Reply With Quote
Do you hear that?
It's the sound of no one giving a .
Christian Taliban getting organized
Jesus camp for adults seeks to impose Christianity on the US by converting 1,000 pastors into politicians
Some 300 evangelical pastors convened in Orlando on Friday with a single goal in mind: To learn how to adapt their preaching and outreach skills for the pursuit of political office. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, himself a former Southern Baptist minister, was slated to the give the keynote address.
The event, part of a national workshop series, is an effort to encourage and mobilize at least 1,000 evangelical pastors to seek governmental office in 2016 order to promote conservative ideals and traditional Biblical values.
Founded by conservative activist David Lane, who describes himself as an evangelical "political operative,"¯ the workshops are called Issachar Trainings, named after an Israelite tribe described in the Bible as one comprised of men "who understood the times and knew what Israel should do." The workshops are just one prong of Lane's American Renewal Project, which aims to inject American politics with a dose of conservatism through various routes.
"Somebody's values are going to reign supreme" in the United States, Lane told National Public Radio. "We want people with our values to represent our values and interests in the public square, be elected to office, and represent our issues."
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/jesu...e+Raw+Story%29
"represent our issues"
nope, impose your fantasy interpretation of the Bible's fairy tales of ethics, morals on everybody else.
Do you hear that?
It's the sound of no one giving a .
Did we hear that? The sound of Darrin's empty posts.
Investor-owned utilities, screwing customers
Residents Fight Back Against Pittsburgh's Privatized Water Authority
Over 42,000 people, based on an estimate from the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA), have received inaccurate and/or delayed water bills for months on end, about 14 percent of the population.
In addition to shutting off residents' water even after payment was proffered, bills that did come in from the PWSA were sometimes outrageously expensive, occasionally 600 percent higher than normal, Wade claims. Residential Properties was soon inundated with calls from angry tenants who were inexplicably charged hundreds of dollars for water. Triple-digit bills even came in for empty homes where water had been shut off for decades.
By the time water bills stopped coming in to Residential Properties' Millvale households between March and late June, Wade realized that homes affected by billing errors were the same homes the PWSA was installing new automatic rate readers that are supposed to instantaneously send accurate information on water usage back to the PWSA.
Pupich says that the billing errors, though egregious, aren't the most sinister thing about the PWSA's billing mess. It's that the authority and the company overseeing it know there is a problem, but still hound customers for payments and shut their water off anyway.
"The problem is the administration of the problem," Pupich told Truthout. "You have a collection agency shutting us off. A collection agency has no power to shut your water off. But they do. [The PWSA] says, 'This is how we do it.'"
He pulled out a 10-day PWSA disconnect notice to prove his point. In it, a homeowner is informed they must immediately pay their delinquent water balance to an en y called Jordan Tax Services, which bills for the authority, to avoid a shut off. The notice not only includes the balance, but also two "restoration of service" fees that together nearly exceed the original bill.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ater-authority
Nevada’s New Voucher Plan Is Designed to Bankrupt Public Schools
.Starting next school year, any parent in Nevada can pull a child from the state’s public schools and take tax dollars with them, giving families the option to use public money to pay for private or parochial school or even for home schooling… Nevada’s law is singular because all of the state’s 450,000 K-12 public school children—regardless of income—are eligible to take the money to whatever school they choose.” A child must be enrolled in a public school for at least 100 days in order to qualify.
Layton and Brown report that the new Nevada voucher bill was developed with the assistance of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the foundation Jeb Bush launched in 2008, but from which he resigned at the end of 2014 to prepare for his presidential run. The Foundation’s chief executive Patricia Levesque describes Nevada’s new voucher bill: “This is the wave of the future. In all aspects of our life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals more control over their path and destiny…. This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education.”
The Education Law Center recently circulated an analysis of Nevada’s new school vouchers from Educate Nevada Now, a statewide organization that promotes public education:
“The ESA (Education Savings Account) law requires the ‘statewide average basic support per pupil’—$5,100 per student and $5,710 for low-income and students with disabilities—be deposited into each ESA (Education Savings Account) from local district budgets, a process that
will divert, over time, substantial resources from the public schools. Studies have shown that Nevada substantially underfunds K-12 public education…
ESAs will trigger an outflow of funds from already inadequate school district budgets, beginning in the 2015-16 school year… As children leave public schools with ESA funds, some of the costs to educate those students will leave with them.
But ESAs will cause a deficit for the local district, given the fixed costs of operating the school system for all children… ESAs also create instability in district and school budgets. Districts will not know how many students will exit and how much money will be taken out of the budget during the school year.
This unpredictability will make it difficult to manage public school budgets, as local administrators won’t know how many teachers and staff to hire… or how to allocate funds to provide sufficient resources to schools throughout the school year.”
http://www.alternet.org/education/ne...public-schools
... other states will follow this VRWC strategy of destroying public schools and school teacher unions. VRWC doesn't give about education, only in transferring taxpayers $Ts to the 1%/BigCorp.
