Bad Deeds for 7-18-2011

 

House Republicans Move to Gut the Clean Water Act – On Thursday, the House passed a bill that effectively eliminates federal oversight on water standards. The bill rolls back the Clean Water Act, returning most oversight to the states, and passed with almost all Republicans and a handful of Democrats supporting it.

The measure has a title that sounds kind of pleasant—the “Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011″—but when you read it you realize it’s really just an effort to return us to the days of the Cuyahoga River fire and Love Canal.

The House passed the bill by a vote of 239 to 184 on Wednesday, but like many of the assaults on EPA authority this year, it’s unlikely to go anywhere in the Senate. Nearly every Republican supported the provision, along with 12 Democrats—most of them from coal states.

MAPLight.org crunched the numbers and found that interest groups that supported this motion—like the National Mining Association and the West Virginia Coal Association—gave 94 percent more money to House members who voted in favor of the bill than they did to those who voted against it. Those interest groups gave 61 times as much money ($13,588 total) to Democrats who voted for it as they gave to Dems who voted against it (just $224).

 

Michele Bachmann: The First 2012er to Get Koch Cash – The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, spread their money far and wide. They fund free-market think tanks, right-leaning academic organizations, and conservative political advocacy groups, such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which helped cultivate the tea party. The political action committee for the Kochs’ massive conglomerate, Koch Industries, has also given generously to big-name conservative politicians throughout the country at both the federal and state level. But when it comes to the 2012 presidential race, the Kochs have been more selective with their giving, with only one presidential candidate so far benefiting from their largesse: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). In 2010, the committee did give $50,000 to Texans for Rick Perry.

 

Corporate Media Serves the Billionaires Who Own It – The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch’s Fox News.

Journalism’s primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, stamping on new ideas, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich.

The rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate.

 

The Debt Ceiling is an Exercise in Bad Faith – The debt ceiling was first enacted in 1917. Why? The date tells all: we were about to enter the Great War. To fund that effort, the Wilson government needed to issue Liberty Bonds. This was controversial, and the debt ceiling was cover, passed to reassure the rubes that Congress would be “responsible” even while the country went to war. It was, from the beginning, an exercise in bad faith and has remained so every single second to the present day.

Today this bad-faith law is pressed to its absurd extreme, to force massive cuts in public programs as the price of not-reneging on the public debts of the United States. Never mind that to force default on the public obligations of the United States is plainly unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th amendment says in simple language that public debts, once duly authorized by law and including pensions, by the way, “shall not be questioned.” The purpose of this language was to foreclose, to put beyond politics, any possibility that the Union would renege on debts and pensions and bounties incurred to win the Civil War. But the application is very general and the courts have ruled that the principle extends to the present day.

What is going on in Congress at this moment already violates that mandate. It is an effort to subvert the authority of the government to meet and therefore to incur obligations of every possible stripe. It is an attack on the concept of government itself – as the “Tea Party” by its very name would no doubt agree. It therefore paints those deficit hawks who are using the debt ceiling to take budget hostages as enemies of the United States Constitution.

 

People Are Losing Their Homes–Even If They Don’t Have Mortgages – Dr. Alan Schroit claims he got a “putrid” surprise when he arrived at his Galveston, Texas, vacation home last October after Bank of America (“with which he has neither a relationship nor a mortgage”) allegedly repossessed his home and turned off the utilities, leaving 75 pounds of frozen salmon and halibut to rot in the fridge. Schroit, who’d been planning to grill the fish for 30 guests the next night, is suing the bank. (For its part, BoA does “not believe the case will show merit.”)

According to ProPublica, a significant number of homeowners have been in for another nasty surprise when they lost their homes while the banks were telling them they were in the process of modifying their loans. In fact, some companies misinformed borrowers struggling to keep up with their payments that in order to be eligible for a loan modification, they first had to go into default on their mortgages. Lenders then added all sorts of late fees and penalties, then recouped those fattened balances by foreclosing.

 

Drug Company Maneuvers to Charge Outrageous Prices – After KV Pharmaceuticals obtained sole rights to a drug designed to stop women from going into labor early, the company increased the price from $10 per dose to $1500 per dose.

 

Republican House Cuts Nearly $1 Billion from the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s Weapons and Nonproliferation Programs – The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved spending legislation for the next budget cycle that would cut nearly $1 billion in proposed funding for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons and nonproliferation programs. The fiscal 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations bill would provide the nuclear agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, $10.6 billion to carry out duties including conducting nonproliferation operations around the world.

 

Florida Tea Party Worries About Government’s Secret Manatee Conspiracy – After propelling Republican Rick Scott into the governor’s office last fall, Florida tea partiers have found a new target: manatees. The endangered species has joined the list of tea-party targets, along with taxes, high-speed rail, and socialized medicine. From the story:

A Citrus County tea party group has announced that it’s fighting new restrictions on boating and other human activities in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We cannot elevate nature above people,” explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. “That’s against the Bible and the Bill of Rights. … As most of us know, this all ties in to the United Nations’ Agenda 21 and Sustainability.”

Ah, that! Stephanie Mencimer has covered the UN-related conspiracy theories that a number of tea partiers and Glenn Beck fans believe underlie all sustainability-related initiatives. The Citrus County group’s website warns that that Agenda 21 is “designed to make humans into livestock.” Surely a one-world government run by manatees must be part of the agenda, too.

Regards,

Jim