VRWC news: gonna be a long thread

[boutons_deux]

Ralph Nader: How Corporate Espionage on Nonprofit Watchdogs Goes Unpunished

Here’s a dirty little secret you won’t see in the daily papers: corporations conduct espionage against US nonprofit organizations without fear of being brought to justice.

Yes, that means using a great array of spycraft and snoopery, including planned electronic surveillance, wiretapping, information warfare, infiltration, dumpster diving and so much more.

The evidence abounds.

For example, six years ago, based on extensive do entary evidence, James Ridgewayreported in Mother Jones on a major corporate espionage scheme by Dow Chemical focused on Greenpeace and other environmental and food activists.

Greenpeace was running a potent campaign against Dow’s use of chlorine to manufacture paper and plastics. Dow grew worried and eventually desperate.

Ridgeway’s article and subsequent revelations produced jaw-dropping information about how Dow’s private investigators, from the firm Beckett Brown International (BBI), hired:

• An off duty DC police officer who gained access to Greenpeace trash dumpsters at least 55 times;
• a company called NetSafe Inc., staffed by former National Security Agency (NSA) employees expert in computer intrusion and electronic surveillance; and,
• a company called TriWest Investigations, which obtained phone records of Greenpeace employees or contractors. BBI’s notes to its clients contain verbatim quotes that they attribute to specific Greenpeace employees.

Using this information, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit against Dow Chemical, Dow’s PR firms Ketchum and Dezenhall Resources, and others, alleging trespass on Greenpeace’s property, invasion of privacy by intrusion, and theft of confidential do ents.

Yesterday, the D.C. Court of Appeals dismissed Greenpeace’s lawsuit. In her decision, Judge Anna Blackburne-Rigsby notes that “However Greenpeace’s factual allegations may be regarded,” its “legal arguments cannot prevail as a matter of law” because “the common law torts alleged by Greenpeace are simply ill-suited as potential remedies.” At this time Greenpeace has not decided whether to appeal.

The Court’s opinion focused on technicalities, like who owned the trash containers in the office building where Greenpeace has its headquarters and whether the claim of intrusion triggers a one year or three year statute of limitations. But, whether or not the Court’s legal analyses hold water, the outcome – no legal remedies for grave abuses – is lamentable.

Greenpeace’s lawsuit “will endure in the historical record to educate the public about the extent to which big business will go to stifle First Amendment protected activities,” wrote lawyer Heidi Boghosian, author of Spying on Democracy. “It is crucially important that organizations and individuals continue to challenge such practices in court while also bringing notice of them to the media and to the public at large.”

This is hardly the only case of corporate espionage against nonprofits. Last year, my colleagues produced a report led Spooky Business, which do ented 27 sets of stories involving corporate espionage against nonprofits, activists and whistleblowers. Most of the stories occurred in the US, but some occurred in the UK, France and Ecuador. None of the US-based cases has resulted in a verdict or settlement or even any meaningful public accountability. In contrast, in France there was a judgment against Electricite de France for spying on Greenpeace, and in the UK there is an ongoing effort regarding News Corp/News of the World and phone hacking.

Spooky Business found that “Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations – including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, S , BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON – have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.”

Three examples:

• In 2011, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, its law firm Hunton & Williams, and technology and intelligence firms such as Palantir and Berico were exposed in an apparent scheme to conduct espionage against the Chamber’s nonprofit and union critics.
• Burger King was caught conducting espionage against nonprofits and activists trying to help low-wage tomato pickers in Florida.
• The Wall Street Journal reported on Walmart’s surveillance tactics against anti-Walmart groups, including the use of eavesdropping via wireless microphones.

...

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-ac...watchdogs-goes

(big) Corporate-Americans are ty Americans

[boutons_deux]

the American financial oligarchs get their puppets at the Fed to distribute taxpayer wealth upward to the financial oligarchs

Wall Street Is Coming to Fleece Your Town

The Fed's bizarre new rules transfer power from the public sector, once again.

In an inscrutable move that has alarmed state treasurers, the Federal Reserve, along with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, just changed the liquidity requirements for the nation’s largest banks.

Municipal bonds, long considered safe liquid investments, have been eliminated from the list of high-quality liquid collateral. assets (HQLA). That means banks that are the largest holders of munis are liable to start dumping them in favor of the Treasuries and corporate bonds that do satisfy the requirement.

Muni bonds fund the nation’s critical infrastructure, and they are subject to the whims of the market: as demand goes down, interest rates must be raised to attract buyers. State and local governments could find themselves in the position of cash-strapped Eurozone states, subject to crippling interest rates.

The first major hit to US municipal bonds occurred with the downgrade of two major monoline insurers in January 2008. The fault was with the insurers, but the taxpayers footed the bill. The downgrade signaled a simultaneous downgrade of bonds from over 100,000 municipalities and ins utions, totaling more than $500 billion.

The Fed’s latest rule change could be the final nail in the municipal bond coffin, another misguided move by regulators that not only does not hit its mark but results in serious collateral damage to local governments – maybe serious enough to finally propel them into bankruptcy.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/wall-street-coming-fleece-your-town?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

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The Koch Brothers' 3-Step Plan to Conquer the Next Generation


ight-wing oligarchs dominating our political process, like the Koch Brothers, are wealthy beyond measure. Combined, Charles and David Koch are worth over $100 billion, and make $6 million per hour. That translates to over $1600 per second, which is enough to feed someone on food stamps for an entire year. Compare that figure to the $13 million that former Kroger CEO David Dillon earned in his last year with the company, which he called “ludicrous.” Their only problem is their age – David Koch is 74, Charles Koch is 78. For their class to maintain power over American politics and government, they have to make investments in future generations to ensure their ideology will live on beyond them.

It’s been well-do ented by now how the Koch Brothers are sponsoring economic programs at colleges and universities around the country. By itself, this could be interpreted as philanthropy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a billionaire donating some of his wealth to education. But the greater strategy in the Kochs’ chess game isn’t just to make themselves wealthier, but a far more sinister one. That strategy can be broken down into three steps:

1. Defund Public Schools

America’s public schools and universities are all being deprived of state tax dollars slowly but surely. This is not an accident. Model bills written by the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (an innocuous-sounding merger of right-wing state legislators and corporate lobbyists) accomplish this goal threefold. First, model legislation aimed at giving corporations huge tax breaks gets passed. Then, model resolutions stating that balancing the budget must take priority over funding public ins utions are passed. Finally, ALEC legislators use those resolutions as justification to slash public services, like schools, to the bone in order to plug the gaping budget hole made by corporate tax breaks.

Florida governor Rick Scott has slashed school funding while simultaneously advocating for over$140 million in new corporate tax breaks.

Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett has given out $3 billion in corporate tax breaks during his tenure, and has cut education funding by $1 billion.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker cut schools by $1.2 billion and has given out $570 million in corporate tax breaks.

On its own, this could be seen as, at best, a radical gamble in economic growth with schools on the line. But when this tactic is repeated in multiple states in different geographical regions, it’s apparent there’s a strategy at play.

2. Make Schools Dependent on Private En ies for Money

At Florida State University, emails from an economics professor in 2008 show that the Koch Brothers were willing to donate millions to the university through their foundation, but only if they had a say in the curriculum that was taught and in the hiring of professors to teach the curriculum.

FSU took the donation, and consulted with the Koch Foundation on who would be hired to teach courses that largely vilified government services and promoted the Kochs’ unique brand of libertarian free market ideology.

At the time, Florida’s public universities had seen their funding levels fall by 41 percent over the previous five years.

Public universities traditionally depend on state government funding for 53 percent of their operational budgets. But without a dependable key funding source like state governments, colleges and universities are forced to raise tuition, which results in only a privileged class of students able to attend college. Public universities are also forced to come crawling to private interests like Koch-funded foundations for funding, which always comes with strings attached.

3. Ingrain students with Greed-Based Ideology

To be blunt, the Kochs’ economic philosophy is essentially, “ you, I’ve got mine.” In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket. Some of his proposals included

killing Medicare and Medicaid,

eliminating federal campaign finance laws,

doing away with all environmental protections,

abolishing the minimum wage, and

privatizing water systems, railways, and the post office.

Koch also called for eliminating laws that prevent creditors from gouging debtors with high interest rates,

deregulating private health insurance companies, and

killing the food stamp program.

In the college and high school courses on Libertarian thought offered by the Ins ute for Humane Studies, a Koch-funded think tank, many of these ideas are taught to unsuspecting and impressionable young students.

As the Center for Public Integrity reported, students are taught about how sweat shop workers in third world countries don’t have it so bad, how the federal minimum wage kills jobs, and how the Environmental Protection Agency is bad for the environment.

