Remember When Rahm Emanuel Was The Worst Thing About DC? Well, Of Course, Now He's The Worst Thing About Chicago

If you're interested in the space where education policy, politics and humor come together, you should be checking out EduShyster.com frequently. The site is premised on that fact that "behind every faddish, jargon-filled plan is a dirty little scheme that ends up making somebody a lot of money. The scary thing is that these fools are winning, and the only way to fight back is to expose the edushysters for the hypocritical charlatans that they are." This week they have a depraved Rahm Emanuel in their sites.

The final “vote” on which Chicago Public Schools to shutter may be a done deal, but the implications of the largest single school closure in US history will be felt well beyond the Windy City. Mayor Emanuel, who has long tethered his political fortunes to hedge-funded education reform, now has poll numbers hovering near the bottom of Lake Michigan. Meanwhile, the Chicago media has suddenly awakened and is practicing, once again, the long-lost art of journalism. And Chicago charter school fever is beginning to look an awful lot like old-fashioned Illinois-style “pay to play” corruption. In other words, on this bad news bears day, my outlook is decidedly wine-box-half-full…

The white course

Let’s start with Mayor Emanuel’s poll numbers. Did I say they were in Lake Michigan? I meant living on Lake Shore drive in a million dollar plus unit with great lake views. A recent poll found that the only voters left who unabashedly approve of the mayor’s education reform agenda are wealthy whites who live in the city’s lakefront wards. Six in ten Chicagoans oppose Rahm’s school closure plan, while a full 75% say they don’t like his vision for education in the city. Of voters with children who attend the Chicago Public Schools, just 9% said they side with the mayor in the debate over how to improve the schools. Fifty-four percent said they now side with the Chicago Teachers Union.

Welcome back, journalists. We’ve missed you!

The past few weeks have seen the kind of reporting that’s all too rare in today’s Walton-funded era of achievement gaptivism. Check out, for example, this “fact check” prepared by a local public radio station in which reporters examine the justifications being given for the mass school closings-- and debunk virtually all of them. Even the Chicago Tribune, which just weeks ago ran an editorial trumpeting the results of a pro-charter push poll, got in on the action. The Trib dug deep into official documents to dispute many of the claims being made by Mayor Emanuel et al and revealed once again just how dependent hedge-funded “reform” is on a lax and fawning press.

Pay for play

Meanwhile reporters at the Chicago Sun Times have been busy digging up the dirt on the state’s largest charter school operator: UNO Charter Schools. It turns out that Illinois’ new favorite past-time, *crushing* the achievement gap by constructing shiny academies of excellence and innovation, looks an awful lot like the state’s old favorite past-time: cash-fueled corruption.

Race to the top

The disproportionate impact of school closings on minority students has already resulted in multiple law suits. But could it finally prompt a conversation on the great white elephant in the room: the overwhelming whiteousness of the education reform movement vs: the communities that reformers are intent on improving? Based on this intriguing tweet from Teach for America CEO Matt Kramer, I’d say the chances are good.

We are so over

In case you missed it, opposition to the school closings in Chicago even precipitated an education reform break up. I’m talking, of course, about the recent decision by the University of Chicago chapter of Students for Education Reform to divorce their national organization. In this Dear John letter, the Chicago students hint at their discomfort with being the fresh Chicago faces of SFER’s national agenda. As for what that agenda is, I will say only that SFER is likely the only grassroots student group in the country to be funded by the Walton Foundation.

Even Republicans are pissed

And now a gratuitous shout out to my favorite Windy City blog: Chicago Public Fools.This Chicago Public Schools mom is representative of the astonishing diversity of voices that are now questioning the city’s education reform mantra. In this post, Red in a Blue City, she fillets would-be school privatizers like lake trout.

If this is all just over your head, just think of it like this-- Rahm and his Wall Street buddies are steering America towards Greece... without the warm Mediterranean breezes and the delicious fresh food. The prospects for children of working class kids is-- horrifying. "With Greece suffering the biggest economic depression in decades," writes ZeroHedge, "all so a few rich men can preserve their wealth and not have their EUR-denominated savings wiped out (even if the alternative means finally being able to rebalance externally using the Drachma instead of forcing internal rebalancing via unemployment and plunging wages), it was only a matter of time before we found out just how humiliating the conversion of the entire economy to a "gray," non-tax paying one would be for the citizens of Greece."

As the NYT reports, in just the past two years, the numbers of Greeks engaging in prostitution as a last course source of income has more than doubled: according to the National Center for Social Research, the number of people selling sex has surged 150 percent in the last two years.

Furthermore, with every business in which there is exploding "competition" and rich client scarcity, it is not just any prostitution, but very deflationary prostitution:

“Five euros only, just 5 euros,” whispered Maria, a young prostitute with sunken cheeks and bedraggled hair, as she pitched herself forward from the shadows of a graffiti-riddled alley in central Athens on a recent weeknight.

Many prostitutes have been selling their services for as little as 10 to 15 euros, a price that has shrunk along with the income of clients afflicted by the crisis. Many more prostitutes are taking greater health risks by having unprotected sex, which sells for a premium. Still more are subject to violence and rape.

Now a new menace has arisen: a type of crystal methamphetamine called shisha, after the Turkish water pipe, but otherwise known as poor man’s cocaine, brewed from barbiturates and other ingredients including alcohol, chlorine and even battery acid.

And with a surge in prostitution come the drugs, and the danger of an epidemic of blood-transmitted diseases, like HIV.
...Unfortunately for the country which is terrified to just say no to Europe due to the indoctrinated dread of what would happen if it left the Eurozone, this is only the beginning as the problem is far deeper, and it goes to the root of everything: an entire generation going to waste.

But while the Greek still soaring unemployment rate is no surprise to anyone, it is the youth unemployment that is the problem. And as the Telegraph reports, in some areas of Greece, youth unemployment has now hit an inconceivable 75%.

And all this Austerity, whether in Greece or Chicago, "just so the 0.001% uberwealthy can continue to get richer and richer courtesy of a year after year of flawed monetary and fiscal policy, even as the real world around them burns." What we need are more Penny Pritzkers in Obama's cabinet.

Who wouldn't pony up $12 for a beer imported all the way from Chicago?

The "imported" beer on the left, Goose Island, may be a splendid brew, but imported it's not, unless you count its Chicago provenance as such.

by Ken

At my very first job, more than a few summers ago, I was stationed primarily in the company's order-processing and accounts-receivable department, one feature of which was an entire long wall lined with file cabinets that contained the order account records. Yes, this will give you an idea just how many summers ago it was; at the time, it would never have occurred to anyone to do any of the order processing, or store any of the account records, on computers. Oh, the company did maintain certain records on computers, but they weren't computers of its own. One of my jobs, in fact, was to carry the new information to be input to the data-processing company.

