House Republican leaders did not put much pressure on their rank-and-file members to back the rescue package." John Boehner, Roy Blunt and other "leaders" of the House Republicans thought they could strike a public pose as if they really cared about the credit seizure that looms over the country while secretly hoping to pin the bill's passage on Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, (and by association, Barack Obama).
End Limited Liability (and Save the World) - Sign the Petition | Change.org - 0 views
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Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Socialist, politically active and not we are reaping the bitter reward of a political and legal system designed to maximize corporate profits at the expense of our environment, our livelihood, and our very lives. Our society is unraveling. We all know this. This is not idle conspiracy theory. These are well established facts. We are ruled by a headless beast that is no longer accountable to us. That it is headless makes it no less beastly. But there is a silver bullet. It's within our power to restore a functioning free market; to take back our democracy. We must end limited liability for corporations. Only when wealthy investors are no longer shielded from the costs that we collectively bear in their stead, only when they can no longer hide from the burden they have placed on us, only then can we expect the end of corporate plunder. We are running out of time. Millions of Germans lost faith in the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression, and "with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program."
Petition: End Limited Liability (and Save the World) | Change.org - 0 views
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Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Socialist, politically active and not we are reaping the bitter reward of a political and legal system designed to maximize corporate profits at the expense of our environment, our livelihood, and our very lives. Our society is unraveling. We all know this. This is not idle conspiracy theory. These are well established facts. We are ruled by a headless beast that is no longer accountable to us. That it is headless makes it no less beastly. But there is a silver bullet. It's within our power to restore a functioning free market; to take back our democracy. We must end limited liability for corporations. Only when wealthy investors are no longer shielded from the costs that we collectively bear in their stead, only when they can no longer hide from the burden they have placed on us, only then can we expect the end of corporate plunder. We are running out of time. Millions of Germans lost faith in the free market and capitalism during the Great Depression, and "with the failure of the left to provide a viable alternative, they became vulnerable to the rhetoric of a party that, once it came to power, combined Keynesian pump-priming measures that brought unemployment down to 3 percent with a devastating counterrevolutionary social and cultural program."
Obama Must Enforce Oil Speculation Laws - 0 views
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With Wall Street speculators driving up oil and gas prices to near record highs, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today urged President Obama to ask for the immediate resignation of federal regulators who won't enforce a new law to stop excessive speculation in oil markets. Gasoline pump prices in Vermont averaged $3.90 a gallon today, a penny more than the national average. At the same time, big oil companies posted record profits. ExxonMobil's $10.7 billion first-quarter profit was 69 percent greater than one year ago.
The Argentine Model - Truthdig - 0 views
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While politicians from Athens to Washington are pushing through devastating austerity programs, Argentines voted in droves Sunday to re-elect their populist, welfare queen of a president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Fernandez is the widow of Nestor Kirchner, who died a year ago after winning the award for world's best husband (Nestor decided not to run for re-election so that his wife could take a turn). But before he left office, Nestor Kirchner infuriated global elites by defaulting on Argentina's $95 billion foreign debt. Greece, facing an external debt load five to six times that amount, has decided instead to severely cut back on public spending while it works with other governments to address its debt crisis. Argentina, on the other hand, pumped money into subsidies and social programs. And while the rest of the world has been circling the drain, financially speaking, Argentina's economy has been booming, with GDP growing last year by more than 9 percent. There are a lot of learned fellows who don't approve of the economic policies of Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, but the undisputed result in the short term is a thriving economy and a landslide re-election. −PZS
Joseph A. Palermo: Defeating the Bailout Looks Like Another Republican Ploy - 0 views
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They wanted Speaker Pelosi to pass the bill without much Republican cover so they could tell their constituents that the Democrats were just "picking the taxpayers' pockets again."
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I agree with the critical flaws in the bill that Dennis Kucinich articulated this morning on Amy Goodman's show, Democracy Now! I don't believe in a government welfare program for Wall Street swindlers who had the audacity to pump up the paper value of one of their hidden, unregulated derivatives, "credit default swaps," from $631 billion in 2001 to $62 trillion in 2008! I think some people should be indicted; some people should go to jail.
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Obama, Republicans clash at heated health summit - Yahoo! News - 0 views
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"We have a very difficult gap to bridge here," said Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. "We just can't afford this. That's the ultimate problem." With Cantor sitting in front of a giant stack of nearly 2,400 pages representing the Democrats' Senate-passed bill, Obama said cost is a legitimate question, but he took Cantor and other Republicans to task for using political shorthand and props "that prevent us from having a conversation." And so it went, hour after hour at Blair House, just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House - a marathon policy debate available from start to finish to a divided public. The more than six-hour back-and-forth was essentially a condensed, one-day version of the entire past year of debate over the nation's health care crisis, with all its heat, complexity and detail, and a crash course in the partisan divide, in which Democrats seek the kind of broad remake that has eluded leaders for half a century and Republicans favor much more modest changes. With Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, they were left with the critical decision about where to go next. Obama and his Democratic allies argued at Thursday's meeting that a broad overhaul is imperative for the nation's future economic vitality. The president cast health care as "one of the biggest drags on our economy," tying his top domestic priority to an issue that's even more pressing to many Americans.
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Of course the "we" in "We can't afford this" is the big health care monopolies (pharma, insurance, etc.). Supposedly, the country and people can afford the continued gouging by those special interests (up to 40% in some places this year alone!). Too, if the government were to find a way to "afford it" (disregarding that Medicare and Medicaid savings might pay for it altogether!), that would probably be on the "back" of the richest 5% and by reducing corporate and business subsidies (like those to oil companies, the military industrial complex, "big finance" bailouts and sweetheart Federal funds rates and "liquidity" pumping, non-risk underwriting for things like coastal flood insurance, etc., etc., etc.). Since that is the "invisible hand" that feeds most "conservatives" and Republican politicians, that would never do.
