Suncoast Sierra Club's Gulf Truth Forum Did Not Speak Truth--Scientists on Their Panel Have Studies Funded by BP
November 19, 2010
By Anita Stewart
This event was held on November 16, 2010 at the Fish and Wildlife Center in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida from 6 until 830PM.

EVENT NOTICE:

First statement on the invitation to this event is this:
"What do scientists say about how the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster affected the fish, wildlife and people in the Gulf of Mexico?"

People? The Human Impact in relation to the Catastrophe and Crime Scene in the Gulf was never mentioned in this forum. Not ONCE!..

The Loaded Chamber: Secret Money (VIDEO)
Friday 22 October 2010
by: Harry Hanbury | GRITtv | Video Report
"The chamber’s increasingly aggressive role — including record spending in the midterm elections that supports Republicans more than 90 percent of the time — has made it a target of critics, including a few local chamber affiliates who fear it has become too partisan and hard-nosed in its fund-raising."

So reports a headline story in the New York Times Thursday about the Chamber of Commerce's increasingly secretive and partisan fundraising and lobbying efforts. The Chamber, once an institution that supported small and family businesses, increasingly does the bidding of a few large corporations, and in the first part of our GRITtv Digs investigation, Harry Hanbury starts to open up the Chamber's secrets for you....

from CodePink -
Christine O’Donnell might not be a witch, but Thomas J. Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is a vampire. Under his leadership, the Chamber is sucking the life out of our electoral system. With Halloween coming up, give Mr. Donohue a call and tell him stop playing tricks by treating right-wing candidates to millions of dollars of vicious and misleading attack ads.

Call 202-659-6000 today and tell the US Chamber of Commerce to get their fangs out of our electoral throat!

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald at Salon both have incisive looks at the secret money funding the onslaught of attack ads mounted by Donohue’s Chamber and other groups, such as American Crossroads founded by his fellow bloodsucker, Karl Rove. We can practically hear Donohue and Rove cackling maniacally over the misinformation and falsehoods in the ads they’ve spawned—distortions that could help the Republicans (with the Tea Party) regain control of Congress. Bwaahahhaahhaa!....

The Wall Comes Tumbling Down

Greg Kaufmann | October 18, 2010 It was an unlikely place to hear Abraham Joshua Heschel quoted, and the rabbi’s words came from an unlikely messenger.

At a news conference on a farm outside of Immokalee in southwest Florida, Jon Esformes, operating partner of the fourth-generation [1], family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers—one of the five largest growers in the nation with more than 14,000 acres in the US and Mexico—declared, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

And with that he announced an agreement with the 4000-member Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to implement a penny per pound pay raise — which stands to increase workers’ annual earnings from about $10,000 to as much as $17,000 — and establish a code of conduct that includes an external complaint resolution system, shade and protective equipment in the fields, and a worker-to-worker education process on their rights under the new agreement....

From CodePink...
*Tell Hillary Clinton: Stop Doing Business with Blackwater!*
October 6, 2010

As we mark the 9th year of this bloody war in Afghanistan, please join us in calling on Secretary Clinton to stop giving our taxdollars to the mercenary firm Blackwater. We'll never end the war in Afghanistan as long as companies like Blackwater can make a killing out of killing. *Tell Hillary Clinton: Stop Doing Business with Blackwater!*

**As part of our Cut Blackwater Loose campaign, CODEPINK's *Medea Benjamin teamed up with DC's premier hiphop artist Head-Roc *to create a rap video "Blackwater Makes a Killing."Check it out.

**Also check out this WIRED report on all the shady things private security firms can do and still walk away with a wheelbarror full of your tax dollars, including killing civilians, lying to investigators, retaliating against whistle-blowers, stealing guns, running guns, and buying drugs...

In January 2010, five Republicans on the Supreme Court gave foreign corporations a Constitutional right to buy Congress and our next President.

If foreign corporations want to buy our elections publicly, they can simply create U.S. subsidiaries. If they want to buy our elections secretly, they can launder their money through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which aggressively raises foreign money, or through Karl Rove's secretive American Crossroads GPS, both of which are spending millions in this year's elections.

That means foreign leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hu Jintao of China, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia can use their enormous wealth to steal millions of American jobs, keep us dependent on foreign oil and even make us fight their wars.

Watch our powerful ad and tell Congress to Stop the Foreign Takeover:

The Supreme Court put America's national security in danger. They were absolutely wrong and their ruling (Citizens United v. FEC) must be overturned.

Urge your Representatives to co-sponsor the DISCLOSE Act to require full disclosure of all corporate campaign spending and ban foreign corporate spending...

It Was Oil, All Along
June 28, 2008
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be....the bottom line. It is about oil.

A Home for the Holidays

What would you do if you lived in one of Henry Kravis' mansions for a day during the holidays?

Would you feed the homeless? Throw a huge party? Sell everything on eBay?

How 'bout a little solidarity?....
Pledge Not to Ship With FedEx Ground This Holiday
FedEx has built a successful company on the backs of its drivers while pledging to "never recognize any unions" at the company. Only public pressure will drive FedEx Ground's leadership to stop harassing workers and meet them at the bargaining table. Take this pledge to show your support for the drivers at FedEx Ground.

It's easy: just don't use FedEx Ground for your holiday deliveries this year. We'll deliver the signatures to FedEx to show them we mean business.
Full Petition Text:...

TOXIC TRADE

Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer
As American consumers buy a sharply increased share of their goods from overseas, the American government has been cutting back its ability to regulate and inspect imports. Americans consumers are thus exposed to increasing numbers of products that were neither produced in America nor subject to American safety standards. The results put people at risk.

Our report, "Toxic Trade: Globalization and the Safety of the American Consumer," documents these two trends. Government statistics show that imports have increased by 338 percent since 1974, the year the Consumer Product Safety Commission was created. Yet the budget for that agency today is less than half what is was in that year. In effect, we have been disarming our ability to protect ourselves, even as the need to do so has been soaring. Our report concludes that it is past time for a change.

Download this report (PDF)

TAKE ACTION: Ask your member of Congress to back a law that will help shut down the flow of dangerous consumer products into our stores...

Petition: http://WhenTheSaints.org It's been two years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, and still there are tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of
the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. Support
the Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 by signing the petition at
www.WhenTheSaints.org

Kucinich campaign is awaiting ABC News explanations for its actions

The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained – some have charged "inexplicable" - way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.

Among the "outrages" that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters - and even non-supporters - thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:

• * Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" photo of the candidates.
• * Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own on-line "Who won the Democratic debate" survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
• * ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
• * After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking "Who is winning the Democratic debate?"
• * During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
• * Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
• * AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.

Stayed tuned for further details.

Comment by TNJP - You can let ABC and ABC's This Week know how you feel by dropping them a line at thisweek@abc.com or politicalunit@abcnews.com

Michael Moore makes the case for media reform whilst putting CNN's Wolfie Blitzter in his place...

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.: Now we've all heard the oil industry and the coal industry and their indentured servants in the political process telling us that global climate stability is a luxury that we can't afford. That we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other. And that is a false choice.

In 100% of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy --- if we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, how it preserves the values of the assets of our community and how it averts the catastrophe of global warming....

Action Alert: Don't Let Conservation Buy The Farm
I have a not-very-taxing question for all you tax payers out there:

Would you like to see your hard-earned dollars used to conserve precious wetlands and vital habitats, or would you prefer to see that money used to build football field-sized pools of pigshit generated by industrial pork producers?...