Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head at a constituent outreach event in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson on Saturday. In all, the gunman shot 18 people, killing 6, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl.
Jamelle Bouie of TAPPED urges President Obama to take up the issue of mental health care in his upcoming speech on the mass shooting. Several people who knew the alleged shooter came forward with stories of bizarre behavior and run-ins with campus police at his community college. College administrators ordered him to seek treatment before he returned to school, but he does not appear to have done so.
H. Clarke Romans of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona explained to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that mental health services in Arizona have been devastated by budget cuts.
In 2008 the state eliminated support services for all non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and stopped covering most brand-name psychiatric drugs. At least 28,000 Arizonans were affected. Arizonans with mental illnesses can expect even more cuts in the future as the state slashes spending in an attempt to address its budget shortfall.
In AlterNet, Adele Stan, argues that, while we don't yet know the gunman's motives, the right wing's intensifying campaign of anti-government hysteria and violent rhetoric may have emboldened an already disturbed person:
Had the vitriolic rhetoric that today shapes Arizona's political landscape (and, indeed, our national landscape) never come to call, Loughner may have found a different reason to go on a killing spree. But that vitriol does exist as a powerful prompt to the paranoid, and those who publicly deem war on the federal government a patriot's duty should today be doing some soul-searching.
The Greater Hudson Chamber of Commerce has had enough: It's so fed up with the shameless politicking that's being done in its name that it disaffiliated from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this month.
Think Progress has more on the US Chamber of Commerce's foreign money-laundering operation. Specifically in the form of funding by top offshoring companies :
The Chamber's anti-American jobs agenda serves not only the profit-seeking of right-wing corporate executives in the United States, but also works to send jobs overseas to the following outsourcing companies, who are some of the dozens of foreign corporations that pay member dues to the Chamber of Commerce's 501c(6) account, which is used to fund its political ads:
InfoSys, Bangalore, India (at least $15,000 in annual member dues): "Infosys is the 'Best Outsourcing Partner' according to the Waters Rankings for the third consecutive year."
KPIT Cummins, Pune, India ($7,500): "Strategic global networking, together with industry-proven practices & processes, give KPIT Cummins a cutting edge in the realm of outsourcing."
Patni Americas, Mumbai, India ($15,000): "Patni, the world leader in IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing provides offshore software development, global sourcing, custom software development, and a vast array of product engineering and IT services to companies worldwide."
Rolta, Mumbai, India ($7,500): "Rolta's global footprint and track record along with its capable off-shoring model gives it a unique positioning in this large market."
SKP Crossborder Consulting, Mumbai, India ($7,500): "SKP's core outsourcing practice is managed out of a fully equipped, spacious premises based in Pune with access to facilities in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore."
Tata Group, Mumbai, India ($15,000): "[W]orld-class solutions in outsourcing - business process outsourcing, application outsourcing, infrastructure outsourcing."
Talk about being caught with your hand in the cookie jar!
This doesn't really surprise me a bit, after dealing with the California State Chamber of Commerce as a journalist for the past 8 years. The state Chamber has a regular practice of taking all the bills it doesn't like and putting it on their list of "job-killer" bills, whether the charge even makes any sense in their twisted worldview or not. My favorite from this years list? SB 967, a bill that would "provide a 5% preference... to a business... when 90% of the employees of the business performing work on the contract reside in the state." So, this bill would "kill jobs" in California by requiring a preference for companies that keep jobs in California!
Take a look at it and some other Chamber doozies on the flip:
A couple of weeks back I suggested that the strong possibility that the Chamber and Rove's American Crossroads group were taking and using money from foreign companies for their scores of millions of dollars in attack ads was the biggest story of this election cycle. This money comes from undisclosed sources, and the secretive nature of these millions in contributions raises huge doubts about who these sources are, what their motives are, and what industries and countries they come from. We know the Chamber is taking a minimum of over $800,000 from foreign companies, and the total is likely many millions more- the 800 is what researchers have been able to find from a smattering of public materials, but we know there is more the Chamber isn't telling us. The Chamber and Rove deny they are using foreign money for their ad campaign, but since they vehemently, adamantly refuse to disclose their donors, we can't know the truth. If it is not foreign money, fine: just tell us how much Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, BP, Massey Mining, Prudential and all the rest of your corporate special interest friends are giving.
