Dusty at It's My Right to Be Left of Center has a widget on her sidebar from CO2Now.org reminding readers about the rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. I picked one that I thought was especially appropriate for this blog posting from that site.





If you like this one, here's sample code you can use to add it to a blog posting on your site.
<br/><!--Start CO2 widget by Pro Oxygen v010.02.MAU315--><br/><a href="http://web.archive.org./web/20101029012055/http://co2now.org/"> <img width="315" height="210" border="0" title="Earth's latest data for atmospheric CO2" alt="Atmospheric CO2 data" src="http://web.archive.org./web/20101029012055im_/http://actionwidgets.org/en/e/co2-m/315-mauna-loa.png"/></a><br/><!--End CO2 widget-->

Despite all the other things on our minds and despite all the bullshit corporate propaganda meant to baffle us, we have to keep the following in mind.

Global Warming is real.

Global Warming is caused by humans.

If we don't do more about Global Warming, the results will be catastrophic.

We need to keep fighting for clean energy, for public transportation, and for conservation. Corporations are designed to only be concerned with short term profits. People live with the long term consequences.

 

The US Chamber of Commerce has gotten a lot of well deserved criticism for its spending of millions of dollars to try to buy elections for Republican candidates. Much of that criticism has focused on the fact that the Chamber gets a lot of money from foreign corporations. Their refusal to disclose where the money for their ad blitzes really come from have aroused perfectly reasonable suspicions that they are being secretive because they are using foreign money.

However, this line of criticism misses out a crucial point. Many "US Corporations" are under foreign control. From Source Watch:

According to the website Economy in Crisis, "Foreign ownership refers to ownership of assets of a particular industry by foreign controlled domestic U.S. Corporations (FDC) 50% or more owned by a foreign entity."
By that definition, the percentage of foreign ownership as of 2002 by industrial sector was as follows:
Sound recording industries - 97%
Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79%
Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75%
Metal ore mining - 65%
Motion picture and video industries - 64%
Wineries and distilleries - 64%
Database, directory, and other publishers - 63%
Book publishers - 63%
Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product - 62%
Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment - 57%
Rubber product - 53%
Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing - 53%
Plastics and rubber products manufacturing - 52%
Plastics product - 51%
Other insurance related activities - 51%
Boiler, tank, and shipping container - 50%
Glass and glass product - 48%
Coal mining - 48%
Sugar and confectionery product - 48%
Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying - 47%
Advertising and related services - 41%
Pharmaceutical and medicine - 40%
Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products - 40%
Securities brokerage - 38%
Other general purpose machinery - 37%
Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media -
36%
Support activities for mining - 36%
Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation - 32%
Chemical manufacturing - 30%
Industrial machinery - 30%
Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and
related activities - 30%
Other food - 29%
Motor vehicles and parts - 29%
Machinery manufacturing - 28%
Other electrical equipment and component - 28%
Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment
activities - 27%
Architectural, engineering, and related services - 26%
Credit card issuing and other consumer credit - 26%
Petroleum refineries (including integrated) - 25%
Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments - 25%
Petroleum and coal products manufacturing - 25%
Transportation equipment manufacturing - 25%
Commercial and service industry machinery - 25%
Basic chemical - 24%
Investment banking and securities dealing - 24%
Semiconductor and other electronic component - 23%
Paint, coating, and adhesive - 22%
Printing and related support activities - 21%
Chemical product and preparation - 20%
Iron, steel mills, and steel products - 20%
Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery - 20%
Publishing industries - 20%
Medical equipment and supplies - 20%

This is just the beginning. These numbers leave out the corporations who have major foreign shareholders, but who have a majority of US ownership, at least for now. Those corporations are under heavy foreign influence as you might expect.

