Rupert Murdoch of News Corp / Fox News Admits Manipulating the News for
Agenda - Admits he supported the Bush Agenda in Iraq - He is part of the
Bilderburg group - This is why Fox News has an agenda against Ron Paul
in the 2008 Presidential Election
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Showing posts with label Fascist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fascist. Show all posts
Monday, December 9, 2013
Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas
Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas
Sunday, December, 8th, 2013, 6:40 pm
America’s “resident dunce,” half-term governor, and failed vice presidential candidate has taken advantage of the non-existent “war on Christmas” to speak to like-minded conservative Christians to sell her latest screed against President Obama and all-things secular proving once again why she has the “well-established-reputation as a world-class idiot.” One hesitates commenting on the absurdity that is Sarah Palin, but her latest contention that Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would join her in the war against the imagined war on Christmas is too much of an affront to American history, facts, and reason to bear; especially for a secular humanist.
On Thursday, Palin pimped her “war on Christmas” book at Jerry Falwell’s Christian Liberty University, a place of “higher education” that Palin likely understands teaches David Barton revisionist history of America’s founding as a Christian nation based on the Christian bible. Palin told the audience that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote the U.S. Constitution (Adams did not) for moral and religious people. She said, “If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand we are to be held accountable by our creator so that is what our constitution is based on. So those revisionists, those in the lamestream media who would want to ignore what our founders actually wrote about in our charters of liberty” must not comprehend the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers. Principles, by the way, that apparently include celebrating Christmas the “religious way” by honoring the virgin birth she claimed atheists were hard at work fighting in an attempt to “abort Christ from Christmas” (note the “abortion” reference).
She said, “Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn – a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is right? Oh, they take such offense, mentally distresses them so they sue, right?” No atheist considers plastic Jewish facsimiles of “virgin birth Jesus” on someone’s lawn offensive or worth a lawsuit. They do, however, take offense when Christians erect plastic virgin-birth Jesus displays, crucifixion crosses, or resurrection representations on land paid for with their tax dollars.
She continued that “heaven forbid we claim any type of offense when we say, ‘Wait, you’re stripping Jesus from the reason, as the reason for the season,’ but heaven forbid we claim any type of offense.” Then Palin went rogue and spoke for Thomas Jefferson she claimed “would recognize those who would want to try to ignore that Jesus is the reason for the season are angry atheists armed with an attorney. They are not the majority of Americans. So I think Thomas Jefferson would certainly recognize it and stand up and he wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down and shut up.”
Thomas Jefferson, a deist, eschewed everything divine about biblical Jesus; particularly what he called the “contrary to the laws of nature” virgin birth and resurrection story. What Jefferson did appreciate about biblical Jesus was the humanitarian ethics of goodwill toward human beings, charity for the poor, and his inherent humanism that Jefferson himself espoused. To make his point, Jefferson gathered 4 translations of the gospel accounts, edited out each and every “contrary to natural law” part, and compiled humanistic Jesus into his version of the gospels minus Christ’s miracles, Christ as divine, and especially the virgin birth and resurrection. In fact, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote to another Founding Father, John Adams, in 1823 that “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” So much for America’s resident dunce counting on Thomas Jefferson joining her in fighting against “atheists trying to abort Christ in Christmas” or the “reason for the season” that is as absurd as a star guiding wise men to Bethlehem around December 25.
The real story is that Palin is a charlatan, an imbecile, and an opportunist with no more knowledge of the “Christ” in Christmas than the Founding Fathers she attempted to channel to sell her pathetic book. Her assault and false account of the Founding Fathers’ intent in writing the Constitution is as offensive as her assault on atheists’ desire to abort Christ from Christmas or wage a war on Christmas. Sarah Palin is a parasite on America and this secular humanist has had just about as much of her bloodsucking pandering to pad her bank account as one person can take. Obviously, the Liberty University audience has not had enough of Palin because there were no reports of even one “higher education” student standing up and telling Palin that her lack of knowledge of the Christ in Christmas, or the Founding Fathers, informed that the only war this holiday season is her assault on intelligence of which she has none.
Sarah Palin Disgraces History With Claim Adams and Jefferson Support Her War on Christmas was written by Rmuse for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Sun, Dec 8th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved
Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits
Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits
Sunday, December, 8th, 2013, 10:58 am
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was on Fox News Sunday to continue his minority outreach to African Americans, by saying we shouldn’t extend unemployment benefits set to expire momentarily because he knows one black businessman who wants tax cuts.
Video:
Paul said, “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for, but if you extend it past that you do a disservice to these workers.” His reasoning is that when you “allow people” to be on unemployment for longer, you are causing them to be “perpetually unemployed”. Don’t forget about his one black businessman.
See, it’s not that there are no jobs, it’s that employers don’t like to hire people who have been out of work for very long. Thus, by taking away the “incentive” to stay unemployed, Paul thinks he can solve the unemployment problem. It’s the “firmer hand” theory, also used as an argument for slavery.
There can be no other explanation for Paul’s reasoning other than people want to stay unemployed, otherwise he wouldn’t think that taking away unemployment benefits creates job opportunities. This veers dangerously close to the “lazy urban” narrative that Republicans favor. It is not accurate to suggest that starving will create jobs. So this is not a good plan for jobs or for the unemployed.
Paul said that African American unemployment hasn’t budged under this President, implying that he thinks he can get the African American vote by criticizing this president and blaming him for higher unemployment among African Americans, as if this is a new phenomenon best addressed by letting a white Southern man make decisions for African Americans and this president. Some things just shouldn’t be said by certain people, especially not people who employed a white supremacist. It’s bad optics.
