Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose imperial war? Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose a horrendous corporate boondoggle that will effectively kill genuine health care reform for years, if not generations? This is what happens to you: The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich.

Yes, if you stand up against endless, pointless, profiteering slaughter in foreign lands, if you stand up against an astonishingly brazen, deeply dirty deal cut in the White House itself to enrich some of the most brutal, rapacious corporate sharks ever to feast, quite literally, on the bodies of nation's working people and the poor, then those Fightin' Progressives at Salon.com will come around and slap you with the cold, wet fish of their withering scorn.

They will join with the very model of a modern major general of the "Progressive Forces," Commander Kos his own self, to belittle you and denounce you -- no, not just denounce you, but accuse you, on national television, of being directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

That's right; according to the Commander, if Dennis Kucinich dares to vote against whatever corporate blank check the bought-and-sold bagmen in Congress and the White House come up with to deliver millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans into the clutches of the health care and insurance conglomerates (which, as our Progressives themselves rightly remind us, are the ones with the real "death panels"), then Kucinich will be a mass murderer of Americans on a scale far outstripping the petty efforts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban during the long twilight struggle of our noble global Terror War.

And isn't it odd that these discrediting blasts from "the left" undermining Kucinich come just as his resolution for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is about to come up for debate on the House floor? Well, no, it's actually not odd at all; it is entirely predictable. The empire simply could not exist in its current form without the diligent self-policing of the "serious," "respectable" "left." They take great pains -- and inflict great pains -- in their efforts to mock and marginalize anyone who steps outside the narrow, suffocating boundaries of "savvy" Beltway gamesmanship. You cannot seriously oppose our empire of military dominion; you can only debate on the best, most "efficient" way to perpetuate it. You cannot seriously oppose the overwhelming sway of Big Money; you can only propose the mildest of mitigations of its depredations -- but only if Big Money agrees, of course.

The main thing you must be is savvy. You cannot be a real live Fightin' Progressive unless you know how to play the game. Look how the Commander's amen chorister at Salon, Alex Koppleman, drips sniffling scorn on Kucinich's legislative record: "of the 97 bills Kucinich has sponsored since taking office in 1997, only three have become law. Ninety-three didn't even make it out of committee." And even those three, Koppleman notes, were just silly little proclamations, of interest only to the hicks back in Kucinich's district somewhere out there in flyover land.

But just think what a howling pig circus the United States Congress has been during Kucinich's 13-year tenure in the House. Look around at the vast wreckage these poltroons have helped perpetrate, from the deregulation of the Bankster gangs to the imposition of draconian bankruptcy laws (championed by our super-progressive vice president) to the panicky, pants-wetting trashing of the constitution in the Patriot Acts and Military Commission Acts and Retroactive Immunity for Telecom Lawbreakers Act (supported by our super-progressive president) to support for the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq (supported by our super-progressive secretary of state) to the redistribution of the nation's wealth (for generations) from working people and the poor to those same Banksters whose Congressionally-deregulated scams have plunged millions around the world into ruin.

This is only a fraction of an overall record of towering cupidity, stupidity and evil that almost beggars description. Why would anyone with even the slightest speck of honor or decency want to be considered a major, "savvy" contributor to such a legacy? And considering the conglomeration of political whores, bribe-takers, liars, warmongers, lackeys and outright lunatics that constitutes the bipartisan bulk of Congress, isn't it actually a badge of honor -- rather than a mark of shame -- for your legislation to be rejected by them?

Not for our "progressives." Koppelman's scorn for Kucinich's lack of "savvy" is palatable. His agreement with Kos's libel -- "holding people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care" -- is evident. The president who literally sold out genuine health care reform is not responsible. The Congress that concocted a series of hideous, confusing, corporate-crafted boondoggles that utterly reject the highly popular notion of a public option is not responsible. And evidently the dark, satanic mills of the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries are not responsible either.

No; Dennis Kucinich -- and "people like him" -- are responsible. Why? Because they cannot find it in their conscience to support what they fervently believe to be a harmful bill. This is their crime; to act according to their conscience on a piece of bad legislation that has somehow been elevated into a sacred totem, a holy grail by our respectable Fightin' Progressives. It doesn't matter what the Grail actually contains (or doesn't contain); all that matters is its symbolic significance as a great "victory" for our "progressive" president, and indeed, for all the progressive forces of our higher progressivism.

But what this "symbolic" victory will really do, of course, is lock into place -- for decades probably -- a rancid, corrupt and ill-serving system that will leave millions of the most vulnerable Americans at the untender mercy of corporate predators. However, if the bill were defeated, one could simply start all over -- with genuine reform this time.

But who wants that? It's too much like hard work. Symbolism is a lot easier than substance -- especially if you're a rootin', tootin', savvy, serious Fightin' Progressive. Anyway, symbolism is all you're gonna get from our imperial overlords. So you better just be happy with that little crumb. After all, as Commander Kos says, it's "a foot in the door." Who knows? If we all stay real serious and respectable, they just might throw us another little crumb somewhere down the line!

This, then, is what now passes for "the left" in America: snippy derision -- and thundering condemnation -- for anyone who dares suggest, even mildly, that a goddamn crumb is not good enough.
 

Rep. Dennis Kucinich's proposal to withdraw from Afghanistan was debated, heatedly, for hours in the House of Representatives on Wednesday. After the debate, dozens of Representatives cast their vote to end the war immediately. This was an unprecedented event in the history of the conflict, now in its ninth year.

Think about that for a moment: an unprecedented event, on the floor of the House, going on for hours, involving a question of supreme national importance. Regardless of one's position on the issue, is this not the very definition of "news"? But on Thursday morning, you could search high and low on the front pages (print and web) of both the New York Times and the Washington Post -- our national arbiters of serious newsworthiness -- yet find no mention whatsoever of this event. This, even though the web fronts -- unlike the paper versions -- contain headlines for dozens of stories, including sections devoted entirely to Washington politics.

You would have had to know about the debate already -- or else trawl diligently through piles of pixels or print -- to reach the small stories that our papers of record deigned to release on the subject. No ordinary newspaper reader -- someone who has a more than passing interest in current events but also has a life to live -- would even know that such a debate took place, much less learn anything about the powerful arguments against the war delivered on the floor of the national legislature. That is to say, it is entirely possible that a reasonably informed and engaged citizen of the Republic would not even be aware that dozens of elected officials at the highest level of government voiced their support for the most radical position on the war: immediate withdrawal.

