OpEdNews - 4/4/2018 - from Alternet

"Political Corruption Is Underwriting America's Gun Control Nightmare.

Let's get the money out of politics. Then we can deal with the NRA."

By Thom Hartmann:

Parkland shooting survivor and activist David Hogg recently asked why John McCain has taken over $7 million from the NRA (not to mention other millions they and other "guns rights" groups have spent supporting him indirectly).

McCain's answer, no doubt, would be the standard politician-speak these days: "They support me because they like my positions; I don't change my positions just to get their money." It's essentially what Marco Rubio told the Parkland kids when he was confronted with a similar question.

And it's a bullshit answer, as we all well know.

America has had an on-again, off-again relationship with political corruption that goes all the way back to the early years of our republic. Perhaps the highest level of corruption, outside of today, happened in the late 1800s, the tail end of the "Gilded Age." (Gilded, of course, refers to "gold coated or gold colored," an era that Donald Trump is trying so hard to bring back that he's even replaced the curtains in the Oval Office with gold ones.)

One of the iconic stories from that era was that of William Clark, who died in 1925 with a net worth in excess, in today's money, of $4 billion. He was one of the richest men of his day, perhaps second only to John D. Rockefeller. And in 1899, Clark's story helped propel an era of political cleanup that reached its zenith with the presidency of progressive Republicans (that species no longer exists) Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Clark's scandal even led to the passage of the 17th Amendment, which let the people of the various states decide who would be their U.S. senators, instead of the State Legislature deciding, which was the case from 1789 until 1913 when that amendment was ratified.

By 1899, Clark owned pretty much every legislator of any consequence in Montana, as well as all but one newspaper in the state. Controlling both the news and the politicians, he figured they'd easily elect him to be the next U.S. senator from Montana. Congress later learned that he not only owned the legislators, but in all probability stood outside the statehouse with a pocket full of $1,000 bills in plain white envelopes to hand out to every Member who'd voted for him.

When word reached Washington, D.C., about the envelopes and the cash, the U.S. Senate began an investigation into Clark, who told friends and aides that, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale."

Mark Twain wrote of Clark: "He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs."

State Senator Fred Whiteside, who owned the only non-Clark-owned newspaper in the state, the Kalispell Bee, led the big expose of Clark's bribery. The rest of the Montana senators, however, ignored Whiteside and took Clark's money.

The U.S. Senate in 1899 launched an investigation, and, sure enough, found out about the envelopes and numerous other bribes and emoluments offered to state legislators, and refused to seat him. The next year, Montana's corrupted Governor appointed Clark to the Senate, and he served a full eight-year term.

Clark's story went national, and became a rallying cry for clean government advocates. In 1912, President Taft, after doubling the number of corporations being broken up by the Sherman Act over what Roosevelt had done, championed the 17th Amendment (direct election of senators, something some Republicans today want to repeal) to prevent the kind of corruption Clark represented from happening again.

Meanwhile, in Montana, while the state legislature was fighting reforms, the citizens put a measure on the state ballot of 1912 that would outlaw corporations from giving any money of any sort to politicians. That same year, Texas and other states passed similar legislation (the corrupt Speaker of the House, Tom Delay [R-TX], was prosecuted under that law).

Montana's anti-corruption law, along with those of numerous other states, persisted until 2010 when Justice Kennedy, writing for the five-vote majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, declared in the Citizens United decision that in examining over 100,000 pages of legal opinions he could not find:

"...any direct examples of votes being exchanged for ... expenditures. This confirms," Kennedy wrote, "Buckley's [the 1976 decision that money equals free speech] reasoning that independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption. In fact, there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate. Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption."

The U.S. Supreme Court, following on the 1976 Buckley case that grew straight out of the Powell Memo and was written in part by Lewis Powell, turned the definitions of corruption upside down.

That same year, they overturned the Montana law in the 2010 ATV v. Bullock ruling, essentially saying that money doesn't corrupt politicians, particularly if that money comes from corporations who can "inform" us about current issues (the basis of the Citizens United decision) or billionaires (who, apparently the right-wingers on the Court believe, obviously know what's best for the rest of us).

Thus, the reason the NRA can buy and own senators like McCain and Rubio (and Thom Tillis/$4 million, Cory Gardner/$3.8 million, Joni Ernst/$3 million, and Rob Portman/$3 million, who all presumably took money much faster and much more recently than even McCain) is because our Supreme Court has repeatedly said that corporate and #MorbidlyRich billionaire money never corrupts politicians. (The dissent in the Citizens United case is a must-read; truly mind-boggling and demonstrates beyond refutation how corrupted the right-wingers on the court, particularly Scalia and Thomas -- who regularly attended events put on by the Kochs -- were by billionaire and corporate money.)

So here we are. The Supreme Court has ruled, essentially, that the NRA can own all the politicians they want, and can dump unlimited amounts of poison into our political bloodstream.

Gun-control activists are only confronting the tip of the iceberg.

