Here's Robert Sheer's take on the new budget: Ever since some lunatics, mostly citizens of our longtime ally Saudi Arabia, used $3 knives to hijack four planes on the same morning, President Bush has exploited our nation’s trauma as an opportunity to throw trillions of dollars at the military-industrial complex…
This Huffpo article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shows the extent to which ExxonMobil is not our wise old friend belatedly coming to our rescue on the issue of global warming:
Last week the release of the IPCC Report by the world’s 2500 top climatologists closed the scientific debate on global warming once and for all with a grave warning about its apocalyptical consequences to human civilization.
After years of denial the oil giant finally acknowledged the role of fossil fuel emissions in global warming, pledged to stop funding the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the country’s most visible global warming denier, and boasted of its own efforts to deal with the catastrophic impacts of climate change.
But behind the scenes, Exxon was engaged in the same old mischief. The American Enterprise Institute, a corporate front group financed by ExxonMobil and staffed by Bush administration dead enders, sent letters to top scientists and economists in the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere, offering them $10,000 each plus expenses for articles explaining shortcomings in the report.
To read the horrifying conclusions of the IPCC, here is the summary written for policy makers: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis” You would think that President Bush would take this report seriously, but he’s not. Here’s the garbage being generated by the White House as of February 8, 2007
In his recent article at Salon.com, “How to fix campaign financing forever for $50,” Farhad Manjoo explores what should be a national priority: campaign finance reform.
Why should it be a priority? Because private money corrupts all political dialogue. It makes us think that politicians are taking The People seriously, when they aren’t. Our current system of private political donations give birth to the ubiquitous Orwellian political sound bites (e.g., the Clear Sky Law).
Presidential candidates must now start raising at least $2 million a week, or $286,000 every day, including weekends, until the election. And the sales pitch for the contribution is not anything like this:
Please give me LOTS of money. In return, I won’t invite you to special gatherings of political and corporate elites. I won’t answer your phone calls any more than I answer the calls of people who don’t contribute anything. I won’t have my staff flock to hear your legislative proposals. All I’ll do is continue representing the interests of all the people.
What doesn’t work to fix the campaign contribution system? Contribution limits. Manjoo argues that getting around the limits “has become a huge Washington business.” Here’s another thing that doesn’t work: Making politicians disclose who gave what to whom. Manjoo suggests that “sunlight just isn’t so great a disinfectant.” Information is freely available, but there’s too much of it for the public to digest, or maybe we’re just apathetic. As if we don’t know that huge energy and …
Bush's oil company chums are trying to buy off climate scientists: Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They…
According to Rolling Stone (January 25, 2007), TXU, an electric power company based in Dallas has recently announced plans to build 11 new coal plants in Texas over the next four years. These additional coal plants would put more pollution into the air each year than 11 million SUVs. These…