But such is the way of our imperial system. Our ruling class does not want the citizenry to know there are any alternatives to the grand bipartisan consensus on the true aims of government: servicing the needs of Militarism and Money. And so what cannot be ignored entirely is buried "certain fathoms in the earth ... deeper than did ever plummet sound."

And as we noted yesterday, our rulers are greatly assisted in these efforts by "savvy" progressives who constantly belittle anyone who actually challenges this stifling and disastrous status quo. Anything that goes beyond a bit of mild tinkering and "tweaking" at the margins of the system is rejected by our savvy progs as "unrealistic." The modern "progressive" ethos seems to boil down to this: You must take whatever little thrice-chewed tidbit of cud the elite is willing to dribble out onto your plate -- and be happy about it. That clump of green viscous slime known as the health care reform bill? Why, that's a "great progressive victory!" Didn't you know?

The sad, degraded, destructive state of the "left" in modern America is clearly shown by this vignette from Seth Ackerman, writing of how a previous generation confronted health care reform:

The last big, ambitious measure [in social legislation], Medicare, was a government-run single payer program that displaced or preempted private health insurance coverage for about one in ten Americans. That’s why the AMA, Ronald Reagan, and the nascent conservative movement spared no effort to decry it as socialism.

Yet none of that prevented Medicare from passing in 1965 with 13 out of 32 Senate Republicans voting in favor. Nor did it stop the bill from winning the support of half the senators from the Deep South (5 out of 10, or 7 out of 14, depending on whether you count Texas and Florida). And what about the Mark Pryors, Blanche Lincolns, Ben Nelsons, Mary Landrieus of the world? In 2009, we were told they fought the Senate bill’s mildly progressive elements because they represented states that are “obviously” too conservative to support even such tepid liberalism. But in 1965, three of the six senators from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Nebraska voted for or pledged support for single-payer Medicare, a.k.a socialism.

Today? Dennis Kucinich opposes the corporate-coddling health care boondoggle pushed by the White House -- and he is called an accomplice in mass death by progressive paladin Markos Moulitsas. Kos even levelled the most dread epithet in the entire progressive canon at Kucinich's opposition: "It's definitely a very Ralph Nader-esque approach .. a very unrealistic and self-defeating approach."

So this is where we've come to. Ralph Nader, who has spent decades fighting corporate power, often successfully (which is more than Kos can say), is now a figure of scorn and derision -- his very name a perjorative term -- among our leading "progressives."

And why? Because Nader dared to offer an alternative to the bipartisan consensus of Militarism and Money in the 2000 election. And this, according to the unrealistic and self-defeating mythology of serious progressives, is what threw the Florida vote -- and thus the election -- to George W. Bush. This fairy tale persists despite the fact that the recounts carried out by the media consortium after the election clearly showed that Al Gore received more votes than Bush in Florida, regardless of Nader's total. It was Al Gore and his fellow establishment Democrats who "threw" the election to George W. Bush by refusing to challenge the result in Congress, by refusing to confront the transparent fraud and corruption at the very heart of the political process, and to use the tools provided them by the Constitution to uphold the will of the electorate.

What they did uphold with their timidity, however, was the true governing system of the country: not the Constitution but the empire of military domination and unrestrained money power.  And this system is precisely what the timidity of our progressive paladins is upholding today. Or as that evil old devil Ralph Nader put it just last week:

The twin swelling heads of Empire and Oligarchy are driving our country into an ever-deepening corporate state, wholly incompatible with democracy and the rule of law.

Oh come on, Ralph! Democracy and the rule of law? Don't be so unserious! Don't be so unrealistic! Don't you like the taste of cud? Here, try a little spoonful, just a taste ... You'll soon get used to it --  just like the rest of us. 

Lawmakers often contend that lobbying, campaign contributions and fancy parties do not sway their votes, yet at least one company begs to differ. As The Washington Examiner reports, Pfizer based its recent decision to grant CEO Jeff Kindler a raise, at least in part, on his "developing and advancing U.S. and global public policies that serve the overall interests of our Company and our shareholders."

The language, buried in the company's most recent proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, explicitly cites Kindler's efforts in "opposing legislation that would allow for importation of prescription drugs."

Pfizer contends that importing these medicines "could jeopardize the integrity of the drug supply chain in the U.S," while groups like AARP say it's a safe and cost-effective solution to lowering drug prices.

An effort to allow importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe failed last December. Sen. Byron Dorgan, who spearheaded the effort, told reporters after the vote that "the drug industry has a lot of clout in this town, and they demonstrated that tonight."

As the Sunlight Foundation noted in an extensive report highlighted by ProPublica, the pharmaceutical industry lobbying group PhRMA agreed to support the White House's health care reform effort as part of a deal that included a pledge by the administration to oppose drug importation.

Sen. Charles Schumer, left, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen speak to the media on Feb. 11, 2010. Schumer and Van Hollen plan to introduce a bill aimed at offsetting the recent Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to use their general funds to run television ads that say outright whether a candidate should be elected. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

This story was reported by ProPublica’s Chisun Lee.

The Supreme Court recently freed corporations to spend more money on aggressive election ads. But if businesses take advantage of this new freedom, the public probably won’t know it, because it’s easy for them to legally hide their political spending.

Under current disclosure laws for federal elections, it’s virtually impossible for the public to track how much a business spends, what it’s spending on, or who ultimately benefits. Experts say the transparency problem extends to state and local races as well.

“There is no good way to gauge” how much any given company spends on elections, said Karl Sandstrom, a former vice chairman of the Federal Election Commission and counsel to the Center for Political Accountability. “There’s no central collection of the information, no monitoring.”

Companies invest in politics to win favorable regulations or block those “that could choke off their business model,” said Robert Kelner, chairman of Covington & Burling’s Washington, D.C., political law group. But they’d rather hide these political activities, he said, because they fear backlash from customers or shareholders.