The carrot dangling is far from over. You know what the number once concern is for African Americans, after tax cuts for businesses? School choice, apparently. “My economic stimulus plan would stimulate Detroit. There is no other plan on the table. If my plan would pass I think it’s the only one that would pass. I am also talking about restoring voting rights and school choice.”
Voting rights? His party is the party that came after voting rights nationally and his party is the party that made Detroiters’ votes meaningless under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. That’s going to be a hard sale.
When asked for alternatives to ObamaCare, Rand criticized ObamaCare and then said he’s for Freedom of Choice. Seriously. The anti-choicer is for Freedom of Choice, which means no plan. It means repeal ObamaCare because the “premiums are higher” – which they aren’t for the majority of people. So that’s his big sell to Detroit: Come and get nothing in order to protect the rich. That’s new for Republicans in Detroit. Detroiters will never see through that (see sarcasm). Clearly Sen. Paul is unaware of the high priority most Americans put on the issue of affordable healthcare. It’s an issue of economic survival for many. Not something they want to toss away into the GOP “freedom” for corporations ring.
Yes, 2016 2016 2016. The Senator is a GOP presidential front runner, and it seems he is already running for President, “the thought has crossed my mind, Chris.” But he’s concerned about the “haters and hacks”. So are we, Senator.
Image: Fox News
Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits was written by Sarah Jones for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Sun, Dec 8th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved
Rick Warren: Marriage Is Not ‘Equally Valid’ For Same-Sex Couples
Rick Warren: Marriage Is Not ‘Equally Valid’ For Same-Sex Couples
By Zack Ford
on
December 9, 2013 at 9:24 am
on
December 9, 2013 at 9:24 am
WARREN: Tolerance used to mean we treat each other with mutual respect even if you have major disagreements. Today tolerance has been changed to mean all ideas are equally valid. Well, that’s nonsense. All ideas are not equally valid. [...]Watch it (via The New Civil Rights Movement):
I’m more against the redefinition of the term marriage than anything else. I don’t think other groups get the opportunity to redefine a term. For instance, if a Muslim says this is a term we use and all of the sudden I take that term and mean it for me. Well, that’s not right. [...]
Don’t take a term and and make it something different. Orwell talked about doublespeak, where words mean the exact opposite of what they used to mean.
Rick Warren has long maintained that marriage equality is wrong because God says so. He was a vocal supporter of California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage, though he has since said that speaking out for that measure was a mistake. He has admitted that some churches are responsible for promoting anti-gay hate, and he himself has suggested that having same-sex attractions is no different than wanting to punch someone in the nose — or as “natural” as arsenic.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
ALEC’s Influence over Lawmaking in State Legislatures
ALEC and State Legislatures
- Saturday, 07 December 2013
ALEC’s Influence over Lawmaking in State Legislatures
The goal of this article is to begin to fill the gap in our
knowledge. Given the pervasive gridlock in Congress, key legislative
change is occurring predominantly in the states. It is, then, all the
more important to know who is affecting which bills are introduced in
the state legislatures, and which bills pass. Using text analysis, I
find where bills based on ALEC model legislation are introduced in the
statehouses during the 2011-2012 session and track their progress in the
legislative process.My findings are threefold. First, ALEC model bills are, word-for-word, introduced in our state legislatures at a non-trivial rate. Second, they have a good chance – better than most legislation – of being enacted into law. Finally, the bills that pass are most often linked to controversial social and economic issues. In the end, I argue that this is not good for ALEC, its corporate partners, or for the democratic process.
About ALEC
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a national policy organization that “provides a constructive forum for state legislators and private sector leaders to discuss and exchange practical, state-level public policy issues.” (ALEC website). ALEC members, including state legislators and corporate representatives, meet in task forces on specific issue areas (i.e., environment and energy, worker’s rights, etc.) and collaborate to write model legislation. Once the task force completes a model bill it is approved by the ALEC membership and governing board. Once bills clear those hurdles, they become official ALEC “model policies,” which are disseminated to state legislators.ALEC is notoriously secretive about the process by which members draft and approve model legislation. A recent Washington Post article by Dana Milbank detailed the closed-door policy at ALEC’s annual policy summit. My own attempts to contact ALEC staff in order to understand the model bill drafting process were unsuccessful.
ALEC does list on its website all official ALEC policies (though it does not say – and representatives claim not to have collected – information on where those policies have been introduced in the states). However, there is reason to believe that the list is incomplete. The ALEC board reviews the status of every piece of model legislation every five years, and adds and removes model bills from the website periodically. It is not surprising, then, that the Castle Doctrine (a.k.a. Stand Your Ground) was removed from the ALEC website following the public scrutiny that arose during the Trayvon Martin trial.
Thus, obtaining a complete list of ALEC model bills and their rates of introduction and success in the U.S. statehouses requires a nuanced data collection strategy.
Methodology:
As discussed in the previous section, ALEC’s public list of model bills is not complete – and may include some of their most controversial and influential bills. Rather than relying on the organization’s own list, I turned to a third party website: ALEC Exposed. ALEC Exposed, a subsidiary of PR Watch, tracks all ALEC activity and keeps a list of the most significant ALEC model legislation approved between 2010 and 2013. From the ALEC Exposed database, I collected information on the 169 model bills that they tag as most significant, covering each of the nine ALEC task force areas.Using the text from those169 model bills, I used Boolean string searches in LEXIS to find bills with the same language that were introduced in the 2011-2012 legislative session. In total, I recovered 132 bills. I then coded a variety of features of those bills including their state and chamber of origin, sponsors’ party identification and connections to ALEC, and legislative history.