Activists struggle to fight for our climate, the rights of communities to be free of pollution from fracking or factory farms, the rights of citizens to health care and education, and dozens of other issues where the government has the ability to limit predatory corporate behavior. Unfortunately, because of corporate money, our federal and many state governments are making things worse for humans and the earth, while jacking up profits and tax cuts for corporations and billionaires.

But there are solutions. While we work as hard as we can to clean up America's gun problem -- and the Parkland activists have given us all a cause and a chance to make real change happen now -- we also need to work to get money out of politics. It was financial corruption, after all, that got us in this gun mess in the first place -- the history of the Heller decision is a horrible history of well-funded right-wing groups testing message after message until they found one that would stick with the Supreme Court.

There are three big ways to overturn the power that billionaires and corporations have seized through their corruption of the Supreme Court.

The first way is to replace enough members of the Court to ensure a moderate or even progressive majority. This looked like a very real possibility in 2000, when George W. Bush lost the national vote to Al Gore by over a half million votes, and, according to a recount done by a consortium of newspapers, would have lost, as the New York Times reported, the electoral vote as well had the Supreme Court not intervened and stopped the Florida recount.

The Times noted: "[A] statewide recount could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his [Gore's] way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent." Unfortunately, they buried that sentence in the 17th paragraph of a story with a misleading headline, because the country had just been attacked on 9/11 and Bush's "legitimacy" was important to preserve during a time of national crisis. And, of course, none of that includes considerations of the considerable voter suppression that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris engaged in, as documented by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, and Greg Palast for the BBC.

More recently, to keep the Court in GOP hands, Mitch McConnell simply flatly refused to even recognize President Barack Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, waiting for Donald Trump to put in one of the most hard-right justices, Neal Gorsuch, since the 1920s.

The second way around Citizens United is for Congress to pass legislation specifically undoing Citizens United. Their authority to do this is found in the Constitution, Article 3, Section 2, which says: "[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." Congress rarely does this (it's referred to as "court stripping"), although banning judicial review was pushed really hard in the 1980s, including by Reagan himself.

The third and most likely way to get around this corruption of our Supreme Court is to do the same thing we did when the Court, in Dred Scott v. Sanford, ruled that African Americans were property and not people under the Constitution. We amended the Constitution (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments) to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling.

Numerous groups, from Public Citizen to Move To Amend, are working hard on this last effort to say that "Corporations are not people and aren't entitled to the rights of personhood," and "Money is not the same thing as speech." If successful, such a constitutional amendment would overturn the "new laws" promulgated (unconstitutionally) by the court in 1886 (corporate personhood) and 1976 (money = "free speech").

The NRA and their weapons-manufacturing buddies aren't the only bad actors trying to damage our democratic republic through what were once illegal methods to corrupt public officials. Companies from the fossil fuel industry to the GMO industry to Silicon Valley have been doing it for years.

They're all symptoms of the real and larger problem: that the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations and billionaires can own a virtually unlimited number of state and federal politicians. These newly empowered billionaires are now even bragging about that ownership, as you can see with the recent Koch brothers announcement that they're injecting an eye-popping $400 million into the election this fall.

Only when we get money out of politics, like the good citizens of Montana did back in 1912, will we be able to deal with the NRA and their ilk on anything like a level playing field.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Political-Corruption-Is-Un-by-Thom-Hartmann-American-History_Corporations_Corruption_Financial-180404-975.html

OpEdNews - 2/22/2018 - from Alternet

''Two Simple Laws Could Solve America's Epidemic of Violence.

Let's regulate gun ownership the same way we regulate car ownership."

By Thom Hartmann:

Two simple changes to U.S. law, both things based in other laws that we already know and like, could solve most of America's gun violence problem:

1. Treat all semi-automatic weapons in a similar way under the same laws as fully-automatic weapons.
2. Regulate gun ownership and usage the same way we regulate car ownership and usage.

Here's the backstory and how each would work:

Semi-Automatic Weapons

Back in the prohibition era, before and during the time John Dillinger and friends were shooting up American cities from New York to Chicago to San Francisco, the National Rifle Association approved of two very consequential laws that restricted gun ownership and use. (The NRA didn't become a lobbying and promotional front group for the weapons industry until the 1970s when the Supreme Court's Buckley v. Valeo decision ruled that the #MorbidlyRich and wealthy gun-manufacturing corporations could legally buy and own their very own politicians. For nearly a century prior to that, the NRA supported rational gun control.)

The Uniform Firearms Act of 1931 in Pennsylvania was the harbinger of the federal 1934 National Firearms Act, which brought an end to the widespread legal availability of fully automatic "tommy guns," along with, later, silencers and sawed-off shotguns. But ownership of such automatic weapons isn't really "banned" -- it's just a somewhat complex process to get permission to own and use them.

First, you must find a local law enforcement officer who will vouch for you and perform a background check on you. His or her signature is the necessary first step to getting an Automatic Weapons Permit, and you must have an absolutely clean record, from a clean criminal record, to not owing any child support, to not having any past firearms violations. If you lie about this, or apply for your permit through a "clean" third party, you and your third-party could both end up in jail.

