The GOP’s Ten Most Extreme Attacks on a Woman’s Right to Choose | Truthout

This is a link to check out. Blows my mind. The GOP’s Ten Most Extreme Attacks on a Woman’s Right to Choose | Truthout

Government Takes A Big Step Toward Biofuels

This originated at Electablog.

 Biofuel Purchase Advances President Obama’s

Energy Security Goals

WASHINGTON, December 5, 2011 — Today, U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) signed a contract to purchase 450,000 gallons of advanced drop-in biofuel, the single largest purchase of biofuel in government history. While the Navy fleet alone uses more than 1.26 billion gallons of fuel each year, this biofuel purchase is significant because it accelerates the development and demonstration of a homegrown fuel source that can reduce America’s, and our military’s, dependence on foreign oil. The Defense Department will purchase biofuel made from a blend of non-food waste (used cooking oil) from the Louisiana-based Dynamic Fuels, LLC, a joint-venture of Tyson Foods, Inc., and Syntroleum Corporation, and algae, produced by Solazyme. The fuel will be used in the U.S. Navy’s demonstration of a Green Strike Group in the summer of 2012 during the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), the world's largest international maritime exercise.

As part of his energy security goals, outlined in March 2011 in the “Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future,” President Obama directed the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy to work together to advance a domestic industry capable of producing “drop-in” biofuel substitutes for diesel and jet fuel. Responding to that challenge, in August 2011, the Secretaries of Agriculture, Energy and Navy announced an intention to invest up to $510 million during the next three years in partnership with the private sector to produce advanced drop-in biofuel to power military and commercial transportation. While that investment awaits Congressional action, today’s announcement uses the existing authority – leveraging Defense Department procurement – to support this energy security goal.

From Nation of Change...Walmart Is Larger Than Norway

"In a report released last week by The World Hunger Organization 17.2 million U.S. households were food insecure in 2010, the highest level on record, as the Great Recession continues to wreak havoc on families across the country. On a global scale, the World Bank reports that over half the global population lives on less than $2.50 per day and over 800 million people go hungry daily. And according to UNICEF nearly 8 million human beings died in 2010 because they were simply too poor to stay alive. Meanwhile, the U.N. reported in 2005 that the richest 500 people in the world earned more than the poorest 416 million. According to the same report the richest 350 people in the world own assets commensurable to more than 50% of the world’s population. And finally, according to a 1998 UN Development Report the wealthiest 15 people on the planet have assets that exceed the total annual income equal to the poorest 98% of those living on the African continent."

To read the entire article, go here.

OWS...WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT????

Newt Gingrich Quotes That Disqualify Him From Ever Being President

I never trusted Newt Gingrich. He doesn't look people in the eye when he speaks. He looks down at this belly button, or his shoes. When he's on a roll, he rarely looks up. That is just wrong.

You know he thinks he's one smart cookie, right?  He thinks he is smarter than most everyone in the country. That's why he's running for President. Problem is, he says some pretty stupid and dangerous things. For example, this is what he thinks of himself...

“I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it. I am now a famous person. I represent real power.”

 “Gingrich – Primary mission, Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Leader of the civilizing forces.”

and this...

“The most serious, systematic revolutionary of modern times.”

And there's more...To read the entire article, go here.

I'm Relieved...Failure Is Good

I like Paul Krugman. The man writes so anybody can understand, and he does it so well. I just had to post this one...well, because time is ticking against the supercommittee that is supposed to come up with some great plan for reducing our deficit and all that jazz.

Krugman says he's betting they won't come to an agreement, and that's not a bad thing.  "Failure Is Good" is the name of his most recent article from the New York Times. He writes:

"It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a complete turkey! It’s the supercommittee!

By next Wednesday, the so-called supercommittee, a bipartisan group of legislators, is supposed to reach an agreement on how to reduce future deficits. Barring an evil miracle — I’ll explain the evil part later — the committee will fail to meet that deadline.
If this news surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. If it depresses you, cheer up: In this case, failure is good. "
Read more here...

And don't forget to check out the comments for the most highly recommended post there. It's post #13 and is written by Meredith. She nailed it.

You say social programs “serving the moral imperative of providing basic security to our fellow citizens and helping those in need.”