ALEC Bills Introduced
During the 2011-2012 legislative session, 132 bills based on ALEC models were introduced in the states. Democrats sponsored nearly 18% of those bills, while Republicans sponsored more than 81% (one bill was introduced by a joint committee, and, thus, does not have a single sponsor). Nearly two-thirds of those bills were introduced in state lower chambers, while only 34% were introduced in upper chambers. Of those legislators who sponsored ALEC model legislation, 57% can be explicitly connected to ALEC. However, that does not necessarily preclude the other legislators from having ALEC ties; ALEC does not disclose the names of their legislative members, so this figure is based primarily on information from leaked documents.ALEC model language appeared in bills in 34 states (see Figure 1). Those bills were most common in West Virginia, where legislators introduced 10 bills based on ALEC model legislation. Both the Oklahoma and Mississippi legislatures considered nine ALEC bills, Arizona eight, and Kansas and Montana saw seven apiece.
One feature that separates ALEC from other lobbying ventures is that it partners with corporations whose interests span the space of conservative issues. This is reflected in the fact that legislation introduced based on ALEC models covers a variety of seemingly-unrelated subjects (see Figure 2).
Most common were bills pertaining to immigration and the environment, followed by those relating to guns and crime. The now-infamous Castle Doctrine Act was introduced in nine chambers and was, thus, one of the more common pieces of ALEC legislation to appear in the statehouses. The five most common ALEC model bills introduced in the state legislatures include:
| Table 1: Top 5 ALEC Model Bills Introduced in the States | ||
| ALEC Model Bill | # of States Introduced | Description |
| No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act | 23 | Closely resembles Arizona’s SB1070 law in that it mandates local law enforcement of federal immigration law, and allows private citizens to sue their local government if they feel the law is not being fully enforced. In addition, it further criminalizes the employment of illegal immigrants, and creates a crime of “trespassing” on state land without immigration status, and a crime of having an illegal immigrant in one’s vehicle, among other provisions. |
| The Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act | 10 | Requires the disclosure of fluid used in the production of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing. It would also allow operators not to disclose any materials that are considered a “trade secret” or present incidentally in the hydraulic fluid, and would limit the ability of individuals to challenge a the operator’s claim to trade secret protection. |
| Castle Doctrine Act | 9 | Also commonly referred to as “Stand Your Ground” legislation, this act authorizes the deadly use of force against an intruder in a residence or vehicle. It declares that a person has a right to stand his or her ground under reasonable fear of great bodily harm. It also reduces the grounds under which law enforcement may investigate the use of deadly force under these circumstances. |
| ALEC State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Change Initiative | 9 |
Declares the lack of benefit to reducing carbon emissions in the state that would adopt it, and would provide that state reasonable cover to withdraw from a regional climate initiative. |
| Consistency of Firearm Regulation | 9 | Prohibits local jurisdictions from independently enacting restrictions on the possession of firearms. This bill would also preempt the right of local jurisdictions to bring certain civil actions against firearms or ammunition manufacturers, trade associations, and dealers. |
Of the 132 ALEC model bills introduced, 12 were enacted. One additional bill passed the New Hampshire legislature only to be vetoed by the governor. Now, a success rate of 9% may not seem high upon first glance. However, consider the fact that, in the 112th session of the U.S. Congress, less than 2% of introduced bills passed. That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.
Table 2 summarizes the ALEC policies that were passed in the 2011-2012 session. Republicans sponsored all of the enacted bills, and 7 of those sponsors have explicit ties to ALEC. Two states – Pennsylvania and Oklahoma – passed the Castle Doctrine. Though the modal ALEC bill introduced in the states was the No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act, only Alabama passed it.
| Table 2: ALEC Bills Enacted | |||||
| Enacting State | ALEC bill | Sponsor | Known ALEC Tie? | Description | |
| |Alabama | 2011 H.B. 56 | No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act | Rep. Micky Hammon (R) | - | See Table 1. |
| Arizona | 2011 S.B. 1546 | Eminent Domain Authority for Federal Lands Act | Senator Al Melvin (R) | Yes | Increases the state government’s ability to appropriate federal lands (such as wilderness areas or national parks) |
| Arizona | 2012 H.B. 2503 | Regulary Compliance Congruity with Liability Act | Rep, Kimberly Yee (R) | Yes | Increases protection for corporations in product liability suits, and adopts a presumption in favor of the corporate defendant when it can show compliance with governmental standards. |
| Kansas | 2011 S.B. 9 | Discovery of Electronically Stored Information and Limitations on Waiver of Attorney-Client Privilege | Judiciary Committee | - | Limits the ability to produce electronically-stored information during discovery. |
| North Carolina | 2011 H.B. 542 | Regulatory Compliance Congruity With Liability Act | Rep. Johnathan Rhyne (R) | Yes | Increases protection for corporations in product liability suits, and adopts a presumption in favor of the corporate defendant when it can show compliance with governmental standards. |
| North Carolina | 2011 H.B. 650 | Consistency of Firearms Regulation Act | Rep. Mark Hilton (R) | - | See Table 1. |
| Oklahoma | 2011 S.B. 704 | Class Actions Improvement Act | Senator Constance Johnson (R) | Yes | Limits individual’s ability to bring class action suits against large companies by specifying that class action suits cannot seek any monetary relief, and restrict the ability to bring a class action suit with plaintiffs from multiple states. |
| Oklahoma | 2011 H.B. 1439 | Castle Doctrine Act | Rep. Steve Vaughan (R) | Yes:Yes | See Table 1. |
| Pennsylvania | 2011 H.B. 40 | Castle Doctrine Act | Rep. Scott Perry (R) | - | See Table 1. |
| Tennessee | 2011 H.B. 1030 | Virtual Public Schools Act | Rep. Harry Brooks H (R) | Yes | Requires “virtual” or online schools be recognized as public schools and given equal resources as other public schools in the state. |
| Texas | 2011 H.B. 3328 | The Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act | Rep. James Keffer (R) | Yes | See Table 1. |
This research shows that the American Legislative Exchange Council wields considerable influence in state legislatures. The bills that it writes find their way into the majority of state legislatures. Moreover, the percentage of those bills that pass is strikingly high compared to the dismal rate at which all other bills are enacted into law.
