Koch Brothers

The Second Most Important Election Of 2012: The Recall Election In Wisconsin On June 5th

Ronald 1 Comment

Obviously, the most important election of 2012 is the choice between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for President in November.

But a likely forecast of what will happen in November is the Wisconsin Governorship recall race to be held on June 5, five months earlier.

Republican Governor Scott Walker, who has warred on the citizens of Wisconsin, set out to destroy labor unions, and cut education funding dramatically, while giving tax breaks to the special interests, and accepting campaign help from the Koch Brothers and other wealthy conservative interests, will face Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, his opponent in the 2010 gubernatorial race, who he defeated by about five points.

Considering that about a million votes were gathered to force this recall race in the middle of the term, only the third recall election in US history, it is inspiring people to believe that Walker can be kicked out of office by Democratic nominee Barrett.

The money flowing is amazing, with much of it coming from outside for Walker, as Republicans see this as a chance to validate their approach toward public affairs, and Walker has become a rallying point for other “Bully” Governors, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Paul LePage of Maine, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, and Rick Snyder of Michigan, among others.

Labor and progressive forces are fighting to retire Walker, and put Mayor Barrett into office, and if this effort fails, it would be a major dampening of hopes of progressives to overcome the Tea Party influence, which has seized control of the Republican Party in a deleterious manner!

Earth Day: A Time For Concern Of Control By Conservatives And Right Wing Christians Denying Reality!

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We will be celebrating Earth Day again on Sunday, first declared by President Richard Nixon in 1970, after promotion the previous year by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.

42 years later, instead of dealing with our environment on an emergency basis, instead we have the power of corporate interests, conservatives, and right wing Christians, who deny global warming, climate change, and even the concept of evolution.

This globe is in a growing crisis, but if you look at the Republican Party and conservative talk radio, you would not know it!

Instead of working toward solutions that will preserve the planet for the next century and beyond, we have people invoking God and putting their heads in the sand!

And behind all this is the goal of a small elite, including the Koch Brothers, enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

So while we can celebrate Earth Day, we must realize that we are living in a time of denial and illusion!

A Political Figure To Watch: Could Cory Booker Be The Next Black President In 2017?

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Cory Booker is the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey since July 2006.

Cory Booker is a handsome, charismatic African American politician, who has been very effective as Mayor of an embattled city with a horrible reputation.

Cory Booker is well spoken and impressive on the stump.

Cory Booker has ambitions to be Governor of New Jersey, and it is expected he will run for that position in November 2013, making that race the major one to follow in an off year election year, when few major political races are conducted.

Cory Booker would have Governor Chris Christie, the hero of conservatives and Republicans as his competition, with Christie running for a second term.

Nothing could make progressives and Democrats happier than Cory Booker retiring Chris Christie from the Governorship a year and a half from now.

Chris Christie was the original “Bully” Republican Governor, setting a standard for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, Florida Governor Rick Scott, and Maine Governor Paul LePage, among other GOP Governors who have warred on public workers, women, the elderly, and the middle class and the poor since 2010!

Christie is the “Godfather” of the loudmouths, the blusterers, the aggressive nasty Governors who have made clear that they are owned by right wing elements, including the Koch Brothers, and the major corporations!

Chris Christie needs to be sent back home, so we don’t have to see his blustering, his obnoxiousness, his boasting, his victimizing nature, a man truly obscene in his public utterances, making one wish to vomit in response! This kind of mean, nasty, “in your face” politics is not good for America!

IF Cory Booker indeed does run for Governor, and wins the office, a very powerful office, one of the most powerful Governorships of one of the major top fifteen states of the Union, he would have to be seen as a prime front runner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in the Presidential Election of 2016!

Booker is not only very articulate, but he is also very courageous and bold, as shown by the news that he rescued a neighbor yesterday from a raging fire, and sustained second degree burns and smoke inhalation. This proves just what a hero he really is, adding to the admiration many have for him.

With seven and a half years as Mayor of a major urban area, Newark, and three years as New Jersey Governor, how could one argue that Cory Booker is not qualified to become our second black President, and as it turns out, second CONSECUTIVE black President?