For instance, a company may want to help Democratic politicians who support health care reforms that would benefit the company, but it worries about offending “Republican shareholders who may care more about their personal ideology than about their three shares of stock in the company,” said Kelner, who says he represents many politically active Fortune 500 companies. “The same would be true on the other side of the political spectrum.”

Businesses must reveal their identities on public reports to the Federal Election Commission if they buy advertising on their own. But one popular and perfectly legal conduit for companies wanting to influence politics under the radar is to give money to nonprofit trade groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber and its national affiliates spent $144.5 million last year on advertising, lobbying and grass-roots activism — more than either the Republican or Democratic party spent, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of public records — while legally concealing the names of its funders. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the Chamber is building a grass-roots political operation that has signed up about 6 million non-Chamber members.

Some of the positions the Chamber has successfully advanced on behalf of its donors include a nationwide campaign to unseat state judges who were considered tough on corporate defendants and opposition to a federal bill that would have criminalized defective auto manufacturing.

Now the Jan. 21 Supreme Court ruling that increases the potential political clout of businesses is drawing fresh attention to the problem of tracking them.

That decision (PDF), Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allows corporations to run television ads that don’t merely speak to an issue but say outright whether a candidate should be elected, and allows them to do so any time they want to, using their general funds. The ruling also gives nonprofit groups like the Chamber these new freedoms, because they are technically structured as corporations.

Before, corporations had to rely on employee and shareholder contributions to a separate political account to finance the most explicit commercials and, in the months before an election, any issue ads that mentioned a candidate. Although the decision addressed federal election rules, its constitutional rationale also dismantles similar restrictions in 24 states.

Soon after the ruling, two Democrats — Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York — announced they were writing a bill to make it easier to tell which companies are backing which ads in federal elections. An outline (PDF) of that bill, which is expected to be introduced this week, proposes forcing nonprofit groups to identify those who fund their political commercials.

At present, nonprofit groups don’t have to disclose the sources of their advertising money, unless the donors specified that their contributions were intended for political ads.

“Unless you’re sort of dumb enough to designate your contribution to the Chamber,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the Campaign Legal Center, “no one will ever know who’s the source of those funds.”

Politically active nonprofits exist across the ideological and policy spectrum and include unions as well as trade groups. Their funders include both corporations and individuals, some of them very wealthy. But campaign finance experts say groups that advocate specifically for business tend to have the greatest resources, simply because corporations have the most money to give.

The lack of tracking mechanisms sometimes leaves company officials themselves in the dark about their organization’s political activities, said Adam Kanzer, managing director and general counsel of Domini Social Investments, which files shareholder resolutions to push corporations to adopt self-monitoring and disclosure practices.

“In a lot of our conversations with companies, they say, ‘We don’t know exactly how our money is getting spent. It’s hard to get those answers,’” Kanzer said. One major drug manufacturer, he said, signed on for voluntary disclosure after learning that its funds had supported a state judicial campaign that many voters — who could be customers or shareholders — viewed as racist.

The public price of spotty disclosure is not being able to gauge the real effects of corporation-backed politics, McGehee said. She questioned one argument, often made by defenders of the Citizens United decision, that the 26 states that have long allowed unlimited corporate advertising in their elections haven’t suffered more political corruption than the rest of the nation.

“How would you know? Most of those states have next to no disclosure,” McGehee said. Corporations “could be buying outcomes left and right, but because of no disclosure, we don’t know.” A 2007 examination by the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that, while 39 states required some degree of disclosure by political advertisers, the laws in most were riddled with loopholes. Only five states required enough detail to link sponsors with specific ads, the report said.

Rep. Van Hollen said the disclosure requirements he and Schumer are drafting would uncover the corporate political money flowing through nonprofit channels.

“If corporations spend money in these campaigns, we cannot allow them to hide behind sham organizations and dummy corporations that mislead voters,” he said in a written comment to ProPublica. “Voters have a right to know who is delivering and paying for the message.”

The requirements would apply to unions and liberal nonprofits as well as trade groups, according to the early outline of the bill. The proposal mentions additional transparency requirements — such as mandating corporate disclosures to shareholders and “stand by your ad” appearances by CEOs of companies that finance commercials directly — and seeks outright bans on political advertising by government contractors, bailout recipients and companies significantly controlled by foreigners.

A strong disclosure law would be “hugely effective” in revealing who is paying for political speech, said Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman and head lawyer for John McCain’s presidential campaigns, who is now general counsel at Campaign Legal Center.

But precisely for that reason, Potter said, politics may get in the way of any serious reform. He expects trade groups on the right, unions on the left and other cause groups across the board to fight hard against such legislation.

Already the political battle is taking shape.

Asked to comment on the push for more disclosure, the Chamber’s chief legal officer and general counsel, Steven Law, instead attacked the political motives of the proponents. “Unions overwhelmingly support those who are pushing this legislation,” he said in an e-mail. “This isn’t about reform, it’s about politicians trying to secure advantages for themselves before an election.”

That reaction drew fire from one of the nation’s most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union, which also declined to comment on the new disclosure proposals. “The coming flood of corporate and foreign money into our elections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a threat to democracy, plain and simple,” said Anna Burger, SEIU’s secretary-treasurer, in an e-mail. She called on legislators to “drag the Chamber’s practices into the light of day.”

The Chamber revealed more about its view of disclosure in an amicus brief (PDF) it filed in the Citizens United case on behalf of the 3 million business members it says it has. It supported the plaintiff, a nonprofit corporation called Citizens United, which wanted the Supreme Court not only to lift corporate advertising bans but also to strike down the existing disclosure requirements.

The Chamber argued that those requirements inhibited corporations from speaking out. If the public discovered that corporations were “taking controversial positions,” it might punish them, the brief said. As an example, it pointed to a 2005 boycott of ExxonMobil products after the public learned the company was lobbying Congress to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

That argument failed to persuade the high court, which by an 8-1 majority decided to leave the current disclosure laws intact.

Transparency is important, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority, because it helps voters “give proper weight to different speakers and messages,” and because it allows citizens to “see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

In light of the overcrowded mess going on at D.C. General's emergency shelter for families, I thought I should call Robert Egger. As founder and president of DC Central Kitchen, Egger is unmatched as this city's most forward-thinking authority on homeless issues.