(It so happened that only a door or two away from the building that housed that company, there was a deli whose sandwich offerings included a shrimp parmigiana hero that was stuffed with about four-inches'-thick worth of fried shrimp for some insanely plebeian price. I frequently arranged my schedule to stop for lunch after making my data delivery. Of course it was no hardship to be forced to "eat in the neighborhood." On the other side of Fifth Avenue from our office on East 46th Street there was a deli whose sandwich offerings included a comparably overstuffed and punily priced steak-and-onions hero. Do I need to add that both of those shops are long gone?)

Getting back to those file cabinets, all of the company's accounts were filed geographically -- first by state, then by city. At the end of this massive bank of file cabinets was a file drawer labeled "Foreign," with accounts filed by country. One day one of the clerks who worked on those accounts issued a plea for help. She was utterly unable to find the file she was looking for, in Indiana -- even though she had, she assured everyone, searched through the entire "Foreign" drawer.

It would be too much to presume that all these years later that young lady has worked her way up to a position of authority in the concession operation at the new Yankee Stadium. It may just be the work of someone with a comparable background in geography.

It's not that the domestic suds is such a bargain at Yankee Stadium, but for customers willing to pay the stiffer tab, the imported options included Goose Island, which as far as anyone knows comes to us straight from Chicago.
Patrick Wall reports for DNAinfo New York (lotsa links onsite):

Yankee Stadium Calls Chicago Brew 'Import" In Latest Beer Flub

CONCOURSE -- Yankee Stadium has hit another foul at the concession stands, charging thirsty ball fans $12 for an "import" beer that actually comes from Chicago.

It's the second time in two months the Bombers have made a suds snafu.

Last month, the stadium had to rename its "Craft Beer Destination" specialty alcohol booth when a fan pointed out that several drinks sold there did not meet the definitions either of craft or of beer.

Now, the Yankees are hastily altering cart signs that hawk $12 "Large Import Beer" after DNAinfo New York pointed out that the menu included Goose Island -- a domestic brew from the Windy City.

Legends Hospitality, the company that operates the stadium’s concessions, said Wednesday that the company is in the process of switching out signs at its four "import" beer carts to more accurately reflect its offerings.

Legends Hospitality spokesman Eric Gelfand said the new signs will read "Premium Beer" instead of "Import Beer," since the carts sell Goose Island's India Pale Ale, a Chicago-based Anheuser-Busch brew that has never been brewed overseas.

The carts also serve Beck’s, a brew originally made in Germany, which was recently bought by Anheuser-Busch and is now manufactured in the U.S. Their other Anheuser-Busch offerings, Stella Artois and Hoegaarden, are both imported from Belgium.

Gelfand said the carts were intended to sell only imports, but that Goose Island IPA was a last-minute replacement for another Anheuser-Busch import that fell through. He said patrons were clamoring for a good IPA.

"It’s a situation where, quite literally, the cart came before the horse," Gelfand said.

The flub wasn't lost on some of The Bronx's beer aficionados.

"Goose Island: It’s good beer -- but it’s not an import," said Bronx Beer Hall co-founder Anthony Ramirez. "Serious beer drinkers are serious about where their beer comes from and how it’s made."

Yankee Stadium was also caught red-faced during its home opener on April 1, when writer Amanda Rykoff noted that all the marked-up beverages sold at an artisanal-looking stand labeled "Craft Beer Destination" were actually MillerCoors products.

The drinks -- Blue Moon, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, Batch 19 and Crispin -- are all mass-produced, so they don’t fit the official Brewers’ Association definition of "craft," a chorus of online critics charged.

In addition, Crispin, a cider, doesn't count as "beer," they added.

"Once again, the Yankees have figured out yet another way to charge a superior price for an inferior product," Rykoff wrote on Tumblr.

After Deadspin and other media outlets picked up on the snafu, the stadium replaced the sign in a matter of days. Now it reads, "Beer Mixology Destination."

It occurs to me that Jerry Seinfeld's pal George Costanza, in addition to working for a time for the Yankees, occasional dabbled in the world of import-export, though it was generally an imaginary world. You don't suppose George could have something to do with the snafu, do you?

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Self-Loathing Closet Case Lindsey Graham Shafts The LGBT Community

When California's most rabidly homophobic state Senator, Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) was arrested for drunken driving and discovered with a young male prostitute in his car, I was impressed with how quickly he came to terms with how disastrous his life in the closet had been.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind — the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press — at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you're in secret, I mean, there really wasn't a choice.

...The best I can do is to say that I was hiding. I was so in terror I could not allow any attention to come my way. So any measure that had to do with the subject of sexual orientation was an automatic "no" vote. I was paralyzed by this fear, and so I voted without even looking at the content. The purpose of government is to protect the rights of people under the law, regardless of our skin color, national origin, our height, our weight, our sexual orientation. This is a nation predicated on the belief that there is no discrimination on those characteristics, and so my vote denied people equal treatment, and I'm truly sorry for that.

Not every Republican who forced the Senate to strip LGBT couple out of the comprehensive immigration bill this week is a closet case. But self-loather Lindsey Graham is. "Everyone" in Washington knows he is but he's allowed to get away with threatening to scuttle the whole bill if it includes gays like himself. Last week former GOP congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) married his boyfriend. Because of DOMA-- which he voted for while still closeted-- he won't be able to sponsor his new Panamanian husband's residence permit in the U.S. Lindsey Graham will have his painful day of reckoning as well.

Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who first introduced the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, in the year 2000 and has re-introduced a version of LGBT immigration equality legislation in each subsequent Congress, was dismayed that the Senate scuttled his legislation.

As the House sponsor of the Uniting American Families Act (UAFA), I am extremely disappointed that an amendment to ensure equal treatment for same-sex, bi-national couples was withheld, without a vote, during the Senate Judiciary Committee consideration of the immigration reform legislation. I applaud the leadership of Chairman Leahy, who was determined to–and did–offer an amendment that would allow LGBT families to stay together. Unfortunately, Senate Republicans made clear that they are unwilling to even consider ending the harsh discrimination that LGBT families face in our immigration process, and the disturbing decision to give in to their threats and fear-mongering has again let prejudice rule the day. Excluding LGBT couples cannot be reconciled with so-called “comprehensive” immigration reform. Committed LGBT couples deserve better than the wanton cruelty that current law exacts, and the failure to even hold a vote both condemns thousands of loving families to more needless suffering and gives unfair cover to those unwilling to stand up for justice.

  Despite this setback, I will continue to press forward in our fight to get relief for these families. And I remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will do what’s right in the Windsor case, by overturning DOMA, and ending discrimination under federal immigration and other laws against legally married same-sex couples.

