Bad Deeds for 2-21-2011

 

Congress Says They Want to Reduce the Deficit, But They Keep Funding Military Programs That the Pentagon Doesn’t Want – With deficit hawks looking for spending areas to cut, the Airborne Laser would appear to be an easy target. Approximately $5.2 billion has been sent on the weapon in the last 15 years, but it has only conducted one successful test. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, “There’s nobody in uniform that I know who believes that this is a workable concept.” But Congress keeps insisting that the military spend big bucks on it.

 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Used His Position to Help Enrich His Wife – Two formal legal complaints assert that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas knowingly and willfully withheld the information about his wife’s employment in order to keep litigants from using that information to ask that he be disqualified from their cases for bias and conflict of interest. Virginia Thomas worked for the conservative Heritage Foundation earning at least $600,000, which Justice Thomas denied on his disclosure forms. The Heritage Foundation benefitted from Justice Thomas’ decisions, including the controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed organizations such as the Heritage Foundation to raise unlimited funds to help conservative candidates. In the wake of that decision, Mrs. Thomas launched her own organization, Liberty Central, and raised over $550,000 in secret money. She then supposedly left that organization in November 2010 following a scandal involving an inappropriate telephone call to Anita Hill, only to start another organization called Liberty Consulting Inc. within the past month.

On February 7, 2011, ProtectOurElections tried to interview Mrs. Thomas at the office suite address listed on her Liberty Consulting website but it turned out to be a UPS Store with “Suite 302” being a mailbox. That mailbox is the same address listed on her Liberty Central IRS 990 form. A video showing UPS Store staff asking them to leave when they began inquiring about Mrs. Thomas’ office is on YouTube. Click here to view the video.

 

Glenn Beck Targets a 78 Year-Old Woman Who Wants to Help the Poor – Glenn Beck’s latest conspiracy theory target is a 78-year-old academic who, 45 years ago, published an article stating the need for certain reforms to help the poor.

The result? City University of New York professor and longtime advocate for the poor and working class, Frances Fox Piven has been receiving repeated death threats on online message boards and has personally received angry and violent emails. Please sign the petition at the link.

 

Job Killers – Policies that balance the budget on the backs of teachers, firefighters, police, public works people, and other workers are immoral. Now is the time for economic solutions, not scapegoats. Many of the proposals to reduce budgets are job killers, plain and simple, There is a big difference between the state’s economy and the state budget. Balancing the budget, while cutting funding of jobs will hurt Texas’ economy and many of it’s people.

Please support real solutions to restore the economy and the middle class.

 

Stealing From the Hungry – In 1953, at the beginning of his presidency, President Eisenhower gave a speech in which he said, ““Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Ike’s predictions define exactly where we are now. The economic crisis, high unemployment and cuts in human services compel us to organize grassroots support for even deeper cuts in the Pentagon budget.

 

Privatization of Public Services Can Leave you Broke and Thirsty -For the past 30 years, there has been a deliberate effort to deregulate industry and to choke off federal support for public services and public spaces, paving the way for greater corporate control. The push to privatize is nothing new, it’s just that our economic crisis is the latest opportunity. Falling on hard times, Coatesville, Penn. decided to sell off its drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in 2001 and invest the money in a trust fund to be used for city services. But privatization hasn’t been the economic boon the city was hoping for. After even tougher economic times hit Coatesville, the trust has already been drained by two-thirds and residents have seen their water and sewer rates jump 85 percent since American Water, the larger water corporation in the country, took the helm. Last year the company even proposed a 229-percent rate hike for sewer services, forcing the city to cobble together money for legal fees to fight back. This worked about as well as privatizing securiy (Blackwater, Inc.) worked in Iraq. [More on Privateering.]

 

Tea Party Patriots Can’t Even Handle Their Own Money – The finances of the nation’s largest tea party group have increasingly become a subject of concern—and outrage—to conservative activists. Some question whether donations to the organization, Tea Party Patriots, have gone to advance the movement, or just the careers and jet-setting lifestyles of its leaders. The group has had a man with an unusual background managing its money: He was sanctioned by the IRS several years ago for failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll taxes related to a failed business that pushed him into bankruptcy. He also happens to be married to one of the group’s leaders.

For a group that has demanded financial accountability and transparency from the Obama administration, Tea Party Patriots (TPP) has not embraced those principles in its own business affairs. It has been highly secretive about its finances, and the organization’s leaders have dealt harshly with activists and employees who’ve pressed for answers on how donor money has been spent.

Meanwhile, the group has failed to file a timely tax return indicating how much money it has raised and what, generally, it spent it on—including how much it’s paying its top staffers. And despite identifying itself for nearly two years as a tax-exempt nonprofit organization, the group has neglected to actually apply to the IRS for such status.

 

The True Cost of Using Coal is Very High to All of Us – Energy from coal might seem cheap on the surface, but when you add in the costs of coal-related pollution and health issues, the true cost of coal starts looking pretty steep.

Coal fired power plants spew toxins into our air while mountaintop removal mining practices destroy our mountains and pollute surrounding waterways. Here are just a few of the hidden annual costs of coal from the Appalachian region alone, according to a recent Harvard Medical School study:

• Public health: $75 billion
• Health costs due to air pollution from coal power plants: $187 billion
• Mercury emissions: $29 billion
• Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions: $206 billion.

According to the study, adding up all of these hidden costs would increase the per kWh price for coal by almost 18 cents. To put that in perspective, coal power now costs around 12 cents per kWh. Solar power costs between 10 and 15 cents per kWh.

 

Houston Man Beaten by Police Without Cause – Chad Holley, a burglary suspect, had surrendered to Houston police officers when they began stomping, kicking, and punching him. Despite this gross and obvious betrayal of the public’s trust and the injury to the young man — including a broken nose — the officers faced misdemeanor charges and only one year in prison under state law. It appears that federal prosecution will be necessary if the officers are to receive punishment commensurate with the crime they appear to have committed.

Regards,

Jim