We are used to thinking of foreign owners of US assets as private individuals and corporations. However, a lot of shares of US stocks are owned by foreign governments through their Sovereign Wealth Funds. According to a 2009 publication by Joel Slawotsky in the Georgetown Journal of International Law:

Sovereign wealth funds ("SWFs") are the new masters of the global financial order. Owned by foreign governments (1) and armed with an estimated U.S. $3 trillion in assets, (2) SWF financial power already dwarfs that of hedge funds. (3) SWFs are generally funded by foreign exchange assets and invested internationally. While SWFs have existed for decades, SWFs from oil exporting nations and Asian exporters have accumulated a staggering amount of assets due to high oil prices, globalization, and large global imbalances. (4) Accordingly, the number of SWFs and their available funds are rising rapidly, and their significance in global capital markets is becoming more prominent. (5) Expected growth in the near term is remarkable:

SWFs are major shareholders in member corporations of the US Chamber of Commerce, along with a lot of other foreign shareholders. It has gotten to the point to where one should question whether or not it is honest to refer to it as the "US Chamber of Commerce" anymore. Wikipedia has a list of countries with SWFs, many of which are countries unfriendly to the US such as China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Libya.

The infamous Citizens United ruling claimed that it limited political meddling by corporations to US Corporations, but "US Corporations" is a term that has lost most of its meaning. In this context, it is physically impossible to have corporations or their trade associations involved in political campaigns without causing enormous foreign influence over our elections.


Illustration: HikingArtist.com

 

In case you are new to this weird aspect of our legal system, here's a very brief introduction to what corporate personhood is from ReclaimDemocracy.org. (Skip to what Green Party is doing.)

Our Bill of Rights was the result of tremendous efforts to institutionalize and protect the rights of human beings. It strengthened the premise of our Constitution: that the people are the root of all power and authority for government. This vision has made our Constitution and government a model emulated in many nations.

But corporate lawyers (acting as both attorneys and judges) subverted our Bill of Rights in the late 1800's by establishing the doctrine of "corporate personhood" -- the claim that corporations were intended to fully enjoy the legal status and protections created for human beings.

We believe that corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges we willfully grant them. Granting corporations the status of legal "persons" effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests. Ultimately, the doctrine of granting constitutional rights to corporations gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power that undermines our freedom and authority as citizens. While corporations are setting the agenda on issues in our Congress and courts, We the People are not; for we can never speak as loudly with our own voices as corporations can with the unlimited amplification of money.

If "corporate personhood" sounds crazy to you, you are absolutely correct. Making corporations into the legal equivalents of people has no factual or constitutional basis and is completely unreasonable.

There are two other points I would like to add:

1) The Supreme Court ruling in the latter part of the 19th Century that enshrined corporate personhood was part of a broader pattern of corruption at that time, which included Plessy v. Ferguson and a ruling that said that anti trust legislation didn't apply to corporations, but instead to unions.

2) Corporations allow investors and speculators to avoid one of the biggest responsibilities of personhood, full civil liability for the actions of the enterprise, yet the Supreme Court granted those very corporations all the rights of people.

The Democrats have complained about Citizens United, a case where the fraudulent doctrine of "corporate personhood" has given the Republicans and foreign business interests a huge advantage in our political system. Those complaints have been reasonable as far as they go, but very few Democrats have called for an end to the sham of "corporate personhood." The Greens have done just that. (From Green Change 10/18/10)

110 Green Party candidates nationwide are calling for a “Green New Deal” to end the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, which grants corporations constitutional rights that had previously been reserved for people.

In addition, in August the U.S. Green Party endorsed “stripping [corporations] of artificial ‘personhood’ and constitutional protections,” along with “revoking the charters of corporations that routinely violate safety, health, environmental protection or other laws.”

In contrast, neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties support ending corporate personhood, or revoking the corporate charters of lawless corporations.

“Democrats and Republicans together have installed the judges who have brought corporate rule to America,” said Gary Ruskin, co-founder of Green Change, a national political organization. “If you want to fix the economy, clean up corruption in Washington, and save the environment, then vote Green to abolish corporate personhood.”

The Green New Deal has some other excellent ideas in it too. Here are the ten planks of it.

· Cut military spending at least 70%
· Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation
· Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them
· Establish single-payer "Medicare for all" health care
· Provide tuition-free public higher education
· Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards
· End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana
· Enact tough limits on credit interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation
· Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood
· Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms

I don't think that a constitutional amendment would even be necessary to get rid of "corporate personhood." All that would be needed would be a court challenge of it in front of a Supreme Court where the majority of the Justices were honest.

 

Photo: mendhak

One day, will peoples' memories of the Roman Catholic priesthood be limited to sinister statues in museums?

