March 31, 2011
By Adrian Wyllie – 1787 Network
TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Senate Committee on Governmental Oversight and Accountability on Wednesday approved an amendment to include “electronic authentication,” as well as “biometrics” to Florida Driver’s licenses. In addition, the amendment to SB 1150, which passed committee on a 12-0 vote, instructs the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles to provide a security token that can be electronically authenticated through a personal computer.
This new amendment lays the groundwork for radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to be implanted into drivers’ licenses. In much the same way that merchandise in a warehouse includes RFID tags to track items through the distribution process, RFID tags on drivers’ licenses would give authorities an additional tool to track anyone carrying a drivers’ license within the reception range of an RFID reader.
The Real ID Act of 2005, implemented in Florida on January 1, 2010, has integrated the more expansive personal data set collected by drivers’ license issuing agencies in the participating states into a national database.
In Florida, this database already includes biometrics in the form of computer facial recognition data, collected at the time one’s DHSMV photo is taken. Sheriffs’ departments in at least 22 Florida counties tap into the database as part of their facial recognition system, or FRnet, and feed real-time images from video cameras to instantly identify anyone whose face is in these cameras’ field of view.
This FRnet database, which is accessible to federal, state, and even local municipal agencies, also contains highly personal information, including scans of birth certificates, social security cards, marriage licenses, and other documents.
Also in the amendment is a provision for the DHSMV to provide a “security token that can be electronically authenticated through a personal computer.” It is unclear from the amendment whether the driver’s license itself would act as the token or a key fob/USB device would be issued.
The Obama Administration has recently pushed for the assignment of a single, unique authentication key for Internet users, which many are calling the “Internet driver’s license.” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and White House Cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt met with computer industry leaders in January seeking input on how this new system would work. Locke confirmed that they in the process of drafting a “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” and said that the Internet ID would likely come in the form of a “smart card.”
The stated goal of the Obama Administration strategy is to provide online consumers an easy way to securely access Internet retailers or financial services without having to remember multiple passwords, while reducing online fraud.
Schmidt brushed off the obvious government surveillance potential of this new technology by saying, “Let’s be clear: We’re not talking about a national ID card.”
But effectively, the Real ID Act has turned the individual states’ drivers’ licenses into a national ID card. Should this amendment to SB 1150 become law and be implemented, it would give federal, state and local government agencies the ability to easily and stealthily track all Floridians without warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Schmidt also used a similar claim to one used during the national health care debate, which was that participation would be voluntary. In Florida, that may mean that one would have to opt out of getting a driver’s license to avoid the additional governmental tracking systems.
The Real ID Act already specifies that beginning in 2013, Americans must have a Real ID compliant driver’s license or identification card in order to access government services or buildings. This includes the ability to pass through a TSA checkpoint at the airport or enter a federal courthouse.
Will we soon need a Real ID driver’s license to access the Internet or go to Wal-Mart? Given the White House’s recent plans, and the Florida Legislature’s willing compliance, it seems that it is only a matter of time.
http://deadlinelive.info/2011/05/01/senate-sneaks-rfid-drivers-license-internet-id-into-transportation-bill/
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Killing Resolves Nothing
Monday 2 May 2011
by: David Swanson, War Is A Crime
The plane I was on landed in Washington, DC, Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.
Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being -- which despite the pilot's prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we've previously supported has been an ongoing disaster.
Our killing of Saddam Hussein has been followed by years of war and hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths. Our attempts to kill Muammar Gadaffi have killed his children and grandchildren and will end no war if they eventually succeed. Our attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, including wars justified by that mission, have involved nearly a decade of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan and the rest of the ongoing global "generational" war that is consuming our nation.
The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over for trial both before and after September 11, 2001. Instead our government opted for years of bloody warfare. And in the end, it was police action (investigation, a raid, and a summary execution) and not the warfare, that reportedly tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan. After capturing him, our government's representatives did not hold him for trial. They killed him and carried away his dead body.
Killing will lead only to more killing. There will be no review of bin Laden's alleged crimes, as a trial would have provided. There will be no review of earlier US support for bin Laden. There will be no review of US failures to prevent the September 11th attacks. Instead, there will be bitterness, hatred, and more violence, with the message being communicated to all sides that might makes right and murder is the way in which someone is, in President Obama's words, brought to justice.
Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death. But I'm not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow. Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try.
Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.
Ending the wars was our moral duty last week exactly as this week. But if the symbolism to be found in the removal of a key propaganda piece can be combined with the recent overwhelming US support for ending the wars, to actually end the wars, then I'll be ready -- with clean hands and with no nasty gleam of revenge in my eye -- to pop open the champagne.
But let's return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a US airline pilot. The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.
Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways? As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?
Not while we're dancing in the street to celebrate death.
Imagine the propaganda that the US media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy. That is the propaganda we've just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr. When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the blind people think that they still see. The world looks to them like a Hollywood adventure movie. In those stories, killing somone generally causes a happy ending. That misconception is responsible for piles and piles of corpses to which more will now be added.
http://www.truthout.org/killing-resolves-nothing/1304358911
by: David Swanson, War Is A Crime
The plane I was on landed in Washington, DC, Sunday night, and the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.
Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being -- which despite the pilot's prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing foreign leaders whom we've previously supported has been an ongoing disaster.
Our killing of Saddam Hussein has been followed by years of war and hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths. Our attempts to kill Muammar Gadaffi have killed his children and grandchildren and will end no war if they eventually succeed. Our attempts to kill Osama bin Laden, including wars justified by that mission, have involved nearly a decade of senseless slaughter in Afghanistan and the rest of the ongoing global "generational" war that is consuming our nation.
The Taliban was willing to turn bin Laden over for trial both before and after September 11, 2001. Instead our government opted for years of bloody warfare. And in the end, it was police action (investigation, a raid, and a summary execution) and not the warfare, that reportedly tracked bin Laden down in Pakistan. After capturing him, our government's representatives did not hold him for trial. They killed him and carried away his dead body.
Killing will lead only to more killing. There will be no review of bin Laden's alleged crimes, as a trial would have provided. There will be no review of earlier US support for bin Laden. There will be no review of US failures to prevent the September 11th attacks. Instead, there will be bitterness, hatred, and more violence, with the message being communicated to all sides that might makes right and murder is the way in which someone is, in President Obama's words, brought to justice.
Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death. But I'm not going to celebrate that until appropriate actions follow. Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try.
Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.
Ending the wars was our moral duty last week exactly as this week. But if the symbolism to be found in the removal of a key propaganda piece can be combined with the recent overwhelming US support for ending the wars, to actually end the wars, then I'll be ready -- with clean hands and with no nasty gleam of revenge in my eye -- to pop open the champagne.
But let's return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a US airline pilot. The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.
Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways? As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to?
Not while we're dancing in the street to celebrate death.
Imagine the propaganda that the US media could make of video footage of a foreign country where the primitive brutes are dancing in the streets to celebrate the murder of a tribal enemy. That is the propaganda we've just handed those who will view bin Laden as a martyr. When their revenge comes, we will know exactly what we are supposed to do: exact more revenge in turn to keep the cycle going.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but the blind people think that they still see. The world looks to them like a Hollywood adventure movie. In those stories, killing somone generally causes a happy ending. That misconception is responsible for piles and piles of corpses to which more will now be added.
http://www.truthout.org/killing-resolves-nothing/1304358911
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Bradley Manning Protest: White House Bans Journalist for Doing Journalism
By: emptywheel Friday April 29, 2011 4:53 am
To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/04/29/bradley-manning-protest-white-house-bans-journalist-for-doing-journalism/
To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)
White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.
The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.
She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.
As with coverage of Omar Khadr’s trial, the Obama Administration seems to be demanding that journalists abdicate their jobs and their instincts to play by the rules.
But the event reminds me of something else: how the White House asked (and persuaded) all the big US outlets to suppress the widely discussed news that Raymond Davis was a spy, even while publications overseas and dirty fucking hippie bloggers were reporting on it.
As the account of Marinucci’s treatment makes clear, the rules they want to enforce on pool reporting basically put her at a disadvantage to everyone else in the room who had and used a cell phone video.
Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist. The public still sees the videos posted by protesters and other St. Regis attendees, because the technology is ubiquitous. But the Obama Administration apparently wants to give the distinct advantage to citizen witnesses at the expense of professionals.
While there’s a bit of professional snobbery here, it is entirely justified. The White House bizarrely imagines it can manage Obama’s image by imposing rules on journalists it can’t impose on others. Not only does that not do a damn thing to prevent videos like this from getting out. It profoundly corrupts the role of journalists, imposing requirements that ensure they offer only a highly scripted and obviously false view of an event.
It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/04/29/bradley-manning-protest-white-house-bans-journalist-for-doing-journalism/
GOP eyes budget bill for anti-collective bargaining law
JESSICA VANEGEREN| jvanegeren@madison.com
The Capital Times
Posted: Thursday, April 28, 2011 1:45 pm
Get ready, protesters. The collective bargaining bill could soon be back before the Legislature.
Andrew Welhouse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Thursday that while the "preferred avenue" for implementing the collective bargaining bill is still the state courts, there is a "possibility" the bill will be inserted into the 2011-2013 state budget.
"There is a possibility, and it has been informally discussed among Republican leadership, including the Joint Finance Committee co-chairs, that if the matter can't be fully decided on by the Supreme Court, then it will be inserted into the full budget," Welhouse told The Capital Times.
The legality of the bill, which would strip most collective bargaining rights from state employees, was challenged by Dane County District Attorney Ozanne Ismael on the grounds that a special conference committee violated the state's open meetings law when it approved the collective bargaining bill on March 9.
The lawmakers gave less than two hours notice before commencing the 6 p.m. hearing. State law requires 24.
Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi blocked the law from being implemented while the legal challenge is being hashed out. Putting the collective bargaining provisions in the budget would sidestep the open meetings issue, allowing the bill to become law when the budget passes.
The move also could get a highly controversial topic resolved and out of the public arena at a time when six Senate Republicans are facing likley recall elections over their previous vote in favor of the bill.
They are Alberta Darling of River Hills; Robert Cowles of Green Bay; Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac; Dan Kapanke of La Crosse; Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Luther Olsen of Ripon.
"I think there will be a real rush to get the Walker agenda through before the recall elections are held," said Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, D-Monona. "And I won't be surprised if it happened soon. Republicans want to destroy the unions because it is politically advantageous for them. Unions are the only group strong enough to stand up against the WMC."
In recent years, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, has raised and spent millions on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative Supreme Court candidates, while unions have been big givers to Democrats.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha said he would be surprised if collective bargaining was added to the budget bill.
He cited the fact that Gov. Scott Walker admitted under oath before a Congressional hearing that restricting collective bargaining rights would not save the state money as well as the mounting number of Republicans facing recall elections as his reasons.
"It would be a political miscalculation if they were to take away collective bargaining rights," Barca said.
Despite the recall effort against her, Darling, a Joint Finance Committee co-chair, told WisPolitics in an interview earlier this week she would vote again for the collective bargaining bill. She also said the bill has enough votes to pass the Senate.
In addition to the Republican senators facing likely recall elections, three Democratic senators are as well.
Wednesday, officials with the Government Accountability Board filed a motion in Dane County Circuit Court requesting one statewide recall election date of July 12. The GAB is currently verifying signatures on the recall petitions that have been turned in.
If Democrats come out of the recall election with a net total of three Senate seats, they will have control of the Senate. Currently, Republicans are in control of both houses.
"I think there's a good chance we'll pick up three seats," Miller said.
Democratic control of the Senate would also spell changes on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee by giving Democrats more seats, including a co-chair position. Right now, the split is 12 Republicans to four Democrats.
Given that Democrats adamantly oppose the restrictions to collective bargaining rights, if the bill remains mired in the courts and Democrats gain control of the Senate, it would no longer stand a chance of passing the Legislature.
Since the open meetings issue has the collective bargaining issue tied up in court, the budget could be the quickest avenue for getting the measure into law, putting the matter to rest before a possible July 12 recall election date.
A repeat of the prolonged protests at the State Capitol that followed Walker's announcement of his effort to curtail collective bargaining in February could pose an electoral pitfall for the GOP.
