Britain’s National Health Service: Simple, Sensible and Civilized
A former NHS patient has some advice for Americans skeptical of single-payer, government-run healthcare: You’ll get over it.
by Clancy Sigal
For the first couple of years I lived in Britain, I was an illegal immigrant from the United States, visaless with an expired passport and looking over my shoulder all the time. Even so, from the very first day I arrived at Victoria Station in London, suffering from bronchitis, I was accepted in the NHS — the national health scheme, we called it — no questions asked and no ID required.
After I’d become a legal resident, I asked my doctor why he had taken me, almost literally off the boat, with so little fuss. Weren’t foreigners a drain on his time and the National Health Service? He shrugged. “If you come here with a contagious disease, we don’t want you infecting the rest of us. So of course we give you medical care. Purely selfish on our part.”
For three decades I used and, being of a hypochondriacal nature, exploited the British medical system without paying a farthing except for the taxes taken out of my wages as a working journalist. And that single-payer, socialistic, government-run, bureaucratized, heavily used, nationalized health system served me — and 50 million others — very well. In need, I saw many doctors, with no money ever changing hands. There was nothing to sign, hardly any papers to shuffle. My primary-care physician ran his “surgery,” his office, with the help of only one receptionist whose job it was to arrange appointments.
My doctor’s waiting room in his storefront office was by American standards shockingly casual, even a trifle seedy. In what was then a rigid class society, the waiting room was also a lesson in democracy where duchesses and dustmen, old and young, rich and poor, waited their turn. It wasn’t perfect. There was the occasional misdiagnosis, crowded hospital ward, sleepy student nurse. But it worked.
It was all free, including specialists, and I came to believe that healthcare is a right, not an entitlement I had paid for. This “free” part sometimes puzzled my visiting American friends. When they got ill in London, I’d send them to my doctor, who would smile bemusedly when offered money. Did they appreciate this? Hardly. “Your doctors,” they’d say, “can’t be much good, can they?”
Is this too rosy a picture of single-payer, government-run healthcare? Maybe. Over the years, an underfunded, over-bureaucratized, increasingly privatized NHS has in some areas turned into a shadow of its former vibrant self.
Perhaps I was lucky to arrive so soon after World War II, when a traumatized, bomb-weary public was in no mood to revisit a prewar history of medical deprivation and the humiliation of means testing. Slowly, over time, by argument and debate, a consensus had been achieved, by Conservatives and Labor alike, that, in the words of Edward VIII as Prince of Wales when he first saw the grinding poverty of the unemployed, “something must be done.”
Recently, the American Medical Assn. responded with skepticism to President Obama’s plea for healthcare reform. In Britain, too, the massed ranks of the medical profession at first fought bitterly against a “socialized” service covering all from cradle to the grave. But Labor’s health minister, a firebrand from the mining valleys, Aneurin Bevan, brought them into line with a mixture of enticements and threats.
The NHS was, and is, a classically English compromise, in which individual doctors are independent contractors paid by the government according to the number of their patients. Doctors are free to remove patients from their list, and patients are free to go elsewhere. Once ideology was laid aside and the system got working, it was actually quite simple.
Once launched, in an astonishingly short time, a matter of a year or so, the NHS was accepted by even its worst enemies — the doctors and the Conservative Party — as indispensable and a civilized way of dealing with life, illness and death.
Does that sound so awful?
© 2009 Los Angeles Times
Declare a Democratic Worldview
by John Hank Edson
This Fourth of July, let’s give America the birthday present she cannot do without. Let’s give the people back their Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence sets forth a worldview that, back in the 18th century, served as the foundation of our new nation. This foundation was composed of the principle of human equality and the rights of self-determination implied by the famous phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Back then, this foundation was sufficient to support the society we hoped to build, one free of the economic monopolies, religious authoritarianism and military brutality embodied, respectively, in the English nobility, the Church of England and England’s Redcoat soldiers. As large as these forces loomed over the colonists in the New World, these were forces still dwarfed by the Atlantic Ocean, the American wilderness and the sheer number of people they aimed to dominate.
In a day of bayonets, wooden hulls and musket balls, mere consciousness of the principle of human equality was enough to give the people confidence in their ability to rewrite the social contract, even if it had to be written in their own blood. “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry cried. In his day, he could calculate the odds of success as reasonable against an enemy that was still on a human scale. He could look his enemy in the eye and say to King George with confidence, our equality is self-evident.