Years ago, Egger had approached city officials about moving away from sheltering homeless individuals in warehouses. He had a plan: Sell CCNV and put the profits in a trust that would go towards opening up a multipurpose homeless center. In 2000, I lived at CCNV and found it to be a hellhole.

Egger's center would provide shelter on some floors and retail on the first floor that would be staffed by residents. There would also be job training as well as a home renovation program. Residents would renovate abandon properties and then those properties would be used for low-income housing.

Let's just say city hall pretty much ignored Egger's big idea. When City Desk talked to him today, he was still saddened that the District's approach to homelessness hadn't changed all that much since his idea got rejected.

"I still am vexed by how behind the times D.C. is when it comes to its homeless programs and how unwilling they are to go forward," Egger says. "It’s still big buildings full of people."

Meanwhile, Egger's kitchen is still a force. During the snowstorm, Egger says his nonprofit produced 70,000 meals.

*photo courtesy of DC Central Kitchen.

By Edward L. Palmer, Robert N. Rhodes and Alice J. Palmer

“There has been a quiet coup in the US in which a financial oligarchy has gained hegemony over the government structure.” That seizure of power has resulted in devastation for Black America, where “48% of the children of middle class Black Americans border on poverty.” Among the general public, “70% of last year’s college graduates in the US did not receive job offers.”

“A financial oligarchy has gained hegemony over the government structure.”

America is on a path toward a savage capitalism that is already decimating the middle class and working people and swelling the ranks of the poor. Adam Smith never intended this.

The U.S. government has spent more than one trillion dollars of taxpayer money to resuscitate the financial services economy and restore the status quo while unemployment has grown by millions since January 2009, and all without developing the real economy: production, sustainable development, infrastructure, and social networks.

Unlike Germany, for example, where, faced with a similar economic downturn, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative, chose to increase public spending on production, infrastructure and human capital. Or, as in Sweden, which took measures to reverse unemployment and the contracting gross domestic product by isolating bad debts, stabilizing their currency, and allowing some banks to fail.

Or, for that matter, the win-win strategy the Chinese favor, which pursues their national economic interests without seeming to threaten the national interests of other countries.

Americans should ask themselves the fundamental questions that Bob Herbert is asking over and over in his New York Times columns: How do you put together a consumer economy that works when the consumers are out of work, and when poverty, particularly among Black Americans, is alarmingly high.

“At least 30% of America’s children are poor; tent cities are now housing displaced and desperate families.”

The statistics about Main Street are distressing. At least 30% of America’s children are poor; tent cities are now housing displaced and desperate families. According to a recent Harper’s magazine monthly index, 70% of last year’s college graduates in the US did not receive job offers. Some 16% of the daughters and sons of White Americans are not as financially stable as their parents. Most disturbing is that 48% of the children of middle class Black Americans border on poverty as they earn little more than $23,000 a year. Their parents, whose incomes average $55,000, came of age in the 1960’s.

For decades, from the late 1940’s through the end of the 1980’s, Black men expected to find work in the plants that dominated industrial centers such as Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Steady work, no matter how initially back-breaking and low-level, afforded Black families adequate incomes to purchase homes and send their children to college from which a solid, often politically active, Black middle class emerged.

There is a “silent Black depression” in the United States, according to a 2008 report issued by the Institute of Policy Studies, in which 29.4% of Black households have zero or negative net worth as of 2004 compared with 15% of Whites; and Black males aged 16-19 have a 32.8% unemployment rate. People of color, in general, are more likely to be poor in the United States; yet, poverty is rarely discussed as an element of the country’s economic crisis.

“29.4% of Black households have zero or negative net worth.”

To gauge the consequences to America’s eroding consumer and family income economies we must look beyond spurious US unemployment and employment figures that do not adequately tell us how many new jobs are part time and how many workers are discouraged or under-utilized. Most European countries count the number of adults who are employed, which is a more realistic measure of consumer and family-economic well-being.

What does happen to a dream deferred? Job loss can also mean pension loss – a loss of family sustainability – which could cause a social crisis for decades to come, warns the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in its yearly report. During the vaunted 1990’s, employers, looking for savings to their companies, encouraged working Americans to choose market-driven defined contribution pension packages that hinted at easy-living wealth at retirement instead of the traditional defined benefit pensions that assured steady retirement incomes. In 2008, private pension funds lost more than 25% in returns; so thousands of retirees cannot make ends meet, and thousands of younger workers must start anew to build their nest eggs.

Yet corporate chief executives and their circle earn an almost unbelievable 400 times what the average employee earns; and, as we have seen recently, garner enormous bonuses in spite of failing companies.

If we say in this country that we believe in family values, then we should value the family with adequate and equitable work, education, pensions and health care policies that matter to their well-being.

The US is not just experiencing an economic crisis, this is a crisis of our social being; and there are no quick fixes. Simon Johnson, a former Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund, pointed out that there has been a quiet coup in the US in which a financial oligarchy has gained hegemony over the government structure.

“In 2008, private pension funds lost more than 25% in returns.”

During the 19th century through c1929, it was common to experience economic panics roughly every 20 years, e.g., in 1819, 1837, and 1873. Since World War II, we have not had feast or famine years. Why? Perhaps because Keynesian principles were in practice that fostered the judicious use of government interventions to fine tune the economy to avoid crises that imperiled people and businesses alike.

At the start of the 1980’s, the size of the financial service sector, i.e., traditional banks, was 4% of gross domestic product; and the number of financial corporations on the stock exchange was 0%. It was against the law for the financial service sector to be listed on the stock exchange. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933, passed after the Great Depression, which prevented banks from underwriting stocks and bonds for companies, was annulled in practice during the 1980’s, and the practice became law in 1999. The financial sector, especially banks, became one-stop centers for selling insurance, questionable mortgages and other risky undertakings to an uninformed public.

What is the significance of this change? A recent Bank of International Settlement report from Switzerland shows that world GDP (the real economy of the world’s people) is about a tenth the size of the financial services sector alone, and the gap continues to widen.

Many respected economists are alarmed by such economic indicators, the direction the US is taking, and the toll on people’s standard of living. Joseph Stieglitz calls the present-day economy ersatz capitalism; Paul Krugman calls it crony capitalism. John Monks, Secretary General of the European Confederation of Trade Unions, calls the economy casino capitalism. By any name, ponzi schemes are proliferating.