In the midst of this success, recent controversy over particular ALEC-inspired bills – such as the Castle Doctrine Act (a.k.a. Stand your Ground) – has caused the organization to come under increased scrutiny from journalists, transparency groups, and voters. As a result, almost 400 legislators and 60 corporations have cut ties with ALEC in the last two years, with some now publicly repudiating the organization’s methods.
Many of ALEC’s prominent (former) corporate partners, such as Wal-Mart, General Electric, and McDonald’s, were almost certainly displeased with the negative publicity and media criticism sparked by ALEC’s foray into hot-button issues like gun control. That involvement damages ALEC’s reputation, hindering their typical (corporate-friendly) efforts surrounding manufacturing regulations, court procedures, and environmental laws. ALEC’s corporate partners are paying to influence legislators over those issues, which they want introduced and passed quickly and quietly. Dirtying its hands with social issues undermines ALEC’s ability to exercise influence over fiscal ones.
This has broader implications for how we think about lobbying. Consolidation of lobbying groups into broader organizations of legislators and corporations increases their reach but also creates significant hazards. Attempting to tie together such a wide range of interests undermines the ability of the umbrella organization to achieve any of its objectives. The bigger you get, the more likely it all is to fall apart. ALEC’s Napoleonic reach may turn out to be its undoing.
This
article was researched and written by The Brookings Institute. Both
CMD’s Sourcewatch and Firedoglake identify Brookings as a once-liberal
now-conservative think tank, with FDL stating “it has become the Alan
Colmes of think-tanks, fake liberals who meekly accept conservative
mythology on every major point, but says we should at least think of the
misery we are causing.”The author credits ALECexposed for a lot of the information used in the article. I want to note that ALECexposed is still the source I use regularly to verify and cross-check information that I have researched. Its Sourcewatch articles are, IMHO, the best.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This article is written by Molly Jackman with research assistance from Grace Wallack and Brian Boessenecker. It is posted by the Brookings Institute at http://tinyurl.com/mw5bog6
Friday, December 6, 2013
McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?
McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?
We can't afford to raise the minimum wage?
But we can always afford a big pay increase for the CEO. Always. Even when sales are down for the year.
And yet these CEO's then proceed to lecture us about being lazy and how they can't afford raises this year, maybe next year, and the stock markets rise and the CEO salaries rise but the rest of us will just have to wait.
But the CEO never has to wait. He always gets his raise. Always.
Over the last few decades the CEO's of corporate America have made themselves filthy rich by paying themselves instead of labor. The boss gets a raise, you don't. You are lucky just to keep your job. Any profit made goes straight to the wealthiest 1% and stays there.
And if you complain they call you a socialist.
If you notice the 800 lb CEO in the room, they say you hate capitalism.
We all have to ignore how rich the rich have become in order for the never ending austerity brigade's working class death march to make any sense.
Because you must suffer so that record corporate profits can live.
But we can always afford a big pay increase for the CEO. Always. Even when sales are down for the year.
McDonald's Corp. more than tripled the pay packages last year for its new CEO Don Thompson and the man he replaced, Jim Skinner. ~snip~McDonald's gave a $9 million dollar raise recently to their new CEO. $9 million dollars that didn't "Trickle Down", $9 million dollars that didn't help workers at McDonald's unless they have a second, better paying job as a waiter at the nicer restaurants the CEO of McDonald's goes to. McDonald's can't afford paying their workers enough to climb out of poverty but just happened to find $9 million lying around to give to their CEO. The golden arches are actually golden parachutes too. Over the last 40 years this has been the trend. Worker's wages stagnate but for some reason CEO salaries go through the roof. The result is growing poverty. No one who works full time should be poor. No one.
McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Ill., gave Thompson a package worth $13.8 million, up from the $4.1 million he received in 2011, according to a regulatory filing made Friday.
Skinner's pay meanwhile rose to $27.7 million from $8.8 million the year before, reflecting a $10.2 million payment as part of his retirement under his contract agreement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
And yet these CEO's then proceed to lecture us about being lazy and how they can't afford raises this year, maybe next year, and the stock markets rise and the CEO salaries rise but the rest of us will just have to wait.
But the CEO never has to wait. He always gets his raise. Always.
Over the last few decades the CEO's of corporate America have made themselves filthy rich by paying themselves instead of labor. The boss gets a raise, you don't. You are lucky just to keep your job. Any profit made goes straight to the wealthiest 1% and stays there.
And if you complain they call you a socialist.
If you notice the 800 lb CEO in the room, they say you hate capitalism.
We all have to ignore how rich the rich have become in order for the never ending austerity brigade's working class death march to make any sense.
Because you must suffer so that record corporate profits can live.
With Wall Street and corporate profits at record highs we should be swimming in trickle down goodness right freaking now.
But we are not. Because trickle down is bullcrap.
So the boss gets a raise and you don't. The boss gets a bigger raise than he would have otherwise by not giving you a raise. Scrooge gets to count coins, Cratchet gets a piece of coal, maybe. If he is lucky.
And Tiny Tim? Humbug!
Overpaid CEO's can not be the end-all-be-all of our economy, sneering Mitt Romney types who think you are lazy and want to be dependent on food stamps, because working to death being dependent on the kindness of a heartless millionaire wasn't good enough.