When we won our independence, we dismantled all the power platforms setting some human beings above others. Against the concentration of wealth and power of the classist aristocracy, we built the one-person, one-vote principle. Against the psychological oppression of religious authoritarianism, we constructed the doctrine of separation of church and state. And against the physical domination of mercenary armies, we instituted civilian control of the military.
But then we lost our way.
After the Civil War, corporations stole the principle of equality and put it in the service of nonhuman monetary engines antagonistic to our democratic political process. During World War II, the military-industrial complex grew into a powerful privatized industry no longer answerable to the people. After the civil rights movement, the corporations and the military-industrial complex offered the authoritarian religious right political legitimacy in exchange for their votes. It took us far too long to recognize the Republican Party as embodying the same feudal alliance of authoritarian platforms we once revolted against.
Simply put, for more than two centuries, we did nothing to defend ourselves against the anti-democratic forces in society that were themselves constantly seeking ever-increasing sophistication and power. Thus, while economic monopolists, religious authoritarians and military industrialists developed subtle strategies for placing the people under their control, the people remained content with a merely “self-evident” equality. As a result, today we harbor serious doubts about our equality, our ability to rewrite the social contract, and the future of our democracy.
Fortunately, our understanding of the principle of human equality, the rights of self-determination that flow from it, and the people’s power to rewrite their social contract need not remain in its 18th century “self-evident” condition. A logical explication of these truths exists. We can give America the birthday gift she so desperately needs if only we will make thinking seriously about the democratic worldview our responsibility. Our original articulation of the democratic worldview changed the course of history in 1776. In 2009, it is high time we upgrade that worldview to meet the sophistication of our 21st century society. In so doing, we will once again expose the ideologies of authoritarian supremacy advanced by economic monopolists, religious authoritarians and mercenary militarists as directly in conflict with the people’s rights and humanity’s well-being. Equipped with this new understanding, we will find the true direction of change that America is wishing for as her birthday candles all blow out.
John Hank Edson is an attorney and the author of “The Declaration of the Democratic Worldview” (Democracy Press, 2008).
© 2009 San Francisco Chronicle
Filed under: enviromental issues, political issues | Tags: Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
Mountaintop Removal: Fourth of July Festival Organizers Fear Violence
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Larry Gibson, the well-known, 72-year-old activist against mountaintop-removal mining, will host his annual July 4 music festival at his Kayford Mountain home above Cabin Creek Saturday and Sunday.
“I’ve been having this event, which is open to the public, for 23 years. Everyone is welcome,” Gibson said.
Maria Gunnoe, a Boone County native, who won this year’s international Goldman Environmental Prize in April for her anti-mountaintop-removal activism, is among the many planning to attend.
“A lot of elders and a lot of children, show up,” Gunnoe said. “Normally, it is very peaceful.
“People get together, socialize and listen to very diverse music,” she said. “Some is traditional Appalachian music. Some is music for younger teenagers, including rock music. It is a good time with your family and friends.”
But both Gibson and Gunnoe worry this year’s festival could spark hostility and possibly violence, especially after last week’s arrest of demonstrators protesting Massey Energy’s mountaintop removal operations in Boone County.
Gibson, in particular, said he has received threats since the arrests.
No one could be reached at Massey Energy’s offices in Boone County on Friday.
A spokesman for the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department said he had heard nothing about any rumors of violence at Gibson’s planned July 4 celebration.
On June 23, 31 picketers were arrested, including: actress Daryl Hannah, National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist James Hansen and former Democratic Congressman and West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler.
Protesting near Sundial, the picketers were charged with obstructing police officers and impeding traffic after sitting in the middle of W.Va. 3 near a controversial Massey coal preparation plant next to Marsh Fork Elementary School.
A nearby Massey dam impounds about 3 billion gallons of coal sludge from company mining operations.
Gibson’s festival started out as a family reunion, but quickly grew into an annual community event.
Last week, Gunnoe distanced herself from “out-of-state environmentalists,” explaining, “We are connected to the environment around our home lands. We care about our culture. But that does not make us tree huggers.”
Gibson hopes today’s event is well attended.
“Everyone is welcome. Bring a covered dish. But this is not a place for any kind of violence. But bring a conversation to the table. I would be glad to talk to anyone,” Gibson said.
Gibson, whose family has lived on or near Kayford Mountain since the late 1700s, travels around the country speaking about mountaintop removal at colleges, churches, public seminars and community groups
“The stand I am taking here is not so much for myself,” Gibson said, “but for all of the people living in this part of the country.”