The White House and other Democrats have been right to jump all over this: this is as fundamental issue to our democracy as there is. Tim Kaine raised the stakes again today, suggesting that the potential scandal involved was as big a deal as Watergate. My only disagreement is that in many ways, this is worse. The slush fund money Dick Nixon's operation raised and spent was penny ante compared to the money being raised today.
Corporate special interests are trying to buy this election. What voters need to do is to think, whenever another nasty attack ad comes on the tube paid for the Chamber, American Crossroads, or some groups with a mysterious name you have never heard, ask yourself:
Where did they get the money for that ad?
Why did the companies giving millions of dollars to run this ad want to help the Republican candidate they are helping?
What sweetheart deals will the candidates they are helping be doing for those big contributors?
Why should we believe anything we are seeing on this ad, given the people paying for it don't want you to know who is behind it?
If this sleazy, secretive strategy works for Rove and the Chamber, and if nothing is done to require disclosure of these fat cat donors, our democracy truly is in trouble for a long time to come. Let's hope the voters ask themselves those questions.
The Democratic Party is spending nearly 100 million dollars raised in part from foreign contributions to help elect more immigration reform minded men and women to Congress.
If you happen to be a conservative of the Grand Old tea Party variety, how does such startling "amnesty" related news make you feel?
Suspicious? Fearful? Angry? Perhaps even more xenophobic than usual?
Each of those emotional responses would be expected from tea partiers had the Democratic Party actually taken this foreign money -- it has not.
The "U.S." Chamber of Commerce however, is a different story entirely.
Unfortunately, as so often happens, the ginned-up [not] ground zero [not] mosque controversy has overshadowed a much more telling story this week--the Chamber of Commerce lashing out against women's equality on the anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and then beating a hasty retreat after getting called on it. It was actually so far out as to be comical, with the Chamber actually chastising women for their grubby materialism, specifically, "a Scrooge-like fetish for money."
I'd like to do a quick run-through, for any who might have missed it, and then dig down a bit deeper into the Chambers essential use of "choice" as a means for rationalizing inequality. In the law review article, "Blame Frame: Justifying (Racial) Injustice in America", Jon and Kathleen Hanson explain that "choice" is one of the three most prominent rationalizations that have historically been used to justify the enormous gap between our abstract ideology of equality and the cold hard facts of injustice. Although their focus is on racial injustice, it fits just as nicely with this example of gender injustice as well.
Chamber Blames Women For Pay Gap: They Should Choose The Right 'Place To Work' And 'Partner At Home'
Today is the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted the right to vote to women. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decided to use this day of equal rights for women to argue that women are now to blame for unequal pay in the workplace. On the organization's official blog, ChamberPost, Senior Director of Communications Brad Peck today makes the argument that the pay gap between men and women in the American workforce - women currently earn roughly 77 cents to every dollar a man earns - is "the result of individual choice rather than discrimination." He argues that, instead of bold legislative action being taken to help correct this pay gap, women should pick the "obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home":
Most of the current "pay gap" is the result of individual choice rather than discrimination. [...]
It is true that culturally speaking women are more likely to have to make the tough choices about work-life balance. But as we all seek to fit our values into a dynamic 24/7 economy, let's not overlook the obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home.
Peck's argument that women could close the pay gap by simply choosing jobs in better paying fields and marrying wealthier men is based on a faulty premise - that the pay gap in the United States between genders exists because women choose to work for less and men choose to work for more.
While it's true that women sometimes migrate into fields that have lower pay, what Peck ignores is that even within the same occupation, women are paid less. For example, data collected by the Census Bureau in 2007 shows that "female secretaries...earn just 83.4% as much as male ones" and female truck drivers "earn just 76.5% of the weekly pay of their male counterparts." A report put out this year by the University of Minnesota finds that women in that state are "are paid $11,000 dollars less each year than men with the same jobs." A 2007 American Association of University Women report compared men and women with similar "hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors normally associated with pay" and found that "college-educated women still earn less than their male peers earn"; the report concludes that workplace discrimination is the culprit in the wage gap.