Leahy is expected to reintroduce the LGBT amendment again while the immigration bill is on the Senate floor, so that Lindsey Graham hysteria won't scuttle it. If Miss McConnell, another deranged closet case, decides to lead a filibuster-- which is likely-- it won't get a vote. But in a straight up or down vote, it would easily win, with several Republicans crossing the aisle. Many non-Southern Republicans would prefer not to be forced into voting on the issue. A large and growing majority of non-Southerners backs equality for the LGBT community. If the Republicans use the immigration bill as a hostage against gays, the Republicans who are the most likely to suffer next year are not rotten closet cases Graham and McConnell-- who represent anti-equality states-- but... no one. It's not likely that a single GOP senator will lose in 2014 because of homophobia (unless Graham and McConnell get into some kind of Larry Craig- or Mark Foley-like scandal) but it further damages the Republican brand and could help persuade independent and moderate voters in close House elections to give up on their GOP incumbents, particularly these 15 seats in areas where people are not interested in legislating bigotry:

• Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)
• Paul Ryan (R-WI)
• Buck McKeon (R-CA)
• Tom Reed (R-NY)
• Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm (R-NY)
• Joe Heck (R-NV)
• Jon Runyan (R-NJ)
• John Kline (R-MN)
• Fred Upton (R-MI)
• Jeff Denham (R-CA)
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)
• Jim Gerlach (R-PA)
• Tom Latham (R-IA)
• Mike Coffman (R-CO)
• Chris Gibson (R-NY)

Ironically, in Gibson's case, the opponent likely to beat him next year is Sean Eldridge, a wealthy venture capitalist married to Facebook founder Chris Hughes. Money won't be an issue.

Too Big To Fail Again

Just 12 banks control almost 70% of total bank assets. This week at a Banking Committee hearing, Elizabeth Warren grilled Treasury Secretary Jack Lew about capping the size of the Too Big To Fail banks. He danced around her questions and sounds as full of crap as any GOP bank shill who's looking forward to his future on Wall Street. Notice in Lew's weasely, misleading answers he says "we" shouldn't do anything because we're in the middle of implementing Dodd-Frank. But mostly what they're doing with Dodd Frank is figuring out how to water it down, eviscerate it and make it more amenable to the Wall Street predators. Matt Taibbi, who says it's as regular as the seasons, that Wall Street executives and lobbyists seek to gut any safeguards to their greed and recklessness, is on the case:

In the last two weeks, we've seen two major developments here. There was a wave of deregulatory bills that snuck through the House with surprisingly bipartisan support, and a series of regulatory decisions by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that will seriously weaken the already-weak Dodd-Frank reform legislation, particularly with regard to derivatives trades.

If a story about a wave of bills designed to prevent the meager derivatives reforms passed in Dodd-Frank from being enacted sounds familiar, that's because it is. I wrote almost exactly the same story a year ago, in the middle of May, 2012, when a herd of Wall Street-friendly congresshumans teamed up in the House Financial Services Committee to push through a wave of nine ambitious bills targeting derivatives reform. This is from last spring:

The nine bills being contemplated by Congress take a variety of approaches to gutting Dodd-Frank. Two bills, H.R. 1840 and H.R. 2308, are essentially stalling tactics, requiring regulators to undertake more of those sweeping cost-benefit analyses that result in lengthy delays. Another bill, H.R. 3283, is more substantive: Sponsored by Connecticut Democrat and hedge-fund industry BFF Jim Himes, it exempts foreign affiliates of U.S. swaps dealers from all Dodd-Frank oversight.

The rule, if implemented, would make the next AIG possible, given that AIG was undone by half a trillion dollars in derivative bets produced by such a foreign affiliate – its London-based financial products outfit, AIGFP. If passed, says Rep. Brad Miller, a Democrat from North Carolina, H.R. 3283 would leave a "massive, gaping hole" in Dodd-Frank. "It would be very easy to move those trades to whatever the most indulgent country would be," Miller explains.

After those bills escaped the House, most of them stalled on the way to the Senate, where of course the Democrats still hold a majority and are reluctant to openly scrap Dodd-Frank just yet.

But this is the key to understanding how financial lobbyists succeed in getting what it wants on the regulatory front: They never stop. It's not a war of ideas, it's a war of resources. You march up the Hill with some crazy idea about overturning a bill prohibiting bailouts of companies that engage in risky derivative trades, you get knocked down, and you march up again, then you march up again, and again...

With each successive attempt, you peel off a few more Committee members in the House, slowly but surely weakening resolve. And while you're attacking on the legislative front, you also file a series of lawsuits that tie up the process by targeting reforms in court, and then you also send armies of lobbyists to sit in the laps of regulators during the rule-making process, so that key new laws (like the Volcker rule, designed to separate risky trading from federally-insured depository banking) are either written in reams of industry-friendly language, or delayed altogether.

No matter how bad your ideas are, and how unpopular they are (or, rather, would be, if anyone in the general public understood them and/or cared enough about them to complain to their congressional reps), you can still score huge wins just by continually attacking and chipping away.

Which brings us to this month: A little while back, I got a call from someone in the House. "You wouldn't believe the shit they just pushed through the Financial Services Committee,” he groaned. This person read off a list of bills, suggested I look them up, then specifically told me to look at how many Democrats voted "yea" on them.

"A lot of bad D votes on this one," was the editorial comment here.

Almost all of these bills turned out to be aimed directly at Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, i.e. the derivatives portion.

...[T]he Democrats have become the victims of their own pusillanimity on these issues. The main Wall Street argument against these new rules is that they're excessive and onerously complicated. But they're only complicated because the Democrats didn't have the stones in the original Dodd-Frank debate to insist on simple concepts like putting all trades on open exchanges.

Instead, they built a system based upon a series of fiendishly complicated compromises. They keep adding more and more fine print to the infrastructural rules for things like Swap Execution Facilities and deriviatives clearing, and the more fine print there is, the more cracks and crevices Wall Street's lawyers can find to slither through.

Anyway, this is just a reminder that when it comes to getting transparency in the financial markets, this is what it takes. You have to fight the same fight over and over and over again. And again...

Conservative and/or corrupt House Democrats on the Agriculture Committee and the Financial Services Committee are voting with Republicans to gut Dodd-Frank. In March, writing about what a corporate shill Ann Kuster had twisted herself into, I mentioned that the derivatives vote she backed "is an especially bad idea-- one that crosses a bright red line. Former Goldman Sachs banker Jim Himes (R-CT) is working with Republicans to pass it and Kuster was one of the Democrats who went along. She's touting her connivance with Murphy on a phony-baloney bipartisan caucus (which includes mostly extreme right-wing Republican sociopaths like domestic terrorist Steve Stockman) and she told a New Hampshire audience recently that 'On social issues, I am what they call progressive. But on the rest of the issues, I’m business-oriented.' So a Republican on economic justice?"

And doing the same thing on House Financial Services is another phony "liberal," careerist Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ).

Tuesday at a House Financial Services Committee meeting, Arizona freshman Kyrsten Sinema, who's racked up one of the most reactionary voting records of any Democrat in Congress, might have thought no one was looking when she sold out her own constituents in favor of Wall Street banksters. She backed all the GOP's deregulation proposals and then touted it in the Democratic caucus. She wasn't who I was talking about here... but she certainly could have been.

