Monthly Archives: June 2013

What Passes For Government In Arizona.

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If you think the right wing lunacy in Arizona is limited to the unconstitutional anti-Latino bill SB 1070, anti-federal government nullification laws, unrestricted gun sales, and the nation’s most corrupt…er…toughest sheriff, you haven’t seen anything.

A few weeks ago, the Arizona legislature held a hearing on Agenda 21 that brought out the Tea Party Parasites to vent their paranoia about the non-binding UN proposal to ensure the sustainability of our planet. Of course, the Parasites’ fear and loathing paled in comparison to that of our tinfoil hat legislators…both those holding the hearing and the wacko woman (who is herself an Arizona State Senator) decrying the new world order.

Here are the video highlights for your amusement and enjoyment: Arizona UN Agenda 21 Hearing Highlights.

As you can see, the tinfoil hat crowd can’t answer simple questions about Agenda 21 and basic city planning. All they can do is recite the lies and paranoia of Glenn Beck and others. They hate the federal government and they HATE the UN, yet the State of Arizona relies on generous federal subsidies to even exist!

Big Oil And Its Worldwide Oiligarchy.

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If oligarchy is a power structure in which all political power effectively rests with a few people, Oiligarchy is the perfect term to describe what has become the most powerful industry on Earth. Since World War II, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and others have gained increasing control over the US government, along with our foreign policy and our military.

Oiligarchy operatives and lobbyists are a virtual Who’s Who of American politics, including Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, as well as former Secretaries of State James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Condoleezza Rice, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Senator Bob Dole, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former CIA Director James Woolsey, and many, many, many others.

Their connections to the oily empire are deep. Richard “The Dick” Cheney was previously CEO of oil giant Halliburton. Condoleezza Rice served on the board of Chevron and even had an oil supertanker named in her honor. And before Dubya failed as president, he experienced multiple failures in the oil business.

At times, these people have sided with Big Oil at the expense of national security, the environment and human rights. Indeed, the oil companies’ greed, along with our thirst for cheap gasoline has resulted in wars, dictatorships, genocides, toppled governments and a growing worldwide hatred of the US.

Following the Cheney-inspired Project for a New American Century, Bush, Cheney and their minions helped Big Oil elbow its way into the Caucasus and Caspian Sea regions in order to steal oil from Russia and keep it from Iran. In the process, we took the side of Chechen rebels who were led by Muslim extremists in their fight for secession from Russia.

The war in Afghanistan was preceded by US demands for an oil pipeline across that country. The war in Iraq was a cynical and clumsy attempt to control Iraqi oil. Even our unyielding support for Israel seems driven less by a desire to protect Israel from its Arab neighbors than by Big Oil’s desire to have a powerful ally near Middle East oil fields. And in an especially cynical move, US-backed Big Oil and Russia are in a race to lay claim to Arctic drilling as the polar ice cap melts. (Ironically, oil-caused global warming is creating an opportunity to capture and burn even more oil!)

Not content with its lethal impact on international politics, Big Oil has set its sights on further destroying our environment in its quest for ever larger profits. The Oiligarchy is demanding that the Obama administration approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which is intended to carry oil from the newly-fracked oil fields in North Dakota and the tar sands of Alberta, Canada to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. The claim is that the pipeline will create “tens of thousands” of new jobs in the US, but a review by the Cornell University Global Labor Institute estimated that the pipeline would add only 506 to 1,387 new jobs.

In exchange for that meager number of jobs, Big Oil wants us to risk the inevitable spills of a substance the EPA says is virtually impossible to clean up. The US has already experienced at least two spills of the particularly dirty and gooey tar sands oil. In one of the spills, a pipeline belched 200,000 gallons of oil into a Michigan river. Nearly three years later, the oil has sunk to the bottom of the river and has not biodegraded. It likely never will.

Worse yet, the bituminous oil from tar sands is often referred to as “junk oil.” As a fuel source, it is terribly inefficient, creating an inordinate amount of pollution relative to the energy it provides. Once it flows (or more accurately, oozes) onto the market, it will dramatically increase greenhouse gases, leading environmental experts to state that it will be “game over” for our planet.

Big Oil doesn’t seem to care.

Spending billions in attempts to elect subservient politicians, to lobby Congress and to confuse voters, Big Oil owners like the Koch brothers deny the impact of fossil fuels on climate change. Ignoring the findings of almost every climate scientist in the world, they and their bought-and-paid-for politicians claim that climate change is “unsettled science,” a “sham,” the “greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.”

If they’re wrong (and it’s almost certain they are), they won’t pay the price. But our planet and most of its inhabitants will.

Subsidizing Millionaires And Billionaires.

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For years, large corporations have whined that US corporate income taxes are “the highest in the world.” While it’s true that our maximum corporate tax RATE is the highest in the world, the EFFECTIVE tax rate paid by US-based multinational corporations is much, much lower.

In fact, as a percentage of GDP, US corporations pay the second lowest taxes in the developed world! And that doesn’t even include the many ways US taxpayers subsidize large corporations through the creation of specialized infrastructure, tax incentives, relocation incentives, government research grants and sweetheart rates on loans.