“World GDP (the real economy of the world’s people) is about a tenth the size of the financial services sector alone.”

Of course America’s financial sector should be kept viable; but in the long run, its salvation depends upon the ability of Americans to participate in and benefit from the economy. Real capital uses money to buy raw materials and machinery, hire workers, and produce products that can be sold for more than the cost of their production. Moreover, investment in research and development should be ongoing as new technologies and new ideas lead to innovations and new productivity. Real capital does not hollow out the lives of the average American.

It is in the interest of the United States, its people, and its place in the world to promote a sustainable development model, which is comprised of a labor policy, deliverable industrial and infrastructural advancement strategies, and social policies that ensure human well-being in health, education, and the post-work and sunset years. Since these policies and practices are not self-generating, it is necessary for common-sense minded people to undertake decisive, principled, actions to forge the path to our well-being.

Edward L. Palmer is Senior Research Associate, retired, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois, palmeredward@ymail.com; Robert N. Rhodes is Political Science Professor, retired, University of Ohio; Alice J. Palmer, PhD, is a former Illinois State Senator and current Associate Research Professor, University of Illinois (aapalmur@yahoo.com) aapalmur (at) yahoo (dot) com.

12-11

Related posts:

Institute for Public Accuracy
News Release
11 March 2010

Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem.” He also stated that the U.S. will hold Israel “accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.”

JOSH RUEBNER
National advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Ruebner said today: “Official written U.S. policy, which is based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, deems Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land as ‘inconsistent with international law.’ The Obama administration should translate its promise into action to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing violations of international law and its defiance of repeated U.S. calls to freeze all colonization of Palestinian land. The most effective way to do so would be to end U.S. military aid to Israel, amounting to $3 billion this year alone; [that would be] a real step towards a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”

The U.S. Campaign recently launched a new website — AidToIsrael.org — that documents “how U.S. military aid to Israel is being misused to injure and kill Palestinian civilians and to commit human rights abuses and violations of international law through Israel’s illegal 42-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.” The website also documents “the budgetary trade-offs in terms of affordable housing, green jobs training, early reading education programs, and primary health care that could have been funded with this money instead.”

For more information, contact the Institute for Public Accuracy

Related:
Joint NGO report on child recruitment practices in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

11 March 2010
johnpilger.com

Adelaide is Australia’s festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper, and Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy.

What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?”

[Read more]

David DeGraw’s six-part series on the The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the USA can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

When you are one of the 180 million Americans now living paycheck-to-paycheck, and you are working 12 – 14 hours a day, six days a week, you have to constantly ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing the most effective way to use my time?”

When it comes to my work here on AmpedStatus, I’m putting more money into it than I’m getting out of it. So, even with the impact and success I’ve been having with recent reports, my mind still questions if I would be better off working on other, more financially rewarding projects. As each month passes, and the bills keep coming, your will and resolve are tested with increased intensity.

When people take time out of their busy schedules to write emails and donate some of their hard-earned money, and when the bad news just keeps piling up with no substantial government actions to combat it, you realize that you must find it within yourself to keep fighting. In the long run, unfortunately, there is really no other option for us. We have been attacked, a war has been launched on us, even though most people are yet to realize this.

My frustration and cynicism is quickly overwhelmed by my survival instinct. As part of this, I must always try to figure out how to be most effective and question my methods. So when someone like Bill Moyers comes along, and quotes your work, you, for a moment, feel a sense of success. Maybe all the hard work is having an affect and paying off, maybe I am getting through to people.

Perhaps it is just my need for some kind of validation, in the face of such a difficult battle, but Bill Moyers has meant a great deal to me over the years. I remember being in middle school, in 1987, and coming across a PBS television show that shocked my young and naïve mind. It was called “The Secret Government: The Constitution In Crisis,” and a man named Bill Moyers gave me my first lesson in how power really works in this country and throughout the world.

I began to get very interested in these deeper political issues that Mr. Moyers revealed and closely followed his work on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Savings & Loan crisis.

At that time, Bill taught me things I could have never learned in my public schooling or through the network news programs that dominated public consciousness. (Keep in mind, the Internet wasn’t even around back then!) So there was much to learn from Mr. Moyers in the late 1980s, just as there is today.

The most important thing he taught me was to always be critical of those with power, to always question and probe below the surface of popular opinion. And I heeded his advice. While my friends and classmates dutifully read their history books and memorized names and dates, I spent my time at the local library looking for books that offered an alternative viewpoint to textbooks that seemed so black-and-white and lacked the depth and critical thoughts that Mr. Moyers made clear were necessary to be an informed citizen, to be a guardian of freedom and democracy.

I took these things very seriously as a kid. Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II, and the person for whom I am named, my grandfather’s brother, died during the war fighting for freedom and democracy. One of my most cherished possessions is the US flag that was folded into a triangle and presented to my family at my Uncle’s memorial service. I was instilled with a deep understanding that freedom was not free and you must stay vigilant if democracy is to be preserved. So I was very thankful that Mr. Moyers taught me how to look deeper into the power-addicted forces within human nature that are often behind the scenes conspiring against free people – always looking to gain power from us for their own greedy purposes.

Though it may sound like a dark view to some, this is the reality of the world, a reality my grandparent’s generation knew based on first-hand experience. A reality that has been obscured by an all-pervasive distraction-based, profit-seeking mainstream media system that has created two generations of dangerously naïve people. We have forgotten the lessons of our elders.

My grandparents were born into the Great Depression, an era of Robber Barons and massive income inequality. They had to fight through poverty and a World War. And when the war was over, the battle-tested American public joined together and created a prosperous middle class which blossomed into the greatest super-power this world has ever known.

But as the generations passed, we became complacent. We stopped paying attention to politics. Our free and open society was then easily corrupted by those same power and greed-addicted forces that we once fought off. We ignored politics, as the richest members of the world began to dominate both political parties and take over our country – economically and militarily.

As President Eisenhower warned, a grave danger to our future would become an unchecked military industrial complex, now represented in a private and covert military that in many ways is more powerful than our own citizen military. Along with this, the Robber Barons have returned, stronger than ever. The income inequality between the richest one percent and the remaining 99 percent of our country is the highest it has ever been. When you ignore the lessons of the past, they have a horrifying way of coming back to haunt you.