There is a lot that is awful about the Roman Catholic Church's discrimination against women, mandate for celibacy (with the exception of having sex with children), harassment of gay priests, and the numerous child molestation scandals. But, there is one good impact of all of this: the growing shortages of priests. Here are some examples of the positive impact this trend already is having.

Anointing of the sick another loss in U.S. priest shortage (USA Today 1/28/10)

Fiftieth parish closes in Diocese of Cleveland’s consolidation program (Catholic News Agency 7/1/10)

Priest shortage leads to closing of Okla. church (Times Record News 3/9/10)

Church lacks enough pastors (The Post and Courier 4/18/10)

As priest numbers fall, even Catholic Spain is not immune to a crisis of faith (Guardian 12/13/09)

The situation has gotten so comical that the RCC is even outsourcing some of the priesthood to guys from India. The day may arrive when the Roman Catholic priesthood is limited to a few creeps watching child porn in the Vatican.

 

Get Equal deserves a lot of credit in its dogged efforts to promote ENDA, the Employment Non Discrimination Act. Passage of employment non discrimination legislation at the federal level is long overdue, to put it mildly.



You can post this fun, pro ENDA video to your blog too. This will make it even easier.
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We need to keep pushing for ENDA until it passes, no matter who is in Congress or the White House.

Here is another pro ENDA video from an individual YouTube member.



 

Remember Amendment 2 from Colorado? That wasn't the last hate Amendment in that state. There is an Amendment 62, which uses the fraudulent premise that human life begins at conception to not only try to ban abortion in the cases of rape and incest, but to ban most forms of birth control, and to ban embryonic stem cell research. You can learn more about this misogynist, hate Amendment from the No 62 campaign.

The Young Turks did a great video on this subject.



The opposition to birth control and stem cell research proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the anti choice movement doesn't give a rats ass about "human life." Of course, their opposition to life saving condom distribution and real HIV education proved that point long ago. These people are rabidly anti sex, except for all the sex they are having.

Militant, Christian fundamentalists like to pretend that they are so much more moral than the rest of us. Yet, when they aren't busy stealing money from their congregations, molesting children, or breaking all of their own sexual taboos, they are so fond of act that is supposed to be immoral in every value system I've ever heard of: lying.

 

Jon Stewart is being heavily marketed by the rightist corporate media as a "liberal" or a "moderate," but I stopped watching him over the past two years when it became clear that he was putting a more reasonable sounding patina on the same agenda as extremists like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Fred Phelps, and Rush Limbaugh. The last straw was when he did a couple of rantings filled with misogynistic, heterosexist, and pro rape jokes defending the notoriously bigoted rightist, Scott Brown.

However, Stewart keeps getting more smarmy, bigoted, and rightist in his goals. His alleged "Rally to Restore Sanity," is an extreme example of his efforts to market right fringe ideology to moderates and liberals. Much has been made of Stewart's efforts to fictionalize false equivalencies between perfectly reasonable behavior of progressives and liberals and the dishonest, bigoted, and fanatical rantings of the far right. One example of this is when Stewart tries to pretend that CODEPINK is insane and even plausibly comparable to the teabaggers.

This obviously reflects Stewart's pro war agenda and his previously demonstrated hatred of women. CODEPINK is a perfectly sensible organization whose behavior is entirely consistent with reason and actual facts, though it strongly contradicts the desires of Jon Stewart's bosses in corporate America.

However, his claim that stating the fact that Bush is a war criminal is somehow insane goes even further, stretching into Rush Limbaugh or Carl Paladino territory. Let's look at what Bush's regime did with the Iraq War.

1) The Iraq War was a war of aggression, which is a war crime under international law.

2) The Bush regime's policy of routine torture of prisoners is a war crime under international law.

3) The Iraq War was an act of racist and anti Islamic genocide which killed over 1.3 million people, a horrific war crime.

Keep in mind that these international laws that Bush broke were written by the US to prosecute Nazi war criminals after the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II. This wasn't something foreign or alien imposed on the United States.

