Patriotic Americans Like Obamacare So It Figures The Anti-American Conservative Media Lies About It

Patriotic Americans Like Obamacare So It Figures The Anti-American Conservative Media Lies About It

Time Warner's Charlotte News 14 omitted critical information about health care premium prices in a report leading up to state-based insurance exchanges opening on October 1 by only reporting average premium prices while omitting the subsidized prices many North Carolina residents would receive under the Affordable Care Act.

The September 25 report relied on data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which listed average subsidized prices for North Carolina residents:

    New estimates show people in North Carolina who shop for health insurance coverage on the federally run, online marketplace could pay more and have fewer choices than the national average.

    The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said premiums for a mid-range plan sold on the health exchange will be $379/month on average. The average cost for that same plan across 48 states will be $328 when the new health insurance markets start.

The figures provided by News 14 represents unsubsidized averages of all people under age 65 but does not tell the entire story for many North Carolina residents. A report by Families USA found that, if Medicaid had been expanded in North Carolina, 868,520 residents would be eligible for tax credits under the exchanges. Yet, as Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy for Families USA explained, this figure is a low estimate because the report assumed the state would expand Medicaid.

Of the more than 850,000 residents eligible for subsidized insurance, younger customers can expect to pay less and will have access to low-cost "catastrophic plans" that provides emergency coverage for people under 30.

Even without the catastrophic coverage plans, premium prices for young adults in North Carolina would be drastically lower than the average price for most individuals purchasing insurance, and they can choose from a variety of "bronze, silver, gold, and platinum plans in the Health Insurance Marketplace." According to an HHS release, a 27-year-old in the state making $25,000 a year can be covered for just $88 dollars a year after applying the tax credit. The same 27-year-old could get a "silver" plan for $145 a month.

Low-income families benefit even more from subsidies. A "bronze" level plan for a family of four making $50,000 can be purchased for $74 dollars a month after applying tax credits, with a "silver" plan costing $282 -- both well under the average price stated in the article.

Nationally, tax credits will allow 6.4 million people to purchase insurance for less than $100 each month. Including the subsidized prices for plans bought on the exchanges is critical to understanding true insurance costs because many of the new shoppers will be low-income uninsured, meaning they are most likely to be eligible for subsidies. As the Kaiser Family Foundation explained in a primer on the makeup of the uninsured:

    Most people without health coverage are in working families and have low incomes. Adults make up a disproportionate share of the uninsured population because they are less likely than children to be eligible for Medicaid. While a plurality of uninsured people are White non-Hispanic, racial/ethnic minorities are at especially high risk of being uninsured.

    [...]

    Health insurance makes a difference in whether and when people get necessary medical care, where they get their care, and ultimately, how healthy people are. The consequences of reduced access to care over time can be serious, including preventable hospitalizations, poor overall health, disability, and premature death.

These low- to mid-income individuals and families will be able to access subsidies based on 2013 poverty guidelines, which according the Miami Herald could mean subsidies for families as high as $10,000 a year:

    When the marketplace open enrollment period under the new health care law begins on Oct. 1, the tax credits will be ready and waiting for eligible citizens and legal residents who earn between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

    In 2013, that includes individuals earning from $11,490 to $46,000, two-person families earning between $19,530 and $78,120, and four-person families earning between $23,550 and $94,200 a year. Tax credit eligibility will be based on the 2013 federal poverty guidelines until the 2014 guidelines are determined.

    [...]

    The size of the tax credit for a person receiving insurance coverage under Obamacare could range from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000, based on family size, income and the cost of coverage in an individual's area.

    The amount will become known after submitting an online coverage application through the insurance marketplaces, which will be operated by either the states or the federal government. Once a person signs up for a marketplace health plan, the tax credit will be sent directly to the insurance company and applied to the plan member's monthly premiums in 2014.

Conservatives do not believe that patriots should have the freedom to have health insurance or even the right to live. That is not in any way an exaggeration. They say the right to health care is not in the constitution, but somewhere in their special copy it does say that patriots have the right to be miserable, in constant pain and die. In other words, conservatives believe in the same things a death cult believes in.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus Acts Like Soviet Propagandist, Spreads Wacky Death Panel Rumor

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus Acts Like Soviet Propagandist, Spreads Wacky Death Panel Rumor

On Sunday, CNN’s State of the Union invited Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus to offer what turned out to be little more than a dump of Republican talking points opposing the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare is “European, socialist style-type health care,” Priebus told CNN. He even claimed that Republicans — who have now voted to repeal Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions 40 different times — are the true defenders of people who are unable to obtain health insurance without health reform. And then he dropped the death panels line — “what people don’t want are government panels deciding whether something’s medically necessary.” Watch it:

Priebus’ decision to drop this line without any context whatsoever represents an innovation in Republican messaging against providing health care to millions of Americans. The “death panel” smear originally emerged on former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-AK) Facebook page, and was widely viewed at the time as an attack on a bipartisan proposal to enable Medicare to cover voluntary end-of-life counseling. After that proposal was dropped from the bill that ultimately became the Affordable Care Act, several Republicans — including Palin once again — retconned the term “death panels” to refer to a cost-cutting measure known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board or IPAB.

Although the IPAB is empowered to take some measures to bring down Medicare costs if those costs grow faster than a certain rate, it is expressly forbidden to take any action that might qualify as rationing care. Under the Affordable Care Act, no proposal generated by the IPAB may include “any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums under section 1818, 1818A, or 1839, increase Medicare beneficiary cost sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co-payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.” Moreover, it is not at all clear that the IPAB will do anything at all, because Medicare costs are currently not growing fast enough to trigger the IPAB’s authority.

So the first provision Republicans labeled as a “death panel” wasn’t actually a death panel, and it didn’t even make it into the law itself. The second provision they labeled a “death panel” also isn’t a death panel, and it may not actually do anything at all. Four years after Sarah Palin invented this canard, the Republican National Committee Chair is reduced to simply asserting, without context or explanation, that death panels exist — and hoping someone out there will still believe him.

It is difficult to say where Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus received his political education, from the old Soviet Communists or from read fascist literature. Either way disinformation campaigns like his, Sarah Palin and the Republican party are not American ideals. These radical conservatives will not be happy until they impose an Iranian style totalitarian theocracy on the USA. That is why they wear flag pins and talk about god and country so much, to cover their UnAmerican agenda. These wacko radicals believe that they can fool all the people all the time.