Charles Koch compares work of his political network to civil rights movement
DANA POINT, Calif. — Charles Koch on Sunday compared the efforts of his political network to the fight for civil rights and other “freedom movements,” urging his fellow conservative donors to follow the lead of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr.
“History demonstrates that when the American people get motivated by an issue of justice that they believe is just, extraordinary things can be accomplished,” Koch told 450 wealthy conservatives assembled in the ballroom of a lavish oceanfront resort here.
“Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement,” he said. “All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”
“If we cannot unite the majority of Americans behind the vision, then we’re done for,” he added. “So that, to me, has to be our number one objective. But to do so, we’ve got to do a much better job of understanding what matters most to people and then to demonstrate that a free society gives them the best opportunity of achieving that.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/p...ghts-movement/
Kock Bros don't gave about The American People or the environment.
The Assault on America’s Unions Continues
Proving that the Domino Theory is alive and well, one more domino fell last week when the Michigan Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that public sector employees could continue to bask in the superior wages, benefits and working conditions that their union contract provided, but weren’t required to pay their “fair share” of union dues. Not one penny of it.
Previously, taking a perfectly reasonable “no freeloaders allowed” stance, the courts had ruled that workers in an agency shop (where employees aren’t required to join the union representing them) still had to pony up full or partial union dues to defray the costs of the collective bargaining process—the very process that yielded the attractive wages and benefits that caused them to seek employment in a union shop in the first place.
But with the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision, that sense of fair play and “agrarian justice” has been totally blown out of the water. Not only are freeloaders no longer vilified or scorned as slimy opportunists, they’re being presented as champions, as “patriots,” as Free Market heroes.
One could argue that the Michigan Court’s screwball decision is tantamount to the Roman Catholic Church being forced to accept lemon-sucking atheists into the priesthood on the grounds that rejecting them would be a violation of their civil rights.
But you say that because union jobs provide better wages, benefits and working conditions than non-union jobs, you chose to work in a union shop? Fine. Then pay your fair share of the freight. Not only does it cost money to negotiate and administer a union contract (collective bargaining, adjustment of grievances, arbitrations, etc.), but most people readily understand the “strength in numbers” argument.
Again, if you’re one of those pilgrims who has a philosophical problem with the notion of workers’ collectivism—if you take the view that management can be depended upon to “do the right thing” when it comes to your personal welfare—that’s fine. By all means, follow your dream and avoid labor unions. Best of luck to you.
But don’t think you can have it both ways. Don’t try to undermine a century of accomplishments by organized labor by couching your naked self-interests in phony libertarianism. It’s time to grow up, folks. With the middle-class continuing to shrink, the stakes are simply too high to tolerate this level of game-playing.
Next year the U.S. Supreme Court (in “Friedrichs vs. the California Teachers Association”) will rule on whether or not to uphold the landmark “Abood” decision, which requires agency shop employees to pay their fair share. It’s no exaggeration to say that for the American worker, “Friedrichs” could be as significant as Dred Scott.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/...ons-continues/
Charles Koch Admits He Needs More Power To Control The Government
Most Americans are unaware, tragically, that America is dangerously close to becoming a fully-fledged plutocracy and although corporations, religion, and the financial sector exert a fair amount of influence over government, the true oligarchs running two-thirds of government are the Koch brothers.
Now, one thought they would never hear it directly from one of the brothers, but last weekend Charles Koch claimed that he did not yet have enough, or completely, control over the government because, “if I had all this power, why aren’t the many things I want changed getting changed?”
In fact, Koch said it was “ludicrous” that he had too much power because there is no such thing in his mind, and to achieve his goal the Kochs are willing to spend nearly a billion dollars to achieve the level of power he demands
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/08/...iticus+USA+%29
Koch Brothers Are Ramping Up To Eliminate National Parks And Seize Federal Lands
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.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/...ral-lands.html
Charles Koch Says its Undignified for the President to Tell the Truth About The Kochs
Likely because they are pathological liars, Republicans and their various conservative and religious cohort basically cannot understand why any human being, much less a politician, would ever utter the truth when they can lie; especially when the truth can be so brutally hurtful.
On Monday while in Nevada, President Barack Obama spoke the truth about the dirty filthy energy industry during an energy speech and it obviously hurt poor beleaguered Charles Koch’s feelings and the White House could not care less and was unafraid to tell Koch he is a liar.
“You start seeing massive lobbying efforts backed by fossil fuel interests, or conservative think tanks, or the Koch brothers pushing for new laws to roll back renewable energy standards or prevent new clean energy businesses from succeeding — that’s a problem.”
It is difficult to discern if Charles Koch’s feelings were hurt because he personally identifies with fossil fuel interests, conservative think tanks, or “the Koch brothers” even though all three are the Kochs, but he lashed out at the President for daring to tell the truth about the Kochs et al (fossil fuel industry, conservative think tanks).
Koch said that it was a low blow for the President to speak the truth and also that he was absolutely “flabbergasted” that a politician had the temerity to speak honestly about the Kochs. He said, “It’s beneath the president, the dignity of the president, to be doing that.”
