Your standard governor, congress critter, and other elected officials routinely insist that they represent “The People.” But when it Comes to making public policy, do they actually represent you… or Mr. Money, who writes big campaign checks?
Right.
Any pretension that we live in a self-governing democratic republic is gone. It’s been snuffed out by a tiny club of Big Money donors (only about, 600 people out of our population of 330 million). They’ve empowered themselves to choose candidates, control the public debate, and bend public policy to their selfish interests. Both major political parties are complicit in this kleptocratic transformation – Republicans by aggressively pushing it, and Democrats by passively acquiescing to it.
While Barack Obama has done nothing to stop this money-perversion of democracy, he’s at least made noise about making the thieves disclose their theft. But noise is not action, and the GOP’s enablers of the thievery have even moved to kill Obama’s modest disclosure ideas. In June, for example, House Republicans quietly voted to prohibit the SEC – the shareholder’s watchdog – from requiring CEOs to tell the corporate owners how much of their money is being spent on particular political candidates. Another GOP backroom proviso would keep the IRS from disclosing the names of corporate tax-law manipulators that use so-called “social-welfare” groups to funnel money anonymously into partisan political campaigns. Also, a third Republican hide-and-seek provision would allow corporations that get billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to avoid telling us the names of lawmakers they’re showering with campaign cash.
The torrent of secret corporate money in our elections is hosing our democratic ideals and possibilities, blasting the people out of the process and imposing Big Money governance over America.
“Dark Money’s Deepening Power,” The New York Times, June 29, 2015.
“The ‘Non-Candidate’ Money Spigot,” The New York Times May 31, 2015
“McCutcheon vs FEC,” www.opensecrets.org, 2014.

ISDS: A corporate cluster bomb to obliterate our people’s sovereignty

The Powers That Be are very unhappy with you and me. They’re also unhappy with senators like Elizabeth Warren, activist groups like Public Citizen, unions like the Communications Workers, and… well, with the majority of us Americans who oppose the establishment’s latest free trade scam.

Despite its benign name, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a cluster-bomb of legalized “gotchas.” TPP empowers global corporations from Brunei, Japan, Vietnam and eight other nations to circumvent and even overturn our local, state, and national laws. Those moneyed elites are upset that rabble like us oppose their latest effort to enthrone corporate power over citizen power, and they’re particularly peeved that we’ve found TPP’s trigger mechanism – something called “Investor-State Dispute Settlements.”
That’s a mouthful of wonky gobbledygook, isn’t it? Indeed, ISDS is an intentionally-arcane phrase meant to hide its democracy-destroying impact from us. It would create a system of private, international tribunals through which corporations (ie, “investors”) could sue our sovereign governments to overturn laws that might trim the level of corporate profits that – get this – they “expected” to make.
These tribunals are not part of our public courts of justice but are totally-privatized, inherently-biased corporate “courts” set up by the UN and the World Bank. A tribunal’s “judges” are corporate lawyers, and they unilaterally decide whether the protections we’ve enacted for workers, consumers, our environment, etc. might pinch the profits of some foreign corporation.
Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the other revolutionaries of 1776 would upchuck at this desecration of our nation’s democratic ideals – and so should we.

To join today’s rebellion against the aristocracy of corporate elites, go to www.StopTheTPP.org.

Peeking behind Walmart’s promise to invest in American jobs

Great news: Walmart is investing in American jobs!
It says so right here in a colorful, full-page ad showing a very happy Walmart worker displaying more than a dozen brand-name products made in the Good Ol’ USA. The ad even gives a website (MadeWithAmericanJobs.com) and says we can learn more by checking it out. So… I did.
Yikes! The website is filled with stuff not made-in-America. In the special Tips & Ideas section touting gifts for Father’s Day, Walmart promotes smart phones (none made in the US), flat screen TVs (made in Korea, Japan, China, etc.), and other foreign-made electronic gadgets that “will leave Dad happy.” Other sections of the webstore offer a Taiwan computer, T-shirts from Fruit of the Loom (which closed its last US plant in 2014), and an imported tent bearing Walmart’s own house brand. In fact, out of some five million products available for online purchase from Walmart, less than five thousand (one-half of one percent) are US-made.
Two years ago, when Walmart’s CEO announced the dazzling “Made With American Jobs” Campaign, he pledged to create a million new jobs for American workers. Apparently, most of those are to be in advertising firms and PR agencies hired to hype the corporation’s attempt to bamboozle us into thinking there’s some substance to the promise to invest in America. For example, one PR promotion touted a towel maker in Georgia as a beneficiary of the retailer’s new initiative. But a follow-up investigation by the LA Times found that the company was adding a mere 35 jobs as a result of the Walmart contract and was keeping 90 percent of its production overseas.
So far, Walmart’s highly ballyhooed USA campaign has produced only about 2,000 of the million jobs promised. The ad campaign expresses a nice sentiment, but where’s the commitment?