I could understand maybe if NO ONE at McDonald's was getting a raise this year. If they were cutting executive salaries and that sort of thing, but McDonald's isn't, nor is WalMart or the other big box stores that wiped out your local Mom and Pop stores. All those businesses are still chugging out profits and raises for executives, but the workers are ass out in the deal, No raise for you, Cratchet! Because the CEO's of these huge corporations have decided they would rather steal your raise so they can get a bigger raise themselves. That's the only way we get record profits AND growing, record poverty at the same time, the rich are making the poor even poorer for their own profit. It's that simple.
The rich are getting richer by PREVENTING "trickle down" from happening.
And they don't even bother lying to you about how it will "Trickle Down" anymore, do they? It's all austerity all the time now, and if you even mention that it isn't "Trickling Down" conservatives get mad at you for even bringing it up. The say you are engaging in class warfare if you dare mention that the "Trickle Down" isn't working. The Right Wing's plan for the poor is basically "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", meaning the right wing has nothing to offer the poor other than animosity and Republicans would rather you not ask since they don't like to talk about the poor anyway.
So you get pushed into whatever low wage job you can get and you struggle to survive and your measly pay isn't even enough to get by on and here comes your local Republican to make things harder for you if you ever need food assistance or unemployment insurance. We can't have you being dependent on anything other than your credit card, can we? In Republican America paying taxes is slavery and working for poverty wages until you die is freedom so quit complaining.
The next time you hear some meathead tell you that we can't raise the minimum wage or prices will go up ask them if that means ANYBODY should ever get a raise again? I mean, if rising wages means rising prices doesn't that mean that all wage increases are bad, or is that just wage increases for poor people? Does that mean that giving huge pay increases to the already rich might drive up the price of certain things like oh say housing? This logic says that paying poor people more is a bad thing, but paying rich people more is good because "trickle down".
Try as you might to make sense of this you can't. There is no logic to talking points against raising the minimum wage. It is just rooted in poor people = bad/lazy and rich people = Randian Supermen who must be coddled at all times and told how awesome and brilliant they are. The same crap Mitt Romney embodied that the GOP breathes on a daily basis, open hostility towards the poor and working class, is embedded in this notion, that poor people have it too good and should just try harder. Because if poor people aren't kept in constant misery they may get lazy and stop contributing, unlike rich people who shit pure rainbows.
McDonald's can afford to pay their workers better, they just don't want to. They refuse to. McDonald's, WalMart and all of these other big box stores has created a class of poor people stuck in dead end jobs who will always be poor and they call them "Associates". McDonald's and these other corporations will not pay their employees decent wages until they are forced to. The rich will lie and lie and say they can't afford to pay their employees, they will lie and say raising wages will force them to raise prices, it's a lie, a lie to keep you poor so they can continue to make themselves rich.
They will say anything to justify not paying their employees a better wage. And this is the basis for our entire economy. The rich are getting richer BECAUSE they are keeping the poor as poor as they can. Keeping you from getting a raise means my CEO compensation might triple this year. Some businesses like CostCo might do the right thing and pay their workers a good wage, but others will not, and that is why we need laws to set a fair floor for wages so that people don't get trapped having to work until they die just to stay poor. Poor people wouldn't need food stamps if they just got paid better, and if some CEO's weren't as grossly overpaid as they are maybe there would be a little money leftover to pay everyone else a raise.
Justifying greed is what conservatives live for. Hating the poor is just a bonus. The people who nominated Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate a year ago bristle with hostility whenever you mention the poor. Resentment is a dish best served buffet style at the RNC convention. But at the heart of it is this, when conservatives say they are against raising the minimum wage they are admitting that trickle down is not supposed to help "those people". Conservatives are admitting that helping the poor simply isn't in the trickle down plan. Nope, the plan is bigger tax cuts for the rich. The better to eat you with.
So let's give a big round of applause to the people who are marching against McDonald's and WalMart and all the big box stores that make huge profits by keeping their workers underpaid, and remember, they always have money to give their CEO's a big pay increase each year, so when they say they can't afford to pay better wages they are just lying to you.
My apologies for not having written much lately, getting adjusted to life with my newborn daughter Janis has made it difficult for me to sit down and think, let alone write. I will be on the Ed Schultz show tonight on MSNBC. Hopefully you catch me there.
Peace and love to all,
Cheers
Originally posted to MinistryOfTruth on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:13 AM PST.
But we are not. Because trickle down is bullcrap.
So the boss gets a raise and you don't. The boss gets a bigger raise than he would have otherwise by not giving you a raise. Scrooge gets to count coins, Cratchet gets a piece of coal, maybe. If he is lucky.
And Tiny Tim? Humbug!
Overpaid CEO's can not be the end-all-be-all of our economy, sneering Mitt Romney types who think you are lazy and want to be dependent on food stamps, because working to death being dependent on the kindness of a heartless millionaire wasn't good enough.
I could understand maybe if NO ONE at McDonald's was getting a raise this year. If they were cutting executive salaries and that sort of thing, but McDonald's isn't, nor is WalMart or the other big box stores that wiped out your local Mom and Pop stores. All those businesses are still chugging out profits and raises for executives, but the workers are ass out in the deal, No raise for you, Cratchet! Because the CEO's of these huge corporations have decided they would rather steal your raise so they can get a bigger raise themselves. That's the only way we get record profits AND growing, record poverty at the same time, the rich are making the poor even poorer for their own profit. It's that simple.
The rich are getting richer by PREVENTING "trickle down" from happening.