In the spring Supreme Court election, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg came close to unseating conservative incumbent David Prosser, an unexpectedly strong showing that was driven by a mobilized Democratic base.
A return of the collective bargaining bill likely would lead to another round of rallies at the Capitol, Miller said.
Welhouse dismissed the potential for renewed protests as a factor in inserting the measure into the budget.
"This budget was not developed with politics in mind," Welhouse said. "It was designed because we think this is the right way forward for a state that has gotten off track."
Welhouse said there are two ways the collective bargaining bill could be inserted into the budget.
He said the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee could pass the 2011-2013 budget and the collective bargaining bill could be added as an amendment once it hits the Assembly floor for debate, or a finance committee member could insert it into the bill through a motion before sending it out of committee.
Or, lawmakers could give the proper 24-hour notice and again vote on the bill in conference committee.
"The mechanism for this happening has not been fleshed out yet," Welhouse said.
http://host.madison.com/ct/article_57a01758-71b3-11e0-a4b9-001cc4c002e0.html
The Capital Times
Posted: Thursday, April 28, 2011 1:45 pm
Get ready, protesters. The collective bargaining bill could soon be back before the Legislature.
Andrew Welhouse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said Thursday that while the "preferred avenue" for implementing the collective bargaining bill is still the state courts, there is a "possibility" the bill will be inserted into the 2011-2013 state budget.
"There is a possibility, and it has been informally discussed among Republican leadership, including the Joint Finance Committee co-chairs, that if the matter can't be fully decided on by the Supreme Court, then it will be inserted into the full budget," Welhouse told The Capital Times.
The legality of the bill, which would strip most collective bargaining rights from state employees, was challenged by Dane County District Attorney Ozanne Ismael on the grounds that a special conference committee violated the state's open meetings law when it approved the collective bargaining bill on March 9.
The lawmakers gave less than two hours notice before commencing the 6 p.m. hearing. State law requires 24.
Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi blocked the law from being implemented while the legal challenge is being hashed out. Putting the collective bargaining provisions in the budget would sidestep the open meetings issue, allowing the bill to become law when the budget passes.
The move also could get a highly controversial topic resolved and out of the public arena at a time when six Senate Republicans are facing likley recall elections over their previous vote in favor of the bill.
They are Alberta Darling of River Hills; Robert Cowles of Green Bay; Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac; Dan Kapanke of La Crosse; Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls and Luther Olsen of Ripon.
"I think there will be a real rush to get the Walker agenda through before the recall elections are held," said Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, D-Monona. "And I won't be surprised if it happened soon. Republicans want to destroy the unions because it is politically advantageous for them. Unions are the only group strong enough to stand up against the WMC."
In recent years, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, or WMC, has raised and spent millions on behalf of Republican candidates and conservative Supreme Court candidates, while unions have been big givers to Democrats.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca of Kenosha said he would be surprised if collective bargaining was added to the budget bill.
He cited the fact that Gov. Scott Walker admitted under oath before a Congressional hearing that restricting collective bargaining rights would not save the state money as well as the mounting number of Republicans facing recall elections as his reasons.
"It would be a political miscalculation if they were to take away collective bargaining rights," Barca said.
Despite the recall effort against her, Darling, a Joint Finance Committee co-chair, told WisPolitics in an interview earlier this week she would vote again for the collective bargaining bill. She also said the bill has enough votes to pass the Senate.
In addition to the Republican senators facing likely recall elections, three Democratic senators are as well.
Wednesday, officials with the Government Accountability Board filed a motion in Dane County Circuit Court requesting one statewide recall election date of July 12. The GAB is currently verifying signatures on the recall petitions that have been turned in.
If Democrats come out of the recall election with a net total of three Senate seats, they will have control of the Senate. Currently, Republicans are in control of both houses.
"I think there's a good chance we'll pick up three seats," Miller said.
Democratic control of the Senate would also spell changes on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee by giving Democrats more seats, including a co-chair position. Right now, the split is 12 Republicans to four Democrats.
Given that Democrats adamantly oppose the restrictions to collective bargaining rights, if the bill remains mired in the courts and Democrats gain control of the Senate, it would no longer stand a chance of passing the Legislature.