By doing that Koch means President Obama told an audience what they are very well aware of; not only are the Kochs waging war on clean and renewable energy, they are the “problem” and fund the “massive lobbying efforts to eliminate renewable energy standards and obstruct new clean energy businesses from even starting, much less succeeding.
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/08/...iticus+USA+%29
Damn, Obama singling out the Kock Bros for the dirty es they are. Shoulda been doing that since Jan 2009.
one key reason why the Roberts VRWC court was assembled: screw employees, protect/enrich employers
A Labor Day Worry: The Court’s Right-Wingers Are Sharpening Their Knives
If the U.S. Supreme Court’s dominant Republican majority has its way when the panel’s new term commences in October, we might as well dispense with the holiday altogether, or at least drop the term “labor” from its le. Among the most important cases the court will consider when it reconvenes is Friedrichs v. California Teachers, which poses what some observers have called an “existential threat” to public unions and by extension to the entire labor movement.
At issue in Friedrichs is the right of public sector unions to collect limited “fair-share” fees in lieu of full formal dues from nonunion workers to defray the costs of collective bargaining that benefits all employees.
A decision against the teachers association would have the potential to bankrupt government employee unions and turn the nation’s
entire public sector into one enormous “right-to-work” jurisdiction.
Even before agreeing to hear Friedrichs, the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts had amassed a staggering résumé of anti-worker decisions.
As astudy published in January by The Nation explains, the Roberts court has issued rulings that have restricted gender-based discrimination and class-action lawsuitsagainst corporations; curbed age discrimination claims; limited the availability of overtime pay; redefined the term “supervisor” to allow employers to avoid liability for harassment; and made it more difficult for employees to prosecute workplace retaliation grievances.
Over the past few years, the court’s conservative majority has expressed a special animus against public employee unions, displayed not just in its interpretation of state and federal labor statutes but in a novel and twisted interpretation of the First Amendment. It’s complicated, but in a nuts , the conservative legal theory works like this:
Under current law, no one can be forced to join a union, even one that has been elected by a majority of workers to negotiate on their behalf. In non-right-to-work states, however, unions nonetheless can collect mandatory fair-share fees from workers who want to keep their jobs without becoming union members.
Typically, dissenting nonunion workers are billed for full regular union dues, but they have the right to “opt out” of making full payments, remitting instead only the fair-share fees that are needed to help the union meet expenses for collective bargaining.
Fair-share fees (also called “agency” fees in reference to the union’s status as the sole agent authorized to act on bargaining) cannot be used to pay for other union expenses, such as contributions to political campaigns and most lobbying.
In a landmark 1977 decision dealing with government unions, one handed down during a more labor-friendly era in the court’s history—Abood v. Detroit Board of Education—the justices upheld the cons utionality of fair-share fee systems.
But the Roberts court, operating in a new era of hostile anti-worker judicial activism, has steadily chipped away at the Abood rule.
Starting in 2012 with its opinion in Knox v. SEIU and continuing with its 2014 decision in Harris v. Quinn, the court’s five Republican appointees have emphasized that the payment of union dues by public employees is a form of political speech subject to the constraints of the First Amendment because public unions negotiate contracts with governmental en ies and such contracts by definition affect public policies and the spending of taxpayer money.
...
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...+the+Headlines
Cell phone lobby win means 'more people will die'
- The FCC says more than 10,000 people die every year when calling 911 from a cellphone because dispatchers can’t get quick and accurate information on them. SHARE THIS FINDING:
- Industry influenced an FCC plan to improve 911-location technology. The rules that eventually passed were based on a plan written by wireless carriers and were called ‘watered-down’ by insiders. SHARE THIS FINDING:
- The telecommunications industry influenced the new rules through heavy lobbying and cozy relationships with trade groups representing emergency dispatchers. SHARE THIS FINDING:
- Better location technologies exist that telecoms say would be too expensive to implement. One estimate puts the cost at $25 million per carrier. That’s 0.4 percent of AT&T's 2014 net income. SHARE THIS FINDING:
- The new rules needed support from two key trade groups representing dispatchers. Both received financial support from the wireless industry.
The failure is that the technologies used by wireless carriers — like industry giants AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — fail repeatedly to locate indoor callers.
The real tragedy, say emergency workers and cellular engineers, is that this doesn’t have to be: Technical solutions exist that can locate people calling on cellphones within seconds. But tough rules proposed by the FCC in February 2014 aimed at requiring more accurate indoor locations of callers to 911 were weakened through a nearly year-long lobbying campaign by wireless carriers.
Wireless carriers said the new rules relied too heavily on expensive proprietary technology that was untested and that accuracy claims were overhyped. They argued that commercially available technology already widely deployed, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices found in almost every business and most homes, promised to provide better location accuracy because it would give a specific street address with an apartment, floor and room number.
