A Bill Of Rights For Billionaires

The Article: The Billionaires Bill Of Rights by Dick Meister in TruthOut.

The Text: Billionaire corporate interests and other well financed anti-labor forces are waging a major drive to stifle the political voice of workers and their unions in California that is certain to spread nationwide if not stopped – and stopped now.

At issue is a highly deceptive measure, Proposition 32, on the state’s November election ballot, that its anti-labor sponsors label as an even-handed attempt to limit campaign spending. But actually, it would limit – and severely – only the spending of unions while leaving corporations and other moneyed special interests free to spend as much as they like.

Unions would be prohibited from making political contributions with money collected from voluntary paycheck deductions authorized by their members, which is the main source of union political funds.
But there would be no limits on corporations, whose political funds come from their profits, their customers or suppliers and the contributions of corporate executives. Nor would there be any limit on the political spending of the executives or any other wealthy individuals. What’s more, corporate special interests and billionaires could still give unlimited millions to secretive “Super PACs” that can raise unlimited amounts of money anonymously to finance their political campaigns.

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A Bloody Fun Song

It might be cooling down some, but Hey Sholay’s “My Blood” makes us feel nice and warm inside.

Income Inequality Still On The Rise

The numbers seen above correspond to the Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of income inequality. A coefficient of 0 means perfect equality, whereas a coefficient of 1 represents gross inequality. Not a pretty shade of blue.

No Negatives By Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Who would have thought that promoting policies of openness wouldn’t be filled with dastardly consequences?

The Rise Of Rove

The Article: Boss Rove by Carl Unger in Vanity Fair.

The Text: n Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s Federal-style town house on Weaver Terrace in northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the fall midterm elections.

Rove, then 59, had host­ed this kind of event many times before. Six years earli­er, he’d held weekly breakfasts for high-level G.O.P. operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser to President George W. Bush, Rove oversaw Bush’s re-election campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. This was not simply about winning elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision—the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.

But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation.

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