You might try to use ignorance as a defense for Stewart. For the war of aggression, that might work. Most Americans don't know that wars of aggressions are war crimes, and Stewart isn't exactly the most well informed person on TV, much less in the real world. The second war crime of mass torture is more difficult to defend. Stewart may be a dumb comic, but is he really that stupid and ignorant? However, Stewart cannot be defended on the grounds that he doesn't know that genocide is a war crime.

Ever Jewish person learns at some point in life that genocide is a war crime. Everyone else should too.

Why does Stewart think that stating the fact that Bush is a war criminal is "insane"? It has to do with Stewart's own racial and religious prejudices. Like so many on the far right, Stewart doesn't see Muslims as humans, nor does he see any person who isn't white as human. Keep in mind that he is loudly proclaiming this himself when he says that it is "insane" to acknowledge the fact that Bush is a war criminal.

Stewart's decision to go rabidly bigoted and pro war didn't occur in the absence of the context of corporate power. All the cable news networks, the old school news shows, and entertainment networks like Stewarts' Comedy Central have gone on a spasm of rightist hatred and bigotry every since Barack Obama has been inaugurated. Part of it is due to network executives and advertisers reasserting their extreme right agendas over what the own or pay for.

However, Stewart's scapegoating of oppressed groups and cynical efforts to attack and divide the left also reflect a strategy of corporate America and its propagandists to deflect attention from how the banksters, the brokesters, the speculators, and the CEOs are ripping the rest of us off while we all suffer. At the same time that the scapegoating goes on, the corporate propaganda networks heavily censor liberal or progressive alternatives to the crap we are getting from politicians and pundits.

Jon Stewart is gleefully leading efforts to equate thoughtful and factual analysis with the far right's incendiary lies. This is an intimidation tactic against liberals and progressives, and I'm not falling for it.

 

Hillary Clinton never met an oil corporation she wouldn't pander to, so this isn't terribly surprising. (From a Sierra Club email blast promoting an Action Alert.)

Just a few days ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she is inclined to approve the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

"We're either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada."

We disagree.

We don't have to import dirty oil from the dirtiest energy project on earth, the Canadian Tar Sands and we certainly don’t have to send billions overseas to oil-rich countries, while we sacrifice clean energy job creation here at home.

We need to push back and fast before the State Department makes its final decision on this dirty oil pipeline.

In a previous posting, I outlined some of the alternatives to depending on more petroleum. We simply don't need this especially filthy tar sands oil.

Besides, encouraging more oil production is the exact opposite of sound public policy that would try to prevent and reverse Global Warming. This is a pipeline to droughts, floods, and species extinction.

Even before Citizens United, it was difficult to get politicians to set aside the special interests of Big Oil. That corrupt Supreme Court ruling has made things even worse. That makes taking action even more important.

Please Take Action Now!

Photo: World Economic Forum

 

Dan Choi does a great job expressing the outrage queers are experiencing in the face of Barack Obama's viciously homophobic decision to unnecessarily appeal a court ruling that the military ban is unconstitutional.



Ms. Jarrett obviously thinks that every queer in the country has no basic knowledge of the legal system. She tried to justify the decision to try to keep the military ban in place through this appeal by saying that the administration is "obligated to defend" the policy in court. They defended the case in lower court and lost. Now, there is one basic fact that she is conveniently hoping we don't know.

In court cases, litigants who lose are under no obligation to appeal. Appeals are entirely optional.

I don't know if Valerie Jarrett is a lawyer or not, but I do know that President Obama is a lawyer. He knows he doesn't have to appeal the ruling. This was a conscious, deliberate homophobic act by the President.

It's not just the games that Obama and the Democrats in DC have been playing with the military ban. Those bigots haven't even lifted a finger to pass ENDA, by far the most important queer issue. Even though the Democrats control both houses of congress, neither has even voted on ENDA. The Obama administration has ignored it because they want corporations to be able to fire people for being queer.

The Obama Administration is just like the Clinton Administration. They say nice things to us occasionally while they stab us in the back and insult our intelligence. I don't blame Choi at all for deciding not to vote for Obama in 2012 after this. I'm voting all Green this year. If the Democrats insist on acting just like the Republicans and treating us like second class citizens, then the queer community has no reason to vote for them or give them a dime.

Like the folks at GetEQUAL say, the GayTM is shut down.