But more than a dozen associations representing firefighters, police, emergency medical technicians, the elderly, the deaf and technology companies said the commercial technology wasn’t developed for the demands of a 911 system and would fail during major disasters when electricity was lost. The industry’s proposal, many of the groups said, allowed the carriers to shift the cost and responsibility of locating 911 callers from the carriers to the public, making it impossible for the FCC to enforce.
But more important, many of the groups said the carriers ignored them when developing their alternate rules, relying instead on associations the carriers had lavished with hundreds of thousands of dollars of support.
“[This] … is a perfect example of how big money and big corporations can make it appear there’s been a democratic and open process, but in fact they’ve corrupted the science and bought off the very organizations that are supposed to be a watchdog in protecting the public,” said a former senior FCC official who asked to not be identified in order to speak more candidly. “And in this case, the result means more people will die.”
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/...eid=3b8f64cce8
BigCorp, 1%, VRWC, Repugs crapify everything they can, for profit.
KocK Vrothers Backing Misleading Anti-Solar Campaign in Florida
The Koch brothers and utility giants are bankrolling a ballot initiative in Florida to block the development of home solar and to protect the utilities' continuing oligopoly on energy generation in the Sunshine State.
State law even prevents homeowners from installing solar panels by restricting the leasing of equipment by consumers.
challenging the pro-solar amendment is a group calling itself "Consumers for Smart Solar" (CSS). Despite the innocuous sounding name, the group was created with cash from the utilities and groups tied to the billionaire Koch brothers - Charles and David Koch, whose vast wealth has grown from their refinery and pipeline business.
CSS is pushing Floridians to support a rival amendment that would actually prevent homeowners or businesses from contracting with solar companies that can install solar for no upfront cost.
The Utilities Have an Oligopoly in Florida, and They're Fighting to Keep It
Eyeing home solar energy as a growing threat to their control of the market, Florida utilities have spent $12 million since 2010 on state political campaigns, according to reporting by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
In just two months, Consumers for Smart Solar has received more than $473,750 from outside groups, including some that have ties to the Koch brothers, plus$325,000 from Florida utilities, according to an analysis of campaign finance data reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Energy and Policy Ins ute.
Here are some examples of the big money at play:
Electric Utility Companies Funding to Consumers for Smart Solar:
- Duke Energy – $60,000
- Florida Power and Light Company – $80,000
- Gulf Power Company – $80,000
- Tampa Electric Company – $75,000
- Powersouth Energy Cooperative – $30,000
Outside Group Funding to "Consumers for Smart Solar":
- National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) – $50,000
- 60 Plus Association – $100,000
- Energy & Social Justice Project – $15,000
- Energy Equity Alliance – $1,000
- The Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy – $51,000
- Florida State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce – $50,000
- Florida Faith and Freedom Coalition Inc – $125,000
- Florida Council for Safe Communities – $20,000
- Floridians for Government Accountability – $61,750
Among the list of contributors to "Consumers for Smart Solar" is NBCC, which gave $50,000. The group has a long history of receiving funding from fossil fuel interests and advocating on their behalf.
Since the early 1990s, the organization has received $950,000 in grants from ExxonMobil.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ign-in-florida
Last edited by boutons_deux; 10-10-2015 at 08:00 PM.
Just 158 families have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...47.mobile.html
For the Billionaire Boy Toys extremist of the "freedom caucus" Repugs, these are "the people back home"
Koch Republicans Advance Plan To Eliminate America’s National Parks
There is a Koch brother mindset that Republicans willingly embrace that the United States government has no legal right to own land, and that the National Parks system and wilderness areas are abominations to the fossil fuel, mining, and logging industries’ profits.
Without success in forcing the federal government to cede its ownership and protection of the American people’s National Parks, wilderness areas, and cultural heritage sites to the Koch brothers, Republicans did the next best thing and defunded the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).
Now that the Kochs own Congress and were able to install a willing anti-government Republican as Chairman of the House Natural Resources committee, they were thrilled to learn they succeeded in killing the LWCF in yet another step toward turning over government to corporate control.
It is irrefutable that the LWCF is one of the most successful conservation programs in America’s history with no cost to taxpayers, and it is why it was crucial for the Koch brothers to score a win for themselves and jeopardize America’s national parks.
The Koch’s victory was in spite of alleged broad bipartisan support to keep the LWCF in operation, but since they own the entire Congress, the Kochs’ anti-government acolytes refused to reauthorize the program effectively killing it.
What that means for the offshore oil and gas production fees funding LWCF is that Koch Republicans will shift LWCF funding into their favorite special interests such as partisan political campaigns against Hillary Clinton, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and of course the military industrial complex and Israel.As head of the Natural Resources Committee, the Mormon Bishop marshaled support from other Koch sycophants on the far right who believe that the federal government is criminal in thinking it can own or preserve federal land for the American people.
Bishop, like his Mormon cohort Cliven Bundy, is very anti-federal government and contends that like federally-owned land and national parks, any money collected from oil and gas producers belongs to his state to do with as it pleases.