Since the open meetings issue has the collective bargaining issue tied up in court, the budget could be the quickest avenue for getting the measure into law, putting the matter to rest before a possible July 12 recall election date.
A repeat of the prolonged protests at the State Capitol that followed Walker's announcement of his effort to curtail collective bargaining in February could pose an electoral pitfall for the GOP.
In the spring Supreme Court election, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg came close to unseating conservative incumbent David Prosser, an unexpectedly strong showing that was driven by a mobilized Democratic base.
A return of the collective bargaining bill likely would lead to another round of rallies at the Capitol, Miller said.
Welhouse dismissed the potential for renewed protests as a factor in inserting the measure into the budget.
"This budget was not developed with politics in mind," Welhouse said. "It was designed because we think this is the right way forward for a state that has gotten off track."
Welhouse said there are two ways the collective bargaining bill could be inserted into the budget.
He said the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee could pass the 2011-2013 budget and the collective bargaining bill could be added as an amendment once it hits the Assembly floor for debate, or a finance committee member could insert it into the bill through a motion before sending it out of committee.
Or, lawmakers could give the proper 24-hour notice and again vote on the bill in conference committee.
"The mechanism for this happening has not been fleshed out yet," Welhouse said.
http://host.madison.com/ct/article_57a01758-71b3-11e0-a4b9-001cc4c002e0.html
Donald Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about the Republicans
by Johann Hari
Friday, 29 April 2011
He is the Republican id - finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and reality
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-donald-trumps-lunacy-reveals-core-truth-about-the-republicans-2276222.html
Friday, 29 April 2011
He is the Republican id - finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and reality
Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.
The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.
The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."
The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."
The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.
Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".
Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.
How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.
The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.
This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "
It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.
Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'
The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.
The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-donald-trumps-lunacy-reveals-core-truth-about-the-republicans-2276222.html
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Special Kathy Nickolaus is special in more ways then one
Tuesday, 26 April 2011 16:19
Citizen Journalist
Madison Wisconsin - Breaking news today in the Prosser/Kloppenburg recount -- as it turns out the software that Kathy Nickolaus used the night of the election was written specifically for her. Yes, I am not kidding you. Politiscoop for the last few weeks have been pressing the GAB to explain this. The Fix is on article we pubished on Sunday, 10 April 2011. Since then we have been asking for answers -- we have even emailed the pdf of what we were sent and we have yet to receive an answer from the GAB. Could it be this new revelation played a part in Prosser appearing to have won the election two days before the votes were cast? -- We still don't know and we do not know why there has not been an answer given to us.
http://www.politiscoop.com/component/content/article/35-last-24h-news/241-special-kathy-nickolaus-is-special-in-more-ways-then-one-.html
Citizen Journalist
Madison Wisconsin - Breaking news today in the Prosser/Kloppenburg recount -- as it turns out the software that Kathy Nickolaus used the night of the election was written specifically for her. Yes, I am not kidding you. Politiscoop for the last few weeks have been pressing the GAB to explain this. The Fix is on article we pubished on Sunday, 10 April 2011. Since then we have been asking for answers -- we have even emailed the pdf of what we were sent and we have yet to receive an answer from the GAB. Could it be this new revelation played a part in Prosser appearing to have won the election two days before the votes were cast? -- We still don't know and we do not know why there has not been an answer given to us.
Today the website http://www.milwaukeenewsbuzz.com revealed that a through an open records request an email was sent to county clerks around Wisconsin. It stated the following:
The email, by Rusk County Clerk Denise Wetzel and addressed to other county clerks in Wisconsin, including Nickolaus, was sent on April 8, the day after Nickolaus revealed the vote-reporting error in a press conference. It reads, “Please note that the program Kathy uses IS NOT the new canvass reporting program that is in the (Statewide Voter Registration System) that we all have been using as of late. It is a completely different program that was created by GAB for Kathy to accumulate her votes prior to uploading them into the program that the rest of us use.”