Gunnoe said, “Some people have had windows broken out of their vehicles because they had ‘We Love Mountains’ stickers on their bumpers.
“For years, mountaintop removal blasting has covered our homes up with dust and polluted our water,” she said. “People fight mountaintop removal because they have lost their water, their land and their quality of life.”
Headzup: Sarah Palin Resigns As Alaska Governor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEsmcOmqpqw&feature=player_embedded
Filed under: Media, enviromental issues | Tags: Mike Papantonio, Pap Attack, Progressive Media
Chevron’s Slick Business Practices
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKkvxAg5G6U&feature=player_embedded
Loss of World’s Seagrass Beds Seen Accelerating
by Jim Loney
MIAMI – The world’s seagrass meadows, a critical habitat for marine life and profit-maker for the fishing industry, are in decline due to coastal development and the losses are accelerating, according to a new study.
![[A fishing boat is moored in waters near Nueva Valencia town, Guimaras Island, September 12, 2006. REUTERS/Leo Solinap ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/seagrass-2.jpg "seagrass-2.jpg")
A fishing boat is moored in waters near Nueva Valencia town, Guimaras Island, September 12, 2006. REUTERS/Leo SolinapBilled as the first comprehensive global assessment of seagrass losses, the study found 58 percent of seagrass meadows are declining and the rate of annual loss has accelerated from about 1 percent per year before 1940 to 7 percent per year since 1990.
Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study, based on more than 200 surveys and 1,800 observations dating back to 1879, found that seagrasses are disappearing at rates similar to coral reefs and tropical rainforests.
“Seagrasses are disappearing because they live in the same kind of environments that attract people,” James Fourqurean, a professor at Florida International University and a co-author of the study, said in an e-mailed response to questions.
“They live in shallow areas protected from large storm waves, and they are especially prevalent in bays and around river mouths.”
Scientists say seagrass processes waste dumped into the sea, helps stabilize ocean-bottom sediments in coastal areas to reduce erosion, provide nurseries for fish and shellfish and feeding grounds for larger marine creatures, including those that live in coral reefs.
But the grasses can be damaged by polluted water from coastal development, decreasing water clarity, and by dredging and filling of meadows.
The scientists also said global climate change “is predicted to have deleterious effects on seagrasses.” Many scientists believe greenhouse gases are causing the world to warm, leading to a host of environmental effects including warming and rising oceans.
‘ECONOMICALLY AND ECOLOGICALLY IMPORTANT’
Seagrass meadows are important food fisheries and host gamefish like tarpon, permit and bonefish.
A recent study estimated the annual economic value of seagrass at $3,500 per hectare (2.5 acres), Fourqurean said.
“Seagrass beds are at least as economically and ecologically important as tropical forests or coral reefs,” he said.
The study, by a team of scientists from the United States, Australia and Spain, found that 29 percent of known seagrass meadows have disappeared since 1879. Over the entire 130-year period, seagrass was lost at a rate of 1.5 percent per year.
An estimated 19,690 square miles (51,000 square km) of seagrass has been lost since 1879 of a total estimated area of 68,350 square miles (177,000 square km), the researchers said.
“Globally, we lose a seagrass meadow the size of a soccer field every thirty minutes,” said co-author William Dennison of the University of Maryland.
The scientists said 45 percent of the world’s population lives on 5 percent of its land adjacent to the coast.
In the early 20th century, heavy seagrass losses were noted in North America and Europe, where the industrial revolution led to rapid coastal development.
Today, population growth in the regions bordering the Pacific and Indian Oceans are likely leading to the heaviest losses of seagrass, but those regions lack the scientific infrastructure to assess the loss, Fourqurean said.
He said mitigation efforts have had some success in saving and restoring seagrass. For example, in Florida, where treated sewage water is often dumped in the ocean, water managers in Tampa changed their method of treating wastewater and failing seagrasses rebounded.
(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
© Thomson Reuters 2009.
Filed under: enviromental issues, political issues | Tags: Mountaintop Removal Mining, Robert F. Kennedy jr
A President Breaks Hearts in Appalachia
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mountaintop removal coal mining is the worst environmental tragedy in American history. When will the Obama administration finally stop this Appalachian apocalypse?
If ever an issue deserved President Obama’s promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day — the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly — to blow up Appalachia’s mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains — encompassing about a million acres — buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region’s air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia’s rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not — obliterating the hemisphere’s oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas — while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry’s promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry’s fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains — with their impoverished and alienated population — are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.