This in spite of Congress eliminating a bizarre requirement in 1970 that funding from offshore drilling goes to state projects that Republicans typically hand directly to the wealthy and corporations in the form of greater tax cuts.
Since its creation in 1964, the LWCF has accomplished, without using even one penny of taxpayer money, “pumping almost $17 billion into federal, state, and local parks, protected more than 500 million acres of land, paid for almost two-thirds of the Appalachian Trail.”
LWCF also funded over 90 percent of the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania without using one penny of taxpayer money.
LWCF is wholly-funded by revenues from gas and oil companies’ fees for drilling offshore in water owned by the American people; another atrocity according to Republicans and the Koch brothers.
The Mormon doing the Koch brothers’ bidding, Utah Representative Rob Bishop, said that any legislator, including any Republican, who fought to preserve the LWCF for the American people are “special interest traitors seeking to hijack LWCF to continue to expand the federal land holdings and divert even more monies away from localities.”
Bishop is a typical lying Mormon; LWCF money could not possibly be “diverted” from localities because it was never theirs to begin with.
Further, when Bishop cites “localities” he means areas that the Kochs want under the purview of the fossil fuel, mining, and logging industries.
Bishop’s crusade is, without any possible doubt, furthering the Koch brother agenda to put an end to the government owning land, creating or maintaining the National Park system, and particularly to eliminate public use of government land they think just might have what Bishop contends are “extractable resources under it.”
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/10/...iticus+USA+%29
VRWC and their Repug s ING UP AMERICA for BigCarbon profits.
Billionaire Charles Koch: Our goal is 'to fight against special interests'
"Listen, if I didn't think it was healthy or fair, I wouldn't do it.
Because what we're after, is to fight against special interests."
"Some people would look at you and say you're a special interest."
"Yeah, but my interest is, just as it's been in business, is what will help people improve their lives, and to get rid of these special interests.
That's the whole thing that drives me."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...28Daily+Kos%29
And Kock suckers go wild!
Koch Political Network Expanding 'Grassroots' Organizing
The political network led by billionaires David and Charles Koch is building what's meant to be a seamless system of grassroots groups, designed to advance the network's conservative and libertarian goals year in and year out, while also helping like-minded politicians.
This strategy could have come straight out of a labor union's handbook, or an Obama campaign memo: community organizing.
"This isn't just about an election cycle," Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, told a group of activists at an August conference. "What makes this network different ... is that we've been in these communities now for three, four years and we're going to be in them in 2017, 2018, 2019."
Concerned Veterans is one of the Koch grassroots groups, and Hegseth was speaking at a session led "Community Organizing — Life Past November."
It's a stark contrast to media campaigns that have absorbed millions of dollars from the Koch network. In 2012, the network spent nearly $400 million overall, including extensive TV attack ads. Other big-budget outside groups, including Crossroads GPS and American Action Network, have also favored TV. They are aiming to spend more than double that for the 2016 election.
Joining Hegseth at the community organizing session were representatives of the broad-based Americans for Prosperity; Generation Opportunity, targeting millennials; and the Libre Initiative, which is working to build ties in Latino communities.
Libre Executive Director Daniel Garza said his organization is putting down roots in neighborhoods where progressive groups have been active for years. "They're embedded," he said. "I mean, they run the ins utions in the community. They've gained the trust of the Latino community."
The session was part of the 2015 Defending the American Dream Summit, sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in Columbus, Ohio. NPR obtained audio of the session from a liberal activist who bought a ticket to the conference. The activist said the recorder was in plain view as the participants spoke.
"The strategy has not changed since Day One," Garza told NPR in a phone interview of his group, which was founded in 2011 and which Garza says now has 15,000 supporters in nine states. "Control the message in media, both in Spanish and English language. Second, was working with the communities, at the community level. And third, was to mobilize an army of advocates and activists and volunteers who could drive our message at the community level."
http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpo...m_campaign=app
aka, Kock Bros America, Americans, Environment Organization
The People vs. the Koch-Funded Asbestos Industry
No Americans are at greater risk of asbestos disease than veterans, first responders and teachers.
Veterans account for just eight percent of the population but roughly a third of Americans who suffer from mesothelioma—an extremely painful and always-fatal form of cancer caused only by asbestos.
Many Navy veterans were intensely exposed for decades to asbestos in shipyards, where asbestos coatings were used to fireproof ships, buildings and other military equipment
Teachers face a special threat because most schools built before 1980 almost certainly contain asbestos-based construction materials. In recent months, news organizations have reported potential asbestos exposures at more than 50 schools in at least 13 states. Locations where children may have been recently exposed to the lethal material include public schools inPhiladelphia, Kirksville, Missouri, Huntsville, Alabama, Hayward, California and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
That’s why national organizations that represent these groups strongly oppose the so-called FACT Act, sponsored by Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ).
This bill would deplete the resources of already-dwindling trust funds set aside to compensate asbestos victims. Trust officials estimate that complying with the bill would require each trust to expend up to 20,000 additional hours a year—slowing claims processing and payment distribution and exhausting scarce funds meant to compensate victims.