It’s much more. Why are there so many needy in the first place? We are seeing a downward spiral toward lower economic classes. In mid 20th century social programs created a launching pad for Americans to develop themselves, releasing energies, ambitions, and talents that millions previously didn’t even know they had. This individual development through expanded opportunities lifted up the whole society.

The success of America wasn’t due to a few superior ambitious people coming from out of nowhere, starting businesses, inventing things, and working hard to create. It was due to millions of people becoming capable of doing these things. But where did they come from? Their ancestors way back tilled the land, could hardly read, and looked up to a thin layer of advantaged gentry safely separated from the hard labor of getting food out of the ground. Only in the 20th century did the great mass of people really further their own development. It was social security, the GI Bill, unemployment insurance, labor unions with work safety, 8 hour days and 5 day week, health insurance, and accessible public education that freed up the next generation to aspire to higher education and become professionals, and workers in skilled occupations. They got the security and leisure to do things beyond just work, eat and sleep and thus develop appreciation for the finer things, arts and culture, hobbies—things not directly related to basic survival. Standards of living rose to a level unique in history, leading to a more stable, advanced society we were proud of. And a spiral of mass purchasing power supported big and small business, multiplying jobs.

So it’s not just doing a favor to keep alive the poor unwashed masses that we should keep govt programs. Voters who elect anti govt politicians don’t have any idea what their lives would be like without the very programs they disdain. Their naiveté makes them vulnerable to predators who want to privatize everything for their own profits.

They must learn that Social Security spread elder support through the whole society, so freed up the individual youth from crushing burdens that left no surplus for their own advancement. Thus elders could live with dignity, while also the whole society could advance.

Before all these govt programs, most working people didn’t aspire to college, but looked for work or apprenticeships after junior high or maybe high school. Today’s emphasis today on college prep for the masses, on test taking, huge student loans, on resumes, is all very recent--after we evolved to a majority middle class, enabled by the govt programs and unions. It’s very incomplete to just frame this in terms of moral duty to the poor unfortunate vs the gop line that govt programs unfairly take away assets from the well off to benefit the less deserving masses. If these programs are gutted, America will spiral down to ever lower economic classes, with less skills, less purchasing power, and ever lower horizons.

(Recommended by 915 Readers at post) 

I'm bracing myself against the media blitz against this supercommittee and its charge. With the deadline  less than a week away, they will slice and dice the topic to microscopic proportions. Usually I'd buy into all the hype about what is going to happen if they don't agree on something significant. But after reading Paul, I'm thinking I won't bother to worry. It's really okay if they don't agree. Maybe the vote will go to the people, and we'll get to vote for ourselves. Think of that.

Memories

Friends of Rick Perry: Mr. & Mrs. Gramm, by Nomad

Sometimes I run across a great article that sort of wraps up a bunch of stuff up in a nice tight package. What a treasure! This blog post over at PoliticalGates was written by Nomad. I only have good things to say about the obvious research and craft that was applied to this post. Tight and powerful.

Let me introduce you to Mr. Phil Gramm. You see, he is good friends with Rick Perry. Yep, that Rick Perry...the one that is running for President of the USA. Well, it seems that Phil Gramm is his fairy godmother. Yep, but that's not all. You remember who Phil Gramm is, don't you? Yeah, that Phil Gramm.

Well, I learned a few things about Phil Gramm that I didn't know before. I think you will, too. Enjoy!
Read the first article here.

And then watch for three more articles that follow....

Mitt Romney's Mouth Is Getting Him In Trouble

He's kind of cavalier...He routinely says off the cuff remarks that make you go "Huh???" Yep, Mitt needs to keep his mouth shut. Here is what one commenter posted:

Mitt Romney, the multi-mill­ionaire, in his own caring words:
-- Dick Cheney is the kind of person I’d like to have for VP - a person of wisdom and judgment.
-- I'm a Detroit guy, so, you know ... I have a couple of Cadillacs, at two different houses. You know, small crossovers­.
-- I'm 110 percent behind the anti-union efforts.
-- Corporatio­ns are people, my friend.
-- I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed­.
-- Don't try and stop the foreclosur­e process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to by homes...
-- After I speak you're going to hear from Ann Coulter...­I think it's important to get the views of moderates.
-- I'd like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and allow the states to put in place pro-life legislatio­n.
-- I will issue on my first day in office an executive order paving the way for waivers from ObamaCare for all 50 states.
-- I appreciate the extraordin­arily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican Members of Congress in.
-- I applaud Rep. Paul Ryan. He is ... getting spending and entitlemen­ts under control.