And they don't even bother lying to you about how it will "Trickle Down" anymore, do they? It's all austerity all the time now, and if you even mention that it isn't "Trickling Down" conservatives get mad at you for even bringing it up. The say you are engaging in class warfare if you dare mention that the "Trickle Down" isn't working. The Right Wing's plan for the poor is basically "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", meaning the right wing has nothing to offer the poor other than animosity and Republicans would rather you not ask since they don't like to talk about the poor anyway.
So you get pushed into whatever low wage job you can get and you struggle to survive and your measly pay isn't even enough to get by on and here comes your local Republican to make things harder for you if you ever need food assistance or unemployment insurance. We can't have you being dependent on anything other than your credit card, can we? In Republican America paying taxes is slavery and working for poverty wages until you die is freedom so quit complaining.
The next time you hear some meathead tell you that we can't raise the minimum wage or prices will go up ask them if that means ANYBODY should ever get a raise again? I mean, if rising wages means rising prices doesn't that mean that all wage increases are bad, or is that just wage increases for poor people? Does that mean that giving huge pay increases to the already rich might drive up the price of certain things like oh say housing? This logic says that paying poor people more is a bad thing, but paying rich people more is good because "trickle down".
Try as you might to make sense of this you can't. There is no logic to talking points against raising the minimum wage. It is just rooted in poor people = bad/lazy and rich people = Randian Supermen who must be coddled at all times and told how awesome and brilliant they are. The same crap Mitt Romney embodied that the GOP breathes on a daily basis, open hostility towards the poor and working class, is embedded in this notion, that poor people have it too good and should just try harder. Because if poor people aren't kept in constant misery they may get lazy and stop contributing, unlike rich people who shit pure rainbows.
McDonald's can afford to pay their workers better, they just don't want to. They refuse to. McDonald's, WalMart and all of these other big box stores has created a class of poor people stuck in dead end jobs who will always be poor and they call them "Associates". McDonald's and these other corporations will not pay their employees decent wages until they are forced to. The rich will lie and lie and say they can't afford to pay their employees, they will lie and say raising wages will force them to raise prices, it's a lie, a lie to keep you poor so they can continue to make themselves rich.
They will say anything to justify not paying their employees a better wage. And this is the basis for our entire economy. The rich are getting richer BECAUSE they are keeping the poor as poor as they can. Keeping you from getting a raise means my CEO compensation might triple this year. Some businesses like CostCo might do the right thing and pay their workers a good wage, but others will not, and that is why we need laws to set a fair floor for wages so that people don't get trapped having to work until they die just to stay poor. Poor people wouldn't need food stamps if they just got paid better, and if some CEO's weren't as grossly overpaid as they are maybe there would be a little money leftover to pay everyone else a raise.
Justifying greed is what conservatives live for. Hating the poor is just a bonus. The people who nominated Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate a year ago bristle with hostility whenever you mention the poor. Resentment is a dish best served buffet style at the RNC convention. But at the heart of it is this, when conservatives say they are against raising the minimum wage they are admitting that trickle down is not supposed to help "those people". Conservatives are admitting that helping the poor simply isn't in the trickle down plan. Nope, the plan is bigger tax cuts for the rich. The better to eat you with.
So let's give a big round of applause to the people who are marching against McDonald's and WalMart and all the big box stores that make huge profits by keeping their workers underpaid, and remember, they always have money to give their CEO's a big pay increase each year, so when they say they can't afford to pay better wages they are just lying to you.
My apologies for not having written much lately, getting adjusted to life with my newborn daughter Janis has made it difficult for me to sit down and think, let alone write. I will be on the Ed Schultz show tonight on MSNBC. Hopefully you catch me there.
Peace and love to all,
Cheers
Originally posted to MinistryOfTruth on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:13 AM PST.
Also republished by In Support of Labor and Unions.
Cato Institute suggests an ‘overthrow’ of U.S. Government is needed
December 5, 2013
“There is one last thing to which the people can resort if the government does not respect the restrains that the constitution places on the government,” Cannon said. “Abraham Lincoln talked about our right to alter our government or our revolutionary right to overthrow it.”Cannon goes on to say that it's “very dangerous” for the President to “ignore the laws” by imposing an “obligation upon the people”
“That is certainly something that no one wants to contemplate,” he continued. “If the people come to believe that the government is no longer constrained by the laws then they will conclude that neither are they.”
“That is a very dangerous sort of thing for the president to do, to wantonly ignore the laws,” Cannon concluded, “to try to impose obligation upon people that the legislature did not approve.”There have been several calls for a revolution to overthrow the U.S. Government because of President Obama and the Affordable Care Act by right wing activists, and they have received some support from Republicans in Congress.
Last month right wing activists held a rally in Washington D.C., promoted by Larry Klayman a far right wing activist, along with Larry Pratt, Bob Barr, Pamela Geller, Alan Keyes, Bradlee Dean, Joseph Farah and Zeeda Andrews. All of these people are right wing activists who say that President Obama is either a Muslim terrorist or worse.
Klayman had suggested that there may be a violent revolution if his Nov. 19 rally failed, he even went as far as issuing a new Declaration of Independence to promote his rally, which did turn out to be a massive failure. During the promotion of the rally, Klayman said that he expected upwards of 1 million people, but only about 100 people showed up.
You can view the C-SPAN2 video clip of Michael Cannon testifying at the Congressional hearing attached to this article above.
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Foreign Press Says What America’s Won’t: Sarah Palin is a Traitor
Foreign Press Says What America’s Won’t: Sarah Palin is a Traitor
“By attacking the democratically elected President of the United States of America at a sensitive time in her country’s history, she shows the tact of a boorish drunkard bawling obscenities at a funeral….Bancroft-Hinchey has been proven correct by the way MSNBC handled Martin Bashir. Palin was engaging in more treasonous talk when she compared the national debt to slavery. Her comments were more of Palin reminding everyone that the president is black, and in her view that is a very bad thing.