Americans Are Getting The Economic Shaft and The Conservative God of Privatization Is To Blame

Most rational Americans know what conservatives and right-wing libertarians worship by now, and it is not morality or common decency, 8 Ways Privatization Has Failed America

Health Care

Our private health care system is by far the most expensive system in the developed world. Forty-two percent of sick Americans skipped doctor's visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. The price of common surgeries is anywhere from three to ten times higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, Canada, France, or Germany. Some of the documented tales: a $15,000 charge for lab tests for which a Medicare patient would have paid a few hundred dollars; an $8,000 special stress test for which Medicare would have paid $554; and a $60,000 gall bladder operation, which was covered for $2,000 under a private policy.

As the examples begin to make clear, Medicare is more cost-effective. According to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, Medicare administrative costs are about one-third that of private health insurance. More importantly, our ageing population has been staying healthy. While as a nation we have a shorter life expectancy than almost all other developed countries, Americans covered by Medicare INCREASED their life expectancy by 3.5 years from the 1960s to the turn of the century.

Free-market health care has been taking care of the CEOs. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, made $1,845,000 in 2012. That's over ten times as much as the $170,000 made by the federal Medicare Administrator in 2010. Stephen J. Hemsley, the CEO of United Health Group, made three hundred times as much, with most of his $48 million coming from stock gains.

Water

A Citigroup economist gushed, "Water as an asset class will, in my view, become eventually the single most important physical-commodity based asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals."

A 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services. A more recent study confirms that privatization will generally "increase the long-term costs borne by the public." Privatization is "shortsighted, irresponsible and costly."

Numerous examples of water privatization abuses or failures have been documented in California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island -- just about anywhere it's been tried. Meanwhile, corporations have been making outrageous profits on a commodity that should be almost free. Nestle buys water for about 1/100 of a penny per gallon, and sells it back for ten dollars. Their bottled water is not much different from tap water.

Worse yet, corporations profit from the very water they pollute. Dioxin-dumping Dow Chemicals is investing in water purification. Monsanto has been accused of privatizing its own pollution sites in order to sell filtered water back to the public.

Internet, TV, and Phone

It seems the whole world is leaving us behind on the Internet. According to the OECD, South Korea has Internet speeds up to 200 times faster than the average speed in the U.S., at about half the cost. Customers are charged about $30 a month in Hong Kong or Korea or parts of Europe for much faster service than in the U.S., while triple-play packages in other countries go for about half of our Comcast or AT&T charges.

Bloomberg notes that deregulators in the 1990s anticipated a market-based decline in phone and cable bills, an "invisible hand" that would steer competing companies to lower prices for all of us. Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time-Warner haven't let it happen.

Transportation

As Republicans continue to deride public transportation as 'socialist' and 'Soviet-style,' China surges ahead with a plan to create the world's most advanced high-speed rail transport network. Government-run high-speed rail systems have been successful in numerous other countries, and England and Brazil both lament industry privatization.

As a warning to wannabe Post Office privatizers, Greyhound and Trailways once provided service to remote locations in America, but deregulation intervened. The bus companies eliminated unprofitable routes, and cutbacks and salary decreases, all in the name of optimal profits, resulted in drivers working up to 100 hours a week -- a fact to consider any time each of us ride the bus.

With privatization comes automatic rate increases. Chicago surrendered its parking meters for 75 years and almost immediately faced a doubling of parking rates. California's experiments with roadway privatization resulted in cost overruns, public outrage, and a bankruptcy; equally disastrous was the state's foray into electric power privatization. In Pennsylvania, an analysis of school busing by the Keystone Research Center concluded that "Contracting out substantially increases state spending on transportation services."

Banking

The industry is bloated with deceit and depravity. Almost all of the big names have taken part. Goldman Sachs designed mortgage packages to lose money for everyone except Goldman. Countrywide and Wells Fargo targeted Blacks and Hispanics for unaffordable subprime loans. HSBC Bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels. GE Capital skimmed billions of dollars from its customers. Dozens of hedge fund managers have been guilty of insider trading. Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase hid billions of dollars of bonuses and losses and loans from investors. Banks fixed interest rates in the LIBOR scandal. They illegally foreclosed on millions of homeowners in the robo-signing scandal.

Matt Taibbi explained to us how financial malfeasance led to the bubbles in dot-com stocks and housing and oil prices and commodities that extract trillions of dollars away from society.

This is all the result of free-market deregulated private business. The best-known public bank, on the other hand, is the Bank of North Dakota, which remains profitable while serving small business and the public at low cost relative to the financial industry.

Prisons

One would think it a worthy goal to rehabilitate prisoners and gradually empty the jails. But business is too good. With each prisoner generating up to $40,000 a year in revenue, it has apparently made economic sense to put over two million people behind bars.

The need to fill privatized prisons has contributed to mass jailings for drug offenses, with African Americans, who make up 13% of the population, accounting for 53.5 percent of all persons who entered prison because of a drug conviction. Yet marijuana usage rates are about the same for Blacks and whites.

Studies show that private prisons perform poorly in numerous ways: prevention of intra-prison violence, jail conditions, rehabilitation efforts. Investigations in Ohio and New Jersey revealed a familiar pattern of money-saving cutbacks and worsening conditions.

Education

The notion that charter schools outperform traditional public schools is not supported by the facts. An updated 2013 Stanford University CREDO study concluded that privatized schools were slightly better in reading and slightly worse in math, with little difference overall. Charter results have shown an improvement since 2009.

An independent study by Bold Approach found that "reforms deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from...policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment."

Just as with prisons and hospitals, cost-saving business strategies apply to the privatization of our children's education. Charter school teachers have fewer years of experience and a higher turnover rate. Non-teacher positions have insufficient retirement plans and health insurance, and much lower pay.

If big money has its way, our children may become high-tech symbols and objects. Bill Gates proposes quality control for the student assembly line, with video footage from the classrooms sent to evaluators to check off teaching skills.

Consumer Protection
Warning signs about unregulated privatization are becoming clearer and more deadly. The Texas fertilizer plant, where 14 people were killed in an explosion and fire, was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over 25 years ago. The U.S. Forest Service, stunned by the Prescott, Arizona fire that killed 19, was forced by the sequester to cut 500 firefighters. The rail disaster in Lac-Megantic, Quebec followed deregulation of Canadian railways.

Regulation is meant to protect all of us, but anti-government activists have worked hard to turn us against our own best interests. Among recommended Republican cuts is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which rescued hundreds of people after Hurricane Sandy while serving millions more with meals and water. In another ominous note for the future, the House passed the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011, which would deny the Environmental Protection Agency the right to enforce the Clean Water Act.

