To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of control. Like so much in the American system, it was not devilishly contrived by some master plotters; it developed naturally out of the needs of the situation.

JillStein.org   Facebook

She and her campaign manager Ben Manski have scheduled a stop at the Occupy DE site at Spencer Plaza (800 N. French St, 19802) Jan. 19, 3-5 pm, on her trip to Occupy Congress and her tour of Occupy camps to meet with the regional Occupy folks.

War is Over...

The U.S. drew the curtain on a war that killed 4,487 Americans, by the Pentagon's count, and more than 100,000 Iraqis.

The conflict also left another 32,000 Americans and far more Iraqis wounded, and drained more than $800 billion from the U.S. treasury.

It was a long and vicious war that was launched to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and plunged the nation into a bloodbath between rival Muslim sects.

"With this withdrawal, the Americans are leaving behind a destroyed country, they left thousands of widows and orphans. The Americans did not leave a free people and country behind them. In fact, they left a ruined country and a divided nation."

It was hard to find an Iraqi on Thursday who did not celebrate the exit of what they called American occupiers, neither invited nor welcome in a proud country whose capital, Baghdad, was once among the world's great centers of culture and learning.

al-Qaida in Iraq became the terror movement's largest and most dangerous franchise, attracting fighters from North Africa to Asia for a war that lingers on through suicide bombings and assassinations.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar, in his own testimony, described it as a cost of doing business.

The U.S.'s "refusal to finance our three current wars with taxes on those who are profiting most from it."

Consumption, Not CO2 Emissions: Reframing Perspectives on Climate Change and Sustainability

Colbert

Stephen Colbert formed a corporation in Delaware to illustrate the abuse of the state's laws to fund political campaigns.

"I think the hard part for me to figure out is whether people will just laugh or take it seriously."

As McCorquodale points out, the courts have ruled that corporations are persons and corporate money is speech.

Free speech is, of course, a constitutional right of persons, so the courts are saying that corporations can spend on politics as freely as people can speak. But because real people rarely have the kind of money corporations have, they wind up “second-class citizens in the political arena.”

And who spends corporate money? The managers who run the corporations. They speak disproportionately loudly in the public arena with money that is not theirs and without personal accountability.

Corporate personhood gives them a megaphone that drowns out our individual voices. This is not fair. The right of free speech applies only to responsible and accountable speech, and it must be available equally to all citizens.

Madeline Gutin Perri
Mark Perri
Wilmington

Letter to the Editors of the News Journal, Labor Day, 2011

CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE

Dave McCorquodale, GPDE Treasurer and Delaware's Move To Amend

Corporations and people were not meant to be equal

In his opinion Justice John Paul Stevens said " ... corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Most readers probably agree with Stevens' opinion, but he wrote the minority dissent. The majority of the court used this case to again expand the "rights" corporations have.

Although the U.S. Constitution never mentions corporations, over the course of two centuries, the Supreme Court has gradually expanded what corporations are allowed to do by viewing them as "persons" with the same human rights as people.

This has culminated in the narrow decision of Citizens United, which overturned the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and thus allows corporations to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns.

Whether or not you were for the McCain-Feingold law, the law was based on the democratic legislative process. But it took only five activist judges to completely overturn that process and discard any attempt to rein in corporations' power to influence with money.

Few people have anything like the resources of large corporations. Therefore most people have become virtual second-class citizens in the political arena. Politicians, ever in need of money to finance their next election campaign, can never change the perception that they are influenced by the big money.

People on different sides of the political spectrum can disagree on many issues. But here is a first principle, with which people from many viewpoints can agree:

The constitution was written for people, not corporations; activist judges over two centuries have distorted the meaning of "people" to include corporations. It's time to eliminate the undue power of corporations in the political process.

Already corporations use their influence in the federal government to overturn laws of state or municipal governments.

This has culminated in the narrow decision of Citizens United, which overturned the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and thus allows corporations to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns.