And Michael Whitney's takedown at FDL included this handy-dandy recapitulation of the some of the Chamber's greatest hits against women:
Big business, bolstered by the terrible Citizens United decision allowing them to spread corporate money to buy elections, is throwing money around like there is no tomorrow. Here are a couple of the most egregious examples:
1. Target has become the poster child for bad corporate behavior in the CU-style corporate spending in elections realm, giving over $150,000 to an effort to help elect far right wing Tom Emmer in the Minnesota Governor's race. Emmer wants to abolish the minimum wage, gave money to a group that condoned the death penalty for being gay, and loves Arizona's immigration law. MoveOn.org, LGBT groups, and other progressives have pushed back, launching a campaign to target Target for this behavior. We need to show corporate America that if they want to spend their corporate money backing right wing candidates, it will hurt their brand and their bottom line.
Check out the MoveOn campaign, add your name, and get involved here.
2. The Chamber of Commerce is sliming Alexi Giannoulias with a nasty personal attack ad. Giannoulias has been making his campaign about taking on big corporate interests - his reform platform echoes MoveOn's Clean UP Washington Corporate Corruption campaign. He has been making these very strong reform proposals the centerpiece of his campaign so far, and because he takes on special interest corporate control of DC, the Chamber has decided to make an example of him.
The political problem is that Alexi doesn't have much money, and the Chamber has a ton, mostly raised from the very biggest corporations. This is a crucial time for the progressive community to get behind Alexi and make a major push for him. Sending him some money is a good way to push back at a Chamber of Commerce that is working hard to keep DC safe for corporate lobbyists.
The Chamber of Commerce is at it again, once again misleading the public on the factual record of our flawed trade policies. In a report released today, the Chamber makes claims of massive export and job gains from our "free trade agreements" (FTAs).
But the actual data show that these pacts, currently in place with 17 countries, have been a dismal failure. On the whole, the U.S. has a $54 billion non-oil deficit with these countries, including a trade deficit with Mexico and Canada that has grown 848 percent over the period.
To repeat, this growth is not caused by oil, but by a loss of competitiveness in the U.S. manufacturing and agriculture sectors vis a vis our two most significant FTA partners. There are many ways to calculate the job loss from these trends, but any honest method comes up with a negative job impact from our FTAs in the millions of jobs.
An honest analysis of the data show that actually U.S. export growth to our FTA partners has been slower than with non-FTA counties - between 1998 and 2008, total goods exports to non-FTA partners grew 47.0 percent faster than exports to FTA partners. Translated into dollar terms, this FTA export penalty amounted to $25 billion in lost potential exports for 2008 alone. And utilizing the job multiplier assumed by the Chamber, this penalty accounted for 302,585 jobs that could have softened the blow of the Great Recession. (See after the fold for more detail.)
Our own Lori Wallach responded to these points in our official statement on the Chamber report:
The implication of the actual FTA record for President Obama's laudable goal of doubling exports in the next five years is clear: there are many ways to increase exports and support jobs, but FTAs ain't one.
I suspect that more Americans are likely to believe reports of UFO sightings than Chamber of Commerce claims about trade agreements creating millions of jobs for them, given many Americans have personally experienced the damage wrought by the job-killing trade deals pushed by the Chamber on behalf of their serial-offshoring multinational corporate members. It's high time that corporate lobbyists stopped lying to the U.S. public about job and export gains from FTAs that never materialize.
If the Chamber supports trade expansion, then instead of serving up another batch of cooked numbers trying to defend the damaging trade agenda of the past that most Americans fiercely reject and that is dead in Congress, the Chamber should help promote the TRADE Act, which rebuilds consensus for trade expansion by providing new trade terms that can benefit more people.
American public opinion polling systematically shows bipartisan opposition across numerous demographics and regions to U.S. trade agreement regime characterized by NAFTA. Already in the 2010 election cycle, opposition to the very pacts the Chamber is a prominent feature of Democratic and GOP House and Senate races. During the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, 72 representatives and senators who supported the status quo were replaced by those who campaigned on trade reform.