Deregulation not only deprives Americans of protection, but it also endangers us with the persistent threat of corporate misconduct. As late as 2004 Monsanto had insisted that Agent Orange "is not the cause of serious long-term health effects." Dow Chemical, the co-manufacturer of Agent Orange, blamed the government. Halliburton pleaded guilty to destroying evidence after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Cleanups cost much more than the fines imposed on offending companies, as government costs can run into the billions, or even tens of billions, of dollars.

People vs. Profits

As summed up by US News, "Private industry is not going to step in and save people from drowning, or help them rebuild their homes without a solid profit." In order to stay afloat as a nation we need each other, not savvy businesspeople who presume to tell us all how to be rich. We can't all be rich. We just want to keep from drowning.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press).

Imagine some very wealthy people - not just the top 1% we've heard about, but the top ten percent in a meeting wondering how they could steal billions or even trillions from the work or capital produced by American workers. If they used gun to take it a few dollars at a time everyone would be upset, angry, frustrated. Everyone has a strong reaction to some poor victim mugged for the few dollars in their pocket. So what the "free market" - unregulated, privatize everything zealots - the ten percent did, was use their money and power to buy politicians and legislation. That includes some Democrats, but it is largely conservative Republicans and the new libertarian "populist" like Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY). They've used the same old propaganda tools. Americans hate communism, who doesn't - even China has turned their economy into a crony capitalist one like ours. So conservatives called everyone who objected to their "free market freedom" ( stealing in disguise) a commie. As dumb as that strategy might sound, it has worked. Many of the American people would rather let conservatives and libertarians steal their money than be called a commie. In reality conservative opposition is largely composed of humanitarian capitalists: Keep things like water utilities public. Regulate telecoms and internet providers whose executives make more money in two weeks than most Americans make in a year. Regulate the poison industry like DuPont, Monsanto and Koch industries - they make Americans sick and than charge us to clean up the stuff that is making us sick and destroying our natural heritage as Americans.

The Week's Link For Patriots

Anti-abortion extremist gets 10 years for Planned Parenthood murder plot. Nowhere in my copy of the Bible does it say that you can act as murderer for what conservative Republicans believe are God's wishes.

Want Evidence Benghazi Is A Phony Scandal? Even the report issued by a conservative Congressional committee will not stop the phony patriots from making up more wacko conspiracy theories. One has to possess some minimum amount of honor and character to have an honest debate, which is all true patriots need to know about conservatives at Fox News.

Democrats introduce Supreme Court Ethics Act to helpfully suggest the Supreme Court have some. Watch for news about anti-American conservative organizations like FreedomWorks and The Federalist Society fighting against ethics legislation. They like the USA to run like a corrupt plutocracy.

Low minimum wage undermines economy. Conservatives, largely the party of the old Confederacy, loves wage slavery. That way they pass health care and other costs along to tax payers.

Could You Survive on Fast-Food Wages? Try Our Calculator. Do you visit fast food restaurants? Very little or not at all? Too bad you subsidize those businesses anyway because the executives take all the money generated by the hard work of the serfs who work there.

Today’s Student Debt Means A $4 Trillion Loss Of Wealth In The Future. Conservatives are passing along the cost of maintaining an advanced industrial and technological society to the nation's future. Yet conservatives have the gall to say they love America.



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With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

 With Paranoid Conspiracies Dancing In Their Pointed Heads, Conservatives Create Kool Secret Organizations

Do you have Groundswell fever? I do! “Groundswell” is the secret organization run by cool right-wingers like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton, a group charged with winning the 30-front war on liberalism. Long story short: Mother Jones’ David Corn received another wonderful leak. This one is about a bunch of true-believing far-right clowns, and how hard they are all working at fighting a bunch of people who didn’t even know they were involved in an ideological war against Ginni Thomas.

So, this is a great and delightful scoop, and bless David Corn for reporting it. But let’s get real: While the people involved in this organization probably think that Corn has exposed a vast right-wing conspiracy, what he really exposed is the silliest corner of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Thomas and Bolton are both sort of “important” people, in terms of their familial or professional connections to people with actual power, but neither one of them has actual power or authority. John Bolton is a mustachioed parody of neoconservative foreign policy belligerence. Thomas is a true-believing weirdo. The media figures involved in this group are mostly marginal and widely disrespected even by conservatives. But that doesn’t mean the group is entirely unimportant.

The conservative movement has this recurring tendency to create institutions and organizations based on what they imagine, in their fevered minds, that The Left is doing. They believe liberal bias is an intentional conspiracy to delude Americans by publishing purposefully slanted stories, so most explicitly conservative “journalism” outlets publish purposefully slanted stories where facts are subordinate to political point-scoring. Sometimes they create entirely redundant institutions when this process laps itself. They believed Brookings was super liberal, so they created Heritage. The Left created CAP in response to Heritage, so the Right creates 10,000 useless nonprofits that exist solely to fundraise.

It is also the case that, generally, The Right thinks The Left is already doing whatever they’re doing, but more efficiently and better and also more viciously. As I’ve said before, there really is a right-wing talking points pipeline of sorts, and a great deal of “message coordination” among the various pillars of the movement, including conservative media figures. Because that’s the case, because the Right is sort of decent at message coordination, they imagine that liberals are great at it, and that our commentators all get their marching orders from on high and dutifully repeat them until the world is convinced of lies like “George Bush was a bad president” or “immigrants aren’t all drug-traffickers.”

So when JournoList happened, dumb (and less-dumb) members of the right-wing media machine looked at it and saw evidence of conspiracy, instead of a bunch of like-minded people debating and arguing and desperately begging for links from commentators with higher profiles. Where there was consensus, they saw “coordination.” They thought this because the Right sort of already did all that. And so now it only makes (tragic, hilarious) sense that some of the least intellectually impressive members of the conservative movement have banded together to create their own sad, weird parody of Grover Norquist’s “Wednesday meetings” combined with what they imagined JournoList to be. This is the result: Groundswell. A cracked-mirror imitation of an imaginary conspiracy.

But this group of clowns and idiots has attracted the attention and participation of members of Congress, and the staff of at least one senator.

If every patriotic Americans - that is most people who are not conservatives - stayed home and watched TV, never voted and just bought the crappy products and services conservatives hire wage slaves to produce for them, conservatives would still start secret weirdo organizations with freaks like Ginni Thomas and John Bolton because conservatism uses paranoia as a fuel. If the paranoia went away and REALITY set in, they would have next to nothing to complain get their false outrage fired up.

Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Simple Truths message to Congress (April 29, 1938). "Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing." Radical UnAmerican Conservatives on Supreme Court Protects Mega-Corporations From Responsibility For Their Actions

In case it wasn’t clear already, the U.S. Supreme Court hammered home Thursday morning that it will protect the rights of corporations to force arbitration over the individuals’ access to the court system at any expense.