As Bill Moyers said in 1987, at the end of his report on the Secret Government:

“Can it happen again? You bet it can.… This is a system easily corrupted as the public grows indifferent again, and the press is seduced or distracted. So one day, sadly, we are likely to discover once again that while freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends.”

Unfortunately, Bill hit the nail on the head. In many ways, we are right back to where our grandparents started.

Fast forward to our current crisis, and Bill Moyers still, as always, remains ever so aware and present in our national consciousness. It was almost exactly one year ago when Bill Moyers invited William Black, a world renowned white-collar criminologist, to speak with him on his TV show about the outright fraud and theft of our money. As Bill so eloquently and boldly summed it up, “For months now, revelations of the wholesale greed and blatant transgressions of Wall Street have reminded us that ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.’” Bill gave us a revealing and much needed look into the systemic criminal underpinnings of our economic structure.

On March 1st, Bill gave his first public speech in three years, as the final speaker in the Dowmel Lecture series. In the speech, Bill, who once served as President Lyndon Johnson’s chief-of-staff, press secretary and speechwriter, choose to address what he feels is “the greatest threat” to our country: the staggering inequality of wealth and the death of the middle class.

He spoke, as always, in clear and concise language:

“This is my fear… at the end of my long career in journalism.… The isolation of the poor, the plight of a failing middle class, the crumbling of our infrastructure. The reckless disregard for our fiscal affairs and the hijacking of our political process by big money. All tear at the social compact that forge the American consciousness.…

We have come to a critical moment in the long fashioning of a democratic people…. America’s wealth is becoming ever more concentrated… concentration of wealth goes hand-in-hand with concentration of power. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how its great wealth buys off Washington and turns our watchdogs into lapdogs. You just have to be a good journalist and connect the dots.… The freedoms and rights we cherish were not sent from heaven and do not grow on trees. They were born by centuries of struggle by millions who fought, bled and died… to protect ordinary people from being overrun by massive corporations, to win a safety-net against the sometimes cruel workings of the market… Here is the lesson we must never forget… Democracy only works when people claim it as their own….”

Once again, we owe Bill Moyers thanks for his immense contribution to the understanding, betterment and well-being of our nation. To have him cite my work is truly an honor and an inspiration that will help sustain me through the long days and nights spent researching, writing, communicating and fighting for our democracy, freedom and future.

Bill’s speech is an hour long and well worth your time. You can listen to it here.

David DeGraw is the founder and editor of AmpedStatus.com and director of MediaChannel.org. You can reach him at David@AmpedStatus.com.

By Washington.

82% of the American public wants tougher regulation of Wall Street.

Most top independent financial experts say that we need to break up the big banks and otherwise rein in the financial giants in order to save the economy.

But Summers, Geithner, Bernanke and Congress like things just the way they are.

Of course they do … they’re bought and paid for:

The chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University (Donald J. Boudreaux) says that it is inaccurate to call politicians prostitutes. Specifically, he says that they are more correct to call them “pimps”, since they are pimping out the American people to the financial giants:

Real whores, after all, personally supply the services their customers seek. Prostitutes do not steal; their customers pay them voluntarily. And their customers pay only with money belonging to these customers.

In contrast, members of Congress routinely truck and barter with other people’s property…

Members of Congress are less like whores than they are like pimps for persons unwillingly conscripted to perform unpleasant services.

***

Politicians force taxpayers to pony it up — just as the services rendered for a pimp’s customers are rendered not by that pimp personally, but by the ladies under his charge. The pimp pockets the bulk of each payment; he’s pleased with the transaction. His customer gets serviced well in return; he’s pleased with the transaction. The only loser is the prostitute forced to share her precious assets with strangers whom she doesn’t particularly care for and who care nothing for her.Also like the ladies under pimps’ power, taxpayers who resist being exploited risk serious consequences to their persons and pocketbooks. Uncle Sam doesn’t treat kindly taxpayers who try to avoid the obligations that he assigns to them. Government is a great deal more powerful, and often nastier, than is the typical taxpayer. Practically speaking, the taxpayer has little choice but to perform as government demands.

So to call politicians “whores” is to unduly insult women who either choose or who are forced into the profession of prostitution. These women aggress against no one; like all other respectable human beings, they do their best to get by as well as they can without violating other people’s rights.

The real villains in the prostitution arena are those pimps who coerce women into satisfying the lusts of strangers. Such pimps pocket most of the gains earned by the toil and risks involuntarily imposed upon the prostitutes they control. No one thinks this arrangement is fair or justified. No one gives pimps the title of “Honorable.” Decent people don’t care what pimps think or suppose that pimps have any special insights into what is good or bad for the women under their command. Decent people don’t pretend that pimps act chiefly for the benefit of their prostitutes. Decent people believe that pimps should be in prison.

Yet Americans continue to imagine that the typical representative or senator is an upstanding citizen, a human being worthy of being feted and listened to as if he or she possesses some unusually high moral or intellectual stature.

It’s closer to the truth to see politicians as pimps who force ordinary men and women to pony up freedoms and assets for the benefit of clients we call “special-interest groups.”

Mossad mania continued in Israel this week when a supermarket chain filmed a marketing campaign inspired by the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai by a 27-strong hit squad. The TV commercials for the Mahsaney Kimat Hinam (Almost Free Warehouse) supermarket chain shows actors carrying tennis rackets, and wearing hats, glasses and wigs - the same disguises worn by the alleged killers in surveillance images released by Dubai police - as they make their way through store aisles. The actors are seen through the supermarket security cameras surreptitiously slipping products into their shopping trolley. One actor wearing a tennis outfit browses the frozen food section while an actress wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat mimicks Israel's policy of neither confirming nor denying involvement in the assassination, saying she "couldn't admit to anything".

The Empire will stop at nothing to find mechanisms and techniques to achieve its final objective, and we cannot disregard the possibility of a military conflict in the near future. If the US places Venezuela on the “terrorist list” this year, we could be on the verge of a regional war.

