

The Guardian do ents show that ALEC has formed a new 501(c)(4) en y, the "Jeffersonian Project," apparently in anticipation of the IRS investigating ALEC's current 501(c)(3) charitable status. This revelation could be seen as an admission from ALEC that its critics were correct about its violations of the tax code (although ALEC insists it does not lobby, despite do entary evidence to the contrary).

ALEC had previously misled reporters about its plans for a 501(c)(4).

In December of last year, ALEC spokesperson Kaitlyn Buss told Bloomberg News "we have no current plans to operate a 501(c)(4) in the near future.”

When Buss said "the near future" and "current plans," she apparently meant "next week."

Just eight days after the Bloomberg story ran, ALEC formed the 501(c)(4) "Jeffersonian Project," according to a certificate of incorporation obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. (ALEC also failed to mention to Bloomberg that it had incorporated another 501(c)(4), "ALEC NOW" in July of 2012; that en y was dissolved earlier this year.)

“The only charity work ALEC does is on behalf of needy corporations and lonely legislators,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who as a state legislator attended some ALEC meetings and wrote about it for The Progressive magazine. “It is past time that ALEC is exposed for what it is—a corporate lobbying firm doing the bidding of corporations."

ALEC forms 501(c)(4) to "provide greater legal protection," "lessen ethics concerns"

ALEC's 501(c)(3) charitable status has been challenged in IRS complaints from Common Cause, Clergy VOICE, and the Voters Legislative Transparency Project, all of which allege that ALEC engages in far more lobbying than is permissible for a "charity," and which were supported with research from CMD. When Common Cause's late president Bob Edgar filed a whistleblower complaint challenging ALEC's tax status in April of 2012, ALEC fought back hard. Its lawyer Alan Dye publicly dismissed the complaint a "harassment tactic" that "ignores applicable law."

"The attacks on the American Legislative Exchange Council are based on patently false claims," he told reporters at the time.

But behind the scenes, Dye took a more measured tone, according to The Guardian do ents. Forming a 501(c)(4) -- which is allowed to lobby without limit -- would “provide greater legal protection or lessen ethics concerns,” Dye wrote in an August 2013 memo to ALEC's board of directors. Forming the Jeffersonian Project would remove "questions of ethical violations made by our critics and state ethics boards and provides further legal protection."

"ALEC certified to the IRS for years that it didn't spend a penny on lobbying, thereby preserving its absurd status as a charity," Steve Spaulding, Staff Counsel at Common Cause, told CMD.

ALEC's charitable status had allowed its corporate members to write-off their ALEC membership dues -- which are essentially lobbying expenses -- as tax-deductible charitable contributions.
"In forming a 501(c)(4) arm, it appears that ALEC is on notice that it's not going to get away with abusing our nation's charitable tax laws much longer," Spaulding said.

ALEC Bleeding Corporate Members, But Told Legislators "Our Numbers Are Actually Up"

The Guardian do ents also reveal the rapid drop in ALEC's corporate and legislative members, and the corresponding impact on ALEC's budget. Many of the departures are attributable to public awareness campaigns by Color of Change, Progress Now, Common Cause, Greenpeace, People for the American Way, CMD and other public interest organizations.

"By ALEC’s own reckoning the network has lost almost 400 state legislators from its membership over the past two years, as well as more than 60 corporations that form the core of its funding. In the first six months of this year it suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income," The Guardian reports.

But ALEC tried to suggest otherwise in communications with its legislative members.

In June of 2012, in the wake of intense criticism for its multi-year drive to get "Stand Your Ground" bills introduced and passed and following an exodus of its corporate members, ALEC sent an email to legislative members to boost morale.

"We’ve done some tremendous work over the years," ALEC wrote, claiming it was "correct[ing] the record" about the "outrageous claims about ALEC" and its dwindling membership.