In a 5-3 ruling with Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated almost any opportunity small merchants have to challenge alleged monopolistic practices by American Express in their credit card agreements.

Sound familiar? Earlier this term, the court turned back on procedural grounds a lawsuit alleging monopolistic practices by Comcast. A week after that, they turned back the claims of workers to challenge employer practices as a class. And in 2011, they issued one of the worst blows to consumer rights in years when they held that consumers challenging $30 fees could not sue together as a class. In each of these cases, the court’s procedural rulings mean the parties may never get to argue about whether these corporations actually violated the law. And as a consequence, these corporations may never be held accountable.

With Thursday’s ruling, the court added small businesses to the list of aggrieved parties whose access to the courthouse has been foreclosed by boilerplate contracts that prohibit parties from filing their challenge as a class, or from otherwise alleviating the immense cost of filing their claims individually. This time, the litigants were small businesses taking on American Express, and their lawyer was none other than conservative powerhouse Paul Clement. Clement has argued many of the major conservative court wins of the past few years, and his argument on the side of the plaintiffs was probably the last best shot at curbing the Roberts Court’s total perversion of the Federal Arbitration Act.

As in the AT&T case, the plaintiffs here argued that the only way they could challenge the policy of mega-corporation American Express was by banding together as a class and pooling their resources. But consumers’ claims in AT&T were struck down on a different rationale, that their state law claims were preempted by the Federal Arbitration Act. This time, the plaintiffs argued that because their antitrust claims are federal , they are protected by the principle of “effective vindication,” meaning that where an arbitration clause effectively immunizes otherwise meritorious federal claims, plaintiffs are entitled to vindication of their actual rights. To show that that the arbitration clause would make any challenge prohibitively expensive, they deployed formal affidavits by economists attesting to the immense cost of these claims — “’at least several hundred thousand dollars, and might exceed $1 million’,” while the maximum recovery for an individual plaintiff would be $12,850, or $38,549 when trebled,” meaning they could not afford to launch their claims without the ability to file them together.

No matter, said the majority. In AT&T, “[w]e specifically rejected the argument that class arbitration was necessary to prosecute claims ‘that might otherwise slip through the legal system’.” This case is about federal law vindication and AT&T was about state law preemption, but as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “to a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Kagan explains the case this way:

    Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately obscured in the Court’s decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a tying arrangement), but the same contract’s arbitration clause prevents him from doing so.

    That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool’s errand. So if the arbitration clause is enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability—even if it has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.

    And here is the nutshell version of today’s opinion, admirably flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.

    That answer is a betrayal of our precedents, and of federal statutes like the antitrust laws.

Today’s ruling was yet another point in the Chamber of Commerce’s remarkable tally of wins before the Roberts Court, and another chance for the most business-friendly justices in 65 years to side with their friends.

It is neither hyperbole or name calling to say that American Express and the Chamber of Commerce are simply proto-fascists. Their mission is not good old business - competing to see who can sell good and services for a fair price. No, their agenda is to take as much power away from the people, individual Americans as they can.

Video Proof That Sean Hannity Should Be Deported For Being a Shameless UnAmerican Hypocrite

Sean Hannity is warning that data mining and surveillance are "very clear violation[s] of the Fourth Amendment," a drastic change for the Fox News host, who was a loud defender of National Security Agency surveillance during the Bush administration. Media Matters offers a look at Hannity on NSA surveillance, then and now.

Patriotic Americans should demand that this Orwellian puppet of Roger Ailes and Proto-fascist Rupert Murdoch be stripped of his citizenship ( has anyone seen Hannity's birth certificate) and deported from the country. Sean would love living in his ideological homeland, China.

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

Real Patriots Should Reject Conservative Propaganda About The Minimum Wage

With seven strikes of fast food workers in eight weeks, demanding $15/hour and the right to a union, a discussion of raising the minimum wage has begun to stir up the predictable frenzy of pro-market mythology.

As in every previous discussion of raising the minimum wage, it has been asserted that such a move would increase unemployment, be harmful to the most underprivileged workers, bad for small businesses, and indeed, disastrous for the wider economy. In this same narrative, low-wage jobs are stepping stones, and hard work and higher education are reliable paths to middle class employment.

Is any of this true?

Who Are Low-Wage Workers?

Let's start with a useful benchmark of a low-wage job as one that keeps a full-time worker and their family of four at or below the federal poverty threshold - $23,005 per year, or $11.06/hour in 2011.

Contrary to the myths, the working poor are an ever-expanding contingent of America's labor force, while the middle class has been steadily shrinking. Over 25 percent of all workers qualify as low-wage workers.

Lest we think this is an issue only in Tennessee and Alabama, nearly 20 percent of Washington workers qualify as low-wage workers, with an additional 40 percent living within what is known as the supplemental poverty measure.

The road of higher education also increasingly leads nowhere. Low-wage workers are better educated than ever before, with over 26 percent having had some college education. Low-wage workers now carry sizable sums of student debt.

Conditions have deteriorated even more rapidly since the Great Recession began. Low-wage jobs comprised about 35 percent of jobs lost in 2008 and 2009, yet they accounted for 76 percent of net job growth in 2010.

Minimum Wage Already Too High in Washington?

It is true that Washington is currently the only state with a minimum wage above $9.00/hour.

What this demonstrates, however, is not a lavishness of wages here, but rather the abysmal standard of living faced by tens of millions of hardworking people nationwide. A full-time job at Washington’s minimum wage fetches about $18,000, clearly far less than necessary to meet basic expenses.

A more useful benchmark is a living wage. The Alliance for a Just Society defines living-wage jobs for Washington state, assuming full-time hours, as $16.13/hour or $33,544 annually for a single adult. Those figures would rise to $28.71/hour or $59,715 a year for a household of one adult and one child, and $29.42/hour or $61,188 a year for a family of four with one adult working. Keep in mind, many low-wage workers are unable to get full-time employment.

What Would the Fallout of $15/Hour Be?

Much is made of the impact a higher minimum wage would have on small businesses. But what about Starbucks, McDonald's, Subway, Pizza Hut and the vast array of huge corporations whose mega profits rest on the poverty wages of their workforce?

The CEO of YUM! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) made $20.5 million last year. The average worker in one of the stores made $7.50/hour. Restaurant chains spent nearly a million dollars in 2006 to fight minimum-wage increases in six states.

The past several decades have seen worker productivity skyrocket, and wages for most stagnate. Where did the balance go? It went to the top one percent. If minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be approximately $22/hour. If it had grown at the same pace as the income to the one percent, it would be around $33/hour.

Increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour is surely reasonable in the face of the massive siphoning of income to the very top. Should those who work hard every day have to struggle to pay for rent and groceries?

Research does show that a minimum wage increase can initially pose difficulty to some small businesses. However, this can be addressed by increasing taxes on big business (which are at historically low rates) and eliminating corporate welfare to subsidize small businesses, along with cutting B&O and property tax burden on small businesses.

But the main danger facing working people and small businesses is the continued proliferation of low wages. The economy is reeling with over 20 million people unemployed or underemployed, a low-wage workforce, a collapse of the housing bubble, and staggering consumer and student debt. Raising wages is a vital measure to break out of the depressionary spiral.

Statistical studies show a positive impact of wage increases on jobs. When working people have more income, their spending power goes up, which in turn boosts sales, which further increases jobs and overall spending power, and so on.

The idea that raising the wage would harm the most disadvantaged workers is a fig leaf to justify anti-worker policymaking. In fact, increasing the minimum wage raises the bargaining power of all workers, and has the effect of raising wages across the board.

The Great Recession has left in tatters the idea that capitalism works. It works well for the billionaires, but for the rest of us, it has meant fast eroding standards of living. The American middle class was created on the edifice of courage and sacrifice of a mobilized labor movement. Let us support the workers demanding $15/hour. They are a sign of the times.

(reprinted here for educational purposes)

There is no CEO at any company in the USA or Western Europe who is worth millions of dollars a year, absolutely zero CEOs anywhere in the world do millions of dollars worth of work, intellectual or otherwise. As profits roll in they take what they want, and let some of the crumbs trickle down to the workers who create the profits. CEO is another name for leech. No CEO should be paid more than three times their highest paid hourly employee.

The National Right To Murder Association NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

The NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

Alabama lawyer Jim Porter will replace current NRA President David Keene, whose two-year term is expiring.

Here's what the media should know about Porter, a conspiracy theorist who calls the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression" and represents more of the same for the organization:

....2.     Porter Believes "Un-American" Eric Holder And Hillary Clinton Tried To "Kill The Second Amendment At The United Nations." Porter said during a June 2012 speech at the New York Rifle & Pistol Association's Annual Meeting that Attorney General Eric Holder, who he termed "rabidly un-American," was "trying to kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations" with the help of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He attributed this to the proposed United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which he claimed would "make it illegal for individuals all over the world to own firearms." This is a blatant misrepresentation of the treaty, which deals with the international arms trade, not private ownership. ( Someone should ask Porter where he gets his drugs. They seem to be string enough to turn anyone who takes them into Glenn UnAmerican Beck).

3.       Porter Calls The Civil War The "War Of Northern Aggression." Explaining the NRA's roots during the same June 2012 speech, Porter said, "NRA was started 1871 right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn't like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the 'War of Northern Aggression.' Now y'all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the 'War of Northern Aggression' down south." ( Corporate profits are higher than ever and wages for working class Americans are lower - just the kind of plantation economy conservatives dream of)

4.     Porter Thinks President Obama Wants European-Style Socialism. In a February 2011 interview with NRA News, Porter said: "I think everybody had a wake-up call after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and I think they had a huge shock when President Obama was elected in 2008. Most folks never would believe that there would be a run on our rights, our individual rights like there's been in this country. And people are so concerned that where this government wants to take us is to a European socialistic, bureaucratic type of government. And it's been a wake-up call." ( being a drug addict, a racist, a mentally deranged UnAmerican fruitbar, Porter is trying to deflect from the FACT that it is conservatives who are trying to do to the American economy, what European leaders are doing to Europe.

So the NRA has another anti-American proto fascist mentally deranged assclown as its president. Gee, what a surprise. Too bad his parents never warned him about sniffing the polish when he shines up his jack-boots.

The NRA or National Right to Murder Association has already blocked Boston Marathon Investigation

The NRA or National Right to Murder and Get Away With It Association has already blocked Boston Marathon Investigation

One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

Explosives manufacturers are required to place tracing elements known as identification taggants only in plastic explosives but not in gunpowder, thanks to lobbying efforts by the NRA and large gun manufacturing groups.

NRA officials at the group’s headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia declined to respond to calls and emails from MSNBC.com requesting comment.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, Inc., share a cross-membership of dozens of firearms manufacturers based out of their joint offices in Newtown, Connecticut. Foundation spokesman Bill Brassard, Jr. told MSNBC.com that no one from either group was available for comment.

“They are concerned about tort liability,” Morhard added to MSNBC.com, referring to manufacturers worried about being sued over the improper use of their ammunition or explosives.

Has American noticed that the NRA - worried that gov'mint will take away their right to be part of a well "regulated" militia does done nothing to fight for the civil liberties that conservatives regularly take away from Americans in the form of the Patriot Act and other surveillance state activity. The NRA does nothing to keep the gov'mint from entangling itself with religious fanatics. The NRA does nothing to protect the right of individuals to have autonomy over their own body. I could go on, but the point is easily made, the gov'mint that they say they need their guns to protect themselves against, takes away rights that the NRA supports being taken away. I'm not anit-gun ownership, but I am anti-fanatics.

Related to chart above, Conservative Republicans want America to follow European economic austerity

The Conservative Republican Movement Sinks Deeper Into Pure Evil With Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories

The Conservative Republican Movement Sinks Deeper Into Pure Evil With Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories

There's been no shortage of delusional claims made by the gun manufacturers' lobby and its allies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Usually, they revolve around macho fantasies of gun owners heroically keeping their cool during surprise attacks, taking down mad gunmen without killing onlookers or being shot by arriving police. In the real world, of course, these are the kinds of people who tend to shoot themselves while shopping for milk at Walmart [3], rummaging around in their purses for lipstick  [4]or sleeping [5] (sleeping can be really dangerous [6]).

But last week, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported [7] that a far more disturbing delusion is gaining traction on the fringes of the “gun rights” movement. Seitz-Wald calls them “Sandy Hook Truthers,” and he appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss the phenomenon. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show here [8]).

Joshua Holland: Alex, Talking Points Memo reported [9] this week that Joe Biden has given some hints of the recommendations that his Gun Control Task Force might offer as soon as next week. They're talking about banning high-capacity magazines and mandating universal background checks. Did you know that as many as 40 percent of all firearm sales in this country are done without a background check?

Alex Seitz-Wald: Yes. It’s really unbelievable. This is the so-called “gun show loophole,” but it extends way beyond gun shows. I can go online on Craigslist right now and find a gun and buy it, without any kind of background check or oversight.