The GAB has since declined comment on the matter. Will we ever find out why Prosser appeared to have won the election 2 days prior to the election and will we find out why Kathy was so special in Waukesha? If and when we do, Politiscoop will bring you the answers. Until then -- your guess is as good as mine.
http://www.politiscoop.com/component/content/article/35-last-24h-news/241-special-kathy-nickolaus-is-special-in-more-ways-then-one-.html
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Monsanto Will Soon Be Allowed To Police Itself
BY Ariel SchwartzMon Apr 25, 2011
Monsanto, enemy of organic farmers and anti-GMO advocates alike, will likely be allowed to conduct its own environmental studies as part of a two-year USDA experiment. But there is no good that can possibly come of an experiment where the company behind nearly every genetically modified crop in our daily diets is allowed to decide whether its products are causing any environmental harm. And Monsanto isn't the only biotech company that will be permitted to police itself.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1749695/monsanto-now-allowed-to-police-itself
Monsanto, enemy of organic farmers and anti-GMO advocates alike, will likely be allowed to conduct its own environmental studies as part of a two-year USDA experiment. But there is no good that can possibly come of an experiment where the company behind nearly every genetically modified crop in our daily diets is allowed to decide whether its products are causing any environmental harm. And Monsanto isn't the only biotech company that will be permitted to police itself.
As it stands, the USDA is responsible for assessing environmental impacts of new GMO crops. The agency has been lax about this, to say the least. In 2005, the USDA gave Monsanto the go-ahead to unleash its sugar beets before preparing an Environmental Impact Statement. This decision triggered a judge to rule that Monsanto sugar beet seedlings should be ripped from the ground.
Because the USDA is so bad at doing its job on time, the agency decided to see if anyone else was prepared to do its EIS work instead. And so it looks like the USDA will at least temporarily hand over environmental impact responsibilities to the biotech companies behind GMO crops. The pilot program will allow these companies to conduct their own environmental assessments of crops or outsource the work to contractors.
The USDA won't actually admit that it's bad at performing its duties--instead, the agency claims that the move will make the environmental reporting process more timely, efficient, and cost-effective, according to the Federal Register (PDF). No knock on Monsanto, which is surely made up of great, honest people, but if the company has a vested interest in getting one of its crops deregulated, why wouldn't it try to fudge the numbers on an environmental review? And why wouldn't its hired contractors do the same? If this wasn't so dangerous, it would be funny.
Already, GMO crops are causing environmental problems. Monsanto's Roundup Ready soy, corn, and cotton have spawned Roundup-resistant superweeds, which force farmers to douse their crops in even more Roundup Ready pesticides (that's called synergy). And cross-pollination between GMO and non-GMO crops is making it ever more difficult for companies to stay organic.
Don't expect any immediately catastrophic changes to the food-supply chain. Instead, the USDA's experiment may slowly push through more GMO crops into fields and onto our plates. One day, we may realize that these crops have triggered irreversible damages. At least we'll know exactly who to blame.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1749695/monsanto-now-allowed-to-police-itself
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Environmentalists Adopt New Weapon: Seed Balls
by Margot Adler
April 15, 2009
Neighborhood organizations across the U.S. that want to improve the environment are using a surprising weapon: seed balls.
It's a technique for planting in abandoned places and often inhospitable land that was developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer in "natural farming."
The technique has worked its way to Brooklyn, N.Y. In the Greenpoint neighborhood on a recent Sunday afternoon, a small group of activists walked the streets carrying paper bags filed with little balls made from clay, compost and seeds. They are members of a local group called NAG, or Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. They drop the balls on dirt piles and throw them into abandoned lots.
How To Make Seed Balls
Emily Gallagher, a NAG member who specializes in open space issues, says it's easy to make seed balls.
"First, we mix the mulch and a seed mixture," Gallagher says. "We try to pick a seed that is native to the area and can withstand drought. We mix those together, and then we knead it like bread into a red terra-cotta clay. It is important to use the red terra cotta, because other kinds have different chemicals in it that affect growth."
The mixture is rolled into little balls, which then has to dry. The group then puts them in bags and distributes them. The mud and clay protect the seeds from being eaten by birds and rodents. After three to five rains, the balls break down and the seeds germinate. The seeds used in Brooklyn are mostly wild cornflowers, lovely blue daisy-like flowers often seen by the roadside.
Development On Hold
The Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg have been gentrifying. There has been lots of development and little attention to open space. But with the economic crisis, a lot of development is now on hold.