Go here to read the article...

This is Why We Support Occupy Wallstreet!...with UPDATE!

It's growing...and we support the movement. Occupy Wallstreet Now!



And this clip was posted a half hour ago....Gas canisters at the Occupy Wallstreet event in Oakland, CA

Republethugs Debate in Vegas...Let's Talk About Cutting Foreign Aid

The Republicans' debate tonight in Las Vegas spent some time on foreign aid. Following a debate on illegal immigration, the tide turned to foreign aid, when all of a sudden Rick Perry and Ron Paul jumped into the fray. The bird was battered about with much ferver, but then I remembered that the actual percentage of the United States budget allotted to foreign aid was pretty small... between 1.0-2.5% Google revealed.  What? These bozos are debating foreign aid and won't touch the Defense Budget??? Oh, no. And don't mention the economy or the job creation issues. Holy cow!!

Yep, look at this article that outlines how our perception of foreign aid is not based on reality. Don't spend your time worrying about this. We need to help feed those who are starving. We need to help those who cannot help themselves. We are ONE. No ifs, ands, or butts.

Asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid the median estimate is 25 percent. Asked how much they thought would be an "appropriate" percentage the median response is 10 percent.

In fact just 1 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Even if one only includes the discretionary part of the federal budget, foreign aid represents only 2.6 percent.

This set of questions has been asked repeatedly since the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) first asked them in 1995, and it was subsequently asked by other organizations as well. Over the years the most common median estimate was that foreign aid represented 20 percent of the budget, most recently in a 2004 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Thus the most recent number represents an increase of 5 points in the median estimate. Steven Kull, director of PIPA comments, "This increase may be due to Americans hearing more about aid efforts occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti over the last few years. There have been some increases in foreign aid under both Presidents Bush and Obama, but, of course, nowhere near to the perceived level."

The median amount proposed as appropriate has consistently been 10 percent in other polls including the 2004 Chicago Council poll.

In the current poll estimates of foreign aid vary by education, growing more accurate with higher levels of education. Among those with less than a high school education the median estimate was that foreign aid represented an extraordinary 45 percent of the budget, those with only a high school diploma 25 percent, those with some college at 20 percent.

 However, even those with a college degree or higher still overestimate by a wide margin, with a median estimate of 15 percent of the budget.
 
Steven Kull comments, "It is quite extraordinary that this extreme overestimation has persisted for so many years, even among those with higher education."

Written a year ago, Go here to learn more!!!

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brunitedstatescanadara/670.php


 Hmmmmmmm?

What? Me Hungry?????

I'm worried about our food supply. 

Romney's Loose Lips....from Bad Lip Reading

Stuff the ice chest!

Herman Cain's 999 Plan...the details + Update

I was curious about Herman Cain's 999 Plan...so I Googled it and this is what I found...
Read it here.

And This Update... Amanda Terkel, a reporter for The Huffington Post, finds that Herman Cain's "9-9-9 Plan" looks a lot like the default tax structure in the computer game SimCity 4. She writes: Long before Cain was running for president and getting attention for his 999 plan, the residents of SimCity 4 -- which was released in 2003 -- were living under a system where the default tax rate was 9 percent for commercial taxes, 9 percent for industrial taxes and 9 percent for residential taxes. When asked about similarities between Cain's plan and SimCity's default tax rates, Cain campaign spokesman JD Gordon replied, "Well, we all like 9-9-9." Cain's plan would replace the entire federal tax code--income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, etc.--with three 9 percent taxes on consumption, business income and personal income.

A Fox News Interview That Never Aired...

This was filmed on September 28 to be included in a segment on Greta's show on Fox News. It never aired. This guy was there for the Wall Street protest, and he used the opportunity to get his message out.



He certainly made his point.

Tip of the Iceburg...Sarah's Going Down

The Rogue, by Joe McGinnis hits the bookstores on Tuesday. At least two more books and a movie will be out by the end of next month. America is going to know way too much information about the former Governor of Alaska...You Betcha! I really don't think running for President of the USA is in the cards for Sarah Palin right now, do you?

Higher Ground

This is a wonderful video featuring musicians from all over the world. Enjoy the music and become involved in this beautiful movement.