Then you need to pull together two sets of your fingerprints and two passport-type photos. Plus the $200 "tax stamp" fee for the permit. And get all the information you'll need on the gun you want to buy, including its serial number and details on its last owner.

Finally, you need to fill out an OMB No. 1140-0014 Application for Tax Paid Transfer and Registration of Firearm form, with such easy questions as category 14:

1. Are you under indictment or information in any court for a felony, or any other crime, for which the judge could imprison you for more than one year?

2. Have you ever been convicted in any court for a felony, or any other crime, for which the judge could have imprisoned you for more than one year, even if you received a shorter sentence including probation? (See definition 1m)

3. Are you a fugitive from justice?

4. Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?

5. Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?

6. Have you been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions?

7. Are you subject to a court order restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?

8. Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence?

You also have to provide the government with the reason why you think it appropriate for you to have a fully automatic weapon, sawed-off shotgun, or other "destructive device":

• 13. Transferee Necessity Statement: I ___________, have a reasonable necessity to possess the machinegun, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotgun, or destructive device described on this application for the following reason(s) ________________ and my possession of the device or weapon would be consistent with public safety (18 U.S.C. 922(b) (4) and 27 CFR 478.98).

Karl Frederick, the NRA's president back when these laws were put into place, was enthusiastic. "I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons," he said. "I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses." When asked if he thought the National Firearms Act of 1934 violated a person's Second Amendment rights, he famously said, "I have not given it any study from that point of view."

The result of the restrictions on ownership of fully automatic weapons (and other "destructive devices") has been that they've pretty much vanished as the scourge on public safety that they were in the late 1920s and early '30s.

Thus, it's rare that either automatic weapons or the less-efficient-at-killing-lots-of-people revolvers and bolt-action rifles are used for mass murders. This is largely because the former are hard to buy/own, and for the latter the time necessary to re-co*k and re-load presents victims an opportunity to stop a mass shooting.

Remember, the only reason the shooter who tried to kill Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was stopped after "only" killing six people was that he had to replace his 33-shot magazine with a fresh one, and Bill Badger, a 74-year-old man standing near him (whom he'd just shot), tackled him and held him to the ground.

Thus, as the volume of production of semi-automatic weapons has increased in the past 30 years or so, and their price has come down, the older-fashioned pistols and bolt-action rifles have been replaced by a more recent generation of semi-automatic pistols, rifles, and assault weapons.

But if most handguns in circulation were revolvers, and most rifles were bolt- or break-action, there would be far fewer (or at least far less deadly) mass shootings.

Revolvers typically have a cylinder that holds from 5 to 10 rounds of ammunition, and each chamber in the cylinder must be individually loaded. While there are autoloaders and other ways to speed up the process, the gun is still largely limited, at least in an "active shooter" situation, to the rounds in its cylinder.

With a single-action revolver, the gun can't even be fired until it's cocked by pulling back the hammer (although a double-action revolver will accomplish this with the first part of the trigger pull).

Revolvers are very efficient killing machines, having been in widespread use since their popularization by the Colt Company in the 1830s, but while they're great for sport and self-defense (and were police weapons of choice just up until the past 30 or so years), for mass killings they can't hold a candle to semi-automatics.

Semi-automatic pistols are, in their modern form, a creation of the last century. They use the recoil force of a shot (some also use the exhaust gases) to load a new round into the chamber and co*k the gun, all in one seamless and nearly instantaneous motion.

As a result, semi-automatics can be fired as fast as one can pull the trigger, and the amount of trigger pressure a revolver would require to co*k the hammer is unnecessary. And, because they don't have a built-in cylinder like a revolver, the magazine in a semi-automatic that stores the ammunition (some as large as 50-shots) can be quickly replaced.

The rifle side of the equation is largely the same; while bolt-action rifles don't have a cylinder, they do require the shooter to pull back the bolt between shots, which ejects the spent shell, inserts a new one, and re-cocks the weapon itself. Variations on this include lever-action and pump-action rifles or shotguns, although all require action by the shooter between shots.

Semi-automatic rifles, on the other hand, like semi-automatic pistols, use recoil or gases to reload and recock the weapon, so that shots can be squeezed off as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger. And, because -- like semi-automatic pistols -- they have quickly replaceable magazines, they're far deadlier than bolt- pump- or break-action rifles.

Since the vast majority of mass murders of the 1930s were accomplished with fully automatic weapons, tightly regulating who could buy and own them pretty much removed mass murders from the streets of America. It's time to do the same with semi-automatic weapons, which are the new mass killers' weapon of choice.

All it would take is amending the National Firearms Act to put any semiautomatic gun of any sort under the same sort of oversight and permitting necessary for fully automatic weapons.

What We Learned From Cars

While there were a number of automobile manufacturing companies in the late 19th century, it was really at the turn of the 20th century that cars became a hot commodity in the United States.