JH: Any private citizen who’s not a licensed firearms dealer can just sell a gun to anybody without doing anything. It’s just crazy.

Anyway, we’re going to have a big fight on our hands against one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, the NRA, which represents the interests of firearms’ manufacturers. That fight is only coming, really, because 20 young children were cut down with a Bushmaster at a Connecticut school. That brings us to your report [7] this week on Salon.com, which I found mindblowing. Alex, tell us about the worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory out there.

ASW: Yes. This is really unbelievable -- I could hardly believe it myself, but we all know about 9/11 truthers by now. These are the people who thought that 9/11 was an inside job. Now these folks -- I’m calling them the “Sandy Hook truthers” -- these are people, and there’s a surprising number of them, who think that the Sandy Hook massacre either didn’t happen or did happen, but was perpetrated by maybe government agents or crazy liberals.

There are different versions of the theory, all in an attempt to create a national movement for gun control. Obama or somebody killed all these little kids in order to get you and me to talk about guns and get the American people interested in gun control.

This was out there for a little while, but then it really picked up steam after they latched onto a girl named Emily Parker. She was a 6-year-old who was killed, and her father has been pretty active in the media. There was a funeral service in Utah, where the governor spoke, and that got a lot of attention. A photo emerged of her sister, sitting on Obama’s lap when he went and visited the family. The girl is wearing the same dress that Emily was wearing in a photo that the family had distributed to the media. To the Internet conspiracy theorists, it must be the same girl. Emily Parker must be alive! Therefore, the whole thing was a hoax.

There’s a YouTube video that lays this all out, and it’s already gotten over 130,000 views. If you look elsewhere, you can find all kinds of Web sites, and blog posts, and forum messages, where people lay this out. They have all kinds of other crazy things about the car being not the one owned by Adam Lanza, and police audio allegedly suggesting there were multiple shooters in the building.

We all know there was tons of confusion on the day of the shooting and a lot of misreporting happened early on, but instead of them dismissing this as the kind of confusion that happens when a terribly disturbing event like this takes place, they latched onto these little things to create this grand construction.

The worst thing, for me, is that they’re denying the grief of these families, these poor parents who had their kids killed. They’re saying it’s all for show and some of them actually want to prosecute the parents for allegedly being actors and accomplices to this crime.

JH: It’s remarkable that people could be so shameless. Do you not have the basic common decency to leave grieving parents alone? It’s amazing.

The evidence – this is very typical, by the way. I’ve seen it with 9/11 Truthers. In the early moments of a big news story -- a big, confusing, breaking news story -- there are always, always, always conflicting details.

Alex, who’s behind this? Who started this? Do you know who’s pushing this?

ASW: It’s really hard to tell. That video that I mentioned was actually made by a production company that produced the film, Operation Terror, which was a really popular 9/11 truther film. It’s a fictionalized version of the truther theory. It’s the exact same people that did the 9/11 truther stuff.

The rest of them seem to be just your run-of-the-mill, Internet cranks. I talked to one of the guys, actually. This is the guy who started it, so he’s really invested here, and has rounded up all the different pieces and put them all in one place. I thought I’d email him and see if he'd respond. I figured he wouldn’t, but he did. I was really disturbed, actually, by the response. I should mention, on his Web site in the About section, he gives himself some credibility by saying, “I’m the only person in the World to solve Lost,” as in the TV show.

JH: (laughs)

ASW: When I emailed him, I asked him about that. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t want to diagnose anybody, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he is having some kind of delusions.

He told me that he launched his Web site on December 21st, which is a significant day. He said – and I’m reading here from his email – “Since I am the new-age Messiah, and the revelation from the Goddess, Tefnut, AKA Ma’at of Egypt, I thought the date was significant.”

This guy, who’s leading this online conspiracy movement, literally thinks he is the new-age Messiah. The word “crazy” gets tossed around a lot, but I think this guy meets a clinical definition of delusions. This is where a lot of this stuff is coming from.

The wild thing, to me, is that you’re only a few steps removed from the other kinds of people that we call “crazy,” but that are intimately involved in the gun debate. Larry Pratt, the head of Gun Owners of America, which is a more radical version of the NRA, he hasn’t said anything quite like this about the Sandy Hook shooting. But after Aurora, he told Alex Jones -- who’s a big conspiracy theorist -- he told Alex Jones that there was a really good chance that government agents perpetrated the Aurora massacre, in order to implement gun control. This is a real thing that’s out there.

There’s a professor at Florida Atlantic University who even got involved in this. It’s really easy to dismiss, but I don’t think we should because it can go, really quickly, from the guy who claims he solved Lost to people who are actually involved in the gun control debate.

...Just one case study that I think is really illuminating here. In Australia, there was a mass shooting, where 35 people were killed. Within weeks, the conservative government passed an assault weapon ban, a much stronger assault weapon ban than we had, including a gun buy back. They actually made it illegal to hold these guns, and they bought them back from the population. Homicide with guns dropped 60 percent in the next decade, and there was no associated rise in crime by other means. This is a common talking point that, if criminals don’t have guns, they’ll just turn to knives or even hammers. There was none of that, and there hasn’t been a single mass shooting in the decade since they passed this law.

There’s no question that gun control is effective, and it’s at least worth trying, but we can’t even talk about it now.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/todd-canady-shoots-himself-buying-milk_n_1698566.html
[4] http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/SC-woman-shoots-self-while-seeking-gun-in-purse-4169655.php
[5] http://www.kxly.com/news/north-idaho-news/Troy-man-shoots-self-while-sleeping/-/101230/10650048/-/1019i8tz/-/index.html
[6] http://www.kansas.com/2012/02/12/2213683/wichita-man-shoots-himself-in.html
[7] http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/the_worst_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory_yet/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/alternet-radio-crazy-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theories-auerbach-jack-lew-fed-judge-curtails-stop-and
[9] http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/biden-gun-recommendations.php
[10] http://www.alternet.org/yes-we-can-have-sane-gun-control-without-trampling-gun-owners-rights
[11] http://americansforcommonsensesolutions.com/

Conservatives does not have the kind of historical roots that progressive liberalism has. If anything conservatism is basically a modernized version of monarchism, with bits of anarchism, ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism thrown. Which is a very generous way of saying conservatism is the refuse of venal, knuckle dragging freaks, weirdos, zealots, Taliban type religious fanatics and conspiracy lunatics. Conservatism is intrinsically UnAmerican. Just one recent example, Conservative Republicans Are a Threat to Liberty,  Brag They Won House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Why food-stamp bans are perpetuating risky behaviors among America’s most vulnerable

Carla walked into my office with despair in her eyes. I was surprised. Carla has been doing well in her four months out of prison; she got off drugs, regained custody of her kids, and even enrolled in a local community college.