With this strategy, students attending college would mistakenly interpret such greed-inspired drivel as scholarly research to be taken as gospel. Upon graduation, it can be assumed they would start families and impress their ideologies upon their children. Colleges themselves would be transformed from ins utions that cherish and develop critical thinkers into additional cogs of the corporate machine, with corporate-approved professors churning out obedient workers instead of independent-minded leaders.
This strategy is nothing short of generational conquest. It is only by insisting that our public schools be properly funded by our tax dollars, instead of by oligarchs with their own agendas, that we can stop the corporate brainwashing of our kids.

http://readersupportednews.org/opini...ext-generation

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ALEC is coming to a city block near you


The conservative think tank known for flooding state legislatures with its agenda is starting to think locally

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has long made headlines as a conservative policy-sharing network that has pushed an agenda of voter suppression and dismantling of public education at the state level. Now the group, backed by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, is going local with its new initiative, theAmerican City County Exchange (ACCE). Soon, city government or county commission policies could be generated at the same right-wing think tank that has attacked environmental protections, attempted to undermine the rights of workers and made it harder for people to vote.
At a time of congressional gridlock and partisan rancor, local policies are easier to come by at the local level, with business and citizen groups coming together to generate solutions to problems such as affordable housing, public transit, open space and good-paying jobs. At the heart of these efforts is the spirit of regional collaboration among people who will have to live with the consequences of policy.
ALEC, with its new project, plans to interrupt that collaborative policymaking process by coming in from the outside with model bills based on an ideological obsession with privatization rather than on local knowledge about what works.

Progress grows local

Some of the most successful, life-improving policies in metro regions involve partnerships among elected officials, private corporations and grass-roots activists. What has made collaboration successful is the fact that stakeholders come together. I saw this firsthand during more than a decade of work in Silicon Valley. There the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (a business consortium) worked with organized labor and community groups to ask for funding for quality public transit and the development of affordable housing. One result of this collaboration was a sales-tax-funded public transit system that is being built to serve all residents of Santa Clara County.

The business community in Silicon Valley also partnered with organized labor around the issue of children’s health care. In 2001 the Santa Clara County government, at the behest of the South Bay Labor Council and local business leaders, set up a combination of property taxes, tobacco taxes and outside grants to fund a universal health care program for all children in the county. Though its funding was shaky at times, the program managed to cover 97 percent of the county’s children, until it became part of California’s Medicaid program in 2013.

ALEC wants to take the same sort of highly ideological agenda that has stunted progress in Washington and state capitals and impose it at the metro level.

Instead of trying to contribute to locally relevant solutions, ALEC’s new project hopes to take local stakeholders out of the equation. It plans to take cookie-cutter bills thought up by corporate lobbyists and try to push them through local government. From its state-level work, ALEC is known for its attacks on environmental protections, its opposition to employees’ rights such as paid sick days and for promoting “stand your ground” gun laws that have been used as legal cover for violence against young unarmed African-American men and women.

Privatization agenda

For city and local governments, ALEC’s primary focus is on privatization. Its new local push through the ACCE wants to “ease the way for corporations to take over local services,” as Jay Riestenberg, an analyst at Common Cause, recently told Bloomberg News.

Conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Ins ute have long pushed a smaller-government agenda of privatizing government services such as mass transit and utilities. They argue that instead of being run by elected public officials using tax dollars, these vital services should be funded and operated by private corporations in a compe ive marketplace.

The problem with this is that privatization locks local government into contracts that remove democratic oversight. While city and county politicians face repercussions at the ballot box if they do not deliver services for their cons uents, corporations can take the money and run — often leaving voters with few means to reverse bad decisions when services are compromised.

We have already seen at the state level that the negative consequences of ideologically driven privatization can be profound. For example, in Rhode Island, ALEC was successful in persuading state government to hand over its public employee pension fund to private hedge fund managers. As Matt Taibbi do ented in Rolling Stone, the regret now runs deep among state lawmakers, who have seen their state pay out millions in servicing fees to these private hedge funds, while the pension fund — and city services — continue to suffer. “They pretty much took the COLA [cost of living pay raises for public workers] and gave it to a bunch of billionaires,” Providence’s retired firefighter union chief told Taibbi.

At the city level, perhaps the most prominent cautionary tale about privatization is Chicago’s move to sign a 75-year contract with finance company Morgan Stanley for the management of its parking meters. A city audit showed that the deal rested on an undervaluing of the meters and lost the city $1 billion as a result.

In addition, Morgan Stanley recently sued the city over lost profit because of the periodic shutting down or moving of meters for street cleaning and city events. Chicago lost that lawsuit, to the tune of another $61 million.

This means the city incurs additional cost when it wants to add protected bike lanes and bus routes and enact other interventions that could help reduce carbon emissions. And because the deal with Morgan Stanley is locked in for another 69 years, voters have little recourse. Future generations will suffer from this decision, which was made before they were born. They won’t be able to use their votes to reverse the parking meter fiasco.

“Local politics in America is the purest form of democracy,” Pittsburgh city council member Natalia Rudiak said to The Guardian about the ACCE. “There is no buffer between me and the public. So why would I want the involvement of a third party acting on behalf of a few corporate interests?”

Rudiak’s comment cuts to the core of the matter: ALEC wants to take the same sort of highly ideological agenda that has stunted progress in Washington and state capitals and impose it at the metro level.

If Americans let them succeed, we will lose the most promising frontier in democratic policymaking today — local government — along with our communities.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinion...overnment.html

[DarrinS]

Did Obama get any Wall Street money?

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Did Obama get any Wall Street money?

more than McLiar (Wall st knows how to pick a winner), but 10x LESS than Bishop Gecko (Wall st knows how to pick a winner)

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IRS Whistleblowers: Agency Executives Behind Multibillion-Dollar Corporate Tax Giveaways


A veteran Internal Revenue Service attorney demands a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

A 10-year veteran Internal Revenue Service (IRS) attorney has demanded a congressional audit of the IRS to investigate the agency's alleged role in allowing US corporations to illegally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes even as it cracks down on individuals and small businesses.

In a letter to Treasury secretary Jacob Lew, IRS commissioner John A. Koskinen and IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, Jane J. Kim, an attorney in the IRS Office of the Chief Counsel in New York, accused IRS executives of "deliberately" facilitating multibillion-dollar tax giveaways. The letter, dated October 19, will add further pressure on the agency, which is under fire for allegedly targeting conservative and Tea Party groups.

Kim, who has previously blown the whistle on "gross waste of government resources" in the IRS New York field offices, wrote in her new letter that senior IRS officials have "intentionally undermined the authority of the IRS Whistleblower Office (WO)" to avoid taking action "in cases involving billions in corporate taxes due." The IRS also refuses to enforce laws for "large corporate taxpayers," resulting in giveaways of further billions, despite applying the same laws with "draconian strictness to small business, the self-employed, and wage-earning individuals."

The IRS attorney's letter was copied to Jason Foster, chief investigative counsel for the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, as well as several other senators and House representatives, including Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, Charles Grassley, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. They could not be reached for comment.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2...-tax-giveaways

the wealthy and corps obtain the govt and policies they pay for.

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John Oliver: The Real Shadow Government Is in the State Legislatures, Where ALEC Calls the Shots


John Oliver has gotten a well-deserved rep lately for doing investigative comedy on Last Week Tonight, and this weekend he made an excellent point about state legislatures and ALEC, the Koch-supported legislation mill. While we’re all focused on how control of the US Senate could be determined by the midterm elections tomorrow, we ought to remember that the gridlocked Congress has passed a mere 185 bills so far this session.

But the state legislatures, which are staffed by folks Oliver believes are downright weird (and he had the tapes to prove it), passed a whopping 24,000 laws in the same period.
And many of those bills are written by ALEC. Like, literally. Oliver shows a clip of a Democratic legislator pointing out on the floor that a bill submitted for passage seemed to be printed off the conservative group’s website, down to the type font and even the little ALEC logo in the text.

And all this goes on under what little radar is left in local media markets. Watch Oliver try to make up for that.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/187673...ec-calls-shots

ALEC is the heavily financed with laundered money, unregistered lobbying proxy for BigCorps.

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The ALEC Problem Is Even Worse Than John Oliver Thinks

The bad news is that ALEC is expanding its influence to a hyper-local level, which even Last Week Tonight overlooked.

In August, ALEC launched an initiative to take its model legislation beyond statehouses and into city councils and county commissions.

This new spinoff, the American City County Exchange, "will push policies such as contracting with companies to provide services such as garbage pick-up and eliminating collective bargaining, a municipal echo of the parent group's state strategies."

The corporate influence of the initiative is poignantly illustrated by the group's membership fee disparity: Local council members and county commissioners are required to pay a nominal $100 for a two-year membership. Meanwhile, prospective private industry members must choose between a $10,000 and $25,000 membership fee.

