Bad Deeds for 8-26-2011

 

Rick Perry Sought State Profits from Death Speculation on Teachers – According to the notes of a meeting in 2003, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation. All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them. When the retirees died, those policies would pay out benefits to Wall Street speculators, and the state, supposedly, would get paid for arranging the bets. The families of the deceased former teachers would get nothing.

The meeting notes offer the most direct evidence that the Perry administration was not only intimately involved with the insurance scheme, but a leading driver of the plan.

 

Hypocritical Teaparty Congressman Collects Disability From His Union Job – Rep. Chip Cravaack won the midterm election for Min­nesota in 2010, thanks in part to his extreme Teaparty platform. The newly elected congressman even voted for the Paul Ryan Teaparty backed budget, that will end medicare and replace it with a voucher program which seniors would be expected to use to satisfy their health needs.

Cravaack worked as a pilot for the Northwest Airlines and being a pilot means that you are a member of a Union, thus receiving the benefits of union negotiated salaries, vacations and ultimately, disability payments. Recent financial records released by Cravaack showed that he received $92,273 in 2010 from disability pay­ments he received from North­west. At this very same time Cravaack was receiving his checks, he was campaigning in Minnesota promising to end “big gov­ern­ment,” and often using the usual Republican talk­ing points of bashing unions.

Chip Cravaack is also a veteran, which means that in addition to his government provided health care in Congress, he also gets benefits from the VA, allowing him to go to any government-owned Veteran’s Administration facility in the nation and receive what he and Teaparty calls, “socialized medicine.”

 

BP Oil Spills Into The Gulf Of Mexico, Again. – Just days after BP publicly denied allegations that its Macondo well was leaking, chemists from Louisiana State University confirmed that samples from the water’s surface above the well are a chemical match for the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf last summer.

On Tuesday, investigators from the Mobile Press-Register collected samples of oil floating on the surface and delivered them to Ed Overton and Scott Miles of LSU. Most of the oil was located in a patch about 50 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long, and reporters found a “pronounced and pungent petroleum smell,” the paper said. The scientists confirmed that the chemical fingerprint of the samples was identical to the the BP oil, known as MC252.

 

Fox News: ‘Facts Are Certainly’ On The Side Of Global Warming, But ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ – On Fox & Friends Sunday, anchor Clayton Morris admitted that Fox News factcheckers have confirmed that man-made global warming is “certainly” real, but argued that it “doesn’t matter” because climate denial is popular among Fox News-watching conservatives.

 

Eric Cantor Says No Earthquake Disaster Relief For His Home State Unless Spending Is Cut Elsewhere – As Virginians scramble to assess the damage, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) quickly returned from his trip in Israel to survey the damage done to his congressional district.

“There is an appropriate federal role in incidents like this,” Cantor said. That role? The bare minimum. Cantor insists that the relief be offset elsewhere in the federal budget.

But worse, Cantor surmised, “Obviously, the problem is that people in Virginia don’t have earthquake insurance.” So, for Cantor, the problem here is that Virginians didn’t have the foresight to predict an exceedingly rare natural disaster and pay out of their own pocket in advance, year after year.

If absolutely nothing else, Cantor is at least consistent in his callous attitude. When Americans were struggling to recover from the deadly tornado that tore through south in May, Cantor also demanded that any disaster relief be offset with cuts. Apparently, to Cantor, the “appropriate role” for public servants is to completely fail the public they serve.

Regards,

Jim