...Don't expect heroism from the Kyrsten Sinemas of the word. Careerism... sure, but not heroism or anything remotely resembling courageousness. Steve Israel dictates her votes; he told the "Frontline Democrats" how to vote and there are only 7 of them who have followed his orders "100% of the time," to quote one of them feeble enough to send me a note about it defending a crap record. These are the 7 freshmen with 40% ProgressivePunch scores (same as right-wing sociopath Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell)-- who have voted as a block 60% of the time against progressive positions on crucial roll calls:

• Dan Maffei (New Dem-NY)
• Bill Foster (New Dem- IL)
• Cheri Bustos (IL)
• Ann Kuster (NH)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)

None of these congressmembers is too big to fail. If you support any of them-- as the better of two evils-- you're perpetrating the cruel game fake Democrats play on America's working families. After Lew was finished in the Senate, he ambled over to the House Financial Services Committee, where Ranking Member Maxine Waters had suggested that the big Wall Street banks be indicted for laundering drug money for organized crime. She greeted Lew by voicing her concerned "that our financial system remains at risk from delays in implementation of Dodd-Frank and continued industry challenges, both here in Congress and in the courts, to weaken the rules before they’ve even been implemented. While Title VII of Dodd-Frank was designed to increase the transparency of the over-the-counter derivatives market, many of the most critical components remain stalled in rulemakings, challenged in the courts, or obstructed in the Congress.

This slow pace of Title VII rulemakings, combined with delays in implementation of the Volcker Rule, finalization of the living wills and the designation of systemically important financial institutions, are made only more troubling when considered in the context of the myriad financial scandals-- from the LIBOR and money laundering cases to illegal foreclosures-- that have occurred since the passage of the Wall Street Reform Act. For these reasons, I am concerned that our financial system remains fragile, despite substantial improvements since 2008.

Does Your Congressman Want To Embroil The U.S. In A War in Syria? Most Do-- Both Parties

Bob Menendez (D-NJ) wants to drag the U.S. into another Middle East War

There are a lot of victims and a lot of "bad guys" in the Syrian civil war. But, from a U.S. perspective, there are no good guys. Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Bob Menendez (D-NJ) voted 15-3 to arm the rebels. The three dissenting votes were from Mark Udall (D-CO), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Chris Murphy (D-CT). Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) warned of the dangers of arming rebel forces whose intentions are unknown. "I think we have to ask the question, 'Who are we arming?'" Sen. Udall asked fellow senators. "To tell you the truth, I don't think we know.…It changes every day."

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said lawmakers who supported the legislation were in effect supporting the provision of arms to rebel groups that are "the allies of al Qaeda," referring to the Islamist al-Nusra Front, a powerful force in the insurgency against Mr. Assad. "It's an irony you cannot overcome."

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) countered Mr. Paul's argument, saying arms now were flowing to Nusra and to the Assad regime, marginalizing more moderate elements in the resistance. To address concerns that U.S. antiaircraft weapons could fall into the hands of extremists, the legislation would require the president to certify that such arms, if he decides to provide them, have been equipped with tracking, disabling or anti-tamper devices.

Tuesday's exchange in the Golan Heights marked the first time the Syrian army has acknowledged firing intentionally at Israeli troops since the civil war began. In a statement, Syria's army said it had destroyed an Israeli jeep that crossed over its border. Israel's army chief, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, denied that allegation-- instead accusing the Syrian leader of fomenting instability, in a sharp departure from previous Israeli characterizations of cross-border fire as errant spillover from Syria's war.

"We will not allow the Golan Heights to become comfort zone for Assad's reprisals," Lt. Gen. Gantz said. "If he destabilizes the Golan Heights, he will bear the consequences." Tensions between the sides have risen in recent weeks after Israeli airstrikes near Damascus targeted what Western intelligence officials say were missiles en route to Hezbollah.

The legislation was authored by Menendez who made a bunch of spurious claims that "Vital national interests are at stake and we cannot watch from the sidelines." There is a similar piece of legislation working its way through the House, cosponsored by AIPAC/Israeli agent Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY) who is salivating at the thought of killing Syrians and Iranians and sounds more like John McCain and Lindsey Graham when it comes to war than what people think a Democratic is supposed to sound like. He was elected by his Democratic colleagues as the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Relations Committee. He's one of the worst and most repulsive warmongers on teh Democratic side of the aisle, with very dubious loyalty to the U.S. when it comes to matters that even remotely concern Israel. And, there is no light between reactionary GOP warmonger Ed Royce (R-CA), the chairman of the committee, and Engel. Tuesday he said arming the rebels "would put our Syria policy on the best possible course... "Syria presents us with a series of difficult policy choices, but the most sensible of the alternatives is to support the moderate opposition. Otherwise, we leave the field to pro-Iran and pro-al-Qaeda forces to determine Syria's fate, and Syria will remain a humanitarian and strategic disaster."

President Barack Obama rebuffed a proposal last year to arm moderate rebel groups despite support for the move by top cabinet members, including the then-Central Intelligence Agency Director David Petraeus and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In recent weeks, however, Mr. Obama and his advisers have begun looking anew at the option of providing arms to moderate rebels groups, possibly in concert with Britain and France, according to senior administration officials.

The Senate bill authorizes the U.S. to provide small arms and training to units of the Free Syrian Army and other groups opposed to the Assad regime "that have been properly and fully vetted and share common values and interests with the United States." The bill says antiaircraft systems can't be transferred.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), an outspoken critic of Mr. Obama's response to the Syria crisis, said the legislation "sends a signal to the administration" that it needs to get more involved in helping end the crisis in Syria.

But Mr. McCain said more action will be needed beyond providing small arms "if we are going to reverse the tide that's now taking place in favor of Bashar Assad." Sen. McCain said the rebels need heavier weapons that those authorized under the current Senate bill.

Marco Rubio knows less than the average college junior about foreign policy. When he read his talking points, he didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about. I got the idea Rand Paul wanted to punch him in the mouth and send him home crying. “The U.S. cannot solve every conflict on the planet. But I believe it’s in the national interest of the United States to ensure that the strongest, best-organized, and best-funded elements in a post-Assad Syria and even before his fall are interests that are aligned with us and are friendlier to us than the alternative.”