According to a search of the Nexis database, only a tiny number of print news outlets have reported on the new initiative. And as local media outlets face extinction or the possibility of being gobbled up by billionaire media moguls, it falls to the larger outlets that remain to lead the way.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/11...-oliver/201424

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How Fox News' Conservative Message Creeps Into Local News Broadcasts

Across the country, Fox News Channel's conservative misinformation is being broadcast to millions of viewers through local television stations, which are owned and operated by the network's parent company, often without the knowledge of the station's viewers.

Local news stations fall into two categories: "owned and operated stations" whose content is controlled by a network or larger parent company, and "affiliate" stations that are not owned by a central network, and thus do not have to use the network's content. So a local "Fox" station might be entirely independent, or it might be controlled by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox -- and they do not have to tell viewers which they're watching.

By owning these local stations, Murdoch and 21st Century Fox can push narratives of their choosing onto large local audiences, often running the same news packages and hosting the same personalities that appear on the Fox News cable channel. According to federal communications law, a single company can own any number local stations so long as they collectively reach "no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households."

21^st Century Fox recently expanded into the San Francisco market, broadening their reach to 37 percent of U.S. television homes. They now own 28 stations in 17 markets.

With 71 percent of Americans getting their news from local channels -- almost double that of cable news networks -- Fox's expansion means that more households will be subject to Fox News' conservative misinformation even if they don't watch the cable news network.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/12...-into-l/201722

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Cashing in on public schools

This picture of what's going on in education policy today may be cartoonified, but unfortunately it's not as exaggerated as we might want to believe. Public School Shakedown offers the big picture in a nuts :

In the past decade, public funding for education has significantly declined.

Yet cuts to public schools budgets aren’t because the resource pie is shrinking – in fact, the past twenty years has seen historic highs in the country’s gross domestic product.

Cuts to public school budgets are because the pie is being unequally sliced, with corporations and the super-wealthy getting richer and richer.

For example, despite massive school closings in Philadelphia, the city’s budget for charter schools increased by $107 million. Government give-aways to corporations through tax breaks and loopholes depress the amount of state aid available for schools.

With padded budgets, these corporations and their philanthropic arms foot the bills for school privatization, from charters to vouchers to the political lobbyists that propel school privatization laws forward.

Not only are public schools suffering, they are being systematically divested from, siphoning funding and resources to private schools and the corporations that fund them.

And students and teachers alike pay the price.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...8Daily+Kos%29#

A lot if not most non-profit charter schools actually sub-contract almost all of their operations to for-profit scammers.

Do you right-wingers still really think the VRWC, BigCorp, evangelical Bible humpers give a flying about the quality of K12 education?

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Barbarians at the Gates: Authoritarianism and the Assault on Public Education

As public schools are privatized, suc bing to corporate interests, critical thought and agency are erased, and education emphasizes market values rather than democratic ideals.

If we conjured up George Orwell and his fear of state surveillance, Hannah Arendt and her claim that thoughtlessness was the foundation of totalitarianism, and Franz Kafka whose characters embodied the death of agency and the "helplessness of the living," (2) it would be difficult for these dystopian works of literary and philosophical imagination to compete with the material realization of the assault on public education and public values in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.

These are dangerous times.

Compromise and compassion are now viewed as a pathology, a blight on the very meaning of politics.

Moreover, in a society controlled by financial monsters, the political order is no longer sustained by a faith in reason, critical thought and care for the other.

As any vestige of critical education, thought and dissent are disparaged, the assault on reason gives way to both a crisis in agency and politics.

The right-wing Republican Party and their Democratic Party counterparts, along with their corporate supporters, despise public schools as much as they disdain taxation, ins utions that enable critical thinking, and any call for providing social provisions that would benefit the public good.

Not only are both parties attempting to privatize much of public education in order to make schools vehicles for increasing the profits of investors, they are also destroying the critical infrastructures that sustain schools as democratic public spheres.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/28272...blic-education

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The Koch network plans to spend nearly $1 billion on the 2016 elections

The billionaire Koch brothers' network of wealthy conservative donors plans to raise $889 million for the 2016 elections, the Washington Post's Matea Gold and Politico's Ken Vogel reported Monday.

The astonishing number is far more than an organized outside group network has ever raised during a political campaign cycle. Indeed, it's more than either the Democratic or Republican Party raised from 2011-2012, according to tallies by the Center for Responsive Politics placing the parties' fundraising at about $800 million each.

Furthermore, unlike donations to political parties, the details of the Koch network's fundraising can be kept secret. The network has many members beyond Charles and David Koch, and while some of their names have leaked to the press, the names of others — and the amounts they contribute — are unknown.

Could the Kochs swing the GOP primary?

Importantly, Gold also reports that the group's officials were exploring whether the network's members "would coalesce around a single candidate" in the crowded Republican presidential field. Back in 2011 and 2012, Koch network-funded groups stayed out of the GOP primary, preferring instead to focus their spending on trying to defeat President Obama and Democrats.

A major financial investment from the Koch network this time around could significantly affect the primary. For instance, it could further bolster the prospects of an "establishment" candidate like Jeb Bush. Bush has quite a conservative record on economic and business issues, and he's not too far away from the Kochs on immigration reform.

But the network could also provide a major base of financial support to a candidate less well-known to the DC lobbyist crowd — for instance, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who reportedly attended the Koch network event last weekend. Walker won the loyalty of many conservative donors by battling against unions — they could pay him back by giving him the funds necessary to let him go toe to toe with Bush, Mitt Romney, or Chris Christie. Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul also attended last weekend's Koch network event.

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/26/7917917/koch-billion-2016

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Koch allies strike again, killing Wyoming's Medicaid expansion

The Koch brothers have made defeating Medicaid expansion wherever possible a primary goal, and have groups active in a number of states. In Maine, it's the Koch-affiliated Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA). In Tennessee, it's the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, which scored a victory by denying Medicaid to more than 200,000 Tenneseeans. AddWyoming to their win column. Late Friday, the Wyoming Senate rejected a plan that Gov. Matt Mead (R) had been pushing the expansion, despite a campaign the FGA started in December.

As Wyoming lawmakers consider an alternative Medicaid expansion proposal, the Foundation for Government Accountability is running a radio spot and sponsoring a pe ion calling on people to “Stand with Mead.” But the version of Republican Gov. Matt Mead they’re referring to is the staunch Obamacare opponent of the past — not the Mead of the present, whose health department devised the expansion plan.The group wants to keep Mead’s past “fresh in his mind” and activate public opposition to any expansion. “We’re honestly slightly confused as to why a strong conservative governor would be trying to push a plan that most of his cons uents don’t support,” said the FGA’s Charles Siler.

The FGA was triumphant in this press release, trumpeting their wins in both Tennessee and Wyoming. This group isn't one of the groups directly under the Koch umbrella, but like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is included in the labyrinthian web of groups where Koch and other money is funneled. The FGA received "$108,150 from the State Policy Network (SPN), an ALEC-founded and Koch-funded umbrella group for state-level conservative organizations of which both FGA and MHPC are affiliates. They also received $25,000 from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, another group with close ties to the Kochs."So even in deep, deep red Wyoming, the Kochs are working to make sure no Republican politician escapes their clutches and does something that might benefit the people.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

Kock Bros are ING TRAITORS, conspiring with their chaep, toxic s to hurt Americans.

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Behind Supreme Court’s Obamacare Case, A Secretive Society’s Hidden Hand

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 by a small group of conservative and libertarian law students at Yale and the University of Chicago. Many of the founders had worked on the Reagan presidential campaign, and when they arrived in their elite law schools, they noticed a profound mismatch between the ideas that were achieving political ascendancy — about limited government and free markets and states’ rights — and a liberal orthodoxy that was embedded in almost all major legal ins utions of the time.

Flash forward 30 years: The Federalist Society has matured into a self-professed “society of ideas” that claims 40,000 to 60,000 members. These include every Republican-appointed attorney general and solicitor general since the 1980s, dozens of federal judges, and four sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices: Antonin Scalia, who was one of the organization’s original mentors at the University of Chicago; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

the Federalist Society’s influence is one step removed from the policy process. Yet that influence is profound.

What Supreme Court cases were they participating in? Were they consistently promoting a certain kind of scholarship or set of beliefs?

I identified the key areas of law that have taken a significant conservative turn over the past 30 years. And by reviewing transcripts from meetings and conferences, I was able to show how those ideas were gestated within the Federalist Society network for decades before being accepted by the Supreme Court.

The organization’s statement of principles provides a useful frame. The first part says: We believe the state exists to preserve freedom. Two key areas where this principle has played out are the Second Amendment — there has been a radical reframing of the right to bear arms as a right on par with speech and religious freedom — and campaign finance, culminating in Citizens United and the idea that corporations and individuals both have free speech rights.