And now she turns not only against the fibre and backbone of her country, but against its democratically elected President, accusing him of being incompetent for not stopping Wikileaks. Where was she and where was her GOP before and during the 9/11 attacks? She accuses President Obama of not taking “steps” to assure the leaks were not published. What “steps”?……
If anything is a threat to the national security of the United States of America, it is this screaming, unrefined oaf with as much class as a searing release of flatulence followed by hysterical giggling at a state banquet. Is this what the people of the USA deserve?
To attack the President of the country at a time when the USA needs to close ranks and stand together to consolidate the enormous strides his (President Obama’s) intelligent and respectful approach has achieved in building bridges, when her party’s period in government bombed them, Spankin’ Sarah Palin comes across as a pitifully inadequate anachronism from the times of the Far West.”
Bashir saw through her latest barrage of hate speech gibberish, and called her out in the most graphic way possible. The media responded by bowing to the imaginary power, and very real privilege of Sarah Palin.
The American Press won’t say what the International Press will for a variety of reasons, but suffice it to say that there are many agendas at play here, causing truth to take a back-seat to dollars. As a noted US media critic once said, “everything to sell and nothing to tell.” And what a shame, because this isn’t about partisanship or even elitism; it’s about patriotism and who better to cover this issue than our domestic press?
Ms Palin cloaks her myth in her flag, but one has to question just what that symbol represents to Ms Palin, given that she won’t stop attacking this country’s sitting President during each crisis that presents itself. The word patriotism derives from the Greek patriōtēs meaning “fellow countryman”; that would include all of us, even President Obama. I’m afraid Ms Palin and her followers conflate their false community of nationalism with patriotism, and under the guise of said nationalism, justify harming America’s standing in the world along with the very unity of our nation. One can’t help but question Ms Palin’s true motives, along with her jingoistic, tabloid-driven patriotism, since she beats this drum of division in each public appearance she makes.
One wonders, can Sarah Palin can see what the Russians see: a shrill, desperate demagogue more interested in making money and getting famous than in the best interests of her country; a woman so jealous of a sitting President that she takes every blow her country faces and exploits it, turning it into an even more negative, frightening moment while distracting from the real work – never once stepping into the debate to lead, to soothe, to unite.
Never once has Ms Palin shown her love for this great country by standing by it and her President in a time of need. Instead, she views each crisis as a cynical opportunity to sow the seeds of division among fellow countrymen. During the oil spill crisis, she took to Fox News to spew nonsense about the Dutch not getting their phone calls received, claiming she knew how to fix the leak if only the President had called on her. Of course, since she was on Fox News, no one bothered to ask her why, then, she did nothing to stop the oil spills that took place during her brief tenure as Governor of Alaska.
When she went to Hong Kong for a speaking engagement, Ms. Palin attacked her President on foreign soil during a time of war. On her first book tour, Palin and her entourage of hit men (aka, her father, et al) attacked the Commander in Chief on military bases. In times of major decisions regarding the war in Afghanistan, Palin has mocked the President when he followed the course of action recommended by his Generals. On 9/11, Palin bashed the President. In her speeches, Ms Palin is sure to remind her followers that Obama’s foreign policy is weakening America while she accuses the President of not loving his country. During the WikiLeaks crisis, Palin blamed the President instead of calling for a united front for our country.
Ms Palin and her followers justify this unpatriotic behavior by claiming the President is “un-American”. We all know what that’s about but if we’re left with any doubt, we have only to listen to Ms Palin assure her listeners that they have every right to ask for the President’s birth certificate:
And here she is just weeks ago suggesting that the failure to vet the President and his associations has harmed our democracy. Talk about projection.
Ms Palin’s heavily moderated Facebook page was just months ago full of comments calling for the death of our President, sedition, and the overthrowing of the Obama administration as being God’s will. Those comments were left standing while comments questioning Ms Palin in any way were scrubbed. Ms Palin stands for a level of vitriolic, simmering revulsion so steeped in delusions of self-righteousness, it’s tough to swim to sanity once you’ve been washed in the blood of her particular lamb.
We are at war, facing a global economic crisis, still reeling from a devastating oil spill and now facing the challenges brought on by the WikiLeaks dump. Yet, on every issue of importance, Palin has inserted herself with jarring accusations against the President, offering nothing but malicious hate fueled by a failure to understand what she doesn’t understand.
Ms Palin’s particular brand of tabloid patriotism leaves out anyone who disagrees with her, beats her in a contest, dares to question her, or has the temerity to actually read and debate important issues. She’s become an international embarrassment:
“If Sarah Palin is not some kind of a massive political joke in the USA, wheeled out to liven up the political scene from time to time with nonsensical and pastiche (one hopes) displays of sheer and utter ignorance, then it is worrying.”
Sarah Palin is the figurehead for an unpatriotic movement here in the United States of America. A movement so bereft of love for this country that they would go to any means to see it fail, in order to elevate themselves into power. A movement which just yesterday met with the democratically elected President of this fine country and then immediately stabbed him in the back in their post-game press conference.
And nestled into this web of traitors is one particularly odious senator, Senator John McCain, upon whose shoulders the blame for this national embarrassment rests. Ms Palin is the front-runner of this group for Presidential candidate in 2012 according to polls. This makes sense, given the Republican Party’s current gamesmanship of our political system, wherein their only goal is to destroy the President – not to lead, not to govern – but to destroy. At any cost necessary.
When the Russians are calling you out for failing to support your country in a time of need, for attempting to bring her to her knees with petty attacks on the President, you have seriously jumped the patriotism shark. Sarah Palin is the traitorous figurehead of the GOP, whose only purpose seems to be to assist them in their goal to bring down President Barack Obama.