The bill would also require public disclosure of victims’ personal information, including medical information and partial Social Security numbers. It would put sick people at heightened risk of iden y theft.
The legislation is backed by the anti-worker, anti-environment and the anti-health American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and by a number of corporations—including Koch Industries and Honeywell—that still use asbestos or have significant asbestos liability from past use and their insurance companies. These companies and their political action committees have spent millions of dollars lobbying and contributing to political campaigns to build support for the FACT Act.
Opponents include:
- American Veterans or AMVETS, 250,000 members
- Association of the U.S. Navy, 22,000 members
- Military Order of the Purple Heart, serves 90,000 veterans and family members
- International Association of Fire Fighters, 300,000 members
- National Education Association, 3 million members
- American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, 1.6 million members
- AFL-CIO, 5 million members
Ironically, Farenthold recently wrote an op-ed in The Hill, “Asbestos Reforms Needed to Protect Veterans, First Responders,” where he argues his legislation is meant to help those vets and first responders who suffer from asbestos-related disease.
Here’s a little taste of what veterans, first responders and other communities who often come face-to-face with deadly asbestos dust think about Rep. Farenthold’s bill he claims he wrote to “protect” them and their families:
“Forcing our veterans to publicize their work histories, medical conditions, social security numbers and information about their children and families is an offensive invasion of privacy to the men and women who have honorably served,” AMVETS and Association of the U.S. Navy wrote Congress recently.
“Our nation’s first responders and teachers dying of asbestos diseases deserve more respect and better treatment from Congress,” the International Association of Fire Fighters, the National Education Association and the municipal employees union wrote members of Congress.
http://ecowatch.com/2015/10/20/koch-...stos-industry/
BigCorp/1%/VRWC taking over, corrupting state judiciaries
Money Flooding State Court Elections Threatens the Promise of Equal Justice
Special interest money is flooding into our state Supreme Court elections, gravely threatening the impartial justice that our Cons ution promises -- and raising troubling questions about whether courtroom decisions are for sale.
This fast-growing trend in American politics, spurred in part by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2010, puts our system of justice at risk. When judges are pressured to answer to deep-pocketed special interests, disillusioned citizens may perceive them as little more than politicians in robes.
And when special interest groups air grisly TV ads accusing judges of being soft on crime or attacking them for decisions in controversial cases, those judges may find themselves especially vulnerable to election pressure.
Consider the startling transformation of state Supreme Court elections in recent years. Traditionally sleepy and low-cost affairs, these high court elections have become politicized, expensive, and dominated by powerful special interests.
In 2011-12, the first full election cycle after Citizens United, interest group spending in judicial races rose dramatically. Interest groups alone pumped a record $15.4 million into TV ads and other electioneering in these high court races, more than 50 percent higher than the previous record.
Another record fell in 2013-2014, when interest groups seeking to shape courts to their liking accounted for more than 29 percent of total spending. That surpassed the previous record level of 27 percent in the previous cycle, according to Bankrolling the Bench: The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2013-14, a recently released study from the Brennan Center, Justice at Stake, and the National Ins ute on Money in State Politics.
When spending by political parties is included, outside spending as a portion of total spending rose to 40 percent, a record for a non-presidential election cycle. Our research found that more than $34.5 million was spent on state Supreme Court elections in 19 states, with such national groups as the Republican State Leadership Committee, Americans for Prosperity, the Law Enforcement Alliance of America, and American Freedom Builders among the special interest spenders.
State Supreme Courts are attracting this deluge of money in part because they have become a major battleground in the hard-fought tort wars that pit business interests against plaintiffs and their lawyers. But these groups' agendas aren't always apparent when voters see brass-knuckle TV ads -- especially when the ads attack judicial candidates for issues unrelated to tort law. In 2013-2014, a record 56 percent of TV ad spots discussed the criminal justice records of judges and candidates. Many of these ads were sponsored by business interests and plaintiffs' lawyers with little apparent interest in criminal justice reform.
Has the politicization of state Supreme Court elections actually skewed justice? A growing body of research suggests that intense politicking in judicial elections around criminal justice issues may in fact be influencing decision-making on the bench.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...-equal-justice
Conservative education policies brought by Koch-backed board polarizes Colorado county
An all-out war has broken out in Jefferson County, Colorado,—or JeffCo, as it's called—as residents ready to
vote on whether to eject three conservative school board members who have
"championed charter schools,
performance-based teacher pay and
other education measures supported by conservatives."
Supporters of the recall vote have drummed up $250,000 ($15,000 of it from a teachers' union) while the drive to save their jobs, led in part by the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, has already spent around $500,000 on TV ads and plans to spend hundreds of thousands more on print ads and mailers favoring the conservative trio. Jack Healy reports on the Nov. 3 school board election that has grown increasingly nasty.
Voters here are almost evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans and independents. In November 2013, voters broke with union-supported candidates to elect a slate of school board hopefuls running as conservative reformers.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...28Daily+Kos%29
But as those members passed new measures giving money to charters and hired a new superintendent, a backlash grew.