R.E. Olds (I used to live in and run a business out of his mansion in Okemos, Michigan) rolled out the first assembly line in 1901, but it was Henry Ford who cranked the popularity of cars up a notch with his "first version" of the Model A in 1903, and then developed the assembly line to crank out the Model T in 1908.

By 1927, around the time he rolled out the "second version" of his Model A, he'd sold over 15,000,000 cars.

So it was that, around 1915, many states began to notice that cars were killing people. They were being hit on the roads, dying when drivers didn't know how to avoid running into trees or off bridges, and in accidents with horse-drawn carts and other automobiles.

Which presented the lawmakers of most states with a serious question: What to do to protect the public, including the car owners, from the dangers of death and disfigurement that cars presented?

The answer that most states came up with, and has now largely been standardized across the U.S. and most of the world, was a very simple and straightforward three-part criterion for car ownership and operation.

1. Establish ownership. In order to be able to manage all the cars coming onto the roads, both as valuable pieces of theft-worthy hardware and to track liability issues, all cars were required to have a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), which was stamped onto the car during manufacture and followed it until the day it was destroyed or decommissioned. Similarly, the owner of that car and its VIN had to present himself to state authorities and sign a title of ownership, which had to be recorded with the state whenever title was transferred to a new owner.

2. Prove competence. By the years around 1915 there had been so many fatalities and serious injuries attributable to cars that the states decided they only wanted people driving on public roads who actually knew how to handle a car properly. This meant defining rules for the road, having people learn those rules, and testing them -- both in writing and practically in person -- to show they truly could drive safely. When people passed the tests, they were given a license to drive.

3. Require liability insurance. Because virtually all car accidents were just that -- accidents -- most people who "caused" accidents were at both financial and legal risk. Many were fine, upstanding citizens (in fact, because cars were expensive, most car owners fell into this broad category). And they wanted some defense against the chance of making a mistake and ending up in jail or broke because of lawsuits or the liability costs of caring for people they'd injured. What came out of this was the development of automobile liability insurance, and the establishment of a requirement for it to be carried by all owners/drivers. While most states adopted this requirement substantially later than 1915, it's now established as a fundamental part of the three steps necessary to drive a car.

Which brings us to today.

These three things that we do for owners of cars are perfect to deal with our American gun problem.

• Registration and title -- as a requirement rather than an option -- would establish a clear chain of custody and responsibility, so when people behave irresponsibly with their guns they can be held to account.

• Having a shooter's license be conditional on passing both a written and a shooting-range test would demonstrate competence and also insert a trained person into the process who could spot "off-kilter" people like the Parkland shooter. Taking a cue from most other countries, we could also require people to prove a need or sporting/safety use for a weapon.

• Today, if a car had run down mass-shooting victims, their families would be getting millions from Geico, et al. Because a gun killed them, they get nothing. This is bizarre in the extreme; we all end up paying the costs of gun violence.

These three steps are nothing but common sense, and don't infringe on the "rights" of gun owners any more than they infringe on the "rights" of car owners. They could even provide a stream of revenue for gun-owners' organizations that chose to train people to prepare for their licensure test, and/or offer low-cost liability insurance.

Learning From Others

Just like most Americans have no idea that every other developed country in the world has already figured out how to inexpensively and efficiently provide health care for 100 percent of their citizens as a right, so too, most Americans have no idea how all the other developed nations of the world have managed to keep their gun-deaths-per-100,000-people below 0.5, while in the USA it's over six people killed with guns per 100,000 citizens.

But other countries have done it, and we can learn a lot from their experience.

This is largely the path Australia has taken. After a decades-long series of mass gun-shootings culminated in the 1996 Port Arthur massacres, that nation, in a moment of collective revulsion, chose to require a license to own virtually any type of gun, and to make semi-automatic pistols and rifles as tightly regulated as fully automatic ones.

They also put into place a series of national amnesty and gun-buyback programs, which pulled hundreds of thousands of now-illegal guns out of circulation in that country, while appropriately compensating former gun owners.

It's still relatively easy for hunters and sportspeople to get pistols or rifles. All they have to do is prove that they are who they say they are, pass a background test, and then prove on an ongoing basis that they're actually using their weapons for sport, at least annually.

Since the implementation of these laws in 1996, Australia has not yet had another mass shooting incident. In the first years after the laws took place, firearm-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent.

And it's not just Australia. Every other developed or developing country in the world has more stringent gun control lawsthan the United States. Which may be why no other such country has the horrific rate of gun deaths and mass shootings we regularly experience.

None of these solutions is difficult. We've done them all before in other venues (like car ownership and fully automatic weapons) and they've worked fine, and every other developed country in the world has successfully applied them to guns.

We can, too. All it takes is for the NRA to get out of the way, or for American politicians to gather together the courage to stop taking the NRA's money.

Thankfully, the young people of Parkland, Florida, are doing everything they can to make that happen. They deserve our support.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Two-Simple-Laws-Could-Solv-by-Thom-Hartmann-Americans-Killed_Firearms_Guns_NRA-180222-512.html

The NPC MOB

·
NPC= Non Playable Character
The character or characters in a video game that are controlled by the game.
They speak scripted words. Say what they are told.
It's been noticed that the letters M, O, and B are each one letter position shy of N, P and C!