It's The Inequality, Stupid: Eleven Charts That Explain All That's Wrong in America

Eleven charts. Yep, check out these little gems and then tell me you don't agree that the current financial inequality is a big problem for America.

See all eleven charts here.

Surface Ozone Kills Trees And Other Living Green Things

I recently found an interesting blog that needs to be shared here. It's called Wit's End and it is about trees...and how they are dying.

Please go here to read some shocking information and then begin to look at the trees around you with a new focus.

I still fail to understand how people can deny that we are killing our planet when it is happening right in front of them.

Make Sure You (and others like you) Are Eligible To Vote

Is there anything the GOP won't touch and taint in
their bid for power? We need to keep abreast of this
voting issue, or by election day, lots of people will be shocked to learn that their vote will not be counted. This article recently published in Rolling Stone Magazine, sheds some light...


The GOP War On Voting

by Ari Berman, August 30, 2011

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. "What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century," says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. "I don't want everybody to vote," the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP's effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

more here...

Happy Labor Day!! Check Out This Labor Day Reflection...from Michael Moore

Dang, I'm having trouble with the new, improved blog interface, but I think I have it figured out, finally. This is after deleting two previous blogs because I couldn't get my videos to post. So here goes...

Today's post is from Michael Moore's website and written by one of Mike's friends, Kevin Zeese. This post is packed with information. We'll save it here so we can come back to it when the GOP starts spreading their lies.

To read this article, go here.

"Sarah Palin: You Betcha!" Trailer

Here's a little documentary that needs some funding.

It looks like a hoot to me.

Check it out here.

Perry's Iowa Remarks Reveal Republican Strategy on Social Security

From Truthout

Wednesday 31 August 2011

by: Daniel Marans, Campaign for America's Future | Report

The media have portrayed Governor Rick Perry’s description of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” at a recent Iowa campaign event as the latest extreme statement of an unconventionally candid, conservative presidential candidate. But Perry’s full remarks reveal just as much about the Republican Party’s strategy for cutting Social Security as they do about Perry himself.

The question that prompted Perry to call Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” and the beginning of Perry’s response—which have not been flagged in the flurry of media attention over Perry’s statement—shed light on rank-and-file Republicans’ support for Social Security and the delicate strategy Republican politicians employ in talking about how to “reform” the program, as a result.

(For a point-by-point takedown of Perry’s biggest Social Security whoppers, click here.)

Here is the text of the question and the beginning of Perry’s response:

    Iowa Woman: The current Administration is promoting Social Security as an entitlement program (inaudible). The question is, is what it originally started out to be is not an entitlement program. Americans were working and putting money into it—

    Rick Perry: It was a retirement program. And actually it’s turned into a tax now—

    Iowa Woman: There is such a bad sum of people who are on it who have never put into it—

To read the entire article, go here.

Epic Waves In Tahiti Draw Pros

Check out this big-wave riding in Tahiti. These epic waves came in on an off day during the Billabong Pro competition. Surfers were towed out to catch the 25 footers.

I'm having trouble embedding the video, so go here for the video and article.

ALEC Exposed

ALEC, which stands for American Legislative Exchange Council, was created in the 1970s to work with conservative politicians to promote the interests of corporations and big business. Basically corporations work through ALEC to craft and write legislation that favors specific corporate interests. Those legislative papers are then handed over to politicians who present them as if they were personally authored bills.

Here is the ALEC mission as stated on their website.

Our Mission

The mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council is...

...to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty, through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector, the federal government, and general public.

...to promote these principles by developing policies that ensure the powers of government are derived from, and assigned to, first the People, then the States, and finally, the Federal Government.

...to enlist state legislators from all parties and members of the private sector who share ALEC's mission.

...to conduct a policy making program that unites members of the public and private sectors in a dynamic partnership to support research, policy development, and dissemination activities.

...to prepare the next generation of political leadership through educational programs that promote the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, which are necessary for a free society.


Here is a short video featuring author Cliff Schecter where he explains ALEC and how it works.

For more information, see "ALEC Exposed" in The Nation and this piece from the Center For Media and Democracy.

America's Real Job Creators Are Broke

“Despite the GOP's ideological claptrap about corporate executives being "job creators," it's ordinary Americans who actually create jobs.”

Jim Hightower has it right, in my opinion. Only when Americans have jobs, will things begin to change. Read the whole article here.