As local and state governments innovate and advocate, the federal government has placed barriers in their way. Increasingly, Congress has legislated, the President mandated, and the Supreme Court adjudicated away the 10th Amendment reservation of power to the states, and by extension, in home rule states, to local governments.

Scorning the constitutional guarantee of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers, and belittling state constitutional provisions guaranteeing limited "home rule" authority to municipalities and counties, corporate lobbyists have developed a doctrine of "federal preemption" as a tool for obliterating local and state laws deemed threatening to corporations.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 severely limited the ability of local governments to regulate local cable markets, and recently introduced legislation would preempt municipal broadband networks.

A petition has been created to gather signatures to show that large numbers of people support the amendment effort. It states:

"We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

"Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

"Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our vote and participation count.

"Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate 'preemption' actions by global, national, and state governments."

Please check MoveToAmend.org. Sign the petition.

Sign the online petition supporting a constitutional amendment at www.MoveToAmend.org

Cost of Coal $500 billion/year in US

Full cost accounting for the life cycle of coal (pdf)

Dr. Paul Epstein on Full Cost of Coal (video)

Accounting for total harm from coal would add more than 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated

August 30, 2011, 10:27 pm, Keystone XL, Monsanto...Game Over?

I wasn’t surprised when the administration of George W. Bush sacrificed the environment for corporate profits. But when the same thing happens under a Democratic administration, it’s depressing. With little or no public input, policies that benefit corporations regardless of the consequences continue to be enacted.

Lines Blur Between Candidates and PACs With Unlimited Cash

Come Home to the Green Party!

"I've long said the African American community gets the worst of both worlds: Democrats get their votes and they ignore them and Republicans don't get their votes, so they ignore them," said former state Sen. Charlie Copeland, a Republican."

 40 percent of all fresh water flowing down the Delaware River can be sucked up by the dozen largest industrial water users between Marcus Hook and Salem.

The Case for Young People and Nature: A Path to a Healthy, Natural, Prosperous Future

A gradually rising carbon price is the sine qua non, but it must be combined with a portfolio of other actions: energy research and development with demonstration programs; public investment in complementary infrastructure such as improved electric grids; global monitoring systems; energy efficiency regulations; public education and awareness; support for climate change mitigation and adaptation in undeveloped countries. In economic theory, within a nation or a common block of nations, a carbon trading system may be useful, but given the need for rapid global emissions reduction, a simple across-the-board carbon tax is the preferred approach from the standpoint of conservative economics (Mankiw, 2007).

The basic matter, however, is not one of economics. It is a matter of morality – a matter of intergenerational justice. The blame, if we fail to stand up and demand a change of course, will fall on us, the current generation of adults. Our parents honestly did not know that their actions could harm future generations. We, the current generation, can only pretend that we did not know.

The next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs. This is a demand-side slump; the evidence is grossly inconsistent with any other story. If we have the wrong kind of workers, then the right kind of workers must be in high demand, and either be in short supply or have rapidly rising wages. So where are these people? ...they’re doing a very good job of hiding. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by "hollowing out." And the hole in the middle has been getting wider.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic lack of action taken in Cancun because heads of states do not agree to some accords on reducing green house gases, women are no longer waiting.

Nukes and Climate Change

Climate change creates new flooding risks for U.S. nuclear reactors safety 

 Hurricane Irene Worse Because Of Global Warming

Sigourney Weaver: Coral Reefs Are Trying to Tell Us Something: We Must Break Our Addiction to Fossil Fuels

Labor Network For Sustainability

We can forge a better future. Climate-generated disasters will bring our doomed future into focus. The failure of political elites to adequately respond to these cascading crises will transform our political landscape and seed the ground for social movements. And if we prepare for the chaos and long battle ahead, our alternative vision will become a necessity rather than an impossibility.

Change the World

The Potomac-Raritan-Magothy aquifer system is one of the primary sources of potable water in the Coastal Plain of New Jersey, particularly in heavily developed areas along the Delaware River. In Pennsauken Township, Camden County, local drinking-water supplies from this aquifer system have been contaminated by hexavalent chromium at concentrations that exceed the New Jersey maximum contaminant level. In particular, groundwater at the Puchack well field has been adversely affected to the point where, since 1984, water is no longer withdrawn from this well field for public supply. The area that contains the Puchack well field was added to the National Priorities List in 1998 as a Superfund site.