A second Federalist principle holds that the separation of governmental powers is central to the Cons ution. There’s been a very, very concerted effort to narrow the federal power over interstate commerce, to restrict the ability of Congress to regulate, and to dramatically expand states’ rights.

The third principle is the idea that it is the role of the judicial branch to say what the law is and not what it ought to be. That is the key issue in King v. Burwell.

There are two very different ways to look at the issue of statutory interpretation. For many years, the dominant view was: If the meaning of that language is not immediately apparent, judges should look to legislative history – what was Congress’s intent when they wrote those words? In the case of Obamacare, the legislative intent is pretty clear: Congress’s aim was to provide tax benefits to lower income Americans to help underwrite the cost of insurance.

But since the 1980s, there’s been a quiet revolution in statutory interpretation by the courts. Instead of taking into consideration legislative history and intent, there’s been a shift to just looking at the plain meaning of the text and ignoring everything else because supposedly things like legislative history are too subjective. This revolution began with a core group of Federalist Society members centered in the Reagan Justice Department. Justice Scalia has been a major proponent.

If the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell prevail, the Federalist Society will have two victories. The obvious one is that Obamacare will suffer another major setback. The other will be to more firmly entrench this idea of statutory interpretation – we shouldn’t look at legislative history; we shouldn’t look at consequences; we should just look at the plain meaning of the words, and our inquiry ends there. The Supreme Court majority’s approach could well be: The ACA says what it says — let Congress fix it. But they know full well that this Congress will not pass that fix.

Twenty or 30 years ago, if you were going to hear oral arguments in a case about the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, much of the discussion would have focused on statutory intent — the fact that the entire purpose of this Act, regardless of how the language is phrased, was to prevent discrimination on account of pregnancy. That is virtually not talked about now.

In the Young oral arguments last December, almost the entire focus was on the meaning of “similarly situated” and “similar in their ability or inability to work.” There was a lot of discussion about semicolons. And when you limit the conversation in this way, the effect almost always is to limit protections, to restrict rights.

http://www.propublica.org/article/be...ent=&utm_name=

[boutons_deux]

the VRWC is winning its War on Public Schools, to be replaced by for-profit, indoctrinating, down-dumbing scam "schools", on teachers and teacher unions.

Where Have All The Teachers Gone?

This is the canary in the coal mine.

Several big states have seen alarming drops in enrollment at teacher training programs. The numbers are grim among some of the nation's largest producers of new teachers: In California, enrollment is down 53 percent over the past five years. It's down sharply in New York and Texas as well.
In North Carolina, enrollment is down nearly 20 percent in three years.

"The erosion is steady. That's a steady downward line on a graph. And there's no sign that it's being turned around," says Bill McDiarmid, the dean of the University of North Carolina School of Education.

Why have the numbers fallen so far, so fast?

McDiarmid points to the strengthening U.S. economy and the erosion of teaching's image as a stable career. There's a growing sense, he says, that K-12 teachers simply have less control over their professional lives in an increasingly bitter, politicized environment.

The list of potential headaches for new teachers is long, starting with the ongoing, ideological fisticuffs over the Common Core State Standards, high-stakes testing and efforts to link test results to teacher evaluations. Throw in the erosion of tenure protections and a variety of recession-induced budget cuts, and you've got the makings of a crisis.

The job also has a PR problem, McDiarmid says, with teachers too often turned into scapegoats by politicians, policymakers, foundations and the media.

"It tears me up sometimes to see the way in which people talk about teachers because they are giving blood, sweat and tears for their students every day in this country. There is a sense now that, 'If I went into this job and it doesn't pay a lot and it's a lot of hard work, it may be that I'd lose it.' And students are hearing this. And it deters them from entering the profession."

While few dispute the shortage itself, Benjamin Riley, head of the group Deans for Impact, a new consortium of 18 reform-minded deans of colleges of education, thinks it's not yet clear why potential teachers are turning away.

"The honest answer is: We don't know. There is nothing that has been done rigorously, in a way that's empirically defensible saying, 'We know this is why the number has dropped,' " Riley says.

Isabel Gray is a senior art history major at Millsaps College in Mississippi. She is passionate about exploring a career in K-12 teaching. But, as graduation nears, she's also having second thoughts about a profession that, she feels, is obsessed with testing and standards.

"You want to find the right balance between being a really good teacher and still meeting those standards and not just teaching toward the test, really retaining that material and not just being taught, you know, testing strategies. And it's hard to find that balance. And there's just so much that's changing" in education, she says.

The teacher employment picture is, of course, local and regional. One part of a state may have too many elementary teachers, while another may have too few. And the gaps vary by specialty — with many places facing serious shortages in areas including science, math and special education.

Riley worries there may be a national mismatch that few are looking at deeply.

"The question, and one that needs to be empirically investigated, is 'Are we overproducing certain kinds of teachers school districts aren't looking for and under-producing certain types of teachers that schools and other types of employers are desperately looking for?' "

There are, of course, alternative teacher certification programs across the U.S. including Teach for America. But TFA, too, has seen large drops in enrollment over the past two years.

One possible path out of this crisis is to pay teachers more.

But, across the country, proposals to boost pay or give teachers merit pay have stalled or been scrapped altogether.

An analysis just out from Georgetown's Edunomics Lab argues that boosting class size for great teachers would save money that could then be funneled into bonuses for
those educators taking on a larger load. The savings would come largely from a reduction in the overall teaching force, angering teachers unions and their allies.

Riley says his group, Deans for Impact, is all for giving teachers a raise — if it's tied to better training that leads to higher graduation rates and other improved student outcomes.

"If we could really take control of the profession and increase the rigor such that teachers are effective from Day 1, I think that will prove to the public at large that this is an investment worth making, and one worth increasing."

In spite of all the noise and politics, surveys show that public school teachers still believe it's an incredibly satisfying job helping children learn.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/...m_term=nprnews

The VRWC/Repug non-trashing trashing of schools, teachers, teacher unions, ty pay, very high churn rate (TX teachers career averages 5 years), blaming teachers EXCLUSIVELY for failing schools and failing students, firing teachers, refusing pay raises, cutting pay and benefits, increasing class size, and making the teachers EXCLUSIVELY for bad test results, why would anybody want to be a teacher?

[boutons_deux]

First Amendment, ‘Patron Saint’ of Protesters, Is Embraced by Corporations

These days, a provocative new study says, there has been a “corporate takeover of the First Amendment.” The assertion is backed by data, and it comes from an unlikely source: John C. Coates IV, who teaches business law at Harvard and used to be a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the prominent corporate law firm.

“Corporations have begun to displace individuals as the direct beneficiaries of the First Amendment,” Professor Coates wrote. The trend, he added, is “recent but accelerating.”

Professor Coates’s study was only partly concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent decisions amplifying the role of money in politics.

“Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint,”

s a detailed history of the transformation of First Amendment law. In his account, “the American right discovered the First Amendment” in the early 1970s.
“An expansive conception of free speech became attractive to Republican justices,” he wrote, “both because robust free-speech protection fit neatly into the right’s skeptical, deregulatory approach to government generally, and because it encouraged vigorous transmission by powerful speakers of the right’s newly energized collection of ideas.”

broad coalitions of justices also voted to protect the powerful.

the court shielded both unrestricted election spending by rich people, “giving the 1 percent a tangible reason to celebrate a muscular First Amendment,” and commercial advertising, “giving corporate management a strong stake in the First Amendment.”

“the bipartisan coalition had generated an enormously powerful body of precedent establishing an imperial free speech clause.”

Before 1976, First Amendment challenges from corporations generally involved companies in the business of free expression, like newspapers, book publishers and film producers. More recently, companies have filed free-speech challenges to laws regulating how ordinary products may be marketed or advertised.

“businesses are growing steadily more aggressive in their use of the First Amendment.” Court dockets these days are full of free-speech challenges from pharmaceutical firms, tobacco companies, miners, meat producers and airlines.

pernicious consequences for both free enterprise and the rule of law. Corporations are diverting resources from research and innovation to litigation, he wrote.

“Concentrated, moneyed interests, represented by those in control of the country’s largest business corporations,” he wrote, “are increasingly able to turn law into a lottery, reducing law’s predictability, impairing property rights, and increasing the share of the economy devoted to rent-seeking rather than productive activity.”

the regulation of virtually all forms of speech and all kinds of speakers is treated with the same heavy dose of judicial skepticism, with exceptions perversely calculated to expose particularly vulnerable and valuable sorts of expression to unconvincingly justified suppression.”

trend toward protecting the powerful

“There is truth in the proposition that a number of recent First Amendment victories in recent years have been on behalf of the ‘haves’ — some of them corporations, some individuals,” he said. “But that is no basis for concluding that the decisions were wrongly analyzed or wrongly decided.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/24...porations.html

[boutons_deux]

Secretive group destroys candidates' chances, leaves few fingerprints


The Law Enforcement Alliance of America once had offices in a nearby office park, but it abandoned them more than a year ago. It hasn’t filed required IRS reports in two years, and its leaders, once visible on television and incongressional hearings, have all but vanished.