Michael Freedman-Schnapp, one of the co-chairs of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, says that community gardening and the "guerrilla gardening movement" of the 1970s "was a reaction to all the abandonment in the city at the time."
"We are at the end of a development boom, and it is clear that the city's resources are going to be constrained," he says. "They are not going to be able to take care of everywhere in the city. And so the city is going to have to rely on citizens stepping up and taking care of their own surroundings."
There are a lot of fenced-in areas in the neighborhood. On the water front, there is a chain-link fence that has a sign with the little maple leaf that signifies a city park, but it's locked. A new re-zoning plan has promised that it will become a park, but nothing is happening yet.
Taking Control Of A Small Piece Of The Planet
If you look around the neighborhood, you can see people sneaking into abandoned, trash-filled areas near the river, finding places to fish, to jog and to walk their dogs.
Gallagher says that seed balls allow people to take control of their small piece of the planet. She says walking around on a Sunday morning throwing seed balls is fun and easy.
"I think it is really important to break down these larger tasks — of taking back our neighborhoods and cleaning up our open spaces — into tasks that are completely doable," she says.
Most people, of course, still have no clue what seed balls are. Back in 2003, during a World Trade Organization protest, a dozen police surrounded a parking lot. They were concerned that these strange pellets they found might be dangerous weapons. They threw them against walls and watched them "explode." It took them a while to figure out that they were seed balls.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103129515
April 15, 2009
Neighborhood organizations across the U.S. that want to improve the environment are using a surprising weapon: seed balls.
It's a technique for planting in abandoned places and often inhospitable land that was developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer in "natural farming."
The technique has worked its way to Brooklyn, N.Y. In the Greenpoint neighborhood on a recent Sunday afternoon, a small group of activists walked the streets carrying paper bags filed with little balls made from clay, compost and seeds. They are members of a local group called NAG, or Neighbors Allied for Good Growth. They drop the balls on dirt piles and throw them into abandoned lots.
How To Make Seed Balls
Emily Gallagher, a NAG member who specializes in open space issues, says it's easy to make seed balls.
"First, we mix the mulch and a seed mixture," Gallagher says. "We try to pick a seed that is native to the area and can withstand drought. We mix those together, and then we knead it like bread into a red terra-cotta clay. It is important to use the red terra cotta, because other kinds have different chemicals in it that affect growth."
The mixture is rolled into little balls, which then has to dry. The group then puts them in bags and distributes them. The mud and clay protect the seeds from being eaten by birds and rodents. After three to five rains, the balls break down and the seeds germinate. The seeds used in Brooklyn are mostly wild cornflowers, lovely blue daisy-like flowers often seen by the roadside.
Development On Hold
The Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg have been gentrifying. There has been lots of development and little attention to open space. But with the economic crisis, a lot of development is now on hold.
Michael Freedman-Schnapp, one of the co-chairs of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, says that community gardening and the "guerrilla gardening movement" of the 1970s "was a reaction to all the abandonment in the city at the time."
"We are at the end of a development boom, and it is clear that the city's resources are going to be constrained," he says. "They are not going to be able to take care of everywhere in the city. And so the city is going to have to rely on citizens stepping up and taking care of their own surroundings."
There are a lot of fenced-in areas in the neighborhood. On the water front, there is a chain-link fence that has a sign with the little maple leaf that signifies a city park, but it's locked. A new re-zoning plan has promised that it will become a park, but nothing is happening yet.
Taking Control Of A Small Piece Of The Planet
If you look around the neighborhood, you can see people sneaking into abandoned, trash-filled areas near the river, finding places to fish, to jog and to walk their dogs.
Gallagher says that seed balls allow people to take control of their small piece of the planet. She says walking around on a Sunday morning throwing seed balls is fun and easy.
"I think it is really important to break down these larger tasks — of taking back our neighborhoods and cleaning up our open spaces — into tasks that are completely doable," she says.