Profiting From Prison Labor

The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?

by Vicky Pelaez
Global Research, March 10, 2008
El Diario-La Prensa, New York

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world's prison population, but only 5% of the world's people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:

• Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years' imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams - 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years' imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.
• The passage in 13 states of the "three strikes" laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.
• Longer sentences.
• The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.
• A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.
• More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.

HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES

During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."

PRIVATE PRISONS

The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton's program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.

Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, "the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners." The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for "good behavior," but for any infraction, they get 30 days added - which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost "good behavior time" at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.

IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state's governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.

After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 - ending court supervision and decisions - caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering "rent-a-cell" services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.

STATISTICS
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country's 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.

Global Research Articles by Vicky Pelaez

Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.

BBC One...The Human Planet

Amazing video from BBC One...enjoy!

Americans Just Want Someone To Do The Right Thing

Not enough people heard this news conference yesterday.

An Intimate Look At Stanley Ann Dunham

Janny Scott, of the New York Times, has researched and written a wonderful article, Obama's Young Mother Abroad, about President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. After reading his book, "Dreams of My Father," I was interested in learning more about Barack's mother. I was not disappointed. To read the complete article, go here.

"The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that helped power Obama’s political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naïve idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama’s presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food-stamp recipient, the victim of a health care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who abandoned her son or duped the newspapers of Hawaii into printing a birth announcement for her Kenyan-born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday....

To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become."

To read the complete article, go here.

Brush Up On Your Propaganda Techniques...Fox Style

I used to teach journalism and mass media back in the late 70s when I lived on the island of Guam. I taught from the daily newspaper most of the year after Typhoon Pamela destroyed all the textbooks and most of the infrastructure on that tropical speck in the Pacific Ocean.

I was on my own in the classroom back then. I had no lesson plans or direction from anybody in the school. I basically checked out the subjects I was to teach and then I read and prepared on my own. In other words, I taught myself about stuff and then I'd share it with the kids.

And so it was with journalism and publishing. I learned it by doing it. I volunteered (or maybe I was volunteered) to be the advisor for the school newspaper and yearbook. That first year I learned more from the kids than they did from me, I'm sure.

What I'm getting to is that I am pretty critical about propaganda techniques and our current 24-hour news cycle/entertainment, brain-numbing gab fest. Truth seems to be optional these days. It drives me crazy. Anyway...

That's why this article from TRUTHOUT resonates with me. And let me just say that I don't approve of any news organization that deceives the public by using these techniques. They are used only to control those who are not aware how they work. Fox News is just so blatent about it that it's too easy not to pick on them.

Maybe someone will read this article and learn something. I can only hope.

14 Propaganda Techniques Fox "News" Uses to Brainwash Americans


Saturday 2 July 2011
by: Dr. Cynthia Boaz, Truthout
News Analysis


"There is nothing more sacred to the maintenance of democracy than a free press. Access to comprehensive, accurate and quality information is essential to the manifestation of Socratic citizenship - the society characterized by a civically engaged, well-informed and socially invested populace. Thus, to the degree that access to quality information is willfully or unintentionally obstructed, democracy itself is degraded.


It is ironic that in the era of 24-hour cable news networks and "reality" programming, the news-to-fluff ratio and overall veracity of information has declined precipitously. Take the fact Americans now spend on average about 50 hours a week using various forms of media, while at the same time cultural literacy levels hover just above the gutter. Not only does mainstream media now tolerate gross misrepresentations of fact and history by public figures (highlighted most recently by Sarah Palin's ludicrous depiction of Paul Revere's ride), but many media actually legitimize these displays. Pause for a moment and ask yourself what it means that the world's largest, most profitable and most popular news channel passes off as fact every whim, impulse and outrageously incompetent analysis of its so-called reporters. How did we get here? Take the enormous amount of misinformation that is taken for truth by Fox audiences: the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that he was in on 9/11, the belief that climate change isn't real and/or man-made, the belief that Barack Obama is Muslim and wasn't born in the United States, the insistence that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are terrorists, the inexplicable perceptions that immigrants are both too lazy to work and are about to steal your job. All of these claims are demonstrably false, yet Fox News viewers will maintain their veracity with incredible zeal. Why? Is it simply that we have lost our respect for knowledge?