The ground water at E.C. Electroplating Company had so much chromium in it it looked like Lime Gatorade when I sampled it back in 2007 or thereabouts.

'Erin Brockovich' chemical detected in Villanova water

Delaware Contamination

"The trajectory is so alarming that even if people pick little holes in the methodology the message that comes across here is overwhelming"

The report says the biggest impact on the global footprint of humanity is an 11-fold increase in carbon emissions in the last four decades. In another 40 years the footprint would double again.

The report, which is published just weeks before a major conference on slowing or halting the loss of biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, calls for a series of changes to help address the problems, including more protected areas, zero net deforestation, eliminating overfishing and destructive fishing practices, and finding ways to put a value on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

There also needed to be more support to sustainable alternatives to modern consumption, such as timber, fish, soy, and other commodities from well-managed sources, said WWF. Although government regulation was the ideal way to achieve this, consumers and businesses also needed to insist on such standards, said Butfield.

The reality of politics is government will only move a certain amount of the way, depending on how much they think consumers and businesses are behind them.

Democrats are just as evil as Republicans. Both are bought and paid for by their corporate masters. Neither serves YOUR best interests.

The plight of youth as a social and political category in an age of increasing symbolic, material and institutional violence is a crisis rooted in society's loss of any sense of history, memory and ethical responsibility.

Welcome to the new era of disposability in which market-driven values peddle policies that promote massive amounts of human suffering and death for millions of human beings.

Too many young people and adults are now pushed and pulled to seek and find individual solutions to socially created problems and implement those solutions individually using individual skills and resources. This ideology proclaims the futility (indeed, counterproductivity) of solidarity

The American public is awash in a craven and vacuous media machine that routinely tells us that people are angry, but offers no analysis capable of treating such anger as symptomatic of an economic system that creates massive inequalities, rewards the ultra rich and powerful and punishes everybody else.

We now live in a country in which the government allows entire populations and groups to be perceived and treated as disposable, reduced to fodder for the neoliberal waste management industries created by a market-driven society in which gross inequalities and massive human suffering are its most obvious byproducts.

The anger among the American people is more than justified by the suffering many people are now experiencing, but an understanding of such anger is stifled largely by right-wing organizations and rich corporate zombies who want to preserve the nefarious conditions that produced such anger in the first place. The result is an egregious politics of disconnection, not to mention a fraudulent campaign of lies and innuendos funded by shadowy, ultra right billionaires such as the Koch brothers, the loss of historical memory amply supported in dominant media such as Fox News and a massively funded depoliticizing cultural apparatus, all of which help to pave the way for the new barbarism and its increasing registers of cruelty, inequality, punishment and authoritarianism.

Driven largely by a handful of right-wing billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch and Sal Russo, this is a stealth politics masquerading as a grassroots movement.

They are no longer children to be nurtured, but a new market waiting to be mined for profits or an army used to fight immoral wars. When deemed necessary, these objectified youth are to be locked up away from the glitter of the shopping malls and the scrubbed and gated middle- and ruling-class communities that float above the dark cesspools of inequality they help to create.

Maybe it's time to reclaim the spirit of a diverse and powerful social movement willing to organize, speak out, educate and fight for the promise of a democracy that would do justice to the dreams of a generation of young people waiting for adults to prove the courage of their democratic convictions.

"The rich are still rich, and Delaware has a significant amount of wealth," said Paco Underhill, CEO of consulting firm Envirosell. "Some of the constraints on the rich in terms of conspicuous consumption have sort of been taken off over the last six months."

The Supreme Court’s recent ruling, allowing for unlimited corporate campaign contributions, has opened the floodgates to a system already awash in big money. Regardless of whether money is the deciding factor in most elections, in a contest between two corporately funded candidates, we all lose. Money makes politicians beholden to outside interests, distracts them from their jobs, and shuts good people out. What all this adds up to is the death of trust — the lifeblood of democracy – and that’s the one thing money can’t buy.