These are the senators who blundered into dragging the U.S. into another war in the Middle East:

• Bob Menendez (D-NJ)
• Bob Corker (R-TN)
• Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Ben Cardin (D-MD)
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)
• Bob Casey (D-PA)
• Ron Johnson (R-WI)
• Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
• Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
• Chris Coons (D-DE)
• John McCain (R-AZ)
• Dick Durbin (D-IL)
• John Barrasso (R-WY)
• Tim Kane (D-VA)

Lindsey Graham, one of the Senate's most vocal advocates of war-- anywhere, any time-- isn't on the Foreign Relations Committee. But he's been braying up a storm about sending U.S. forces into Syria. The Democrat running against him in Jay Stamper, who sounds more like Rand Paul when it comes to waging the kinds of aggressive wars Graham can't get enough of. A few weeks ago he told us that "the main reason we should all care about retiring Lindsey Graham is the carelessness with which he advocates the use of American military force abroad. There is something disturbing about someone who has never seen combat being so consistently eager to deploy other people’s sons and daughters overseas. Maybe that’s why he has falsely and repeatedly claimed to be a Gulf War veteran." He continued:

I believe that Graham may be one of those people who appreciates our military's capabilities and are frustrated when they aren’t being employed. It’s like having a brand new sports car in your garage all gassed up, the keys in the ignition, but not being able to take it for a spin.

Having voted to authorize the use of force in both Iraq and Afghanistan, was Graham not chastened when these two wars left over 100,000 civilians and U.S. soldiers dead or wounded and our economy on life support. Did he consider resigning, maybe to write a memoir in the hope that we could at least learn from his mistakes. At the very least, did he shy away from any future discussion of foreign policy. No-- not Lindsey. Instead, he’s weighing in on Syria. After reviewing all the facts, he’s come to a conclusion that we need boots on the ground and we need to bomb the country with cruise missiles.

There are so many ways this can backfire. Cornering Assad with U.S. force would make it more likely-- not less-– that he would resort to using chemical weapons out of desperation. The Arab proverb is “an enemy of my enemy is my friend” and intervening would make us friends with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Nusra Front, Syria’s al-Qaida. We could end up spending money and American lives replacing a brutal dictatorship with a radical theocracy. Lindsey actually wants us to arm fractured rebel groups, many of whom have already committed war crimes. Their empowerment would risk the disintegration of any central government and could turn Syria into a sort of lawless failed state like Somalia, even more of a refuge for terrorists than it is currently. Not to know how wrongheaded it is to intervene is to ignore the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and also to ignore the complexity of the Syrian situation, which virtually guarantees undesired and unintended consequences.

Lindsey, can you look into the eyes of these troops, or their parents, and honestly tell them that deploying on a mission to Syria has a high probability of making Americans safer, advancing the interests of the United States or contributing to regional stability in the Middle East? In fact, intervening in the crisis will not do any of these things.

Can you look into the eyes of the veterans of past wars who are disabled and homeless and tell them they just need to wait longer to get the help they need because we need those billions of dollars to fight yet another war? And how can we claim to support the troops when we send them to war and forget when they get home, voting to cut benefits for people who risked everything to serve our country?

Has Lindsey Graham thought about how $1.4 trillion in war spending could have been used to improve people’s lives? We could have increased funding for the National Institutes of Health by 600% every year for the last 10 years, speeding the development of treatments and cures for cancer, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, MS, and countless other diseases that destroy more lives every year than any Islamic terrorist could dream of. We could have provided low-income healthcare to 70 million people for 10 years, or hired an additional 2 million public elementary school teachers for 10 years. We could have provided 17 million military veterans VA medical care for 10 years, or provided 4-year university scholarships to 40 million students.

Don’t let Lindsey Graham (or anyone else) question your patriotism because you disagree with his foreign policy views. This is a senator who single-handedly blocked President Obama’s popular choice for Defense Secretary-- not out of principled opposition-- but to gain leverage over the President on a completely unrelated issue. As a result, the United States was without a Secretary of Defense at a time of escalating tensions overseas.

Want to help an advocate for peace replace a warmonger always trying to prove how macho he is by sending troops to war? You can support Jay Stamper's campaign here.

Tobacco Industry Lobbyists And P.R. Hacks Reinvented The Tea Party-- All They Needed Were Some Angry, Lo-Info Kooks Willing To Wear "Attention-Drawing Accouterments"

Howie with a crackpot happily wearing attention-drawing accouterments, Pasadena, 2009 

Many Republicans will tell you former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) invented the TEA Party-- Taxed Enough Already-- to help popularize the Republican scheme to eliminate progressive taxation, which they feel puts too much burden on the wealthy-- and replace it with a flat tax that would force the burden down the income scale. But, as Lee Fang points out in his new book, The Machine-- A Field Guide To The Resurgent Right, that's not exactly what happened. The tobacco industry's expensive p.r. firms and lobbyists came up with the idea, fumbled it and watched Armey grab the ball and run with it. It was never grassroots at any time, though-- and always strictly astroturf.

[T]he roots of the modern antigovernment, antitax Tea Party can be traced to carefully formulated plans concocted by the tobacco industry. In the late eighties and throughout the nineties, the tobacco industry faced an assault from all sides. Legislators, litigators, and ballot initiatives alike sought to prohibit tobacco advertising to children, ban indoor smoking, tax tobacco products, place warning labels on tobacco products, and fine the industry for intentionally misleading consumers about the health effects of its products. The tobacco industry’s efforts to win the battle of public opinion by funding fake citizens’ groups sympathetic to the tobacco industry, such as “smokers’ rights” leagues, are well documented. It has also been reported that the industry made huge investments in conservative think tanks and bought off academics to produce junk studies casting doubt on the health effects of smoking. A less well-known tactic, however, was the attempt to create a “Tea Party” movement against government as a shield to protect the tobacco industry. Tobacco lobbyists, needing to win over public opinion-- and perhaps inspired by antitax political operatives like Norquist, who was on the tobacco industry payroll-- thought they could instigate a backlash against government regulation and taxes, and in doing so, stop government and consumer intrusion into the tobacco industry’s business.

Memos from the American Tobacco Company, Philip Morris, and R.J. Reynolds detail a broad array of strategies to engineer an antigovernment backlash, using a “Boston Tea Party” theme. A campaign advertisement from tobacco giant Philip Morris sought to use former Republican Senator Howard Baker to compare curbs on tobacco products to infringements on freedom tantamount to the British repression that led to the Tea Parties. A document, dated 1989 and archived at the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the university of California, San Francisco, outlined an advertisement with the following script: “British policies of minority rule, increased government intervention, unfair taxation... Ironically, those same issues face us again today. Excise taxes, advertising restrictions, franchise legislation, price supports, and smoking bans make it necessary to act to protect our rights as citizens of the united States.” After a movie clip of colonists casting tea into the harbor, the advertisement proposal indicated that Senator Baker was supposed to say, “The Boston Tea Party was one of the sparks that ignited the Revolution.” A call to resist government regulation of tobacco closed the video.

One attempt to create a national Tea Party phenomenon was defused when O’Dwyer’s Washington Report, a trade publication for the public relations industry, exposed the plan. O’Dwyer’s revealed a proposal from a tobacco industry group, Coalition Against Regressive Taxation (CART), to contract the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to create a citizens’ protest against a proposal to eliminate deductions on excise taxes on products such as tobacco. Burson-Marsteller said it would create a “Boston Tea Party theme” that included a “guerrilla campaign after Labor Day” aimed at the 1992 presidential candidates. Burson-Marsteller's agents would hand out signs while wearing “attention-drawing accouterments” to create political buzz for the cause. One of the fake citizens’ groups suggested in this campaign was Citizens for a Sound Economy, a corporate front group that would later play a dominant role in the anti-Obama Tea Parties (subsequent documents from the late nineties, naming the tobacco industry’s “3rd party allies,” showed that Philip Morris had budgeted up to $2 million a year for Citizens for a Sound Economy).