MOB or NPC, think of those "progressive" protesters who chant the same scripted words, seemingly with no original thought.

Thom Hartmann : Biography

Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talkshow host whose shows are available in over a half-billion homes worldwide. He's the New York Times bestselling, 4-times Project Censored Award winning author of 24 books in print in 17 languages on five continents. Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Thom's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" to make the movie "The 11th Hour" (in which Thom appears), and Warner Brothers is making a movie starring DiCaprio and Robert De Niro from the book Thom co-authored with Lamar Waldron, "Legacy of Secrecy."

Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the 8th most important talk show host in America in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (10th the two previous years), and for three of the past five years the #1 most important progressive host, in their “Heavy Hundred” ranking. His radio show is syndicated on for-profit radio stations nationwide by Westwood One, on non-profit and community stations nationwide by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio (The Progress, Channel 127), on cable systems nationwide by Cable Radio Network (CRN), on its own YouTube channel, via Livestream on its own Livestream channel, via subscription podcasts, worldwide through the US Armed Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann App in the App Store. The radio show is also simulcast as TV in realtime into nearly 40 million US and Canadian homes by the Free Speech TV Network on Dish Network, DirectTV, and cable TV systems nationwide.

Thom has spent much of his life working with and for the international Salem relief organization (www.saleminternational.org) and he and his wife Louise founded a community for abused children in New Hampshire (www.salemchildrensvillage.org) and a school for learning disabled and ADHD kids (www.hunterschool.org). His book "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception" sparked a national debate, both in the psychology/psychiatry community and among the general public, on ADD/ADHD and neurological differences ranging from giftedness to autism. His book "Rebooting The American Dream" so inspired Senator Bernie Sanders that he wrote a cover letter to accompany the delivery of the book to his 99 colleagues in the United States Senate and he read from it extensively on the floor of the Senate during his famous filibuster.

As an entrepreneur, he's also founded several successful businesses which still are operating, and lived and worked with his wife, Louise, and their three children on several continents.

An inveterate traveler and sometimes a risk-taker, Hartmann has often found himself in the world's hot spots on behalf of the German-based Salem international relief organization or as a writer, a situation which causes his friends to sometimes wonder aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not and never has). He was, for example, in The Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Uganda during the war of liberation by Tanzania; in Hungary when the first East German refugees arrived; in Germany when the wall came down; in Beijing during the first student demonstrations; in Thailand when the military coup of 1991 occurred; in Barbados during the 2004 anti-government strikes and shutdowns; in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, during the spate of killings of presidential candidates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifada started there; on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down; in Kenya during the first big wave of crackdowns on dissidents; at dinner in Moscow with Vladimer Putin and Mikhael Gorbachev as Donald Trump was sweeping the Republican field Christmas 2016; and in Venezuela during the 1991 coup attempt. He has been successful in avoiding some disasters, however. For example, he was out of the country when George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate.

He was born and grew up in Michigan, and retains strong ties to the Midwest, although he and Louise have lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, Georgia, Germany, and Oregon...and now live with a small menagerie in Portland, Oregon.

Perhaps you should wonder why you're the last leftie here instead of worring excessivly about me......Nov. 6th is almost here!

checkmate!

OpEdNews - 6/26/2018 - From Alternet

"Billionaire Activist Tom Steyer: You Want Trump Out? Buy Clear Channel.

The billion-dollar-plus cost of iHeartMedia shows just how powerful and valuable the right-wing media machine has become."

By Thom Hartmann:

If liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer want to have a real and lasting impact on American politics, they should seriously think about buying a nationwide radio network.

Bloomberg reports that iHeartMedia LLC, previously known as Clear Channel, is "open to takeover talks." It's the largest operator of radio stations in the nation.

The simple fact is that if Richard Nixon had had hundreds of radio stations in virtually every city or town in America of any consequence, with all of them running right-wing talk nonstop, it would have been difficult to impeach him.

If Nixon had had Fox News in addition to all that radio power, he could have safely and easily pulled an Andrew Jackson (who sneered at and ignored the Supreme Court's order to stop the Trail of Tears) and refused to turn over his tapes when SCOTUS ordered it, thus avoiding both impeachment and resigning office.

As Trump may well do when Mueller's final reports come out. (It's probably not a coincidence that Andrew Jackson's portrait now hangs in the Oval Office.)

Liberty Media made a $1.4 billion offer to buy 40 percent of the debt, and effective control, of iHeartMedia (it's bankrupt and massively in debt because of a failed takeover by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, but that's another story) and iHeart turned it down as insufficient.

But with just a little more money, a progressive billionaire or two could own a nationwide radio network with virtually 100 percent penetration, and restore progressive voices to the nation's largest stations.

The billion-dollar-plus cost of iHeartMedia, along with the eye-popping profit numbers and immense political influence of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Wall Street Journal, shows just how powerful and valuable the right-wing media machine has become.