So long, Democracy, it’s been good to know you

"Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer."

Although Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, they were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

If this were a functioning democracy, our financial institutions would be helping everyday Americans and businesses get the mortgages and loans – the capital – they need to keep going; they’re not, even as the financiers are reaping robust awards.

We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it.

...a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds. "It’s coming to America."

“What are we to do? ORGANIZE! Yes, organize—and don’t count the costs.”

"It’s OK if it’s impossible; it’s OK! Now I’m going to speak to you as organizers. Listen carefully. The object is not to win. That’s not the objective. The object is to do the right and good thing. If you decide not to do anything, because it’s too hard or too impossible, then nothing will be done, and when you’re on your death bed, you’re gonna say, 'I wish I had done something.' But if you go and do the right thing NOW, and you do it long enough 'good things will happen—something’s gonna happen.'" -- Baldemar Velasquez

Energy companies are rushing to develop unconventional sources of oil and gas trapped in carbon-rich shales and sands throughout the western United States and Canada. So far, government officials have shown little concern for the environmental consequences of this new fossil-fuel development boom.

Tea Party, Inc.

The Tea Parties are billed as a people's movement. But they wouldn't exist without the help of deep-pocketed billionaires.

Wall Street Journal columnist Stephen Moore -- a member of the newspaper's editorial board and a former fellow at the Koch-funded Cato Institute -- told the gathering of Tea Party activists he thought global warming was "the greatest hoax of the last 100 years." He called the climate change agenda "not just evil, but…contrary to the free-market system that made this country great."

If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.

--Naomi Oreskes  vs. 
??

The Atlantic Wind Connection Project will serve 1.9m homes from New Jersey to Virginia with electricity from dozens of offshore windfarms

The World Is Run by Those Who Show Up

Propositions 23’s overwhelming defeat constitutes a clear mandate from California voters that they want the state to continue to take action on climate change and move towards a clean energy future.

Vermont nuclear power plant up for sale...two days after Peter E. Shumlin, a prominent opponent of the plant and the state Senate’s president pro tem, was elected governor.

Imagine a no-holds-barred “summit” that comes up with ideas to solve both our job and environmental problems. What might it come up with?

Climate sabotage on a global scale...

Tea Party climate change deniers funded by BP and other major polluters

BP, BASF, Bayer and Solvay, which are some of Europe's biggest emitters, had collectively donated $240,200 to senators who blocked action on global warming – more even than the $217,000 the oil billionaires and Tea Party bankrollers, David and Charles Koch, have donated to Senate campaigns. Think Globally, Sabotage Locally...Liar liar pants on fire

Opposition to action on global warming is spreading from 'big oil' to 'big chemical'

...smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer. [The Kochtopus] projected that if pollution were controlled it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.

...We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.

In the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History [!!!]:

An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

(see )

Warren E. Buffett: "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

Why Are Americans Just Letting the Super Rich Win?

The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!

They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves. [The Kochs are] at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.

The Last Gasp of Aging White Power  but time is not on your side
Youth Vote Against Republican Tsunami by 19 Points
MADD: mass-Attention Deficit Disorder

Koch brothers’ Tea Party connections confirmed

But the Guardian reports that footage has emerged showing David Koch at the podium during an AFP gala receiving direct and detailed reports from his astroturf AFP army on their efforts to organize tea parties around the nation.

Watch the clip from the new documentary (Astro)Turf Wars: How Corporate America Faked a Grassroots Revolution:

download ogg video

Thursday, Oct 21, 2010 17:15 ET

Secret memo displays corporate and media tentacles of the Kochtopus
Fresh evidence of the New York billionaires' midterm campaign implicates journalists as well as fat cats

Oct 20th, 2010 at 9:50 am

MEMO: Health Insurance, Banking, Oil Industries Met With Koch, Chamber, Glenn Beck To Plot 2010 Election
Koch Industries has dramatically boosted its own profits by using conservative front groups to manipulate public policy. The fusion between the “intellectual” conservative movement and big businesses opposed to regulations and accountability has a history in America dating back to the New Deal. During the thirties, the Du Pont family and other wealthy interests organized an assortment of “Liberty League” front groups to try to defeat New Deal agenda items and repeal President Roosevelt’s Social Security program. Now, corporations fund groups like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute — both had representatives at the Koch meeting — to further their lobbying agenda.