The exposure of the CART document killed the Tea Party idea in 1992, but Tea Party themes from tobacco lobbyists continued to emerge in later years. When President Clinton proposed taxing cigarettes to fund his health reform plan, the tobacco industry needed citizen outrage. In June of 1994, the New York Times reported that “about 3,000 tobacco farmers mounted what was billed as a modern-day ‘Boston Tea Party’ today, cheering as bales of tobacco were tossed into the Kentucky River to protest proposals to increase taxes on tobacco products to help finance health care.” The Times reporter, as well as dozens of other media outlets which carried the story, did not realize that the event was orchestrated by political operatives working for big tobacco. In an October 5, 1995, memo to Philip Morris, the PR firm Jack Guthrie and Associates of the Worldcom Group took credit for the event. The lobbyists at Jack Guthrie and Associates saw the Kentucky River protest as just a start. The memo outlined that a broad antigovernment Tea Party movement could be orchestrated as a political maneuver to kill proposed Food and Drug Administration regulations on tobacco products as well:

It is conceivable that tens of thousands of people from the six states-- representing hundreds of industries and interests-- could carry a powerful message to the President, Congress and the FDA. JGA (Jack Guthrie and Associates) will explore possible “themes” that could be associated with such rallies. (In June 1994, for example, JGA organized a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, where 6,000 farmers converged at the Kentucky state capitol to hurl stalks of tobacco into the Kentucky River-- in protest to President Clinton’s proposed tax increases on cigarettes to pay for health care reform. The event, organized on behalf of the Council for Burley Tobacco, was covered by nearly every national print and broadcast outlet.)

Ultimately, the anti-FDA Tea Party never took place. But the David vs. Goliath ethos of the Tea Party clearly took hold within the executive suites of the tobacco industry. “The government’s plan to influence personal behavior through higher taxes is reminiscent of colonial times,” wrote Philip Morris CEO Michael Miles in a letter to shareholders. He added, “back then” the people responded with the “Boston Tea Party.”

And then along came Armey and his big money sugar daddies, the Koch brothers, with their plans to slash government functions-- like privatizing Social Security and e and shift more of the tax burden onto the middle class. How ironic that by trying to cheat the IRS by setting up phony social welfare organizations and triggering a badly handled series of investigations, the Establishment has played right into their hands.

The stock-market "boom" may not be a bubble, but that doesn't mean it's good news for most of us

"Today, there's a growing divide between the fortunes of corporate America and those of the majority of Americans. . . . The stock-market boom is real, but most Americans have been left on the outside looking in."

-- James Surowiecki, in his latest New Yorker
"Financial Page," "Boom or Bubble?"

by Ken

So what do you think, is this great stock-market boom really another in our recent series of stock-market bubbles?

I confess I haven't given the matter much thought. I'm not even sure I was aware that there is a stock-market boom. I've had, um, stuff on my mind. A stock-market boom doesn't figure heavily in my stuff. A stock-market bubble, however, might force itself on my attention, judging by that recent history of market bubbles, which somehow came crashing down on those of us who thought we were pretty remote from either tech or housing hysteria.

Not surprisingly, The New Yorker's financial columnist, James Surowiecki, has been paying attention.

With the stock market setting new highs on a nearly daily basis, even as the real economy just slogs along, there seems to be one question on everyone's mind: are we in the middle of yet another market bubble? For a growing chorus of money managers and market analysts, the answer is yes: the market is a house of cards, held up by easy money and investor delusion, and we are rushing all too blithely toward an inevitable crash. Given that we've recently lived through two huge asset bubbles, it's easy to see why they're worried. But in this case the delusion is theirs.

The bubble believers make their case with a blizzard of charts and historical analogies, all illustrating the same point: the future will look much like the past, and that means we're headed for trouble. Smithers & Company, a London market-research firm, says that, according to a number of market indicators, stocks are, by historical standards, forty to fifty per cent overvalued. The bears admit that corporate profits are high, which makes the market's price-to-earnings ratio look quite normal, but they insist that this isn't sustainable. They think that earnings will return to historical norms, and that, when they do, stock prices will be hit hard. Today, after-tax corporate profits are more than ten per cent of G.D.P., while their historical average is closer to six per cent. That's a vast gap, and it's why bears believe that the market is, in the words of the high-profile money manager John Hussman, "overvalued, overbought, overbullish."

As you may have guessed, Surowiecki isn't in the "bubble camp." He allows that "It's certainly unusual for corporate profits to soar during a slow recovery."

But the argument for a stock-market bubble is flawed: when it comes to the role that corporations play in the U.S. economy, the present looks very different from the past, which means that historical comparisons to the nineteen-fifties, let alone the thirties, tell us little. The four most dangerous words in investing may be "This time, it's different." But this time it is different.

Different how?

* Taxes. One reason to believe in today's corporate profits is that corporations now are paying so much less in taxes. "In 1951, corporations had to pay almost half of reported profits in taxes. In 1965, they had to pay more than thirty per cent. Today, they pay only around twenty per cent."

* Globalization. Another reason to believe: So much more of the corporate bottom line today comes from foreign earnings, which 'account for almost a third of corporate earnings," almost three times the case in 2000. "The global economy, even with its current woes, is projected to grow more briskly than the U.S. economy over the next decade, so corporations will continue to benefit."

* "Labor's share of the economy has fallen steeply." Unions have no power, and apart from some skilled workers, neither do workers. There may not be new profits to be racked up by squeezing the stuffing out of whipped-to-the-mat workers, "but keeping profits where they are doesn't look all that difficult."

Which brings us to what for me is the money quote, and we take it in whole.

It's still possible that investor hysteria could eventually inflate stock prices, or that investor panic could send them crashing, but there is no profit bubble and, for now, no stock-market bubble, either.

For investors, that's obviously good news: there's nothing wrong with profits, and the rebound of the stock market has helped restore many Americans' battered finances. Still, it's unsettling that companies and investors are doing so well while the economy as a whole is stuck in the mud. Throughout the postwar era, high corporate profits were coupled with rising wages and strong economic growth. Today, there's a growing divide between the fortunes of corporate America and those of the majority of Americans. You might hope that people could make back as investors some of what they're not getting as workers, but in fact only about half of Americans have any money in the stock market, and most of those who do have only small sums. What's more, the crash of 2008 scared many ordinary investors out of the market, so they haven't benefitted from the recent profit boom at all. "There's a lot of residual shell shock at work, and that's made investors still pretty gun-shy," [Doug] Ramsey [chief investment officer for Leuthold Weeden Capital Management] said. The stock-market boom is real, but most Americans have been left on the outside looking in.