Most people, of course, still have no clue what seed balls are. Back in 2003, during a World Trade Organization protest, a dozen police surrounded a parking lot. They were concerned that these strange pellets they found might be dangerous weapons. They threw them against walls and watched them "explode." It took them a while to figure out that they were seed balls.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103129515
South Carolina State Sen: Today’s Tea Party Should Go After Corporate Power Like Original Boston Tea Party Did
By Lee Fang
Apr 23rd, 2011 at 9:30 am
At a the Tax Day Tea Party on Monday in Columbia, SC, a number of politicians, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), gave rather routine speeches blasting the Obama administration and liberals. Towards the end of the event, one speaker delivered a fiery speech excoriating both Democrats and Republicans for giving away hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to well connected corporations in the state. State Sen. Tom Davis (R-SC) explained to the crowd that corporations are dominating South Carolina by hiring lobbyists, then demanding huge tax giveaways from the “ruling elite” of politicians. By giving money away to already powerful corporations, costs are pushed upon regular people in the form of service cuts or higher sales taxes.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/23/south-carolina-state-sen-tea-party-should-go-after-corporations/
Apr 23rd, 2011 at 9:30 am
At a the Tax Day Tea Party on Monday in Columbia, SC, a number of politicians, including Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), gave rather routine speeches blasting the Obama administration and liberals. Towards the end of the event, one speaker delivered a fiery speech excoriating both Democrats and Republicans for giving away hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to well connected corporations in the state. State Sen. Tom Davis (R-SC) explained to the crowd that corporations are dominating South Carolina by hiring lobbyists, then demanding huge tax giveaways from the “ruling elite” of politicians. By giving money away to already powerful corporations, costs are pushed upon regular people in the form of service cuts or higher sales taxes.
After his speech, ThinkProgress spoke with Davis about corporate influence in politics and his fight against tax giveaways to powerful businesses. We also spoke about how receptive the current Tea Party movement is to his message. In fact, as many historians have accurately noted, the real Boston Tea Party was a revolt against a massive corporate tax cut given to the East India Trading Company. The tax cut effectively gave the British corporation a monopoly over the tea trade in colonial America:
DAVIS: You’ve got leadership in the House, Republican and Democrat, leadership in the Senate, Republican and Democrat that are presiding over this ballooning in special deals that are given away to corporations. And the numbers don’t like: $34 million dollars worth of targeted “tax credits” back in 1998 to corporations who lobbied for them has ballooned to $523 million in 2008 and this year it has ballooned to over a billion dollars. We’re not a big state. Our general fund is $5.1 billion dollars. And with a $5.1 billion dollar general fund budget, we’re giving away one billion dollars in tax credits to targeted industries that have lobbyists that are going to lobby for them? Somebody pays that bill, and there’s no free lunch. Who pays the bill are those folks out there that don’t have the power to hire lobbyists. [...]
FANG: The Tea Act that kind of sparked the revolution was actually a specialized tax cut for the East India Trading Company and it basically pushed the price of American imported tea out of the market. And it seems very similar to what you’re saying here.
DAVIS: And the Tea Party was about 1773. Here we are in the year 2011 and we’re still talking about politicians passing out special tax breaks to help--
FANG: To big corporations, like the East India Trading Company was a British corporation.
DAVIS: Oh yeah. It’s absolutely crazy. And its not the free market and its not what made our country great. Our country has been because we’ve counted on individuals taking risks, saving money, working hard. Now, it’s large corporations that have access to lawmakers that get huge tax breaks and there’s no way that the little guy can compete.
Watch it:
The anti-corporate streak of the Tea Party has been muffled by corporate-dominated front groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, which are both run by lobbyists. But in ThinkProgress’ conversations with ordinary Tea Party activists, many have expressed concerns that corporate lobbyists have far too much influence in politics. When asked about massive subsidies given to the oil industry, or the fact that dozens of some of the most profitable corporations in America don’t pay a dime in corporate income taxes, Tea Party activists have agreed with progressives that there is a structural imbalance in the political system towards corporate power.
Notably, many companies like Koch Industries (which funds fronts like Americans for Prosperity) have falsely claimed to represent the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. In fact, Koch Industries has used its lobbying power to demand a $50 million tax break from states like Kansas, and has lobbied to pollute tens of billions of dollars worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for free.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/23/south-carolina-state-sen-tea-party-should-go-after-corporations/
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