“You may be interested in knowing that, since CMD and others began their efforts, our private sector membership has increased by 20 percent in the last 12 months,” ALEC wrote in the June 2012 email. "In fact, despite the prevailing narrative of late, our numbers are actually up from where they were just 12 months ago."

But ALEC's internal do ents indicate that the organization was misleading its legislative members.

According to The Guardian do ents, ALEC's "private sector" members dropped from 280 in 2011, to 241 in 2012, to the new low of 214 in 2013, as of this summer. Legislative membership dropped from 2,200 in 2011, to 2,010 in 2012, to 1,810 in 2013 (although ALEC still boasts of 2,000 members on its website).

When confronted with these facts by The Guardian, ALEC gave a statement markedly different than what it previously told its legislative members.

"No one disputes that ALEC lost public and private members during the past several years," said ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling.

ALEC as Pay-to-Play

Other do ents, such as those describing potential ALEC task forces that could help attract new funders, undermine the notion that ALEC is a legislator-driven organization. The materials indicate that ALEC operates as a genuine pay-to-play.

Despite ALEC describing itself as being "run by and for state legislators,” the factors ALEC considered when deciding whether to enact task forces like "Gaming" or "Tribal Affairs" had little to do with the interests of state legislators. A "pro" for a Gaming task force is that the industry generated $37 billion in revenue last year; a "con" for a potential Tribal Affairs task force is that "there may be little to no private sector funding," even while acknowledging that the issue would be relevant to many ALEC legislators.

Pledging Allegiance to ALEC

One of the more bizarre revelations in the do ents is a plan to have the legislators who serve as ALEC State Chairs sign a pledge of "loyalty" and agree to "put the interests of [ALEC] first." This proposal underscored concerns that some ALEC politicians have been putting the interests of ALEC (and its corporate backers) ahead of their cons uents, and ahead of their commitment to upholding their state cons ution.

Another element of the pledge is an agreement that State Chairs will "inform ALEC of any public records/FOIA requests that include ALEC do ents." This fits into a larger pattern of ALEC trying to keep its communications with lawmakers secret. This year, ALEC began stamping the materials it gives to legislators with a “disclaimer” asserting that the do ents are not subject to any state’s open records/freedom of information laws, and has been sending communications to legislators via an online dropbox, which it admitted was an effort to try to evade disclosure under open records laws. CMD has fought ALEC legislators' efforts to keep ALEC records secret in Texas and Wisconsin.

The cover page for the State Chair pledge states that ALEC recommends that "The Board should approve the following job descriptions for State Chairs," but ALEC told The Guardian that the pledge was not adopted. Still, it reflects a very troubling mindset to even propose that elected officials who lead ALEC’s legislative agenda in the states owe ALEC a duty to put the organization first and to report to it.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2...d-press-public

aka, ALEC is nothing but a conspiratorial lobbying/front operation for United Corporations of America.

[boutons_deux]

Conservative Groups Plan US-Wide Assault on Education, Health and Taxes


State Policy Network co-ordinating plans across 34 US states
• Strategy to 'release residents from government dependency'
• Revelations come amid growing scrutiny of tax-exempt charities

• Read key excerpts from the SPN proposals
• Portland Press Herald: group's plan to eliminate taxes
• Texas Observer: the money behind the fight to wreck Medicaid

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment,do ents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

The do ents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are cons uted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian do ents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The do ents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Ins ute and the State Policy Network itself.

SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian do ents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian do ents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN's president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that "as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society."

In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a "research and demonstration project" that would "release residents from extreme government dependency". It would turn the state's poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as "a gigantic tax-free zone"

... etc

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ion-health-tax

[Winehole23]

Why not just make a blog?

Implies an editorial function, fluent and correct English idiom, and a conscious appeal to readership.

[boutons_deux]

The World Champion USA inequality is not accidental, but a direct, intended result of the 1%/VRWC/UCA buying the govt policies that created it.