Without much prodding she admitted to me that she had retuned to prostitution: “I am putting myself at risk for HIV to get my kids a f---ing happy meal.”

Despite looking high and low for a job, Carla explained, she was still unemployed. Most entry-level jobs felt out of reach with her drug record, but what’s worse, even the state wasn’t willing to throw her a temporary life preserver.

You see, Carla is from one of the 32 states in the country that ban anyone convicted of a drug felony from collecting food stamps. With the release of the Global Burden of Disease Study last week, it bears looking at how we are perpetuating burdens among the most vulnerable Americans with our outdated laws.

If she’d committed rape or murder, Carla could have gotten assistance to feed herself and her children, but because the crime she committed was a drug felony, Carla joined the hundreds of thousands of drug felons who are not eligible. ......Women with children are especially affected. It’s estimated that 70,000 women and their children are banned from obtaining food stamps. This means mothers who are simply trying to feed themselves and their children, and who are trying to get back on their feet after serving their time, are banned from receiving the money to pay for the basics necessary to survive.  Meanwhile, 46 million others, including college graduates and PhDs with far more resources, can receive food aid.

 This is a cultural legacy of America's Puritanical and hypocritical history. White men can get away with stealing millions, beating their wives and still have a relatively comfortable life.

Few of our fellow Americans are scholars, but basic reading comprehension is not too much to ask, Radical Anti-America "news casters" at Fox New - Self-Congratulation Over Benghazi Report Undermined By Report Itself. Conservatives are so desperate and deeply immoral they have to make up scandals when there are none.
The Craziest UnAmerican Republican Legislative Proposals Of 2012. I don't know why Republicans hate America and freedom. They're certainly free to leave if they hate living in a democratic republic so much.

The 12 Days Of Crony Conservative Capitalism Christmas

The 12 Days Of Crony Conservative Capitalism Christmas

On the first day of Christmas my employer gave to me a penny for every $3 [3] the richest 130,000 Americans make. It's been a national tradition since 1980.

On the second day my doctor showed me TWO Americans needing mental health care, but only one of the two could afford treatment [4]. The doctor informed me that the fifty states have cut $1.8 billion [5] from their mental health budgets during the recession, and that the 2013 Republican budget proposes further cuts. "It's crazy," I protested. "Some states are allowing guns [6] in schools and daycare centers and churches and bars and hospitals, but they're cutting mental health care?" The doctor just nodded in frustration.

On the third day The Economist [7] told me that it costs just THREE cents [8] in administrative expenses for every $100 raised through a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in the United Kingdom, versus $1.42 for the personal income tax and $1.25 for the corporate income tax. With up to THREE quadrillion dollars [9] in total U.S. financial transactions, we could replace federal income taxes with a tiny FTT.

On the fourth day a food pantry gave me FOUR dollars worth of food. That's about what food stamp recipients [10] get each day through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To pay for rent and utilities, a family of three gets $400 per month [11] from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes to about FOUR dollars a day per person.

On the fifth day a financial advisor introduced me to his FIVE richest investors, who were the only ones out of 100 Americans to increase [12] their wealth over the past 25 years, by the impressive rate of almost 20% [13]. It's like that throughout the entire country, the advisor said: only 5% took almost all the gains.

Five golden rings, indeed.

On the sixth day, as the traditional 12-day song started to get annoying, Santa appeared to take me by the hand to the U.S. corporate offices, where the tax lawyers gave to me SIX cents [14] for the national treasury. "Hey," I said, "this used to be twenty-five cents. You've doubled your profits [15] in the last ten years, but individual and payroll taxes have to pay 94 cents out of every dollar!" The lawyers just smiled. Santa shook his head in frustration.

On the seventh day a guidance counselor informed me that one out of SEVEN [16] Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 is neither working nor in school.

On the eighth day an IRS agent gave me these matching facts [17]: Over EIGHT percent of the GDP (8.4%) goes for tax expenditures (subsidies provided through the tax code, mostly to the very rich). That's almost exactly the same amount (8.4% of the GDP) that goes to Social Security and Medicare.

On the ninth day an unemployed dietitian told me that the average male has increased his weight by NINE percent [18] over the past 20 years (180 to 196), and the average female by TWELVE percent (142 to 160). As a NINE dollar per hour [19] food-service worker gave me and Santa our burgers and fries and shakes, my jolly old partner chortled, "Ho Ho Ho, soon you'll all look like me!"

On the 10th day a Forbes article confirmed that the TEN richest Americans [20] made more than our entire national housing budget [21] in just one year [22]. That's over $50 billion. The twenty richest Americans made more than our entire education budget. Santa assured me that the transfer of wealth from society's needs to a few individuals was not the norm around the world.

On the eleventh day a creditor gave me a bill for ELEVEN trillion dollars [23] of debt incurred by the American consumer, including mortgages, student loans, and credit card liabilities.

And on the twelfth day Santa gave me an IOU for TWELVE trillion dollars [24], the U.S. share [25] of up to $32 trillion [26] held overseas, untaxed. "One problem," cautioned Santa, "my reindeer haven't been able to find any of it yet."w

After all this I stood perplexed. "What does it all mean?" I asked Santa.

"Well, that's capitalism," I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight. "It's all about the individual getting all he can, because that will benefit everyone. And let me tell you," he added with a twinkle, "those benefits are just as real as I am!"

It does not have to be like this, a USA that conservatives have made to look like 17th century France with most of the population working to make the elite aristocracy wealthy. We need to break back morality and the social contract.

[3] http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/17/seven-facts-about-americas-mental-health-care-system/
[5] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/civil-liberties/news/2012/07/31/11871/cuts-to-mental-health-services-could-lead-to-more-spree-killings/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/7-craziest-gun-laws-america
[7] http://www.economist.com/node/7855196
[8] http://truth-out.org/news/item/10232-can-a-financial-transactions-tax-work-in-america-an-ftt-faq
[9] http://simonthorpesideas.blogspot.fr/2012/10/bis-transaction-data-for-2011-roughly-3.html
[10] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/05/linden_rebuttal.html
[11] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3625
[12] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2009/200913/200913pap.pdf
[13] http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf
[14] http://www.nationofchange.org/myth-free-market-1340630005
[15] http://www.payupnow.org/CorpTaxByYear.xls
[16] http://www.measureofamerica.org/one-in-seven/
[17] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust_2011/features/20000_leagues_under_the_state030498.php
[18] http://www.fitsugar.com/Average-Weight-Americans-20-Pounds-Heavier-Than-20-Years-Ago-20605443
[19] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-should-pay-too-its-time-for-fast-food-workers-to-get-living-wages/265714/
[20] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budget
[22] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/pf_article_113540.html
[23] http://www.creditscore.net/u-s-consumer-debt-in-2011/
[24] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/19-3
[25] http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Inequality_120722_You_dont_know_the_half_of_it.pdf
[26] http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf
[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0
[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/christmas-0
[29] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives Against Any Gun Regulation Know Nothing About American History

 Conservatives Against Any Gun Regulation Know Nothing About American Historyand The 2nd Amendment

Right-wing resistance to meaningful gun control is driven, in part, by a false notion that America’s Founders adopted the Second Amendment because they wanted an armed population that could battle the U.S. government. The opposite is the truth, but many Americans seem to have embraced this absurd, anti-historical narrative.