Latin America has suffered constant aggressions executed by Washington during the past two hundred years. Strategies and tactics of covert and overt warfare have been applied against different nations in the region, ranging from coup d’etats, assassinations, disappearances, torture, brutal dictatorships, atrocities, political persecution, economic sabotage, psychological operations, media warfare, biological warfare, subversion, counterinsurgency, paramiliary infiltration, diplomatic terrorism, blockades, electoral intervention to military invasions. Regardless of who’s in the White House – democrat or republican – when it comes to Latin America, the Empire’s policies remain the same.

In the twenty-first century, Venezuela has been one of the principle targets of these constant aggressions. Since the April 2002 coup, there has been a dangerous escalation in attacks and destabilization attempts against the Bolivarian Revolution. Although many fell beneath the seductive smile and poetic words of Barack Obama, it’s not necessary to look beyond the past year to see the intensification of Washington’s aggressions against Venezuela. The largest military expansion in history in the region – through the US occupation of Colombia – the reactivation of the Fourth Fleet of the US Navy, as well as an increased US military presence in the Caribbean, Panama and Central America throughout the past year, can be interpreted as preparation for a conflict scenario in the region.

ESCALATION IN AGGRESSIONS
The hostile declarations from various Washington representatives during the past few weeks, accusing Venezuela of failure to combat narcotics operations, violating human rights, “not contributing to democracy and regional stability”, and of being the “regional anti-US leader”, form part of a coordinated campaign that seeks to justify a direct aggression against Venezuela. Soon, Washington will publish its annual list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, and if Venezuela is placed on the list this year, the region could be on the brink of an unprecedented military conflict.

Evidence seems to indicate a move in that direction. A US Air Force document justifying the need to increase military presence in Colombia affirmed that Washington is preparing for “expeditionary warfare” in South America.

The 2009 Air Force document, sent to Congress last May (but later modified in November after it was used to demonstrate the true intentions behind the military agreement between the US and Colombia), explained, ““Development of this CSL (Cooperative Security Location) will further the strategic partnership forged between the US and Colombia and is in the interest of both nations…A presence will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability”.

ON THE VERGE OF WAR
The first official report outlining the defense and intelligence priorities of the Obama administration dedicated substantial attention to Venezuela. The Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community – which has mentioned Venezuela in years past, but not nearly with the same emphasis and extension – particularly signaled out President Chavez as a major “threat” to US interests. “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has established himself as one of the US’s foremost international detractors, denouncing liberal democracy and market capitalism and opposing US policies and interests in the region”, said the intelligence document, placing Venezuela in the same category as Iran, North Korea and Al Qa’ida.

Days after the report was published, the State Department presented its 2011 budget to Congress. In addition to an increase in financing through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to fund opposition groups in Venezuela – more than $15 million USD – there was also a $48 million USD request for the Organization of American States (OAS) to “deploy special ‘democracy promoter’ teams to countries where democracy is under threat from the growing presence of alternative concepts such as the ‘participatory democracy’ promoted by Venezuela and Bolivia”.

One week later, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the OAS – funded by Washington – emitted a whopping 322-page report slamming Venezuela for human rights violations, repression of the press and undermining democracy. Despite the fact that it was a report – and a Commission – dedicated to the topic of human rights, the detailed study barely mentioned the immense achievements of the Chavez government in advancing human rights; advances which have been recognized and applauded over the past five years by the Unted Nations. The evidence used by the OAS to elaborate the report came from opposition testimonies and biased media outlets, a clear demonstration of dangerous subjectivity.

Simultaneous to these accusations, a Spanish court accused the Venezuelan government last week of supporting and collaborating with the FARC and ETA – organizations considered terrorist by both the US and Spain – provoking an international scandal. President Chavez reiterated that his government has absolutely no ties with any terrorist group in the world. “This is a government of peace”, declared Chavez, after explaining that the presence of ETA members in Venezuela is due to an agreement made over 20 years ago by the government of Carlos Andres Perez in order to aid Spain in a peace treaty with the Basque separatist group.

THE EMPIRE HAS NO COLOR
Last week, on tour in Latin America, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn’t stop attacking Venezuela during her different declarations made before international media. She expressed her “great concern” for democracy and human rights in Venezuela, accusing President Chavez of not “contributing in a constructive manner” to regional progress. In a cynical tone, Clinton advised President Chavez to “look further south” for inspiration, instead of towards Cuba.

Clinton’s regional trip was part of a strategy announced by the Obama administration last year, to create a divide between the so-called “progressive left” and the “radical left” in Latin America. It’s no coincidence that her first tour of the region coincided with the announcement of a new Latin American and Caribbean Community of States, which excludes the presence of the US and Canada.

THE COMING CONFLICT
A military conflict is not initiated from one day to the next. It’s a process that involves first influencing public perception and opinion – demonizing the target leader or government in order to justify aggression. Subsequently, armed forces are strategically deployed in the region in order to guarantee an effective military action. Tactics, such as subversion and counterinsurgency, are utilized in order to debilitate and destabilize the target nation from within, increasing its vulnerability and weakening its defenses.

This plan has been active against Venezuela for several years. The consolidation of regional unity and Latin American integration threatens US possibilities of regaining domination and control in the hemisphere. And the advances of the Bolivarian Revolution have impeded its “self-destruction”, provoked by internal subversion funded and directed by US agencies. However, the Empire will not cease its attempts to achieve its final objective, and a potential military conflict in the region remains on the horizon.

–By Lisa Putkey, Scoville Peace Fellow, Peace Action Education Fund, and Kevin Martin, Executive Director, Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund

2010 is the year to set the roadmap for nuclear disarmament as an international community, and the US is integral to progress.  2010 marks 65 years since the birth of the atomic bomb in New Mexico and 65 years since the United States atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Nearly two decades have passed since the Cold War and yet the nuclear arms race continues.  This May the world will come together in New York for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (NPT RevCon in United Nations parlance), which aims to bring about a nuclear weapons-free world.  Despite President Obama’s lofty rhetoric on nuclear disarmament, his administration has requested billions for new nuclear bomb-making facilities.  It is now up to the American public to create the groundswell necessary to derail nuclear funding and get the US to accelerate steps toward abolishing nuclear arms.