1 Percent’s Surge Is 40 Years In The Making

From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. experienced a significant economic recovery, in which average real income growth jumped by 6 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that almost all of that increase — 95 percent — was enjoyed by those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.

To appreciate this remarkable finding, set out in an important paper by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, we need to add some context. From 2007 to 2009, the recession produced a 17.4 percent decline in average real income — the largest drop since the Great Depression. Every income class was hit hard, but in percentage terms, those at the top of the economic ladder suffered the biggest decreases.

During the recovery — from 2009 to 2012 — members of the top 1 percent have enjoyed a big boost in their average income: 31.4 percent. As Saez shows, this figure almost wiped out the loss from the recession, returning the top 1 percent to essentially where it was in 2007.

By contrast, the remaining 99 percent saw measly growth of 0.4 percent, about a 30th of the 11.6 percent loss they experienced in the recession. By the end of 2012, the bottom 99 percent wasn’t close to where it was in 2007.

If we go back to 1993, we can see how extreme these patterns have been. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the U.S. enjoyed significant expansions. Both expansions were quite lopsided in favor of the top 1 percent, but at least everyone gained.

In both periods, the top 1 percent did great, enjoying annual income growth of 98.7 percent (under Clinton) and 61.8 percent (under Bush). The bottom 99 percent did well, too, with annual gains of 20.3 percent under Clinton and 6.8 percent under Bush.

It should be plain that during both expansions, the U.S. saw nothing close to the disparities of the first years of the current recovery.

Here’s another way to see the point. From 1993 to 2012, the top 1 percent has enjoyed an increase of 86.1 percent in annual income, with the rest of us getting 6.6 percent. That means the top 1 percent received 68 percent of total income growth over the period — a high figure, but much lower than the whopping 95 percent from 2009 to 2012.

Extreme as that figure is, it can be seen as consistent with the broader pattern of continuing increases in economic inequality since the early 1970s, when the top 10 percent received about 33 percent of total annual income (a figure that had remained pretty much constant since the 1940s). Over the next decades, the share of the top decile grew fairly steadily until 2007, when it ended up with about 50 percent of the whole.

The recession reduced that figure to about 47 percent, but in 2012, it climbed back to more than 50 percent. Focusing on just the top 1 percent, Saez finds a broadly similar pattern, with a generally growing share since the 1970s, to the point where its members could claim about 22 percent of total income in 2012.
Are these patterns a reason for concern? Americans certainly don’t believe in equal results, but they do believe that whether or not your parents are rich, you should have a fair chance to get ahead.

The troubling fact is that in the top and bottom 10 percent, U.S. families show a degree of economic “stickiness.” If a child has rich parents, there is a good chance he will stay in the economic elite, but if his parents are poor, he has a decent chance of remaining poor.

A disturbing implication is that if the top earners experience big income growth while everyone else gets stuck, there will be growing disparities in the opportunities of rich children and poor children.

A lot of work needs to be done to specify the reasons for the post-1970s increases in economic inequality. But one point is clear: Through 2012, the gains from the current recovery were concentrated among the top 1 percent, and that pattern, extreme though it is, fits with a general surge in economic inequality over the last 40 years.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/1-percents-surge-is-40-years-in-the-making/

cuts in capital gains tax down from 35%, cuts in top marginal tax brackets, globalism exporting jobs and profits to low-tax countries, tax breaks for executive "performance" awards, etc, etc. Over 40 years, the wealth piles up, while the 99% stagnate or decline.

As linked in another post, it is now the strategy of the 1% to obstruct, through tea bagger/Repug 100% obstructionism, any major changes in policy that would threaten the 1%'s curent, very privileged and powerful status quo.

Buying local, state, federal politicians and judges is only pocket change to the 1%.

iow, America's 99% is ed and un able.

[Winehole23]

http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsu...ic-report-2013

[boutons_deux]

http://www.incapsula.com/the-incapsu...ic-report-2013

gfy