Critics accused the board of secrecy and of trying to turn the 86,500-student district into a petri dish for conservative educational ideas.
Board meetings turned into shouting matches. Upset parents spliced the live-streamed meeting video — an innovation of the new board — into outrage highlight reels. ...
In September of last year, thousands of students walked out of school when [Julie] Williams [one of three conservatives] proposed shifting the focus of the Advanced Placement United States history course toward patriotism and away from “civil disorder” and “social strife.”
It was a moment when festering disputes among parents, students, teachers and the board leapt into the national news. Even though the curriculum was never changed, many voters around the district say they are still upset.
VRWC won't stop until education is ed, judiciary is ed, voting rights are ed, until ALL America and Americans are ed into indoctrination, poverty, insecurity.
They're conservatives/VRWC, so they're LYING:
Koch Brothers Say They Are 'Largely Failures' at Influencing US Politics
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...ng-us-politics
They've put their s into many levels of local, state branches, including the judiciary and SCOTUS. Their s in the House and Senate are ing up everything.
But that's not enough for the whiney asshole Kock Bros, they want the White House and the full Exec.
Dems trying to undo the nasty work of the VRWC's s on SCOTUS
Congressional Democrats Launch a New Strategy to Restore the Voting Rights Act
The 2016 election is a year away, and many states are holding local elections today, but not everyone will be able to vote.
The 2016 election will be the first presidential election in 50 years without thefull protections of the Voting Rights Act. Twenty-one states have put new voting restrictions in place since the 2010 election, with voters in 15 states facing these obstacles for the first presidential cycle in 2016, including in crucial swing states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Legislation has been introduced in Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting the law, but neither the modest Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014 or the more ambitiousVoting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, which both have bipartisan support, have moved legislatively.
http://www.thenation.com/article/con...ng-rights-act/
Slave states, red states dominate voter suppression, naturally.
Voter Fraud!
Robert Reich: Everywhere You Look Huge Cartels Are Jacking Up Prices, Gouging You However They Can
The only way to stop them is to prevent big corporations and Wall Street banks from rigging the market
Much of the national debate about widening inequality focuses on whether and how much to tax the rich and redistribute their income downward.
But this debate ignores the upward redistributions going on every day, from the rest of us to the rich. These redistributions are hidden inside the market.
The only way to stop them is to prevent big corporations and Wall Street banks from rigging the market.
For example, Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than do the citizens of any other developed nation.
That’s partly because it’s perfectly legal in the U.S. (but not in most other nations) for the makers of branded drugs to pay the makers of generic drugs to delay introducing cheaper unbranded equivalents, after patents on the brands have expired.
This costs you and me an estimated $3.5 billion a year – a hidden upward redistribution of our incomes to Pfizer, Merck, and other big proprietary drug companies, their executives, and major shareholders.
We also pay more for Internet service than do the inhabitants of any other developed nation.
The average cable bill in the United States rose 5 percent in 2012 (the latest year available), nearly triple the rate of inflation.
Why? Because 80 percent of us have no choice of Internet service provider, which allows them to charge us more.
Internet service here costs 3 and-a-half times more than it does in France, for example, where the typical customer can choose between 7 providers.
And U.S. cable companies are intent on keeping their monopoly.
It’s another hidden upward distribution – from us to Comcast, Verizon, or another giant cable company, its executives and major shareholders.
Likewise, the interest we pay on home mortgages or college loans is higher than it would be if the big banks that now dominate the financial industry had to work harder to get our business.
As recently as 2000, America’s five largest banks held 25 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Now they hold 44 percent – which gives them a lock on many such loans.
If we can’t repay, forget using bankruptcy. Donald Trump can go bankrupt four times and walk away from his debts, but the bankruptcy code doesn’t allow homeowners or graduates to reorganize unmanageable debts.
So beleaguered homeowners and graduates don’t have any bargaining leverage with creditors – exactly what the financial industry wants.
The net result: another hidden upward redistribution – this one, from us to the big banks, their executives, and major shareholders.
Some of these upward redistributions seem to defy gravity. Why have average domestic airfares risen 2.5% over the past, and are now at their the highest level since the government began tracking them in 1995 – while fuel prices, the largest single cost for the airlines, have plummeted?
Because America went from nine major carriers ten years ago to just four now. Many airports are now served by one or two.
This makes it easy for airlines to coordinate their fares and keep them high – resulting in another upward redistribution.
Why have food prices been rising faster than inflation, while crop prices are now at a six-year low?
Because the giant corporations that process food have the power to raise prices. Four food companies control 82 percent of beef packing, 85 percent of soybean processing, 63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.
Result: A redistribution from average consumers to Big Agriculture.
Finally, why do you suppose health insurance is costing us more, and co-payments and deductibles are rising?
One reason is big insurers are consolidating into giants with the power to raise prices. They say these combinations make their companies more efficient, but they really just give them power to charge more.