Back in 2004 when Air America was rolled out, it was successful for as long as it was in large part because it could lease stations owned by what was then Clear Channel and is now iHeartMedia: we were on over 50 Clear Channel stations in the nation's major markets, and drew very good ratings, even occasionally beating Rush Limbaugh and his ilk on competing Clear Channel stations.

Following a string of Democratic victories in cities and states where Clear Channel was leasing stations to Air America, the company was purchased in a leveraged buyout by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital and Thomas Lee.

Soon thereafter, Clear Channel began pulling Air America's progressive programming off the air, dramatically cutting Air America's audience and their advertising revenue; the new progressive network was soon bankrupt, and two years later so was Clear Channel (because of the debt load dumped on them by Bain's business model), then reincarnated as iHeartMedia.

Meanwhile the right-wing media machine continues to elect Republicans with big funding from right-wing corporations and the billionaires that own them and fund right-wing think tanks. As Ken Vogel, et al, point out in a 2011 article for Politico, "The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million [a year] to sponsor Limbaugh's show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity's -- and considers it money well spent."

To the best of my knowledge, none of the talkers on the left has ever been funded in such a fashion. Small wonder that Hannity now owns a real estate empire worth tens of millions, and Limbaugh can brag of an eight-figure net worth or more. But more importantly, the influence of those two well-financed talkers has altered America's political landscape in fewer than three decades.

What this shows is that the movers and shakers on the far right, the libertarian billionaires like the Kochs, understand the power of media.

Those of great wealth aligned with the left in America, however, have always largely ignored media, probably because they grew up in an America with the Fairness Doctrine and before the 1996 Telecommunications Act and they always just assumed that "the truth will eventually be known."

But investing in political media can produce both a huge return on investment, and can transform the politics of the nation.

That's certainly what Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch thought when they lost an average of $90 million a year for about five years before the Fox News Channel became profitable.

Brit Hume noted, in a 1999 interview with PBS: "This operation loses money. It doesn't lose nearly as much as it did at first, and it's -- well, it's hit all its projections in terms of, you know, turning a profit, but it's -- it will lose money now, and we expect for a couple more years. I think it's losing about $80 million to $90 million a year."

But that loss wasn't viewed by these right-wing billionaires as a "loss" -- rather, it was an investment.

It's what Reverend Moon believed, as his Washington Times newspaper lost hundreds of millions of dollars but spread right-wing perspectives that influenced the nation. It's how the Koch brothers have referred to the hundreds of millions they shower on right-wing politicians and causes. And it's what the people who started Air America Radio believed, although they couldn't get big funders to understand the stakes.

While Rupert Murdoch lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Air America's bankruptcy was for $14 million) in its first few years, Murdoch hung on and kept pouring in the cash. And it put George W. Bush into the White House, according to several independent analyses.

As Richard Morin wrote for the Washington Post back in 2006, asking rhetorically, "Does President Bush owe his controversial win in 2000 to Fox cable television news?"

The answer was an emphatic "yes!" according to academics who did exhaustive research into what they called "the Fox Effect."

As Morin reported:

"'Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect,' said Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkely [sic] and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.

"In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox Effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush -- clearly a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes."

The analysis looked at the vote from 1996 to 2004 in 9,256 American cities and towns where Fox was available on basic cable.

"They found," reports Morin, "clear evidence of a Fox Effect among non-Republicans in the presidential and senate races, even after controlling for other factors including vote trends in similar nearby towns without access to Fox."

The researchers added, Morin wrote, that, "[T]he Fox effect seems to [be] permanent and may be increasing." And that was in 2006.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786 to his close friend Dr. James Currie, "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

But ever since Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1983, leading to an explosion of acquisitions and mergers, and Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, leading to an even more startling concentration of media in a very few hands, freedom of the press in America has become as much an economic issue as a political one.

This is problematic, because no democracy can survive intact when only one voice or political perspective overwhelmingly dominates any major branch of the media.

Literally hundreds of right-wing talk show hosts, both local and national, are broadcasting every day, all day, in every town or city in America.

Progressive voices, on the other hand, are few and far between; in most parts of America (and virtually all of rural America), the only radio signal that carries any progressive programming whatsoever is SiriusXM, which requires a subscription and special receiver -- costs that are hard to bear among voters in the reddest states where Republican policies have destroyed unions and exported jobs overseas, thus leading to widespread poverty.

Jefferson made his comment about newspapers being vital to America just at the time he was being most viciously attacked in the newspapers.

The core requisite of democracy is debate. When there's only a single predominant voice in the media, American democracy itself is at greatest risk, be that voice on the right or the left.

If Tom Steyer wants to see Trump impeached, wants to see a semblance of balance on our airwaves, and wants a positive, healing, life-affirming progressive message available in every town in America, he should buy iHeartMedia tomorrow morning...

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Billionaire-Activist-Tom-S-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Clear-Channel_Impeach-Trump_Radio-180626-223.html

The brain of a Trump fool.