First, the White House should fix the “fill” rule the Bush administration adopted in 2002 to allow coal companies to use streams as waste dumps. Under this perverse interpretation of the Clean Water Act, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams have been interred under mining waste. Obama could reverse the “fill” rule to reflect its original meaning, which forbids waste matter from being dumped into waterways.
Second, the Interior Department should strictly enforce the widely ignored “buffer zone” rule that forbids dumping waste within 100 feet of intermittent or perennial streams.
Third, our laws require companies to restore mined areas to their original condition. The administration should end the absurd fiction that extraction pits filled with unconsolidated rocks and rubble where trees will never grow and streams will never flow are “reclaimed.”
Fourth, current law forbids the issuance of “fill” permits that will cause “significant degradation” to waterways. It is absurd for the Army Corps of Engineers to endorse the canard that filling miles of streams is not causing significant degradation. The president should require the Corps to deny and rescind permits where operations will cause downstream damage.
Fifth, the Clean Water Act requires mining operators to prove that they can restore the “function and structure” of affected streams. Operators have never been compelled to make the functional or structural analyses of the aquatic ecosystem required by the act. Obama should order his officials to stop ignoring this requirement.
Sixth, the administration should enforce the law requiring an environmental impact study for each permit when a mine “may have significant environmental impacts,” individually or cumulatively. The Corps of Engineers routinely allows coal operators to escape this mandate — an illegal practice that should stop.
Instead of acting to enforce these laws, administration officials indicated last month that they will allow more than 100 permits to go forward while they carefully review their regulatory options. If they act accordingly, the ruined landscapes of Appalachia will be Obama’s legacy.
President Obama should go to Appalachia and see mountaintop removal. My father visited Appalachia in 1966 and was so horrified by strip mining — then in its infancy — that he made it a key priority of his political agenda. He complained that Appalachia, with our nation’s richest natural resources, was home to America’s poorest populations, its worst education system, and its highest illiteracy and unemployment rates. These statistics are even grimmer today as mining saps state wealth. In 1966, 46,000 West Virginia miners were collecting salaries and pensions and reinvesting in their communities. Mechanization has shrunk that number to fewer than 11,000. They extract more coal annually, but virtually all the profits leave the state for Wall Street.
The coal industry provides only 2 percent of the jobs in Central Appalachia. Wal-Mart employs more people than the coal companies in West Virginia. Last week a major study documented how coal imposes a net cost to Kentucky of more than $100 million per year. Coal is not an economic engine in the coalfields. It is an extraction engine.
Obama has the authority to end mountaintop removal, without further action from Congress and without formal rulemaking. He just needs to make the coal barons obey the law.
© 2009 The Washington Post
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is chairman of the Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.
Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms
DHS Officials Debating The Privacy Implications
by Ellen Nakashima
The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.
President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve “monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic,” and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems.
But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the officials said, because of uncertainty about whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency’s involvement in warrantless wiretapping during George W. Bush’s presidency would draw controversy. Each time a private citizen visited a “dot-gov” Web site or sent an e-mail to a civilian government employee, that action would be screened for potential harm to the network.
“We absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has. But . . . they will be guided, led and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security,” the department’s secretary, Janet Napolitano, told reporters in a discussion about cybersecurity efforts.
Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the plan called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks.
AT&T, the world’s largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration’s choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot program was to have begun in February.
“To be clear, Einstein 3 development is proceeding,” DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said. “We are moving forward in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties.”
AT&T officials declined to comment.
A DHS official said the delay occurred because the original timeline “did not take into account all that was required to ensure the exercise would provide the data needed.”
The program is the most controversial element of the $17 billion cybersecurity initiative the Bush administration started in January 2008. Einstein 3 is crucial, advocates say, in an era in which hackers have compromised computer systems at the Commerce and State departments and have taken military jet data from a defense contractor.
The NSA declined to comment on Einstein 3, but a spokeswoman said the agency would help DHS in “any way possible, including technical support,” as it seeks to protect government networks.
The internal controversy reflects the central tension in the debate over how best to defend the nation’s mostly private system of computer networks. The techniques that work best, experts say, require the automated scrutiny of e-mail and other electronic communications content — something that commercial providers already do.
Proponents of involving the government said such efforts should harness the NSA’s resources, especially its database of computer codes, or signatures, that have been linked to cyberattacks or known adversaries. The NSA has compiled the cache by, for example, electronically observing hackers trying to gain access to U.S. military systems, the officials said.