Those are just the direct subsidies. Indirect subsidies are often even more costly!

Consider the study recently released by Congressional Democrats which found that a single Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin could cost taxpayers up to $900,000 a year as a result of Walmart’s notoriously low wages and minimal benefits. According to the study, most of Walmart’s employees qualify for food stamps, Medicaid, low-income housing assistance, energy assistance, and other forms of public assistance.

The authors of the study summarize the findings this way, “When low wages leave Walmart workers unable to afford the necessities of life, taxpayers pick up the tab.”

Of course, Walmart responds by saying that its policies benefit all Americans through lower prices. But Costco, another big box chain that competes with Walmart, offers low prices. It also offers full benefits to its employees and pays them an average annual salary of $45,000. There are millions of Americans like myself who try to never set foot in a Walmart store. So why should we be forced to subsidize Walmart’s bad behavior? What is the benefit to us?

There are approximately 4,000 Walmart stores in the US. If each of those cost taxpayers $900,000 a year, Walmart is costing US taxpayers a total of more than $3.6 billion per year!

And that doesn’t include other indirect costs such as the company’s impact on the environment, the impact on independent small businesses that are forced to compete with Walmart, lost revenue in personal income taxes from those forced to accept Walmart’s low wages…the costs are many. There’s also a moral and ethical cost created by Walmart relying on sweatshops in undeveloped countries like Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, the Walton family that owns Walmart enjoys undeserved profits through taxpayer subsidies. For 2011, the company’s net income was $15.4 billion.

Walmart is not alone in unfairly profiting from subsidies and loopholes. A recent study found that 18 of America’s largest corporations, including Abbott, Apple, Citigroup, GE, Google, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, Nike and Pfizer, have stashed profits in off-shore tax shelters in order to avoid paying $92 billion in US income taxes!

We should demand more of corporations. We should demand that they pay all of the costs associated with doing business. We should stop the subsidies. We should require that they pay employees a living wage. And we should require them to pay their fair share of taxes.

Darrell Issa Has Long Been An Expert On Lies And Corruption.

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It seems that Rep. Darrell Issa sees lies and corruption everywhere in the Obama administration; Fast & Furious, Benghazi, IRS and AP. Yet after months of “investigations” Issa has yet to find any evidence of White House involvement in these scandals.

In fact, to use the term “scandal” is a misnomer.

So why is Issa so intent on seeking evidence of corruption when even members of his own party say there is no there there? Aside from the obvious political motivation to discredit the president, it may be because Issa has walked a rather shady path in his own life. Indeed, few are more inclined to expect to find corrupt activities than someone who has committed many of his own.

To wit, Issa lied about his military record. He was indicted by a grand jury for the alleged theft of a Maserati. After being stopped for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, he was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of an unregistered firearm. He was indicted a second time for grand theft auto, but the prosecution dropped the case.

Issa’s personal fortune stems from Steal Stopper, a company he obtained through foreclosure when its founder missed a payment on a $60,000 loan. But the company’s offices and factory were destroyed by fire. A fire investigation found that the fire had started in two places aided by an accelerant such as gasoline. Interestingly, Issa was accused of increasing the fire insurance policy by 462% just a few weeks earlier and of removing computer equipment containing accounting and customer information prior to the fire.

Suspicious of an apparent arson, the insurance company paid about one-tenth the insured amount, which still was enough to provide Issa with a tidy profit. Issa later rebuilt the company and sold it to a California-based maker of car alarms making himself wealthy.

And this is the guy who, as Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is now in charge of Congressional investigations? It would seem that if Issa is serious about finding corruption, he’d be more successful by investigating himself.

New Poll Finds 33 Percent Of Americans Are Batcrap Crazy!

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A recent HuffPost/YouGov poll found that 44 percent of Americans view Rep. Michele Bachmann unfavorably while 33 percent had a favorable view of one America’s most ignorant and batcrap crazy politicians!

That tells us less about Bachmann than American voters.

Keep in mind, this is the woman who confused John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy; who believed “the shot heard ’round the world” for American independence took place in Concord, New Hampshire; that the slave-owning Founders “worked tirelessly to end slavery;” that an overabundance of CO2 in our atmosphere is harmless; that the Census is a government plot to round up dissenters; that Congress is full of communists; that evolution is just a theory.

During her six years in office, Bachmann has had only one bill passed by the House – the repeal of “Obamacare” – and none signed into law. Indeed, even fellow Minnesota politician, Tim Pawlenty described Bachmann as having “a legislative record of offering failed amendments.”

That’s being kind.

As leader of the Tea Party delegation in Congress, Bachmann presided over the most destructive element in US history. She is the leader of the misguided, the uneducated, the uninformed, the misinformed and the heavily armed. She and her colleagues measure success by how much legislation they can block; how completely they can destroy safety nets for the poor and the vulnerable; how completely they can undermine education; how thoroughly they can destroy our own government.

She and her Tea Party parasites even held hostage the faith and credit of the US Treasury, causing the US to lose its AAA bond rating for the first time in history. And, even though she has announced that she won’t seek re-election, she’s not done. She still has more than a year to cause further obstruction and destruction.

And she has the support of 33 percent of Americans??? God help us.