LOL,

I sure they will be pleased with the end theirs is going in!

Wild Turkeys are very gamey I've been told.

San Francisco Spends $6326 A Vote To Register 49 Undocumented Migrants To VoteSan Francisco has triggered a national debate over its decision to register undocumented migrants to vote in school board elections. However, a more pressing controversy may be the amount of money spent on the effort. San Francisco scents( sic ) $310,000 to register just 49 people in the city. That translates to $6326 a vote. The measure has created an interesting split among advocates as some have warned the city could be giving ICE a ready-made list for roundups of deportations.

https://jonathanturley.org/2018/10/28/san-francisco-spends-6326-a-vote-to-register-49-undocumented-migrants-to-vote/

Brilliant!

Also,

https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/texas-is-top-refugee-resettlement-state-in-the-nation-since-2008-blue-state-here-we-come/

cont'd (2 of 2)...

OpEdNews - 3/16/2018 - From Alternet

"The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants.

The GOP lackeys are eager to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money."

By Thom Hartmann:

Trump loved it.

Just like when he was a shill for the Kochs, Pompeo is more than willing to take any position -- regardless of how badly it may hurt America or risk war or environmental destruction -- that's being pushed by his new billionaire overlord.

One imagines Pompeo as a loyal dog, constantly eager to please his master.

On its surface, this seems like an indictment of Pompeo himself, but it's really not. It's an indictment of the entire political system in the United States, as it has been re-invented by a "conservative" Supreme Court that created a brand-new legal structure around the notion that "corporations are persons" and using money to buy politicians is First Amendment-protected "free speech."

No legislature or president had ever advocated those radical, anti-democratic positions, and neither had any American political party other than the Libertarians. The 1974 campaign finance reforms after the Nixon scandals, struck down by SCOTUS in 1976 with the Buckley case, were scrupulously bipartisan.

But Lewis Powell reached out to the oligarchs who often hired his legal services, and in 1971 his infamous "Powell Memo" charted how corporations and billionaires should take over virtually all the institutions of America, from Congress and the courts to our schools and local governments.

Later that year, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he dutifully made the Buckley case happen in 1976, throwing open the door to corruption of our political system by American oligarchs. Citizens United, in 2010, took it even further, allowing foreign governments and non-U.S. oligarchs to take a simple step through a U.S. corporation (like, for example, the NRA) to, themselves, own American politicians.

In a breathtaking power seizure not authorized by the Constitution, the Supreme Court singlehandedly created an entire new body of law, and thus began the process of turning America from a representative democracy into an oligarchy.

And now, predictably, we have a billionaire oligarch as president, multiple billionaire oligarchs in his Cabinet, and the billionaire oligarch Kochs committing hundreds of millions of dollars to oligarch-friendly Republicans in every election cycle.

In an oligarchic nation, there is one singular skill for political success: one must willingly, ably, and enthusiastically suck up to the rich and powerful, subordinating one's ethics, reason, and even humanity.

This is a tragedy for both the USA and for democracies all over the world that emulate us.

Oligarchy (and its companion, strong-man pseudo-populism) is spreading rapidly, subsuming former liberal democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary while nibbling away at other democratic countries. China is holding oligarchy up as the new model for the world.

We must reverse these disastrous Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment, explicitly stating that corporations are not people and that money is not speech; otherwise, our rapid march to total oligarchy will continue to gather speed and power.

And suck-up politicians like Pompeo will continue to rise to the top, eager and willing to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money, prestige and power.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/The-Trump-Administration-I-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Corporations_Government-Crime_Trump-Bully-In-Chief-180316-730.html

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OpEdNews - 3/16/2018 - From Alternet

"The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants.

The GOP lackeys are eager to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money."

By Thom Hartmann:

A few years back, former President Jimmy Carter told me that, because of Citizens United and its predecessors (like the Buckley decision in 1976), we're no longer a democracy, but instead, "an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery."

For proof that Carter was right, one need look no further than Mike Pompeo taking Rex Tillerson's job, stepping into Thomas Jefferson's shoes as Secretary of State.

While Pompeo has an impressive resume on paper, something endlessly mentioned on cable news and other corporate media, the one skill-set that has truly enabled his rise to power, first in Congress and now in the Executive Branch, is his fine-tuned ability to suck up to #MorbidlyRich billionaires.

Prior to Trump arriving, Pompeo was one of Congress's single largest beneficiaries of money from the Koch brothersand groups associated with them. Forget Pompeo's army service and Harvard law degree; you don't get to be the favorite son of the morbidly rich if you don't know how to suck up to them.

Billionaire Trump, like so many others of America's billionaire oligarchs, doesn't take kindly to people who have their own minds. He wants fealty and sycophancy, not brilliance or competence.

For example, Rex Tillerson, actually looking at facts and political realities, made the mistake of pointing out to Trump that tearing up the Iran no-nukes deal at the same time you're trying to negotiate a brand-new no-nukes deal with North Korea was contradictory messaging. What country, after all, would want to cut a deal with a partner who kills agreements unilaterally without contractual justification?