“That’s the secret sauce,” one official said. “It’s the stuff they have that the private sector doesn’t.”
But it is also the prospect of NSA involvement in cybersecurity that fuels concerns about unwarranted government snooping into private communication.
“The bitter battles over privacy and NSA’s role in domestic wiretapping hang over cybersecurity like a toxic cloud,” said Stewart A. Baker, who was assistant secretary of homeland security under Bush.
AT&T was sued over its role in aiding the Bush-era counterterrorism program to intercept Americans’ e-mails and phone calls without a warrant. It is seeking legal assurance that it will not be sued for participating in the pilot program. That legal certification has been held up for several months as DHS prepares a contract, several current and former officials said.
Einstein’s promise, they said, is that it can more effectively detect malicious activity and disable intrusions before harm is done to civilian government networks.
“Intrusion detection is like a cop with a radar gun on a highway who catches you speeding or drunk and phones ahead to somebody at the other end,” Michael Chertoff, former homeland security secretary, said in a recent interview. “Einstein 3 is a cop who actually arrests you and pulls you off the road when he sees you driving drunk.”
The pilot program has two goals. The first is to prove that the telecommunications firm can route only traffic destined for federal civilian agencies through the monitoring system. The second is to test whether the technology can work effectively on civilian government networks. The sensor box would scan e-mail messages and other content just before they enter the civilian agency networks.
The classified NSA system, known as Tutelage, has the ability to decide how to handle malicious intrusions — to block them or watch them closely to better assess the threat, sources said. It is currently used to defend military networks.
The database for the program would also contain feeds from commercial firms and DHS’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, administration officials said.
“We’re looking for malicious content, not a love note to someone with a dot-gov e-mail address,” a senior Bush administration official said. “What we’re interested in is finding the code, the thing that will do the network harm, not reading the e-mail itself.”
Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, was among a group of privacy advocates given a classified briefing in March on the Einstein program. The advocates wanted to ensure that officials had a plan to protect privacy and civil liberties, including shielding such personally identifying data as Internet protocol addresses.
“We came away saying they have a lot of work in front of them to get this done right,” Schwartz said. “We’re looking forward to their next steps.”
Bush administration lawyers determined last year that DHS had the legal authority to conduct the Einstein program, and could do so in compliance with existing wiretap and privacy laws, as long as appropriate policies were in place.
Last fall, plans for the pilot were proceeding, former officials said. But in the Bush administration’s final weeks, AT&T lawyers raised concerns about legal liability, they said. Then-Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey was willing to give AT&T written assurance that it would bear no liability for participating in the program, but both AT&T and the Justice Department agreed that the new administration should issue the certification, they said.
“They just wanted to make sure the certification would not be reversed by the next administration,” a Bush administration official said.
In hindsight, Baker said, the Bush White House’s decision to classify so much of its initiative was a mistake.
“It meant that the problem was not well understood,” said Baker, who was NSA general counsel in the Clinton administration. “The solution was veiled in secrecy in a way that allowed people outside to be suspicious, so anybody who mistrusted the intelligence community could just assume that it was because they were doing something that they shouldn’t be doing.”
Staff writers Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson contributed to this report.
© 2009 The Washington Post Company
Here is my annual posting President Kennedy reading the Declaration of Independence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poT5yr5lJCU
I think it is important that we remember the words and thoughts of the great Americans who wrote these words so many years ago.
As we get close to 4th of July 2009 I think it is important that we ask ourselves has our nation turned away from the principles that this country was founded on? If our Founding Fathers were alive today would they be happy with the direction this nation has taken over the year and the path we are currently on? For me the answer is NO, they would be asking themselves why has this generation been so weak and cared so little that they would allow the country that was founded with such high hopes and principles to be destroyed.
This year I am asking myself the difficult question of if one truly loves this nation (which I do) than don’t we have a duty to save this nation from continuing down the path we have been going down since 1963?
Will we as a generation have the courage to pick up the torch that has been passed on to us by all the generations who walked before us? Will we fight to save this country or will we continue to allow the ones who have hijacked our government by their subversion of our government get away with their crimes? I look around me and I don’t know if we as a generation or a people have the will to follow in the footsteps of the first generation of Americans (our ancestors) who fought for their freedom. I think they would weep in sorrow this 4th of July!!!!!