My curiosity about this question compelled me to sit down and document the most oft-used methods by which willful ignorance has been turned into dogma by Fox News and other propagandists disguised as media. The techniques I identify here also help to explain the simultaneously powerful identification the Fox media audience has with the network, as well as their ardent, reflexive defenses of it."

Read more here.

Lie To Me

Coinciding with the release of Bristol Palin's memoir this week, I have a need to revisit a couple of interviews that Levi did with his Mom and sister. One was on the Tyra Banks show and the other was on Larry King Live. This was after Levi and Bristol's first breakup when they were fighting over custody of Tripp...spring of 2009. There is a lot of information in these interviews and videos. I think it is time to listen to Levi's side of the story. Did the Palin's know that Bristol and Levi were sexually active? Was Levi at the Palin's house most of the time? Were the couple trying to have a child? How did they break the news to both families? What was their reaction?

Take a look at this interview with Larry King. Watch Levi's face when he speaks and listen carefully. At about 4:16 he stumbles and recovers very quickly when referring to Bristol's age. He starts to say 16 and then changes it to 18. Watch his eyes dart at the camera when he recovers. This has bothered me since the first time I watched this video. What do you think?



Here is the link to the Part II of the interview. And here is part III.

And then there is this video compilation by The Young Turks of Levi, Sherrie and Mercede on the Tyra Banks Show. Watch around the 6:30 minute mark for Sherrie to make reference to Levi's age..".forget about being 17. That went right out the window. I was excited to be a gramma," she says.

The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent!

State Of The Ocean: 'Shocking' Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress

by Huffington Post reporter Travis Donovan 

If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report.



The preliminary report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) is the result of the first-ever interdisciplinary international workshop examining the combined impact of all of the stressors currently affecting the oceans, including pollution, warming, acidification, overfishing and hypoxia.


“The findings are shocking," Dr. Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director, said in a statement released by the group. "This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that."

To read the entire article go here.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

This one speaks for itself....ahhhhhhh

The Economy in About Two Minutes

Robert Reich explains the economy in less than 2:15 minutes, including some pretty nifty drawings.



Funny thing. When I posted this video I looked back at some previous posts and guess what I found? Yep, a few weeks ago I posted a link to Robert Reich's article. So, if you missed that and would like to read what he is saying here in a little more detail, go here.

Palin's Emails Are Out...Enjoy Links And Comments From Alaskan Bloggers

After three years, the state of Alaska has finally released over 24K emails under the Palin administration. You can follow these links to get right to the heart of what is uncovered...

Politicalgates

Immoral Minority

After most of the afternoon, Politicusa reveals that after sifting through a few thousand initial emails , it seems that those in Alaska who were responsible for releasing these emails are the same people who were appointed by Palin in the first place. So, what we are finding is that they have redacted emails that reveal anything of interest about Palin, but leave in the emails that criticize Palin so it looks like she is the victim again and again. And they don't stop there. They very thoughtfully left the names, addresses and even phone numbers on those emails.

"Once again, Sarah Palin shows a remarkable ability to turn a normal request (freedom of information or open records request in this case) into an opportunity for revenge on citizens whom she feels have wronged her. These emails were so heavily redacted that they tell the same story the upcoming propaganda film tells about Sarah Palin, though not even all of the Palin lawyers could put Sarah the Governor back together again. It’s clear from her emails that Sarah Palin was not governing the state of Alaska; she was a CC on emails between other people who governed for her, with very little guidance, direction or input from Sarah Palin until it came to her myth management."

I won't hold my breath that there is anything worth the time and energy it will take to look through the rest of the emails. They have been combed through and sanitized just like Sarah wanted.

More Truthful Than Funny

Isn't this the truth?

Sarah Palin Makes Up Stuff About Paul Revere

Sarah Palin spent the day being all folksy with the people of Boston as she and her family toured the Freedom Trail. But Sarah doesn't blink as she recounts her version of Paul Revere's ride and how it fit into our American history. I just love watching video that captures those idiotic moments for eternity. Enjoy this from Mediaite!




Palin said, “He who warned uh, the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin’ sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”

I have to agree with what Jason Easley wrote in Politicausa. Sarah Palin must be held accountable for her ignorance. She does not get a free pass when she makes up stuff when speaking about the history of this country. She must be exposed for the joke that she is.