Tillerson, of course, was right. But he wasn't sucking up to Trump in the way the oligarch wanted (and apparently, needed). Tillerson even occasionally put our nation's security ahead of his subservience to Trump. Big mistake.

Many members of today's billionaire class think of themselves as "self-made," and so have a sneering disregard for the working people of America who "merely" aspire to the American Dream of being in the middle class with a safe job, good benefits, and a secure retirement. These oligarchs are more concerned with their profits than with the impact of their products or services on our country.

And they only want people around them who share their vision of their own greatness; who, in other words, are pathetic suck-ups. Pompeo has developed this to an art form.

After years of sucking at the Koch teat, Pompeo apparently realized that Trump, too, wanted only to surround himself with people who eagerly agreed with him. Probably Trump is even needier than the Kochs, and so would only elevate people who tell him daily how brilliant and strong and noble he is.

Thus, Pompeo apparently saw a career opportunity to ingratiate himself with another billionaire oligarch.

To make it happen, Pompeo changed the normal daily routine by which the president is briefed by the CIA. Instead of it being done with clear, cold precision by a career intelligence officer, henceforth, Pompeo decreed, the Director of the CIA himself (Pompeo) would take hours out of his day to make the daily trek to the White House to hang out with Trump and give him a pleasant daily tongue-bath.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Trump-Administration-I-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Corporations_Government-Crime_Trump-Bully-In-Chief-180316-730.html

cont'd...

cont'd (2 of 3) ...

OpEdNews - 4/28/2018 - from Alternet

"We May Be on the Verge of a Human-Made Climate Disaster.

Is Europe about to experience famine?"

By Thom Hartmann:

But how can global warming provoke cooling in the eastern part of North America and across Europe?

The scenario was the plot basis (albeit wildly exaggerated) of the 2004 sci-fi film The Day After Tomorrow.

A deep ocean current sometimes called the Great Conveyor Belt (scientifically called the AMOC or Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) brings warm South Pacific water down under the southern tip of Africa, and then up the east coast of South and North America (we call it the Gulf Stream) to western Europe. (Here's a video from NASA.)

This river of water -- larger in volume than all the land-based rivers in the world -- delivers millions of tons of warm water a minute to an endpoint just south of Greenland and west of the UK, where, as much of the heat from that water is lifted into the atmosphere to blow east and warm Europe, the now-cool and saltiest-sea-water-in-the-world (it loses moisture along with heat) sinks deep down toward the ocean floor to begin its multi-year-long journey back toward the South Pacific.

Because this system is driven by both temperature and the sudden increase in salinity as it loses heat in the North Atlantic, its driving system is called thermohaline (temperature-salt).

The reason London and Amsterdam, at latitudes similar to Calgary and Edmonton, have weather like that of Europe is an Atlantic Ocean current driven by heat and salt.

And because the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and all of Northern Europe and Scandinavia are at roughly the same latitudes as the area from central Canada to Alaska, the only thing that keeps them warm enough to sustain rich crop yields (unlike Alaska) is the heat distributed to them from the Great Conveyor Belt/AMOC.

And the main thing that keeps the AMOC moving is the incredible salinity that forms in the North Atlantic as the current gives up both heat and water vapor, (leaving behind the salt) into the soon-to-warm-Europe air with the warmth. Because the strongly saline water is so much denser/heavier than normal seawater, it sinks vigorously toward the deeper parts of the ocean, pulling the rest of the current behind it and helping maintain the AMOC's flow.

Should something begin to inject fresh water into that region, thus diluting the salinity of the AMOC there, it would reduce the density of that water column and thus could shut down the Conveyor Belt. And that would shut off Europe's main heat source.

This is a scenario that most climate scientists -- until this year -- considered a remote possibility, even in the next century.

But it's beginning to happen right now, both in Antarctica and off the coast of Greenland and Western Europe, because of massive glacier melts.

One part of the thermohaline circulation of the AMOC runs around Antarctica. And, because of global warming, Antarctica is shedding hundreds of billions of tons of ice-melt fresh water into the ocean every year -- which is diluting and cooling saltwater and reducing local thermohaline circulation.

As Chris Mooney notes in the 4/3/18 Washington Post ("One Of The Most Worrisome Predictions About Climate Change May Be Coming True"):

"The new research, based on ocean measurements off the coast of East Antarctica, shows that melting Antarctic glaciers are indeed freshening the ocean around them. And this, in turn, is blocking a process in which cold and salty ocean water sinks below the sea surface in winter, forming 'the densest water on the Earth'..."

Meanwhile, the northern part of the Great Conveyor Belt -- which warms Europe -- is also faltering in the North Atlantic, largely as a result of hundreds of billions of tons of cold, fresh water from Greenland glacier-melt, caused by global warming, pouring into it every few minutes.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/We-May-Be-on-the-Verge-of-by-Thom-Hartmann-Climate-Change_Disaster_Famine_Water-180428-225.html

cont'd...