Rough Water - 0 views
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For most of the last 1,500 years, the river supported a sustainable salmon economy. Salmon were at the heart of all the Klamath’s tribal cultures, and Indians were careful not to over-harvest them. Each summer, the lower Klamath’s Yurok and Hoopa tribes blocked the upstream paths of spawning salmon with barriers; then, after ten days of fishing, they removed the barriers, allowing upstream tribes to take their share. As the salmon completed their lifecycle, dying in the waters where they’d been spawned, they enriched the watershed with nutrients ingested during years in the ocean. Among the beneficiaries were at least 22 species of mammals and birds that eat salmon. Even the salmon carcasses that bears left behind on the riverbanks fertilized trees that provided shade along the river’s banks, cooling its waters so that the next generation of vulnerable juvenile salmon could survive. “We tried to go to court, to go through the political process, but it didn’t work. …The big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them.” Salmon’s biological family may have started in the age of dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They’ve survived through heat waves and droughts, in rivers of varying flow, temperature, and nutrient load – but they were as ill-prepared for Europeans’ arrival as the Indians themselves. Gold miners who showed up in the mid-nineteenth century washed entire hillsides into the river with high-pressure hoses and scoured the river’s bed with dredges. Loggers dragged trees down streambeds, causing massive erosion, and dumped sawdust into the river, smothering incubating salmon eggs. Cattle grazed at the river’s edge, causing soil erosion and destroying shade-giving vegetation. Farmers diverted water to feed their crops. The dams were the crowning blows. Between 1908 and 1962, six dams were built on the Klamath. The tallest, the 173-foot-high Iron Gate, is the farthest downstream, and definitively blocked salmon from the river’s upper quarter – after it was built, the river’s salmon population plummeted. In addition, the dams devastated water quality by promoting thick growths of toxic algae in the reservoirs. For Klamath basin farmers, however, the dams were deemed indispensable, as they generated hydropower that made pumping of their irrigation water possible.To the farmers, the potential loss of the dams’ hydropower was considered no less crippling than an end to Klamath-supplied irrigation.
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For most of the last century, the farmers were oblivious to the damage that dams and water diversions caused downstream, while the tribes and commercial fishermen quietly seethed. The annual salmon run, once so abundant that people caught fish with their hands, was roughly pegged at more than a million fish at its peak; in recent years it has dropped to perhaps 200,000 in good years, and as low as 12,000 – below the minimum believed necessary to sustain the runs – in bad years. Spring Chinook, which once comprised the river’s dominant salmon run, entirely disappeared. Two fish species – the Lost River sucker and the shortnose sucker – that once supported a commercial fishery, were listed as endangered in 1988. Coho salmon were listed as threatened nine years later. All this has had a devastating impact on the tribes. Traditionally able to sustain themselves throughout the year on seasonal migrations of the river’s salmon, trout, and candlefish, tribal members suffered greatly as the runs declined or went extinct. For four decades beginning in 1933, the tribes were barred from fishing the river even as commercial fishermen went unrestricted. Members of the Karuk tribe once consumed an estimated average of 450 pounds of salmon a year; a 2004 survey found that the average had dropped to five pounds a year. The survey linked salmon’s absence to epidemics of diabetes and heart disease that now plague the Karuk. The 2001 cutoff left farmers without irrigated water for the first time in the Klamath Project’s history. Over the next four months, many farmers performed repeated acts of civil disobedience, most notably when a bucket brigade passed pails of banned water from its lake storage to an irrigation canal while thousands of onlookers cheered. The protests attracted Christian-fundamentalist, anti-government, and property rights advocates from throughout the West; former Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage likened the farmers’ struggle to the American Revolution.
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Maybe the Klamath River basin would have turned itself around without Jeff Mitchell. Back in 2001, at the pinnacle of the conflict over the river's fate, when the Klamath earned its reputation as the most contentious river basin in the country, Mitchell planted a seed. Thanks to a drought and a resulting Interior Department decision to protect the river's endangered fish stocks, delivery of Klamath water to California and Oregon farmers was cut off mid-season, and they were livid. They blamed the Endangered Species Act, the federal government that enforced it, and the basin's salmon-centric Indians who considered irrigation a death sentence for their cultures. The basin divided up, farmers and ranchers on one side, Indians and commercial fishermen on the other. They sued one another, denounced one another in the press, and hired lobbyists to pass legislation undermining one another. Drunken goose-hunters discharged shotguns over the heads of Indians and shot up storefronts in the largely tribal town of Chiloquin, Oregon. An alcohol-fueled argument over water there prompted a white boy to kick in the head of a young Indian, killing him.
Socialism Today - Capitalism: costing the earth - 0 views
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THE 2007 STATEMENT from the United Nation’s climate panel, the IPCC, that the average temperature on earth must not rise more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels or an incalculable disaster will take place, was a powerful reminder of the nature of the problem.
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The market always chooses the easiest means to save a given quantity of carbon in the short term, regardless of what action is needed for long-term reduction. The result is that the system reinforces technological lock-in. For instance, small cuts may often be achieved cheaply through making a technology a little bit more efficient, whereas larger cuts would require massive investments in new technology.
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Does this mean that emissions are dropping? Not at all. So what does this trade mean in practice? An Oxford academic who studied the scheme, Adam Bumpus, concluded that "this regulation is ultimately there to facilitate the markets – it’s not about making cheap reductions, it’s about making a lot of money"
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