The debate over measures to fix America's broken labor laws took a back seat during the long debate on health care. Now that the focus has shifted to efforts to stimulate economic growth and job creation, it's time to put workers' rights front and center.
If you go to the website for the US Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), America's "voice of business" that claims to represent the interests of over 3 million businesses, it feels like you've found the site for a right wing advocacy group. There are clips from FOX News (that aren't making fun of them), attacks on healthcare and financial regulatory reform, and links to Wall Street Journal op-eds claiming that America has more to fear from the political influence of labor unions than from corporations with annual profits in the billions. The implication is clear -- American businesses have right wing values.
However, this assertion was challenged in 2009 when USCOC announced its opposition to attempts by the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. USCOC said that doing so would "strangle the economy", called for a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" as if human-caused climate change was yet to be proven, and threatened to sue the EPA if it decided to act without holding the trial. In response, Nike resigned from USCOC's board of directors, and major companies like Apple, Pacific Gas and Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon left USCOC completely.
It turns out that when it comes to climate change, US businesses aren't so conservative after all. That's why a group like American Businesses for Clean Energy (ABCE) is so important. And if you own a business and believe the US should be doing more to fight climate change and help support the clean energy economy (which is creating jobs at 2.5 times the rate as the rest of the economy), you should seriously consider joining ABCE.
ABCE represents over 2,500 businesses of all shapes and sizes, including big companies like Gap Inc. and Warner Music Group as well as small local businesses from Al's Painting in Ann Arbor, MI to Zoey's Pizza in Manchester, NH. You don't need to be a business that focuses on green products or services to join -- all are welcome. There are no fees or dues to pay, no meetings to attend, no further obligations, and ABCE will not engage in any lobbying on your behalf. You don't need to resign from any other business coalitions. All you have to do to join is visit ABCE's website and enter some basic information about your business.
That's it. You're done. But you will have done something incredibly important.
On Thursday afternoon, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) pulled out a rarely-used Congressional tool in an attempt to keep the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating carbon and other greenhouse gasses. Sen. Murkowski offered a "resolution of disapproval" of the EPA's impending action, which would limit companies' carbon emissions.
The resolution would overturn the EPA's finding that carbon dioxide is harmful to the public health. Three Democrats-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)-joined Sen. Murkowski and 35 Republicans in sponsoring the resolution.
"Ms. Murkowski's Mischief'"
"This command and control approach is our worst option for reducing the gasses associated with climate change," said Sen. Murkowski on the floor of the Senate yesterday. She called the EPA's actions "backdoor climate regulations with no input from Congress" and said they would damage the country's flailing economy.
The EPA first announced in April 2009 that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses posed a threat to the public health. The agency formalized that finding last month, giving itself the power to regulate emissions of greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. In March 2010, for instance, the agency is expected to announce carbon emissions rules for the auto industry that would match California's higher standards. Sen. Murkowski's resolution would derail that process.
Sen. Murkowski argued that she wants to give Congress room to come up with a legislative solution to climate change, but her critics see a more dangerous tilt to her resolution. "It's a radical attempt by the legislative branch to interfere with executive branch scientists," writes David Roberts at Grist.
Responding to "Ms. Murskowski's mischief" on the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called the resolution an "unprecedented effort to overturn scientific decision" and "a direct assault on the health of the American people."
Resolution of disapproval
What is a "resolution of disapproval?" Grist's Roberts called it "the nuclear option."
"It would rescind the EPA's endangerment finding entirely and thereby eliminate its authority over both mobile and stationary sources," Roberts explains. "Furthermore, the administration would be prohibited from passing a regulation "substantially the same" as the one overruled, so the constraint on the EPA would effectively be permanent."
This type of resolution was created by the Clinton-era Congressional Reform Act. The resolution has one big advantage: It cannot be filibustered. Passage requires only a majority in both houses of Congress. Members have tried using it in the past to delay the Dubai Ports World deal, derail FCC regulations on new media, and stop the flow of bailout funds.
Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones has been following Sen. Murkowski's actions closely. She reports that "Senate supporters of climate action say Murkowski could obtain the votes of moderate Democrats from coal, oil, and manufacturing states. However, a resolution would still need to be approved by the House and signed by the president-both long shots, to put it mildly. 'I think we're a little worried about [Murkowski's resolution] winning. I'm not sure we're worried about it becoming law,' a Senate Democratic staffer says."
But Grist's Roberts argues that passage in the Senate alone would be a problem. "Even if blocked by the House or vetoed by the president, such a public, bipartisan slap at the administration would be highly embarrassing and demoralizing," Roberts writes. "It would mean at least ten conservative Democrats washing their hands of the administration's initiative."
Climate change and Congress
Sen. Murkowski insists that she's still ready to work with her colleagues on climate change and that it's better to approach the problem of climate change via legislation, not regulation.
But no one in Washington believes that climate change legislation is going to pass-even come to the Senate floor-any time soon. The issue was already in line behind health care, and the election of Republican candidate Scott Brown to Sen. Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat this week means that none of the bills that the Senate is working on are likely to come to a vote this year.
"There was hope that the [climate] bill would come to the floor in the spring," writes Steve Benen at Washington Monthly. "Regrettably, a narrow majority of Massachusetts voters have made it significantly more likely that Congress won't address the problem at all. Proponents focused on solutions have vowed to "persist," but Massachusetts has made a difficult situation considerably worse."
The role of special interests
Sen. Murkowski has come under criticism for allowing Bush-era EPA administrators, now lobbyists representing clients on climate change issues, to help her craft an earlier amendment cracking down on the EPA. Yesterday, she said that those criticisms are "categorically false."
But as JP Leous reports at Care2, Sen. Murkowski does receive substantial backing from energy industries that oppose climate change legislation and regulation.
"According to OpenSecrets.org Sen. Murkowski has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from polluting companies, and some of her biggest campaign contributors in recent years include firms with fossil-fueled motives like Exxon Mobil Corp," Leous writes "Add those dots into the mix and a different picture emerges - and it starts to look like a person who is poised to introduce legislation next week attacking the Clean Air Act."
On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Boxer charged, "Why would the Senate get in the business of repealing science? Because that's what the special interests want to have happen now. Because they're desperate."
The Democratic Senators who co-sponsored the resolution also come from energy producing states where companies object to the new EPA regulations.
If at first you don't succeed...
If Sen. Murkowski's resolution does pass the Senate, there's little chance it will pass the House as well. But this isn't the only option that regulation opponents are looking at to fight the EPA. The Chamber of Commerce and other groups are planning to challenge the regulatory action in court, as Mother Jones' Sheppard reports.
Last week, these opponents met to discuss their strategy. What's interesting, Sheppard says, is that "the group was apparently divided on the best course of action. The Hill observes that "two camps have emerged." One wants to challenge whatever rules the EPA issues, while another wants to question the science of global warming itself."
We're back to that old saw? With legislation off the table, the fight over climate change, for now, is in the regulatory arena.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
By proposing financial reforms that won't curb Wall Street excess, U.S. policymakers have offered an unacceptably weak response to our enormous financial crisis. If voters don't demand that their elected representatives help workers and consumers instead of simply boosting corporate profits, the economic downturn will last for several more years and leave the economy vulnerable to another bank-induced meltdown.
The banks have unbelievable lobbying clout. In an interview with Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks, Heather Booth, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform, describes how one-sided the Wall Street reform fight has been. Despite broad public support for a fundamental financial overhaul, going up against the bank lobby is, as Booth describes, "a David and Goliath fight." It's basically Americans for Financial Reform against every major corporation in the U.S.
Booth notes that the Chamber of Commerce has vowed to spend $100 million on a campaign to defend the "so-called free enterprise system"-you know, the "free market"-in which corporate lobbyists spend millions of dollars to write the rules of the economic game. Just seven financial lobby groups have spent a massive $147 million peddling influence over the past two years.
In fact, as Janine Wedel observes for Salon, the U.S. economic system is starting to look an awful lot like the clannish systems of government that looted Eastern European countries in the early 1990s. Today, the public good takes a backseat to the narrow interests of powerful corporations.
With the Obama administration working with advisers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, we're not just watching Wall Street write its own regulations. We're watching the financial sector re-write the official role of the government in the economy. In this new role, the government's top priority is securing profits for corporate America.