Read more on OpEd News…

The seventh Israeli radio broadcast an interview with Professor Martin Van-Crevel, a noted world specialist in low-intensity wars. Former Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Van-Crevel discussed publicly what he has been advocating for years in closed military academic circles in Israel and the United States. In his view, the continued struggle of the Palestinians will inexhorably lead to the collapse of the State of Israel. Which is why Tel-Aviv has no choice but to \"transfer\" the Israeli Arabs and the stateless Palestinians beyond safe borders (that is, not only outside the 1948 borders but also from the 1976 occupied territories and, ideally, from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). In the event the Europeans opposed such a transfer, in order to survive Tel Aviv will be forced to destroy the European capitals with nuclear weapons, it being understood that the Europeans will be unable to retaliate without annihilating their Palestinian friends. “The (...)

Howard County wants to know WHY FUND WAR?

So what can we do about it in Howard County?

Join us for a talk, discussion and book-signing with Phyllis Bennis Author, “Ending the War in Afghanistan”, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies and Kevin Martin, Executive Director, Peace Action. All are welcome this Sunday, March 14, 3-5 p.m. at Oakland Mills Interfaith Center Meeting House, 5885 Robert Oliver Place, Columbia, MD 21045.

This event is sponsored by Howard County Coalition for Peace and Justice. Contact Virginia Rodino, 202-465-0918 for more information.

The partisan divide on climate science has been growing for a while, as I discussed in a 2008 review of the Gallup polling.  No surprise, really, since the anti-science disinformation campaign uses “experts” that are more credible to conservatives, and that disinformation is repeated to death on conservative media outlets.

Now Gallup has updated its polling and just now released its own analysis, “Conservatives’ Doubts About Global Warming Grow,” with this fascinating ideological breakdown that shows how the divide has grown in the past 2 years:

Josh Nelson at Enviroknow explains further:

Newly released Gallup polling seems to show a sharp drop in the percentage of Americans who know about, are concerned about and understand the threat of global warming.

The piece leads with a graph showing a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who think the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated:

When I saw this I immediately assumed the increase was due to the changing opinions of Republicans, and did not reflect a general trend within the broader population. As Joseph Romm has demonstrated, the GOP’s understanding of climate science has been on a steady decline for years. More evidence of this here and here.

See also my February 2009 post on Rasmussen’s polling, “Disinformers are still mostly duping only GOP voters.”  I would also note that in recent years, many voters have shifted identification from GOP to independent, which has made both groups relatively more conservative.

I do think there are other factors at play — 2008 and 2009 were not unusually warm years in North America, many progressives and enviros have been convinced by dubious polling analysis to downplay talk of climate science, the media has gone back to a he-said, she-said formulation that gives equal time to the most fringe contrarian views,  and so on.  I’ll discuss these more below.

In the piece, Gallup notes that “evidence from last year showed that the issue of global warming was becoming heavily partisan in nature, and it may be that the continuing doubts about global warming put forth by conservatives and others are having an effect.” I’ll say.

Gallup has provided EnviroKnow with the full cross-tabs, which are available below. To illustrate the fact that the shifts shown in the poll are largely partisan in nature, I’ve produced a series of graphs based on the cross-tabs.

Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply, far beyond what 99% of people I talk to realize, even highly informed people:

See also this new RealClimate post, “Sealevelgate.”

That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.  Certainly the messaging has not merely been poor, but many progressives and environmentalists have actually been persuaded to downplay or stop talking about climate science and global warming entirely in recent years (see Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ — and that’s a good thing).

The conservative disinformers, however, have kept pushing hard on the “global warming is exaggerated” meme, abetted by see-no-evil editors (see “The day DC journalism died: Washington Post is staffed with people who found ZERO mistakes in George Will’s error-filled denial column” and “John Tierney makes up stuff, just like George Will — does the New York Times also employ several know/do-nothing fact checkers?“).  As EnviroKnow puts it:

Reasonable people can disagree on policy solutions for dealing with problems we face as a society. But the Republican party is playing a different game entirely. Republicans and conservative thought-leaders — at the behest of the corporate polluters who bankroll their campaigns — have made a conscious decision to deny the science in order to advance their political agenda. Put simply, they seem to think they are entitled to their own facts. Unfortunately for them, and ultimately for the rest of us as well, physics doesn’t give a damn about politics.

Even (semi)serious former Republican  leaders on climate like Sen. John McCain and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, have been walking away from the issue and even “smart” new candidates are forced to play dumb:  Asked about whether he agrees with scientists that humans are changing the climate, GOP candidate for MA governor says, “I absolutely am not smart enough to believe I know the answer to that question.’’

And of course many in the media figure they “did” catastrophic global warming in 2006 and 2007, so of course that ain’t news any more. And the media keeps downplaying or omitting the link between extreme weather occuring now and global warming (see CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change and my entire media category).

And of course the media tends to ignore climate impacts (i.e. the cost of inaction) when it discusses climate economics, while rarely failing to report the wild overestimations of the cost of action by conservatives and fossil fuel companies — thus again leaving the public with impression that the danger of global warming is being oversold (see Must-read study: How the press bungles its coverage of climate economics — “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress”).

And the media has more recently been “Exaggerating Denialism,” using the stolen emails and some trivial mistakes by the IPCC to give voice to the most extreme disinformer views with unbalanced climate coverage.

Now throw in a 2008 and 2009 were not unusually warm years in the U.S. — a cold summer in much of the country and a much over-hyped cold spell this winter that fits the disinformer-spun and media-pushed myth of global cooling — and you have the perfect storm in this country for these kind of poll numbers.

Finally, the public sees that we aren’t taking action.  And that would appear to be prima facie evidence to them that this is not a serious problem.  It is awful hard to convince people a problem is serious when nobody is doing anything about it.

Polls, however, don’t change the scientific realities.  This is still likely to be the hottest year on record and the evidence for human-caused warming is just going to get stronger and stronger.  Also, scientists and others have finally figured out we are in a street fight, so maybe their messaging will improve.  Thus, these poll numbers strike me as likelier to get better than worse, especially for Democrats and independents.  Another good piece of news is that young people seem to be more impervious to disinformation:

Unfortunately, conservatives and conservative-leaning independents are only likely to be significantly moved once their leaders and their media outlets start reporting the science, rather than the disinformation.  Until that happens, the partisan divide on climate change will not be bridged.