The reality was that the Framers wrote the Constitution and added the Second Amendment with the goal of creating a strong central government with a citizens-based military force capable of putting down insurrections, not to enable or encourage uprisings. The key Framers, after all, were mostly men of means with a huge stake in an orderly society, the likes of George Washington and James Madison.

President George Washington, as Commander-in-Chief, leading a combined force of state militias against the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 weren’t precursors to France’s Robespierre or Russia’s Leon Trotsky, believers in perpetual revolutions. In fact, their work on the Constitution was influenced by the experience of Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786, a populist uprising that the weak federal government, under the Articles of Confederation, lacked an army to defeat.

Daniel Shays, the leader of the revolt, was a former Continental Army captain who joined with other veterans and farmers to take up arms against the government for failing to address their economic grievances.

The rebellion alarmed retired Gen. George Washington who received reports on the developments from old Revolutionary War associates in Massachusetts, such as Gen. Henry Knox and Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. Washington was particularly concerned that the disorder might serve the interests of the British, who had only recently accepted the existence of the United States.

On Oct. 22, 1786, in a letter seeking more information from a friend in Connecticut, Washington wrote: “I am mortified beyond expression that in the moment of our acknowledged independence we should by our conduct verify the predictions of our transatlantic foe, and render ourselves ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of all Europe.”

In another letter on Nov. 7, 1786, Washington questioned Gen. Lincoln about the spreading unrest. “What is the cause of all these commotions? When and how will they end?” Lincoln responded: “Many of them appear to be absolutely so [mad] if an attempt to annihilate our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered as evidence of insanity.”

However, the U.S. government lacked the means to restore order, so wealthy Bostonians financed their own force under Gen. Lincoln to crush the uprising in February 1787. Afterwards, Washington expressed satisfaction at the outcome but remained concerned the rebellion might be a sign that European predictions about American chaos were coming true.

“If three years ago [at the end of the American Revolution] any person had told me that at this day, I should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite – a fit subject for a mad house,” Washington wrote [3] to Knox on Feb. 3, 1787, adding that if the government “shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws … anarchy & confusion must prevail.”

Washington’s alarm about Shays’ Rebellion was a key factor in his decision to take part in – and preside over – the Constitutional Convention, which was supposed to offer revisions to the Articles of Confederation but instead threw out the old structure entirely and replaced it with the U.S. Constitution, which shifted national sovereignty from the 13 states to “We the People” and dramatically enhanced the power of the central government.

The drastic changes prompted strong opposition from some Revolutionary War figures, such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry, who denounced the federal power grab and rallied a movement known as the Anti-Federalists. Prospects for the Constitution’s ratification were in such doubt that its principal architect James Madison joined in a sales campaign known as the Federalist Papers in which he tried to play down how radical his changes actually were.

To win over other skeptics, Madison agreed to support a Bill of Rights, which would be proposed as the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Madison’s political maneuvering succeeded as the Constitution narrowly won approval in key states, such as Virginia, New York and Massachusetts. The First Congress then approved the Bill of Rights which were ratified in 1791. [For details, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative [4].]

Behind the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment dealt with concerns about “security” and the need for trained militias to ensure what the Constitution called “domestic Tranquility.” There was also hesitancy among many Framers about the costs and risks from a large standing army, thus making militias composed of citizens an attractive alternative.

So, the Second Amendment read:  “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Contrary to some current right-wing fantasies about the Framers wanting to encourage popular uprisings over grievances, the language of the amendment is clearly aimed at maintaining order within the country.

That point was driven home by the actions of the Second Congress amid another uprising which erupted in 1791 in western Pennsylvania. This anti-tax revolt, known as the Whiskey Rebellion, prompted Congress in 1792 to expand on the idea of “a well-regulated militia” by passing the Militia Acts which required all military-age white males to obtain their own muskets and equipment for service in militias.

In 1794, President Washington, who was determined to demonstrate the young government’s resolve, led a combined force of state militias against the Whiskey rebels. Their revolt soon collapsed and order was restored, demonstrating how the Second Amendment helped serve the government in maintaining “security,” as the Amendment says.

Beyond this clear historical record – that the Framers’ intent was to create security for the new Republic, not promote armed rebellions – there is also the simple logic that the Framers represented the young nation’s aristocracy. Many, like Washington, owned vast tracts of land. They recognized that a strong central government and domestic tranquility were in their economic interests.

So, it would be counterintuitive – as well as anti-historical – to believe that Madison and Washington wanted to arm the population so the discontented could resist the constitutionally elected government. In reality, the Framers wanted to arm the people – at least the white males – so uprisings, whether economic clashes like Shays’ Rebellion, anti-tax protests like the Whiskey Rebellion, attacks by Native Americans or slave revolts, could be repulsed.

However, the Right has invested heavily during the last several decades in fabricating a different national narrative, one that ignores both logic and the historical record. In this right-wing fantasy, the Framers wanted everyone to have a gun so they could violently resist their own government.

This bogus “history” has then been amplified through the Right’s powerful propaganda apparatus – Fox News, talk radio, the Internet and ideological publications – to persuade millions of Americans that their possession of semi-automatic assault rifles and other powerful firearms is what the Framers intended, that today’s gun-owners are fulfilling some centuries-old American duty.

If radical conservatives want to live in a perpetual fantasy land called the United OK Corral where they get up every morning, strap on some high powered firearms and shoot their way through the day; well there is nothing stopping them from packing their bags and founding that country. me and my neighbors are gun owners and none of us free threatened by some sensible gun regulations. That says a lot about the freak out that conservatives are having. They're gun worshipers, not gun rights advocates.

What liberal media? Will Media Fact Check Misleading Claims From NRA's Question-Free Press Conference? 

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