She says this "vacation" of hers is not about posturing for her run at the Presidency? This family trip is not about raking in money for SarahPAC? No. No. She says this bus tour is about showing "us?" about the history of our country and how exceptional we are?

I say spare us, Sarah. My ears are bleeding.

The Truth About The American Economy

How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?

Berkeley Professor and Huffington Post contributor Robert Reich has managed to write about the economy so that anyone could understand it. Read the whole article here.

Frank Bailey's Book Is Getting Some Play Today

Cenk from The Young Turks has been reading Frank Bailey's book, " Blind Allegiance." This tell-all book lays Sarah Palin out like a filleted trout as the author, who was a Palin insider, backs up all the dirt with actual emails...tens of thousands of them...written between the former Governor of Alaska and himself.

Consider the following...

Sarah Palin Is Not Having A Good Week

AKM has outdone herself this time. It took awhile to get on her site after she posted today at The Mudflats...lots of traffic. Her article, "The Real Tragedy of Sarah Palin" is one of the best articles on Sarah Palin and how her political career was carved out of an opportunistic personality.

Over at The Immoral Minority Gryphen has posted an interview between Laura Novak and Professor Scharlott that focuses on the possibility that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with Trig. Specifically, it zeros in on a photo from a video clip that clearly shows the outline of a square sofa pillow stuffed under Sarah's shirt. To read this article, go here.

Geoffrey Dunn has just released his book, "The Lies Of Sarah Palin" and curently I'm reading it on my Kindle. Frank Bailey's book is due out next week. "The Rogue" by Joe McGinness hits the shelves in September. It's going to be a long, hot summer, Sarah.

Who Increased The Debt?

Rachel Maddow On South Dakota Drakonian Abortion Laws

Republicans are fixated on abolishing any abortion rights for women in this country. I just don't understand this fanatical obsession to rewrite the laws, not when we have more pressing problems to deal with as a nation. I don't understand this.

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President Obama Speaks About The Raid And Killing Of Osama Bin Laden on "60 Minutes"

I am so proud that President Obama is our Commander in Chief.

The President Loosens Up At The White House Correspondents' Dinner

It's been too long since I laughed out loud like I did tonight when President Obama spoke at The White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Humiliation, Riding On A Carpet Of Racism

This video by Baratunde Thurston sums up the outrage we should all feel after the events of yesterday when our President, Barack Obama, offered his birth certificate up for public view after Donald Trump has stolen the media spotlight with his ridiculous, racist actions and words.

Goldie Taylor Explains Racist History Of Demanding Identification on Rachel Maddow's Show

It has always been about race. No matter how much they deny it, it has always been about race.

Today on Rachel Maddow's show...Goldie Taylor, contributing editor for TheGrio.com, tells the story of the arrest of her great, great grandfather, Major Blackard, to explain the racist history of demanding identification from African-Americans and its connection to present-day "birtherism."

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Happy Earth Day...The Life Of A Water Bottle

Click on the pic to enlarge it.

Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog: "The Grand Old Birther Party"

My husband held a top-secret Q clearance when he worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

You can bet your life that Barack Hussein Obama was checked out for years before he was even allowed to get involved in high-level government business.

I don't know what conservatives are thinking when they suggest that President Obama is not a natural born citizen of the USA. Maybe they remember back when Sarah Palin was picked to run with John McCain. Now there is a candidate that was never vetted before she was thrust upon the American people. Duh!

I blame most of the misinformation on Fox News. It sure seems that those who get their information from that source are certainly mislead. They don't seem to have an original thought beyond the party line either. They repeat stuff they don't even understand and refuse to listen to another point of view.

And now Donald Trump is their new favorite candidate? Give me a break. Do they really think that man has a moral compass? He's a blow hard who publically fought with Rosie O'Donnell, remember? Yeah, he'd be a good choice to negotiate policy and foreign relations.

From Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog.....

Posted 4/21/2011
The Grand Old Birther Party
by JM Ashby

With or without Donald Trump, the Republican party is now the Birther Party. I certainly wouldn't defend Trump under any circumstances, but I would like to point out that he is simply playing the game that was already established before he arrived at the crime scene.

A new poll released today by the New York times and CBS shows that 69% of Republican voters either believe president wasn't born in the United States or they aren't sure.