I truly worry about the future of this country. We have Americans who because of the corruption and lies of people in our government have given up on the political system. They know that there is very little difference between the Democratic and Republican party. They are in fact two faces of the same party. When you have a population of our people not believing in our political system anymore and give up voting because they see no point. They know that whoever they vote for it will be the same ole same ole. We elect great speakers but people who do not tell us the truth. We elect people who lie to us. They don’t earn our respect or vote, but tell us what they know we want to hear only to get elected. It is all a sham. We have a government that could fall. As people are waking up to the reality of what is going on in our government and how they have been corrupted to allow such evil policies as mountaintop removal mining than I have to believe that people will care enough to fight for what is morally right and stand against a corrupted government.
Did you know that there are Americans in this very country who want our political system to fall? They are waiting and planning that they will move in and form a new government. White Nationalists dream of that day. Their America will be a very different America than what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but will be more like the National Socialist government of Germany under Hitler. They don’t like to use the word National Socialist because they know that image to most Americana is not good, but they know that is the form of government that they will take. Many of them glorify Hitler and the Third Reich.
I worry because if people are not willing to form a real political party that hasn’t been corrupted by the corporate elite who run and control the other two parties and we don’t elect true American Patriots who will not cave in or back down and sell their principle for a few coins of silver than I worry that more and more people will loose faith in our political system. When you have a system that doesn’t allow third parties to be part of political debates so that they can elect people to government than we will continue to have to choose between a Democrat who lies and a Republican who lies. Is there anyone brave enough to tell the American people the TRUTH?
We the American people are tired of being lied to by those who hold political office in this country!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We are tired of having the best government that money can buy and those Americans who do not have money to lobby have no voice in this government! We are tired of this being America for the corporate elite and not America for the people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We are tired that we Americans have no right to health care. We have millions of Americans who fall through the cracks and receive no basic medical care. Real Health care reform has been taken off the table. Corporate America is once again defeating real health care reform.
My ancestors were part of fighting for the American Revolution. They were there. Maybe it is their blood running through me that makes me a spitfire who will fight? Maybe it is because I grew up with a great love and passion for America and our History and I will not just allow our vision to just be corrupted without that fight that they would expect me their daughter to fight.
America is truly at a crossroads. Yet, even in spite of the late hour I still believe that if we would make a stand and were willing to risk the very things that they risked we would have a chance to achieve victory. The question is will we have their moral courage to do what we know we must do to save this nation that some of us love with our whole hearts? Will we fight so that future generations of Americans will be able to live FREE? I really don’t know the answer to that question, but I pray and hope we will make an effort to save this country from the evil that has subverted our government.
Maybe it is time to write a new Declaration?
Filed under: Climate Change Issues, political issues | Tags: Climate Change, Exxon
ExxonMobil Continuing to Fund Climate Sceptic Groups, Records Show
Records show ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to lobby groups that have published ‘misleading and inaccurate information’ about climate change
by David Adam
The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.
![[Exxon. Photograph: Donna Williams/AP]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/exxon-2.jpg "exxon-2.jpg")
Exxon. Photograph: Donna Williams/APCompany records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.
According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”
On its website, the NCPA says: “NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth’s current warming trend is [sic] still unknown, the cost of actions to substantially reduce CO2 emissions would be quite high and result in economic decline, accelerated environmental destruction, and do little or nothing to prevent global warming regardless of its cause.”
The Heritage Foundation published a “web memo” in December that said: “Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007″. Scientists, including those at the UK Met Office say that the apparent cooling is down to natural changes and does not alter the long-term warming trend.
In its 2008 corporate citizenship report, published last year, ExxonMobil said it would cut funds to several groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy.
The NCPA and Heritage Foundation are included among groups funded by ExxonMobil, according to details of its “2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments” published recently.
Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.”
In 2006, Ward, then at the Royal Society, wrote to ExxonMobil to challenge the company’s funding of such lobby groups. The move, revealed in the Guardian, prompted accusations of censorship and debate about whether experts should “police” the distribution of scientific information.
In an article on the Guardian website, Ward writes: “I have now written again to ExxonMobil to point out that these organisations publish misleading information about climate change on their websites, and to seek guidance on how to reconcile this fact with the pledge made by the company. I believe that the company should keep its promise by ending its financial support for lobby groups that mislead the public about climate change.”
ExxonMobil said it annually reviews and adjusts its contributions to policy research groups. A spokesman said: “Only ExxonMobil speaks for ExxonMobil and our position on climate change is clear. We have the same concerns as people everywhere, and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We take the issue of climate change seriously and the risks warrant action.”
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