Health insurers are hiking rates 20 to 40 percent next year, and their stock values are skyrocketing (the Standard & Poor’s 500 Managed Health Care Index recently hit its highest level in more than twenty years.)
Add it up – the extra money we’re paying for pharmaceuticals, Internet communications, home mortgages, student loans, airline tickets, food, and health insurance – and you get a hefty portion of the average family’s budget.
Democrats and Republicans spend endless time battling over how much to tax the rich and then redistribute the money downward.
But if we didn’t have so much upward redistribution inside the market, we wouldn’t need as much downward redistribution through taxes and transfer payments.
Yet as long as the big corporations, Wall Street banks, their top executives and wealthy shareholders have the political power to do so, they’ll keep redistributing much of the nation’s income upward to themselves.
Which is why the rest of us must gain political power to stop the collusion,
http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-everywhere-you-look-huge-cartels-are-jacking-prices-gouging-you-however-they
Repugs are paid to block ANY attempt to correct the above wealth-sucking, re-distribution-upwards disasters for Americans.
Americans are so ed in so many ways, and un able.
Koch Brothers Hit the Airwaves in Support of Wisconsin Corruption Measures
The Koch-backed measures to eviscerate Wisconsin's limits on money in elections and neuter the state's election watchdog hit a stumbling block in the state senate recently, with a handful of Republican senators expressing concern that the measures go too far.
So the Kochs are going on the offensive.
David Koch's Americans for Prosperity is up with ads targeting cons uents of GOP Senators Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Luther Olsen of Ripon, Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls, and Jerry Petrowski of Marathon, who have expressed reservations about the measures. The ads portray the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board (GAB) as a cold war-era agency "silencing free speech" and "raiding conservative's (sic) homes." AFP Wisconsin's director Eric Bott also said the group would be mobilizing its activists recently. AFP is the only group registered to lobby in favor of dismantling the GAB.
Wisconsin Club for Growth also launched a robocall campaign on Tuesday, with a recording of the Club's director Eric O'Keefe urging the wavering senators' cons uents to demand the senators vote "yes" on the bill.
Wisconsin Club for Growth and Scott Walker were part of a $20 million scheme during the recall elections to evade the state's campaign finance laws and disclosure requirements, prosecutors believed.
The GAB assisted in that investigation, sparking a legal and media counter-assault from the Club, with O'Keefe as its most visible proponent.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, whose majority was elected to the bench with at least $10 million in spending from the Club and other groups under investigation, shut down an investigation into the scheme earlier this year.
The Club has previously coordinated with Walker to support his legislative agenda. In 2011, for example, the Club ran ads supporting Walker's controversial union-busting Act 10 just days after it was introduced, and targeting moderate Republicans who were wavering in their support.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ption-measures
VRWC's $Bs in action.
Kock Bros intimidating REPUGS! who don't show fealty to the VRWC policies.
WI is as big a corrupt hole as TX and other slave states
The scary lessons of Matt Bevin: What we can learn about American politics from the right wing’s destructive anti-Medicaid crusade
Study 2: The Koch brothers go to the statehouse
Another new study from Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Theda Skocpol and Daniel Lynch examines how interest group lobbying affected passage. They find that:
“GOP-leaning or dominated states have been most likely to embrace the expansion when organized business support outweighs counter pressures from conservative networks.”
Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol and Lynch find a major divide in conservative organizations, with more mainstream business organizations often supporting the Medicaid Expansion. They cite a lobbyist who tells them that the Chamber of Commerce was almost “leading the charge” for the Medicaid expansion, out of fear that the state would leave money on the table.
On the other hand, strongly ideological groups, like Americans for Prosperity (a Koch group) and ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the State Policy Network (an association of far-right policy organizations) universally opposed the Medicaid expansion. What they find is that where the business organizations were stronger, the Medicaid expansion would pass, even in a Republican-dominated state (Michigan). On the other hand, in many cases the more ideologically extreme activists dominated, like in Virginia, which despite having a Democratic governor, did not expand Medicaid because of strong opposition from Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (even though the expansion would have benefited the state immensely).
After years of researching the Koch organizations for a similar research project, Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol find that they now rival the Republican Party in spending power (see chart). Skocpol writes that, “the Koch network parallels, rivals, and leverages the Republican Party itself, both nationally and in most states.” As the chart below shows, the national GOP committees are now far weaker than they were in the past, while extra-party organizations, particularly those funded by the Kochs, are far better funded.
The result is that in the 2016 election, the Koch network may well spend more than the GOP to influence the election.
This helps us understand national politics (for instance the rise of Paul Ryan over John Boehner) but the results are even more disturbing at the state level.
The power of the Kochs has led more and more Republican governors to ignore the desires of their cons uents in order to serve the Koch agenda.
As the Kochs grow even more powerful, it will be difficult for even the very conservative, yet pragmatic politicians to be able to govern (like Ohio Gov. John Kasich, for instance).
http://www.salon.com/2015/11/07/the_...icaid_crusade/
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