A plurality of Republican voters, 47 percent, said they believed Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was born in another country; 22 percent said they did not know where he was born, and 32 percent said they believed he was born in the United States.

A separate poll released last week by Public Policy Polling also found that a full 23 percent of Republican voters would not cast their ballot for a candidate who believes the president is an American citizen.

The truth is you can't spend four years whipping up the base by encouraging their racist-worldviews through various winks and nods and then expect them to nominate someone reasonable when the time comes to do so. It just doesn't work that way. Donald Trump may have captured the spotlight right now, but the entire conservative establishment is responsible for creating the environment in which a candidate such as Trump can even exist.

Elected officials. Talk-radio. Conservative pundits. Fox News. They're all guilty. They failed to stomp out the fire while it was small and isolated because it was more convenient to let it fester and grow. That fire has now morphed into a blazing inferno that will more than likely leave the Republican Party with a birther as their presidential nominee.

Nearly every candidate currently running or considering running for the Republican nomination has at some point in the recent past closely associated with birthers, declared themselves to be birther, or dished out winks and nods when confronted by the issue. Donald Trump is simply doing the best job at exploiting the emotions that were already present among Republican voters.

I applaud Lawrence O'Donnell's dedication to exposing Trump as an emotionally-exploitative fraudster, but I believe he is missing the larger point. The entire Republican Party is guilty-as-charged, and while the establishment scolds Trump as being a "joke," behind the scenes they're really just angry because he stole their mojo, not because they disagree with him.

To watch what some of these people say, go to this video.

What In The World Are They Spraying?

Dear Alex, Abby, Kira, Michael, Anthony, and all the other children in this world.

You are too young right now to know about what is going on in the world, but I'm not. I turn 65 years old in less than a month and you are children, innocent children. Maybe one day you will read this blog and see that I was interested in the environment that you have inherited.

There is something going on in this world and it frightens me. Actually, it scares the crap out of me. I think we are being poisoned. I think our forests, land, oceans, lakes, people, animals...all of God's creation is being poisoned. I don't know who is doing it, but there is evidence that it is happening.

Geoengineering is the word. Most people don't know that there are 32 weather modification programs in the works today. Somebody is controlling the climate by spreading an aerosol of aluminum, barium and strontium via airplanes that criss-cross our skies. This deadly aerosol drifts down on our planet, without any oversight or restrictions. Scientists around the world are concerned and have determined that nature is being impacted in a very negative way.

This video is over an hour long, but it shows what is going on right now. I hope you watch it some day. Because you might just understand what happened to the world when you were too young to pay attention.

Heck, people in this country are living their lives as if nothing is going on. Yet, they see the chemtrails in the sky. They comment about how we can't see the horizon anymore. They know we are genetically engineering our seeds and passing legislation to tinker with nature more and more. By the time they figure out what has transpired, it will be too late. It may be too late already.

WARNING:  After you watch this film, you will never look at the sky like you did before.




Here is a website where I will be going to follow this issue. Maybe someone else will find it of interest as well.

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

I Was Born In Hawaii And I Don't 'Have Horns'

Obama to Stephanopoulos on ABCNews.com~


“I think that over the last two and a half years there’s been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short-term for Republicans. But [it] creates, I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the President was born where he says he was, in Hawaii. He– he doesn’t have horns…we’re not really worrying about conspiracy theories or– or birth certificates,” President Obama told me.

And in all my talks with Obama I think it was the first time he was one the same page as Karl Rove who thinks the “birther” controversy is hurting the GOP.

“The truth of the matter is that I think that the vast majority of Americans across the country – Democratic or Republican – really want this election to be about growing the economy, getting control of the deficit, preparing the future for our kids. And my suspicion is that anybody who is not addressing those questions…Is going to be in trouble. I think they may get a quick pop in the news. They may get a lot of attention. But ultimately, the American people understand this is a serious, sober time,” he told me.

And as the interview wound down the president got ready to his hometown this afternoon for the first fundraising rallies of his last campaign.

Who's Serious Now?

Paul Krugman writes today in the New York Times...
"Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, sounds upset. And you can see why: President Obama, to the great relief of progressives, has called his bluff.

Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy. "

To read the whole article, go here.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Speaks Up For Women's Rights

For the article in Huffington Post, go here.

I Like Alan Simpson

Here is Alan Simpson (R) of Wyoming with Chris Matthews on Hardball. I like this guy.

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