Ralph Nader’s letter to Barack Obama regarding Elizabeth Warren

Ralph Nader has written quite a challenging and apparently much-needed letter to Barack Obama, who has become comfortable serving the needs of big business while offering mostly pretty rhetoric to common folks. Here's an excerpt from the letter, which appears at Common Dreams:

[Y]ou promptly appointed Mr. Immelt to be the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitive, while letting him keep his full time lucrative position as CEO of General Electric (The Corporate State Expands). At the announcement, you said that Mr. Immelt “understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy.” Did you mean that he understands how to avoid all federal income taxes for his company’s $14.2 billion in profits last year, while corralling a $3.2 billion benefit? Or did you mean that he understands how to get a federal bailout for GE Capital and its reckless exposure to risky debt? Or could you have meant that GE knows how to block unionization of its far flung workers here and abroad? Perhaps Mr. Immelt can share with you GE’s historical experience with lucrative campaign contributions, price-fixing, pollution and those nuclear reactors that are giving people fits in Japan and worrying millions of Americans here living or working near similar reactors. Compare, if you will, the record of Elizabeth Warren and her acutely informed knowledge about delivering justice to those innocents harmed by injustice in the financial services industry. . .

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“In God We Trust” Signs Going Up in Missouri Public Buildings

This morning I spotted this article on FriendlyAtheist.com and thought I should share. Apparently Dee Wampler, Christian Lawyer, is sending letters and drafts of proposals to every city administration in Missouri to officially declare allegiance to God and to post this motto on the interior and exterior of every City Hall. Go read the first link for all the details. The sad thing is that it is working. His method is to treat the issue as resolved, and to goad each city board into merely ratifying his contention that this is a Christian nation, has always been so, and every entity should visibly so proclaim. Several counties have already unanimously approved and signed into law his proposal. Theocracy, here we come!

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It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

The radical right will say and do anything in their attempts to discredit, disgrace and dishonor Barack Obama, America’s first African-American president. The ruling Republican leadership does nothing to dispel falsehoods about President Obama but, tacitly endorses these falsehoods in their attempts to “make sure Barack Obama is a one term President!” The tactics and accusations aren’t new, almost all of them are from previous Republican playbooks and most have been used in Republican primary and general election campaigns for the past 40 years. Some other accusations are vicious racist paranoid rants of a more vocal lunatic fringe that has come to dominate the right as more and more corporate and rich ultra-conservative donor dollars are pumped into any effort that might bear the fruit of the continued destruction of President Obama, the Democratic Party, unions and the American Middle Class. It’s as though the right has taken all the racist, fascist, and corporatist twisted deep blue stygian depths of paranoid lunacies of past Republican abuses of government and recast President Obama, the Democratic Party, unions and the Middle Class as the “perpa-traitors” instead of the actual Republicans who have already done exactly what the right claims to fear the most. My personal favorite is “Obama is the anti-christ!” Polls show that 25%, a substantial minority, of Republican voters actually believe that President Barack Obama is the anti-christ. If these folks would stop drinking the Jonestown Kool Aid they could see that their personal insanities about Armageddon and the end-times are not here because an African American was elected President of the United States in 2008. See here, here and here. [More. . . .]

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Dubai: defined by money

At Vanity Fair, A. A. Gill offers this portrait of Dubai:

Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai . . . Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

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