Once upon a time we heard some political chatter about "The Two Americas." Thank goodness we stopped hearing about that! The compact coterie of Americans Who Matter just don't want to hear about the rest of us, because, after all, by definition we don't matter.

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Which Georgia Extremist Will Out-Extreme All The Others?

Republican voters seem more and more insane lately-- like in the last decade. No one believes in all the trumped up "scandals" Republican congressional obstructionists are pushing out to a media desperate for fireworks except GOP voters. And in the Old Confederate states, the Republican base is far crazier than the representatives they elect (except for a few like Louie Gohmert, Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey and domestic terrorist suspect Steve Stockman). And speaking of Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey...

Those two crackpots are among a gaggle of crackpots running for the Republican nomination for the open Georgia Senate seat. They're all running to the extreme right-wing fringes, the lunatics who vote in the Republican primaries. And their antics are turning off mainstream voters and independents. The latest polling in Georgia shows the main candidates bunched up together and "undecided" (which can also be interpreted as "none of the above") way ahead.

• Jack Kingston- 17.61%
• Phil Gingrey- 15.98%
• Karen Handel- 15.81%
• Paul Broun- 14.14%
• David Perdue- 5.77%
• Undecided- 30.69%

And the more radical and extreme the candidate the GOP primary comes up with, the more likely Sam Nunn's daughter, Michelle Nunn, will snatch the seat from the Republicans. Nunn is competitive polling wise, and would beat former Secretary of State Karen Handel hands down. But is she going to run? Sunday she was the big buzz-- along with Obama-- at an Atlanta DSCC fundraiser. Michael Bennet (D-CO), chair of the DSCC said "We believe Georgia presents us with the greatest opportunity for a pickup." And, needless to say, all the Republican crackpots have, for example, come out against the bipartisan immigration reform bill. They know well who the Know Nothing primary voters are.

"We absolutely must deal with it but we don't need any new laws," Broun said. "The solution is to secure the borders, both north and south."

"We absolutely are going to be opposed and stand strong against any amnesty," Gingrey said. "My idea about solving this problem is to enforce the laws that are currently on the books."

Gingrey and Handel both said the current proposal was too similar to a 2007 immigration bill that ultimately failed.

"We are about to have deja vu all over again," Handel said. "Only in Washington could the same failed policies be put forward as 'reform.' We need to secure the borders now before we do anything else."

Kingston also called for the end of automatic citizenship for those born in the United States. "When you come to America as a visitor and if you have a child, that child should not automatically be an American citizen," Kingston said. "We are one of the few nations left that still have that relic on the books. It was needed at one time but it is not needed anymore."

The Governor asked them not to behave like the Hatfields and the McCoys and destroy each other's chances. Broun, a former drug addict and a current John Bircher, is probably the most extremist of the candidates, though not by much. When he first entered the race, he claimed he was the "only" conservative running and that the others are, essentially, poseurs. "I believe in the original intent of the Constitution," he clucked. "There’s no other candidate that’s going to get into this race that does. I believe in the Constitution as the Founding Fathers meant it. They believe in a Constitution where government finds all the solutions for all the problems. So there are big differences between me and all the other candidates that can get in this race."

Chris Christie Still Counting On New Jersey Voters To Pick A Pig In A Poke

"It's official: Governor Christie is a card carrying member of the Flat Earth Society. We know that climate change is causing more severe weather, like Hurricane Sandy. But Governor Christie ignores overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of right-wing ideology. It's no surprise coming from a governor who's rolled back environmental protections, defunded investment in clean energy and withdrawn our state from a regional effort to reduce greenhouse gases. New Jersey should be leading efforts to fight climate change, not burying our heads in the sand." -Barbara Buono

Barbara Buono, who gave me the above quote this morning, has a tough road ahead. After Hurricane Sandy hit and Chris Christie was seen working amicably with President Obama, Christie's approval rating's-- which had been in the toilet-- soared. According to a PPP poll at the end of last year, his approval (67%) was the highest of any governor in the country. And his 25% disapproval was one of the lowest. I went to talk with a neighbor, originally from New Jersey, about his Tesla the other day. He's a progressive Democrat and we wound up talking about Christie and the New Jersey governor's race. He didn't know much about Buono but he said he did know a lot about Christie, primarily that he's "a moderate." I asked him if he knew Christie had vetoed the marriage equality bill or that he's vehemently anti-Choice or that he would like to defund public schools on behalf of financial predators who want to make billions with private schools. He didn't.

All he really knew was that Christie took a walk on the beach with Obama after Hurricane Sandy and that he stood up to right-wing congressional bullies from the South who didn't want to fund aid to New Jersey. So it was somewhat ironic Monday when Christie got up in front of voters and put on his climate change denier hat.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Monday said there is no proof climate change caused Hurricane Sandy.

Christie rejected an accusation by public radio station WNYC that New Jersey Transit was systemically unprepared for extreme storms in the run up to Sandy.

From WNYC:

"Well, first of all, I don’t agree with the premise of your question because I don’t think there’s been any proof thus far that Sandy was caused by climate change," Christie said, as residents and officials from Lavallette clapped. "But I would absolutely expect that that’s exactly what WNYC would say, because you know liberal public radio always has an agenda. And so since I disagree with the premise of your question I don’t feel like I have to answer the rest of it.”

Christie was speaking at a Lavallette, N.J., ceremony commemorating the town’s restored boardwalk on the Atlantic Ocean, which Sandy destroyed.

The East Coast storm last fall caused billions in damage, as Congress approved $60.2 billion of relief funding despite objections from fiscal conservatives.

While climate scientists avoid attributing individual events to climate change, they largely say its effects-- such as warmer waters and higher sea levels-- intensify storms such as Sandy.

Sandy underscored the fear of some federal and state lawmakers across the country that climate change and the extreme storms linked to it made coast regions vulnerable to natural disasters.

A couple of years ago, Senator Buono teamed up with Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Union) to do an OpEd for the Newark Star-Ledger, Climate Initiative flip-flop in NJ is troublesome. They pointed out that Christie first campaigned as a supporter of climate change initiatives but that once he got into office, threw all that aside and adopted a deranged right-wing ideological perspective.

Experts have been warning us for years about the impact our dependency on fossil fuels will have on our climate, not to mention our national security due to the heavy reliance this creates on foreign oil. From Hurricane Katrina to massive flooding in the South and Midwest, to the recent widespread destruction caused by tornadoes in the South, we are witnessing more extreme weather patterns each year. By the end of this century, experts predict that coastal areas such as the Meadowlands and Atlantic City will likely be uninhabitable because of chronic flooding.

We have been firmly committed to taking a proactive approach to address climate change. In mid-2007 and early 2008, we sponsored two landmark measures that passed and were signed into law-- the Global Warming Response Act and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, designed to work hand-in-hand to curb our dangerous overreliance on fossil fuels.