But the nonprofit that calls itself “the nation's largest coalition of law enforcement professionals, crime victims and concerned citizens” still has teeth. It has succeeded in helping knock out 12 state-level candidates in 14 years, including an Arkansas judicial candidate last year. In doing so, the group helped launch the current governors of Texas and Nevada to their stepping-stone positions as state attorneys general.

The LEAA uses brute tactics — parachuting into otherwise small-dollar racesclose to the end and buying up TV ads that accuse candidates of siding with “baby killers” and sexual predators.

“They can put out some sort of horrible attack ad on any judges that they want and really influence an election with a fairly small amount of money,” former Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz said. “They're buying seats on supreme courts in states all around the country."

How the LEAA pays for the campaigns is a mystery that political opponents, state officials and advocacy groups have fought unsuccessfully for years to unravel. The group, which has ties to the National Rifle Association but no public connections to official law enforcement agencies, has repeatedly gone to court to fend off such efforts. A dispute over whether the group violated Texas campaign laws is expected to wrap up this month, but the group’s donor list has so far remained a closely guarded secret.

In the sights of the Law Enforcement Alliance of America

The nonprofit Law Enforcement Alliance of America’s aggressive campaigning has helped knock out 12 candidates from 15 state-level races in 14 years. The group also attacked four congressional candidates starting in the 1990s.

• 2001
  A. Donald McEachin
  Virginia attorney general race
  
  • TV ads attacked McEachin, then a Democratic legislator in the House of Delegates, as being soft on crime when it came to “sexually violent predators” and “drug kingpins.” He lost.
  • Current status: Virginia state senator
  
  
  
• 2001
  Kate Ford Elliott
  Pennsylvania Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads painted Ford Elliott, a Democrat, as soft on crime. The ads cost at least $300,000. She lost the race, giving Republicans control of the state supreme court.
  • Current status: president judge emeritus at the Pennsylvania Superior Court
  
  
  
• 2002
  David Adkins
  Kansas attorney general race
  
  • The LEAA spent an estimated $250,000 on ads attacking Adkins, then a state senator, in the Republican primary. Adkins lost.
  • Current status: executive director/CEO of the Council of State Governments
  
  
  
• 2002
  Kirk Watson
  Texas attorney general race
  
  • TV ads said the Democrat "made millions suing doctors, hospitals and small businesses, hurting families and driving up the cost of healthcare." The LEAA spent more than $1 million, Watson claimed in a lawsuit he filed. Watson lost to now-Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican.
  • Current status: Texas state senator
  
  
  
• 2002
  Lisa Madigan
  Illinois attorney general race
  
  • The LEAA spent an estimated $1.3 million on TV ads attacking the Democrat and supporting her opponent. Yet she won anyway.
  • Current status: Illinois attorney general
  
  
  
• 2002
  Michael Madigan
  Illinois state representative race
  
  • TV ads attacked the House speakerover an FBI investigation into whether he abused public funds to help his daughter, Lisa Madigan, win her bid for attorney general. The Democrat won despite the attacks and was never chargedwith a crime.
  • Current status: speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives
  
  
  
• 2002
  Mike Head
  Texas state representative race
  
  • Postcards sent to residents in Head's district accused the Democrat of siding with "convicted baby killers and murderers." He lost, then, together with state Sen. Kirk Watson, sued the LEAA for campaign finance violations.
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  
• 2002
  C.P. “Chuck” McRae
  Mississippi Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads attacked McRae for voting to overturn a murder conviction. He lost the nonpartisan race. “That's been one of the biggest travesties around — that you can go behind an organization like this and put in hundreds of thousands of dollars and the people don't know who really is supporting that ad," McRae said.
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  
• 2002
  John Hunt
  Nevada attorney general race
  
  • The Democrat lost his bid to now-Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, after the Law Enforcement Alliance of America spent an undisclosed amount on TV ads attacking Hunt.
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  
• 2003
  Jim Hood
  Mississippi attorney general race
  
  • The Law Enforcement Alliance of America spent an estimated $800,000 on ads attacking Hood. Yet the Democrat won. "If you attempted to try to identify anybody at the LEAA, if you tried to call the office, nobody ever answered the phone. It was always the answering machine," said Jonathan Compretta, who helped run Hood’s 2003 campaign.
  • Current status: Mississippi attorney general
  
  
  
• 2008
  Oliver Diaz
  Mississippi Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads accused Diaz, an in bent, of siding with a "baby killer" and a man who raped an elderly woman. Diaz, a former Republican lawmaker, lost the nonpartisan race. “Judges aren't, for the most part, seasoned politicians, and sometimes they're limited in their ability to respond,” Diaz said. “Therefore, they can put out some sort of horrible attack ad on any judges that they want and really influence an election with a fairly small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.”
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  
• 2010
  David Leyton
  Michigan attorney general race
  
  • TV ads attacked Leyton, a prosecutor, for making plea deals with murderers and other violent criminals. The Democrat lost.
  • Current status: prosecutor in Genesee County, Michigan
  
  
  
• 2010
  Denise Langford Morris
  Michigan Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads attacking Langford Morriscost the Law Enforcement Alliance of America an estimated $800,000 to air. The Democrat lost.
  • Current status: circuit court judge in Oakland County, Michigan
  
  
  
• 2012
  Richard “Flip” Phillips
  2012 Mississippi Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads that cost at least $450,000to air portrayed Phillips as a greedy trial attorney. He lost the nonpartisan race.
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  
• 2014
  Tim Cullen
  Arkansas Supreme Court race
  
  • TV ads attacking Cullen and supporting his opponent cost at least $320,000 to air. He lost the nonpartisan race. “The core problem of it is it's anonymous. You typically don't know who's behind these things, so there's no accountability, and that's uniquely troubling in a judicial setting,” Cullen said.
  • Current status: attorney
  
  
  

Sources: TV station records, court filings, The Washington Post, The Austin American-Statesman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Chicago Tribune, Justice at Stake, Brennan Center for Justice.


The LEAA and its current leader, Chief Operating Officer Ted Deeds, did not respond to repeated calls and emails. Lawyers representing the group said they were not authorized to speak on its behalf, and the LEAA’s accountant referred questions back to the group. In the past, its leaders have argued that its anonymously funded activities are protected under the right to free speech.

The group is an extreme example of a growing cadre of political organizations — from the conservative Crossroads GPS to the environmental advocate League of Conservation Voters — that insert themselves into elections, flood the airwaves with attack ads and often tip the scales in favor of the candidate they prefer. All the while, voters have no idea who is behind the effort and what their motives are because of a gap in disclosure laws.

The LEAA is among the most mysterious and successful, coming into races like a stealth assassin, then all but disappearing when the race ends.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/...eid=3b8f64cce8

America is so ed and un able.

[DarrinS]

Four years and only 13 pages? You need to pick up the pace, boo.

[boutons_deux]

Chief Justice Roberts Accidentally Reveals Everything That’s Wrong With Citizens United In Four Sentences

"Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences of their supporters.

Indeed, such “responsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.” "

the implication of the passage quoted above is that members of Congress, state lawmakers, governors and presidents should provide such consideration to their supporters and to their donors. The President of the United States is the president of the entire United States. A member of Congress represents their entire cons uency.

Yet Roberts appears to believe that they should “follow the preferences” of their supporters and give “special consideration” to the disproportionately wealthy individuals who fund their election.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...ous-sentences/

Giving Roberts the benefit of the doubt that as a lawyer, he chooses he words carefully, he is blatantly using "preferences of ... supporters" rather than "voters".

[boutons_deux]

The Five-Step Process to Privatize Everything

Law enforcement, education, health care, water management, government itself -- all have been or are being privatized. People with money get the best of each service.

At the heart of privatization is a disdain for government and a distrust of society, and a mindless individualism that leaves little room for cooperation. Adherents of privatization demand 'freedom' unless they need the government to intervene on their behalf.

These privatizers have a system:

1. Convince Yourself that "I Did It On My Own"

The people in position to take from society seek to rationalize their actions, and many have accomplished this through the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the author of The Virtue of Selfishness. She rejected community values, saying "Any group...is only a number of individuals...If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Post-Ayn-Rand, in the growing era of neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan blurting "government is the problem" and Margaret Thatcher proclaiming "There is no such thing as society," once-respected ins utions like public education and public transportation were demonized as "socialist" and "Soviet-style." The message has been repeated so often by the business-backed media that the general public began to believe it. Said The Economist with regard to product development, "Governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online, turn them into products at home and market them globally from a garage. As the revolution rages, governments should stick to the basics...Leave the rest to the revolutionaries."