"The intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market," Wedel writes.
GRITtv's Laura Flanders echoes this theme in an interview with John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and journalist Russ Baker. Lobbyists have so thoroughly hijacked the U.S. economy, Perkins argues, that the nation's government now resembles those of Latin American nations he worked with in the 1980s and 1990s.
"I don't think the U.S. president has much power these days, to be honest with you. . . . It's the big corporate executives who call the shots today, and let's face it, they financed Obama's campaign," Perkins says.
The very efforts the government deployed to save the financial system are being perverted to create another disaster. In a five-part interview with Paul Jay of The Real News, Jane D'Arista, an influential economist and author of The Evolution of U.S. Finance, explains how Wall Street destroyed itself over the past decade. By borrowing massive amounts of money, Wall Street was able to place bigger bets in the capital markets casino, resulting in huge profits when those bets paid off. But when the bets backfired, the losses were just as massive. Companies couldn't pay them off, so the government stepped in to support them.
One of those support mechanisms came from the Federal Reserve, which began making incredibly cheap loans to firms that engaged predominantly in speculative trading. The Fed used to lend exclusively to commercial banks, which used the money to make loans that helped grow the real economy. But now those loans are being used to support risky securities trading, so we're seeing big profits in the financial sector, without much help for workers and consumers. This is a major long-term problem-if the economy can't keep pace with the Wall Street casino, those speculative trades are going to backfire and we'll be right back to the chaos of September 2008, only with an even weaker economy.
All hope is not lost. As Perkins and Baker emphasize in their interview with Flanders, citizens have to demand corporate accountability and a government that actually serves the public good. For much of the past decade in Latin America, governments have been elected that stood up to major corporations and demanded that they stop pillaging their nation's resources at the people's expense.
In addition to demanding much stronger reforms for the financial sector, we have to demand that the government respond seriously to problems facing workers. With the unemployment rate at 10.2% and expected to go still higher, we need jobs. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama's economic stimulus package helped stave off total economic devastation. What we need now is another stimulus to get people back to work, not just slow the pace of job losses.
"A bold, ambitious jobs bill can make a huge difference-the stimulus got us out of the ditch, a new effort can get us going in the right direction again," Benen writes.
And the only argument against this plan is that we "can't afford it." That is-the government's fiscal deficit is too high, and we just can't spend money to help people in real economic trouble.
But as Christopher Hayes writes for The Nation, the deficit excuse is pretty pathetic. Economic stimulus bolsters economic growth, thus improving tax returns for the government in the future. And any spending on any project can be taken out of the budget from other measures. Hayes notes that our massive military spending is almost never included in discussions about "fiscal responsibility." If we were really worried about how much it would cost to fix the economy, we could stop spending so much money killing people.
"Fiscal conservatism and deficit concern is nearly always code speak in Washington for something else," Hayes writes. "Most often, when someone in Washington says they're concerned about the deficit, what they're really saying is, 'I would like to make sure we have a government that focuses maximally on blowing people up.'"
The government has to start saying 'no' to corporate America. Corporate profits are not the same thing as a strong economy. We need to demand an economic policy that answers to workers, not just bank balance sheets.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce's recent actions on two of the most important issues facing our country, healthcare reform and climate change, are a complete riddle to not only me, but to many of the chamber's own members and former supporters.
After several prominent members left the Chamber of Commerce over its prehistoric climate change policies, the organization appeared to do an about-face on its climate stance during a press conference on Monday. Sound too good to be true? It was. Members of the Yes Men, a group of satirical, anti-corporate activists, posed as Chamber of Commerce officials and held a fake press conference claiming that "There is only one sound way to do business: That's to support a strong climate-change bill quickly, so that this December in Copenhagen, President Obama can lead the entire business world in ensuring our long-term prosperity." In reality, the Chamber has not changed their climate stance and continues to oppose climate change legislation. The Yes Men's stunt is just one more in a chain of hoaxes this Autumn, including a boy in a balloon, death panels on health care reform, and recent allegations that radical Islamists are using interns to infiltrate Capitol Hill.
STATE BLOGS