RGGI is a regional agreement among 10 northeast and mid-Atlantic states to implement a cap-and-trade program on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, essentially a major vehicle to achieve the goal of the Global Warming Response Act, which is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

Through RGGI, energy companies in each state are capped at a certain allowable tonnage of carbon dioxide they can emit, which is broken down into units or credits. The states that implement efficiencies to lower their greenhouse gas emissions can sell their excess credits at periodic auctions where businesses in other states that have not reduced their emission levels can then purchase these credits. States then invest the proceeds from these auctions into consumer benefits, such as energy efficiency, renewable energy and other clean energy technologies.

According to a recent RGGI report, pollution is down 15 to 30 percent since its launch, almost 18,000 jobs have been created and the region’s economy has grown by more than $2.3 billion. Weatherization and retrofitting programs funded by RGGI proceeds also have helped consumers realize energy bill savings of 15 to 30 percent.

In New Jersey, just the first dozen projects funded through the program will help reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 84,000 metric tons each year and help businesses generate more than 167,000 megawatt hours of clean energy per year-- enough to meet the equivalent annual electricity needs of more than 19,600 typical Garden State households.

The funds RGGI generates for New Jersey are used to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy in the commercial, industrial and institutional sectors; to assist limited-income households with their electric bills; to help local governments reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and to invest in protecting and restoring our forestry and tidal marshes.

This cooperative initiative is a step in the right direction toward stemming climate change by encouraging lower carbon dioxide emissions and alternative energy use. Weaning ourselves off of our fossil fuel dependency will ultimately help ease the acceleration of climate change.

Despite the fact that the program has spurred the development of green jobs, reduced pollution and been championed by environmentalists and businesses alike, Christie’s proposed budget confiscates the entire $65 million allocation for this program and he has announced New Jersey’s withdrawal from RGGI altogether.

At this crucial juncture, we cannot afford to make short-sighted decisions. Congress is dragging its heels on this issue. States must take the initiative now.

The time to create a more sustainable future is now. Everyone should join us in calling on the governor to remain committed to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

After a meeting with the Koch brothers, Christie took New Jersey out of the regional program and continued bloviating to the voters-- in this instance, in Toms River-- that he doubted human activity has any relation to climate change. "I think we're going to need more science to prove something one way or the other," the exact talking point Big Oil asks Republicans to use. So let's hope that the New Jersey Environmental Federation doesn't make the same mistake this year that they made in 2009, when he beame the first Republican gubernatorial candidate they had ever endorsed. He snowed them and they fell for it. Now they're disappointed, of course. "He has not kept his promise," Ben Forest, a member of the federation board, said recently.

Since taking office, Christie has taken more than $800 million from three funds dedicated to promote clean energy initiatives like solar and wind power and used the money to plug state budget gaps. Most of it has come from the Clean Energy Fund.

Another $194 million-- more than half of the Clean Energy Fund’s anticipated revenue-- would be siphoned under Christie’s proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

In addition, Christie has scooped up money from other environmental funds other governors never touched before-- including one that provides grants to towns and encourages recycling and another that pays for damages caused by operating or closing landfills.

...State Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex), Christie’s likely Democratic challenger in November, accused the governor of forsaking the environment for other priorities. "It’s going to take a long time to undo the damage he’s done," Buono said in a recent interview.

The energy fund is meant to pay for such items as grants for home and business owners who are seeking to increase energy efficiency and cut costs. But the money being diverted is instead going toward fuel and utility costs for NJ Transit and state facilities.

Democrats and environmentalists are calling the diversions a tax.

"The voters and the citizens understood it was to be used for clean energy services," state Sen. Bob Smith (D-Middlesex) said. "None of that money’s gone to that purpose. It’s all been used to cover his budgetary holes. Moral of the story is, it’s a tax ... He says, ‘I haven’t done any new taxes.’ Wrong."

The Ugly Republican Politics Behind Aid For Oklahoma Tornado Victims

Like most Americans, President Obama's reaction to the tornado devastation is Oklahoma was to ask how we could help. He pledged "all of the resources" necessary to rebuild to the state that gave him his poorest results in November, 33% and a loss of every single county. (Cleveland County, where the devastation was the most brutal, went for Romney 59,019 to 34,701 in November.) Oklahoma has 5 congressmen, all Republicans. Jim Bridenstine, Markwayne Mullin, Frank Lucas, Tom Cole and James Lankford. The two senators-- both are extreme right Republicans who have been especially obstructionist since Obama became president-- are Jim Inhofe and Tom Coburn. Inhofe and Coburn both voted against aid to the survivors of Hurricane Sandy. In the House, where a majority of Republicans voted against aid, the two most senior Oklahoma Republicans, Frank Lucas and Tom Cole bucked their party and voted with the Democrats in favor of the aid package. Most of the devastation was in Cole's district, which includes Moore. Cole said on MSNBC yesterday that one reason he voted for Sandy relief was his own state’s history of catastrophic tornadoes. “Frankly, one of the reasons that we try to be sympathetic to people in other parts of the country” is that “we’re always going to be there to help because we’re always one tornado away from being Joplin.”

"As a nation," said Obama yesterday, "our full focus right now is on the urgent work of rescue and the hard work of recovery and rebuilding that lies ahead... [F]or all those who have been affected, we recognize that you face a long road ahead. In some cases, there will be enormous grief that has to be absorbed but you will not travel that path alone. Your country will travel it with you fueled by our faith in the almighty and our faith in one another. So our prayers are with the people of Oklahoma today, and we will back up those prayers with deeds for as long as it takes."

Tom Coburn, on the other hand, is insane, politicizing the tragedy to score points for his anti-social, reactionary ideology and, basically, holding the victims hostage-- yes, his own constituents-- unless he gets his way. Coburn, many are saying, is disastrously wrong but at least consistent. I think the picture from Act Blue on the right goes a long way to explain why Oklahoma's right-wing ideologues can behave this way.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) will insist that any federal aid to deal with the tornado in his home state must be offset by budget cuts.

“He will ask his colleagues to sacrifice lower priority areas of the budget to help Oklahoma,” spokesman John Hart said. Should other Republicans join Coburn, it could set up a fight similar to the January tug-of-war over Hurricane Sandy funding. That aid package was delayed by GOP opposition and ultimately passed with mostly Democratic support.

Coburn was against the Sandy relief package, as well as 2011 legislation to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster fund. His office has noted that the 1995 aid for victims of the Oklahoma City bombing was balanced by cuts to unspent appropriations. However, he did ask for expedited FEMA aid in 2007, when an ice storm hit his state.

Inhofe is already making excuses for his own inconsistency by claiming the Hurricane Sandy bill he voted against was filled with pork and that the bill to help the tornado victims won't be. He's a stinking pile of moldering pig dung. When his constituents finish digging out, they should demand he resign.