But as Mariana Mazzucato points out in The Entrepreneurial State, "In reality it is the State that has been engaged on a massive scale in entrepreneurial risk taking to spur innovation." There is much evidence for this, in a mul ude of disciplines, especially in technology and pharmaceuticals, both of which have seen corporate research labs diminishing if not entirely disappearing.

In the burgeoning new field of nanotechnology, says Mazzucato, industry cannot justify applications that require 10 to 20 years of development and which demand a coordination of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering, and computer science.

2. Insist that the Removal of Government Will Benefit All People

The removal of government is equated to a vague demand for "freedom" which is hyperbolic if not meaningless. It gained momentum with Milton Friedman, who said: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." The Cato Ins ute went on to preach that "Free markets create a future promoting integrity and trust." And Forbes Magazine founder Steve Forbes blustered: "You can't create prosperity without freedom!"

Despite the fact that this 'freedom' has generated the greatest inequality in nearly 100 years, apologists try to convince us that somehow we're all prospering. From the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. economy is on a tear. From a Moody's analyst: Our economy is firing on most cylinders.

Some libertarian "lovers of freedom" go to even greater extremes to defend the benefits of inequality for all of us, claiming that income inequality is Good For The Poor, and even that "Income inequality in a capitalist system is truly beautiful."

3. Ensure that Government Isn't Removed Until You Get Rich

As the well-to-do have complained about government, they've also made sure that government has continued to help them, with a mind-boggling array of deductions, exemptions, exclusions, and loopholes.

At least $2.2 trillion per year in tax expenditures, tax underpayments, tax havens, and corporate nonpayment go mostly to the very rich, the most brazen of whom make the astonishing claim that their hedge fund income should be taxed at a much lower rate than a teacher's income.

Their tax breaks are augmented by the payroll tax rate limit, which allows multi-millionaires to pay a tiny percentage compared to middle-income earners; by high-risk derivatives that are the first to be paid off in a bank collapse; and by a bankruptcy law that allows businesses, but not students, to get out of debt.

4. Defund Government Until Privatization Seems Like the Only Option

This has happened most notably in education, with a simple formula, according to The Nation: "Use standardized tests to declare dozens of poor schools 'persistently failing'; put these under the control of a special unelected authority; and then have that authority replace the public schools with charters." And, of course, cut funding. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, forty-eight states — all except Alaska and North Dakota — were spending less per student in 2014 than they did before the recession.

It's happening to Social Security, perhaps the most efficiently run system, public or private, in our nation's history. As Richard Eskow notes, "Congress has cut 14 out of the last 16 SSA budget requests. There’s only one rational explanation for that: a hostility toward government itself, combined with the determination to place more public resources in corporate hands through 'privatization.'”

It's happening to police forces, which are going private in neighborhoods and on corporate campuses as public money is disappearing.

5. Remain Ignorant of Any Troublesome Facts

Facts abound of failing private systems, including:

Education: A private system that pays a charter CEO 350 times more per student than the corresponding public school chancellor.

Health Care: The most expensive system in the developed world, with the price of common surgeries anywhere from three to ten times higher than in much of Europe, and with 43 percent of sick Americans skipping doctor's visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. Medicare, on the other hand, which is largely without the profit motive and the competing sources of billing, is efficientlyrun, for all eligible Americans.

Banking: Thanks to private banks, interest claims one out of every three dollars that we spend, and by the time we retire with a 401(k), nearly half of our money is lost to the banks. But the public bank of North Dakota (BND) had an equity return of 23.4% before the state's oil boom. The normally privatization-minded Wall Street Journal admits that the BND "is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003."

Law Enforcement: As public money for police protection is depleted, our communities are being subjected to law enforcement officers who are insufficiently trained, poorly regulated, and often unaccountable to the public for their actions.

Water Management: A water security expert suggested that "One promising solution is to create water markets that allow people to buy and sell rights to use water." But a 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services.

The Environment: According to former World Bank Chief Economist Nicholas Stern, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has seen." Yet Bloomberg reports that "Wall Street firms are investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter."

Government Itself: In a study of outsourcing, the Project on Government Oversight found that in 33 out of 35 cases "the average annual contractor billing rate was much more than the average annual full compensation for federal employees."

Great Individuals Emerge from Cooperative Efforts

Privatization is closely connected to the demand for individualism over cooperation. But the belief that self-centeredness will benefit everyone is backwards. As George Lakoff summarizes: "The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases..."


http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...ize-everything

[boutons_deux]

VRWC, BigCorp division

Did John Oliver just shake and bake the poultry industry?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI

[boutons_deux]

VRWC obtained the SCOTUS majority they purchased

8 Ways the Supreme Court Has Been Destroying American Democracy

Most people have little idea how badly the U.S. Supreme Court has damaged American democracy.

It’s not just watching a handful of billionaires drive the Republicans’ 2016 presidential contest from the inside out, as a result of the Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010 and others that followed. There’s been a long line of anti-democratic rulings going back decades that have narrowed who can—and cannot—participate in politics, from citizens to candidates to parties and reformers.

These maddening problems and their source fill the pages of a striking new book about the First Amendment and what the Bill of Rights is really about from New York University legal scholar Burt Neuborne. It’s called Madison’s Music [3], named after the Bill of Rights’ author James Madison. Neuborne explains how core democratic rights have been shredded by decades of narrow-minded rulings that intentionally ignore Madison’s tapestry envisioning a populist, people-centered, activist politics.

What follows are a list of eight gigantic problems caused by decades of misreading the founding do ent of American democracy. These don’t just include how the rich have more influence, but how the big political parties have suppressed compe ive elections, and how the system’s mechanics discourage millions of people from participating.

“We’ll never do Madison full justice until we revere him as a great poet—not a literary poet like Wallace Stevens, but a political poet like Abraham Lincoln,” Neuborne said. “The fact is that for more than fifty years Supreme Court justices operating inside doctrinal silos have shaped the quality of American democracy without once asking what kind of democracy they were building,”

“The justices do not ask why the ten amendments cons uting the Bill of Rights open with the protections listed in the First Amendment or why the forty-five words and six ideas in its text are ordered as they are,” he said, launching the discussion.

1. First big mistake: making free speech the top right.

The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to pe ion the Government for a redress of grievances.” What makes this declaration so brilliant is that it isn’t only about free speech, Neuborne said, but about protecting ideas and beliefs as they arise in one’s conscience and make their way into the political world and democratic government.

“The Bill of Rights opens with a blueprint for an ideal ‘city on a hill’—a place of respect for individual conscience, robust political discussion and democratic self-government,” he explains. It starts with acknowledging that freedom begins in the individual spirit and goes into the world as people speak. But lone voices need to be amplified so others can hear, which is where the press comes in. And for people who cannot speak as well as others, it permits peaceful protest and the right to pe ion the government for change.

But what’s happened is the Supreme Court has elevated the free speech clause to be the most important part of this process, Neuborne said.

Then the Court gave that elevated right to the rich, by ruling that spending money is the highest form of speech: not having a right to hear ideas, not organizing, nor protesting nor pe ioning government. What has that wrought?

2. Giving the rich disproportionate political power.

This isn’t a new trend, but it has gotten worse. In the mid-1970s, Congress passed a law limiting campaign spending by wealthy individuals—and the Court tossed it out. A few years later, corporations were given rights to spend money in ballot campaigns. Most recently, its rulings have deregulated spending limits on corporations and the wealthy, yielding the 2016 landscape where a handful of billionaires and super PACs have super-sized roles in picking presidential candidates—at least for the GOP—and voters are an afterthought. Here’s how Neuborne puts it:

“Supercitizens of both parties set the national political agenda, select the candidates, bankroll the campaigns (virtually all campaign contributions and expenditures come from the top 2 percent of the economic ladder), and enjoy privileged postelection access to government officials (Whose telephone call does a busy senator take?). Membership in the supercitizen tier is neither defined by law nor confined to the wealthy. It is possible to be a supercitizen on the basis of talent, fame, good looks, family status, inheritance, or sheer persistence. But money gets you in no questions asked.”

3. Thwarting efforts to balance big money.

The simplest solution to the private financing of politics and the outsized influence of the wealthy after Election Day is to have taxpayer-funded campaigns. Many states, even some red ones such as Arizona, have tried to do exactly that to help underfunded candidates. But the current Court “said no, ruling that matching campaign subsidies uncons utionally ‘penalize’ the free-speech rights of rich candidates,” Neuborne writes, giving one of many examples where a narrow-minded ruling ultimately eviscerates Madison’s plan for a democracy.