So while a scant few of them (Rove, Scarborough, and a few of the “elites” who are not elected officials; the elected officials are quivering in the corner rather than standing up to the myth of Palin lest they alienate what little remains of the Republican Party base) make the rounds distancing themselves from her now, do not forget how they set her into motion in 2008 to do exactly what she’s doing now. And do not forget that even as they take a slight step away from the noxious whiff of disgust that follows in Ms Palin’s wake, they’re not silencing her; they’re not calling her out for her attacks on the President. No, the most they can muster from their cowardly bunkers of fear from which they wage their war on America is mild outrage that she would insult the Bushes or Reagan.
Nary a word about her outrageously destructive actions toward our current President. And why is that? Because Ms Palin is doing the dirty work for the Republican weaklings; sowing seeds of division, suspicion, hatred, and rage against a sitting President.
And those, my friends, are not the actions of a patriot. True Glasnost has arrived when the International Press says what the American Press will not. Sarah Palin is no patriot.
(Note: The original version of this story was first published on December 1, 2010. It has been updated to reflect recent events.)
Foreign Press Says What America’s Won’t: Sarah Palin is a Traitor was written by Sarah Jones for PoliticusUSA.
© PoliticusUSA, Fri, Dec 6th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved
Unarmed Man Charged With Wounding the Bystanders That Were Shot By Police
Unarmed Man Charged With Wounding the Bystanders That Were Shot By Police
Back in September an emotionally disturbed man walked out
into Times Square traffic causing a disturbance by throwing himself in
front of cars. The police responded by trying to shoot him (because of
course that is what you do when someone is displaying unbalanced
behavior) and instead shot the bystanders on the scene.
Police officers arrived and tried to corral Mr. Broadnax, a 250-pound man. When he reached into his pants pocket, two officers, who, the police said, thought he was pulling a gun, opened fire, missing Mr. Broadnax, but hitting two nearby women. Finally, a police sergeant knocked Mr. Broadnax down with a Taser.(Because of course any movement by anyone is the pulling of a gun). Now he is being charge with charging the man with felony assault for the cops' shooting and injuring innocent bystanders.
This is where police decided to open fire on unarmed man
Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.” “The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.One of the victims of Mr. Broadnax's "assault" has spoken out against the charges.
Mariann Wang, a lawyer representing Sahar Khoshakhlagh, one of the women who was wounded, said the district attorney should be pursuing charges against the two officers who fired their weapons in a crowd, not against Mr. Broadnax. “It’s an incredibly unfortunate use of prosecutorial discretion to be prosecuting a man who didn’t even injure my client,” she said. “It’s the police who injured my client.”The incident recalled a previous one near the Empire State Building where bystanders were injured:
The incident calls to mind a 2012 case where nine bystanders were injured during a police shooting by police bullets, ricochets and fragments when two officers fired at a man suspected of gunning down a former co-worker outside the Empire State Building, calling in question the police's ability to handle such situations, endangering the lives of bystanders who were in little to no danger before the police showed up. In that incident, officers fired a total of 16 shots outside one of the world's most popular tourist attractions as a large crowd watched. While an investigation later determined the suspect, who was killed in the incident, had 10 bullet holes in him, many nearby were still wounded. The NYPD and Mayor Michael Bloomberg fiercely defended the officers' actions at the time.As Salon notes, more than half the people shot at by police have mental health problems. The NYPD seems to have no training in dealing with and handling these types of incidents reasonably.
As reported here, an investigation last year by the Portland Press Herald and the Maine Sunday Telegram found that over half of people shot by police in the U.S. suffer from mental illness. The Times Square incident is no exception. As the Times reported, “after his arrest, Mr. Broadnax was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where he told a detective that ‘he was talking to dead relatives in his head and that he tried throwing himself in front of cars to kill himself.’” Luckily, then, New York’s finest were there to open fire.We know the police in New York already have free rein to shoot people they think might be criminals or might be pulling guns. Now they have free rein not only on so-called suspected criminals, but unfortunate people who happen to make the mistake of being anywhere near their line of fire. This is a new low in justifying their behavior by the judiciary. Especially considering the daily crime taking place about 50 blocks south of Times Square, on a daily basis.
Originally posted to Heavy Mettle on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:21 AM PST.
Also republished by Police Accountability Group.
Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states
Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states
The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.
The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN’s summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.
Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.
Most of the “thinktanks” involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of “media campaigns” aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to “advancing model legislation” and “candidate briefings”, in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.
The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.
SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.
The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN’s link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a “top 20″ and “bottom 20″. It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle’s sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman’s “commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights”.
The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:
• “reforms” to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.
SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that “as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society.”
In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a “research and demonstration project” that would “release residents from extreme government dependency”. It would turn the state’s poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-free zone”.
Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county’s income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.
Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.
“[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step,” the proposal says, adding that the “missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring significant savings” to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.
The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation”. One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).
Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. “Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI,” the funding proposal says.
The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never any lobbying,” he told the Guardian. “Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that.”
But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. “The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”
Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network’s members belied a larger purpose. “They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers,” she said.
The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. “There’s no mystery here,” Sharp said. “The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so.”
Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt “research and education organization”, floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.
“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition,” the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a “research study” which it would call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.
The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim being the “full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts”.
“We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton,” it says.
CSINJ’s president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.
“CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don’t represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he said.
He said the proposal was focused on the “abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We’ve seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment.”
The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago’s government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform.”
The institute plans to “leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois.” It adds that “friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process.”
John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system.” He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.
“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don’t. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013
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