Oct 21st, 2010 at 7:30 pm

Polluter-Funded Groups Spending Almost $70 Million On Anti-Clean Energy Ads

Oct 20th, 2010 at 3:35 pm

What Role Have Scalia And Thomas Played In The Koch Money Machine?

David Koch: "If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent. And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding."

Koch Industries...the poster child of a company run amok.

The question comes down to whether we want a society in which the rich take an ever-increasing share of the pie, or prefer to return to conditions that allow all classes to anticipate an increasing standard of living. Demanding that the rich get a tax cut as a condition for tax relief for others is simply elitist. Tea Partiers, take note.

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During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. -- George Orwell

Bewitched by Wichita

... In the case of both the New Left and the Tea Partiers, a group of people with no political experience who are agitated about social issues create a movement based on shared ideals and personal relationships. The movement attracts media coverage as it gains supporters, and that media coverage fundamentally transforms it. Of course, the history of the Tea Party differs from that of the New Left in that the Koch brothers’ subsidy system preceded the movement as such, but the pervasive similarities remain. ...For a long time now, powerful men (Sarah Palin is a rare exception) have been seizing upon the fears and anxieties of ordinary people. They have been offering them comforting solutions to complicated problems in the form of marketing slogans. These marketing slogans have made people feel so good that they have willingly given their time and energy to work for the cause. Yet no matter what phrases or code words are employed, their ultimate purpose is, and always has been, to make rich men richer and powerful men more powerful.

As long as it's safer than oil... -- Carl Cook

As we learned from the Gulf oil spill, we realize that high-impact accidents do happen, and it's quite likely that no one has a clue about how to clean them up or deal with the emergency. -- Michele Boyd

Regulatory delays are not causing nuclear power's problems today. Instead, investors and lenders will not provide capital because of the high risks of reactor cancellation, cost of overruns, and cheaper energy alternatives.

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More than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.

Unless we change our present course soon, the future of human civilization will be in dire jeopardy.

"Building a coal-fired power plant today is betting that we are not going to put a serious financial cost on emitting carbon dioxide That may be true, but unless most of the scientists are way off the mark, that's pretty bad public policy."

And I think the U.S., in its inability to get in front on this issue, is abdicating its leadership to other countries around the world and going to find itself in a very difficult economic position in what many, including us, are calling the Industrial Revolution of the 21st century.

• BP May Be Barred From U.S. Contracts Under Plan Weighed by EPA | Business Week
• James Carville Takes On Obama On Oil Spill: He's 'Risking Everything' With 'Go Along With BP Strategy' | Huffington Post
• Experts testify on grim ecological fallout from Gulf oil spill | CNN
• Hurricane, Oil Spill Could Be Troubling Mix | NPR
• It's Bush's Oil Spill | Daily Beast
• Crime on the High Seas – the “Deepwater Horizon” Oil Rig Disaster | Daily Censored
• White House Covers Up Menacing Oil "Blob" | Oil Price
• BP refuses EPA order to switch to less-toxic oil dispersant | LA Times
• U.S. government slams BP for missed deadlines on spill | Reuters
• Give Kevin Costner Credit for BP Oil Spill Efforts | Opposing Views
• GOP Blocks Oil Spill Liability Bill | CBS
• The Gulf Oil Spill is a Crime Scene! | Associated Content
• The BP Blowout: Legal Claims and Questions | Jurist
• BP Oil Spill: Congressman Says 'Environmental Catastrophe' Worse Than Previously Thought;
  Rep. Edward Markey Criticizes BP as EPA Forces Change at Site of Leak