4. Giving corporations more political power.

A century ago, corporations were seen as having too much power and were banned from spending money in elections. “Congress, following the advice of Teddy Roosevelt, sought to wall off the vast trove of corporate wealth from our elections,” Neuborne wrote, referring to that achievement, which the Court’s right-wing majority has since undone.

“The suffocatingly strict Supreme Court said no, ruling that unlimited corporate electioneering is protected by the Free Speech Clause because, according to five justices, an unlimited diet of corporate propaganda is actually good for us.”

5. Ensuring the two major parties are monopolies.

To make matters worse, over the decades the Court has allowed the two major political parties to act like elite private clubs—where real challenges to party orthodoxy cannot get off the ground.

It starts with who is allowed to run for office. “Excessive deference to local party bosses erodes democracy at the nominating stage,” he said, referring to how

the Court treats the process of choosing candidates as a private activity.

The Court also has limited who can vote in a primary.

The parties not only have “a right to protect themselves from ‘raiding’ by hostile outsiders,” he said, but can impose waiting periods on its newest members before they can vote in nominating contests.

“The Court’s insistence on treating major parties as private associations for the purpose of the nominating process even casts doubt on whether political parties can be forced to nominate through primaries at all, instead of allowing the political bosses to choose the candidate in a ‘smoke-filled room.’”

6. Weakening effective third parties.

As you might expect, there have been many efforts by the major parties to undermine compe ion from third parties. Several of these have resulted in cases that came before the Court, where the majority ruled against these efforts “to pump democracy into the nominating process,” Neuborne said. Oklahoma, for example, banned minor parties from inviting Democrats and Republicans to vote in their primaries—which “six justices upheld.”

“So major parties have a cons utional right to open their primaries to independents and possibly to defecting members of the other major party.

But ideological protest parties, seeking to challenge the electoral status quo, can be forbidden from inviting members of the two major parties to vote in their primaries,” he said.

“From a democracy standpoint, it’s hard to imagine anything worse.”

7. Makes elections uncompe ive via redistricting.

The common thread that runs through Neuborne’s analysis is that the Court will grab one seemingly democratic tenet under the First Amendment and apply it in a way that yields anti-democratic results. For example, when allowing the rich to pay the operating costs of elections, the Court ignored how that “undermine[s] the independence and integrity of the men and women who govern us by turning them into political beggars.”

The same dynamic is true with another big concept that’s embraced more in theory than reality: one person, one vote. This standard has led to states redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts in ways that are numerically equal, but lock in in bents and make most elections uncompe ive.

The Court has allowed that practice, Neuborne said, and only spoken out when efforts to produce fairer elections were challenged. For example, “North Carolina drew legislative lines to help racial miniorities recover from centuries of political exclusion,” he writes.

“The suffocatingly strict Supreme Court scolded state officials and said no, insisting that drawing electoral lines in an effort to help racial minorities secure fair political representation is a dangerous form of racism.”

8. Allowing the governing class to suppress the vote.

Here, Neuborne is referring to mix of barriers that discourage voting, which the Court’s right-wing majority does not see as violating the First Amendment’s vision of an inclusive democratic process.

“A century ago, political participation was legally rationed by formal denial of the vote to women, the poor, and newcomers, as well as de facto prohibitions that prevented Blacks and Latinos from voting,” he said.

“Today participation in the democratic process is rationed by the operation of our system of voter registration, election administration, legislative apportionment, and campaign finance, with its capacity to skew available information in favor of the rich. The political rationing system may be less visible to the naked eye, but the effect on the poor and less educated is almost as effective.”

Neuborne notes that it’s important to pay attention to what the Court doesn’t do. A “tier of spectator citizens” is the “predictable result of the

Supreme Court’s toleration of cynical obstacles to voting, including obsolete equipment in poorer areas, incompetent and Balkanized election administrators beholden to the two major parties, pre-election voter registration requirements, prevention of weekend voting, and requirements for photo ID and proof of citizenship that disproportionately limit electoral participation by weak and unsophisticated spectator citizens.
In fact, the Supreme Court has tolerated or perpetuated virtually every antidemocratic practice that currently burdens American democracy—disenfranchising ex-felons, upholding cynical efforts to suppress the vote, permitting ruthless partisan gerrymandering, and allowing the nominating process to be controlled by political bosses and thr campaign process by the superrich.”

Ignoring history and destroying democracy

There are so many examples where the Supreme Court’s has taken a selectively edited, narrow-minded view of the Cons ution to issue right-wing edicts.

The Second Amendment rulings expanding gun ownership rights have nothing to do with that clause’s purpose, Neuborne said, noting that Madison placed it after the democracy creating First Amendment—and before the series of amendments that establish a judicial process protecting the rights of the accused—because the Founders understood “that subversion or overthrow by force of arms is the fate of most democracies.”

When it comes to democratic rights, what the Court did to disenfranchise former felons is appalling. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth and Fifiteen Amendments were passed to ensure former slaves could vote. But in 1974, Chief Justice William Rehnquist grabbed a phrase from those amendments where the right to vote could be revoked “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” As Neuborne writes,

“Rehnquist twisted the words ‘rebellion or other crime’ …to grant affirmative power to states to disenfranchise convicted felons, even though the prison population is—and was—disproportionately Black and Latino as the result of systemic racial discrimination in the criminal justice process. So a cons utional amendment designed to help freed slaves has been hijacked as a device to disenfranchise their descendants.”

Neuborne, who has been a First Amendment lawyer and scholar for more than four decades, is not without hope. He has distilled and placed a lifetime of insight and thought about the First Amendment and American democracy into Madison’s Music [3]. He would not write such a book if he thought that American democracy were fatally wounded and could not recover. But what’s needed is a new Supreme Court majority that understands Madison's vision and is not hostile to a broad and inclusive democracy.

“The result has been and is an accidental, highly dysfunctional political system cobbled together by judges wearing blinders," he wrote.

"Properly read, Madison’s great First Amendment poem to democracy

would never accept a judicially imposed president [George W. Bush in 2000],

the cynical disenfranchisement of the weak,

the elimination of contested legislative elections, or

the rule of ‘one dollar, one vote.’”

http://www.alternet.org/civil-libert...ter1037665&t=1

[boutons_deux]

Billionaires making govt policy in the USA's corporatocracy

Export-Import Bank's expiration a victory for billionaire Koch brothers

The Export-Import Bank, created by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to help foreign customers buy U.S. goods, has been reauthorized 16 times, usually with little fuss and often with strong Republican support.

But Congress let the bank's charter expire this week, halting any new loans.

Even more surprising than the rare event of a government program being wound down was

the force behind the shutdown: the billionaire Koch brothers. Their network of groups turned what was once routine reauthorization of a lesser-known financing en y into a litmus test for conservatives — and they scored a major victory.

The ability to make the bank a Capitol Hill priority and even a presidential campaign issue highlights the growing power of the Koch network within the GOP. It also spotlights some of the internal divisions complicating the Republican effort to recapture the White House in 2016.

"This is a really interesting case in how battles are won," said Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia and an expert on the bank.

Without the involvement of the Koch network of conservative groups they fund, "we wouldn't be where we are," she said.

The bank's demise may yet prove temporary because Republican leaders have vowed to again consider reauthorizing it when Congress returns from its Fourth of July recess.

The bank's charter currently allows $140 billion in annual activity, and much of its lending ends up helping big businesses — facilitating the sales of Boeing airplanes and General Electric power plants abroad.

Supporters, who include many business groups typically aligned with the GOP, say the bank is vital to fill the gap when private lending lags and to counter aid that rival countries provide for their exporters. They point to many smaller American firms and export suppliers that rely on the bank.

Opponents argue that it creates an uneven playing field, with taxpayers shouldering risks for big business.

For the Kochs and the groups they fund, the campaign against the bank provided a way to prove that their small-government campaign extended beyond reducing programs for poor people, such as food stamps and Medicaid.
Their network of organizations seized on the Export-Import Bank late in 2013 as a prime example of what they labeled "crony capitalism." The campaign against the bank also provided a way of proving their clout within the party by defeating a priority of long-established GOP powers in the business community.

Brent Gardner, vice president of government relations at Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit group heavily financed by Charles and David Koch and their allies, said that for the billionaire brothers, the bank is "the perfect symbol for what they've talked about — a more free society."

"This little never-heard-of bank, it became kind of a litmus test for people who wanted to prove their potential free-market bona fides," Gardner said.

Republican presidential hopefuls, anxious to curry favor with the Kochs, have made ending the bank part of their campaign platforms. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and other leading GOP candidates have all come out against it.

Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida gave an entire talk in the early primary state of New Hampshire not on the economy or national security, but on why the Export-Import Bank needs to shut down. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said he switched his vote on the trade bill in June because he feared that it included a backroom deal to save the bank.

The campaign to close the bank started after the Republicans won control of the House in 2010 as conservative groups, including Heritage Action for America and the Club for Growth, began organizing opposition to the bank on and off Capitol Hill.

They viewed the goal as attainable because it did not involve getting Congress to pass legislation; simply doing nothing would accomplish the goal.

The effort truly took off when Americans for Prosperity got heavily involved, tapping its list of 2 million members to contact their representatives. The group held town hall events across the nation and pounded the halls of Congress. Its government relations team met with more than 150 lawmakers or their staffs, including all the freshmen.

Andy Roth, vice president of government affairs at Club for Growth, said a turning point came a year ago after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) suffered a stunning primary loss to a tea party challenger who had made the bank one of his issues. Cantor's successor as majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), quickly made clear that the bank's charter should expire.

"It was no longer us shouting from the cheap seats," Roth said. "Leadership was echoing."

This year, the Koch-aligned Freedom Partners began running ads that called the bank a "bad deal" and asked, "Will Congress follow Hillary Clinton or free market champions?"

Clinton, in turn, has positioned her support of the bank as an example of moderation, in contrast to what she terms Republican extremism.

But more than the grass-roots campaigns and the ads, the involvement of Koch-aligned groups gave the campaign against the bank the imprimatur of a political force whose support can make or break candidates' futures.

That power could be seen earlier this year as Republican presidential hopefuls addressed the Club for Growth's annual membership conference in Florida. One by one, each announced support for letting the bank expire.

The GOP's conventional allies in the business community scrambled to salvage the bank, but they were late to recognize the threat they faced. "It caught a lot of people off guard," said Ron Kirk, a former U.S. trade representative in the Obama administration.

"Maybe I put too much value in the fact that you have all of those interests saying, 'Wait a minute, this is critically important to us,'" Kirk said. "I don't think anyone believed it would grow to this extreme."

Tony Fratto, a strategist hired by a coalition led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, lamented that the business community had been lax in defending the bank as the political climate changed.

"That created the opportunity for critics to walk in and attack and present this to staff and members who didn't have bedrock of knowledge," said Fratto, a former official in the George W. Bush administration.

The two sides dispute some basic facts about the bank. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that by one measure, the bank doesn't add to the nation's deficit but has contributed $14 billion over the decade in revenue; but using a different accounting model, the bank costs the government $2 billion.

Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred P. Hochberg warned that halting the bank's loans would cost hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. jobs.

"All because Congress won't move to get this done — all because of a vocal minority here in Washington has put ideology ahead of American workers," he said at a trade summit last week.

Many believe that the bank's expiration will be temporary. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently suggested a vote to reauthorize the bank could be part of a highway package that will be debated when Congress returns this month.

"It's not that there's some big groundswell," Fratto said about the opposition.

Even if Congress agrees to reauthorize the bank this summer, however, those who have been leading the fight against it believe that it's only a matter of time before they finish the job.

"If you're going to be successful in reforming en lements, you don't have moral credibility if you don't take on corporate welfare — and you can't do better than Ex-Im," said Michael A. Needham, chief executive of Heritage Action.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ry.html#page=1

but the Kock Bros are "en led" to operate govt to their advantage.

Heritage STINK TANK? "moral credibility" ?

[boutons_deux]

Koch Brothers Are Ramping Up To Eliminate National Parks And Seize Federal Lands

Most Americans, whether they complain about the government or not, have at least a passing interest in it remaining in existence for a variety of benefits they seldom bemoan receiving.

What that means is that most Americans are in conflict with Republicans and their masters the Koch brothers who have made no secret they want the government eradicated with extreme prejudice from the top down.

Republicans have duly served the Kochs’ interests by taking every opportunity to destroy every aspect of the government, except the military-welfare complex, by starving it of funding just to bolster their “government does not work” agenda.

A favorite target of Koch-Republicans is the National Park system that Republicans have so drastically underfunded that a Koch and ExxonMobil-funded organization is calling for an end to national parks and privatization of all federally-owned land. The argument being put forward by the executive director of Koch fossil fuel organization, Reed Watson, is that since the National Park system is hurting for funding, the only option is to first stopcreating national parks and then cheaply sell off those already in existence.

Why?

Because according to the Koch brothers’ organization calling to sell off all public land and national parks, “True conservation is taking care of the land and water you already have; we can protect it properly.”

The group pushing to sell off (privatize) the national park system to the fossil fuel industry, and indeed, sell off all public land to the highest corporate bidder, is the Koch and ExxonMobil-funded Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).

PERC, Exxon-Mobil, the Koch brothers, and Republicans across the nation contend that no state, federal, or local government has any right to own any land within America’s borders; it is precisely the same argument trumpeted by seditious anti-American rancher Cliven Bundy.

Although Bundy’s contention is that he, Cliven Bundy, retains “sole stewardship rights over government-owned land,” he clearly fails to comprehend that the Kochs have a different vision of what their stewardship as private corporate owners will entail. Unless Cliven Bundy owns monumental drilling, mining, or lumber operations, he should make no mistake that when the Kochs own all government land, he will have no stewardship rights, grazing rights or input into how the land is managed whatsoever.

The Kochs and ExxonMobil have already committed PERC to publicly call for an end to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) because it is one of America’s most successful parks programs.

LWCF is not in financial jeopardy yet because Republicans have failed to end its budget-neutral status.

LWCF is budget-neutral as a result of using funds from offshore oil and gas development fees to fund projects across the country at the federal, state and local levels.

The LWCF program supports some of nation’s “most iconic” national parks such as Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. It has also created tens-of-thousands of outdoor projects the general public uses regularly such as local parks and baseball diamonds in all 50 states.

The Kochs want those local parks, like national parks, wilderness areas, and all federal land transferred to corporate ownership because “It just kills the fossil fuel industry and its allies that there’s any scrap of land that they can’t get their hands, or drilling rigs, on.” However, it is not for a lack of Republican efforts.

For example, last year as part of the ongoing Koch-funded and driven initiative to seize control of public lands from the federal government, Colorado Republicans, like Utah Republicans, introduced legislation calling for jurisdiction over federally-owned national forests, wilderness areas, national parks, and all Bureau of Land Management land.

Now with PERC’s blatantly public involvement and push to privatize National Parks and federal lands, it appears the concerted effort is fully underway to seize government property to satisfy the greed of the Kochs and Exxon-Mobil by exploiting all federal land, including federally-protected wilderness areas and national parks, for fossil fuel profits.

Three years ago Utah Mormons passed a law demanding that the federal government cede its ownership, and immediately turn over the les of all federal lands in Utah including all wilderness areas and national parks the state planned to sell to the Koch brothers to “manage” as “owners” exempt from federal environmental regulations and oversight.

The concept of selling off federal land to the fossil fuel, mining, and lumber industry began in earnest in 1999 when the Kochs’ PERC complained publicly that “fully a third of the land area of the United States is owned by the federal government. Although many Americans support the preservation of those lands, the failure of socialism in the realm of resource economics is as evident as other areas of the economy.”

Resource economic failure in Koch parlance means they cannot yet drill, mine, or log wherever they want and without being held to environmental regulations.

So PERC offered some Koch reform criteria to convince the American people and disabuse the United States government of the idea it has any right to own any land in America. PERC asserts that, “land should be allocated to the highest-valued use, transaction costs should be kept to a minimum because auctioning off all public lands will enhance environmental quality and economic efficiency through private rather than public ownership.”Americans should seriously start worrying, and pushing back against, these vile attempts by the Koch brothers and Republicans to sell off what is effectively the American people’s public land; particularly the 282 million Americans who visited the National Parks in 2011 alone.

That figure does not include visits to state and regional parks, wilderness areas, or the many, many national monuments around the country or in and around the nation’s capital that are owned and operated by the people’s government; the government the Kochs and Republicans want eliminated.

It is true that on their own, the Koch brothers are incapable of taking over all federal, state, and local government land and properties, but with Republicans doing their bidding in Congress and state legislatures, and Koch-funded groups like PERC, Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation and many others openly calling for the end of government land ownership, the concept of public land, national parks, or wilderness areas free of drilling, mining, and logging operations is in jeopardy.

It is not enough for the Kochs to take Americans’ government, workplace protections, pensions, healthcare, safe roads, schools, and bridges to privatization and eventual ruin, they are jockeying even now to take over Americans’ public land with little to no outrage or push-back from the people.

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/...iticus+USA+%29

VRWC, Kock Bros, Repugs, conservatives! What's NOT to HATE?