This is the kind of person we need to focus on as a strong possibility to succeed President Barack Obama, or if unfortunate enough to have President Mitt Romney in office, to deny him a second term in the White House!

Cory Booker is definitely a man to watch over the next few years! He would be a youthful 47 upon taking the oath as President in 2017, the same age as Barack Obama was when he took the oath of office in 2009. We could do far worse than a President Cory Booker!

A good friend of MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow when they both attended Stanford University, he not only earned a degree at Stanford, but also a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and a law degree at Yale University. He also has been given credit for urban transformation reform, a real leader in reviving declining urban areas such as Newark, producing a renaissance! He has been subject to threats of death from gang elements who do not want to see Newark and other urban areas transformed away from crime and drug infestation and toward economic renewal, and is a true example of courage more than almost any American politician!

So do NOT take your eye off Cory Booker, as he may be the future of the Democratic Party!

The Gasoline Mythology And Barack Obama’s Public Opinion Ratings

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After having improved his public opinion ratings in recent months, with the improvement in unemployment numbers and other successes, suddenly Barack Obama has witnessed a dramatic drop in poll ratings, due primarily to the rise in gasoline prices.

Apparently, the people polled feel that Barack Obama is out to cost them more money in purchase of gasoline for their cars and trucks.

This is totally preposterous, as the facts are that NO PRESIDENT can control the price of gasoline, which is controlled by foreign conditions in the Middle East and elsewhere, and by manipulation of prices by the oil companies and their wealthy supporters, including the Koch Brothers.

The oil companies have heard that Obama wants to cut down oil subsidies on taxypayers’s backs, so this is the way they can undermine him, while making even more obscene profits than ever before.

And of course, the instability over Iran’s development of nuclear capability also contributes to uncertainty, when it comes to the future of oil prices, mostly based on hysteria and panic, rather than reason.

This is not the first time that a President has been undermined by oil prices that he could not control. Ask former President Jimmy Carter about how oil prices rising in 1979 and 1980 harmed his quest for re-election.

Nothing could please conservatives and Republicans more than to see Obama defeated, and then the oil lobby would be in full control of the White House and Capitol Hill, and we would be far worse off!

The gasoline prices will simply make Obama’s battle for re-election tougher, as he will have to try to reason with voters that he has no control over that issue, which again, I wish to reiterate, is the truth!

Barack Obama Accepts The SuperPAC He Wanted To Avoid: Only Way To Compete!

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President Obama’s campaign term has decided, reluctantly, that they will have to accept a SuperPAC to raise money for their re-election campaign, or lose the edge for the election.

Proud of the fact that 98 percent of their campaign funds raised have been by small contributors, including this author, with an average per contribution of $55, the reality still exists that the competition of the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove and others forming massive SuperPacs, plus the SuperPacs of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, represent a threat to the survival of the Obama Presidency, because there simply is not enough money being raised to compete with the plans for hundreds of millions of dollars of concerted attacks on everything that the Obama Administration believed in, has accomplished, and hopes to achieve.

It is simply reality that, despite the justified criticism of the Citizens United Case of the Supreme Court in 2010, which allowed this campaign monstrosity to develop, that the temporary situation requires that both sides play the same game, with the hope that after the election, there can be found some way that the Citizens United Case can be overcome in future political campaigns.

If one stands on ceremony, plays a puritanical game, the result will be a tragedy for the nation as the right wing seizes power and destroys everything that has been accomplished since the New Deal of FDR and the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson, which, if that happened, would set us back an entire century!

A Sad Development: Hull House (Chicago), Jane Addams’s Settlement House, Goes Into History!

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Hull House, the original “Settlement House” founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889, is “biting the dust” in difficult economic times.

Founded as a model for others, Hull House had middle class and wealthier people operating and contributing to a place where immigrants and the poor could come and receive services, much of it gained by private contributions, but also with the growing involvement of government as a commitment to those less fortunate.

With the Great Recession doing its damage, even when the Great Depression of the 1930s did not impede its work seventy years ago, Hull House becomes another victim of the lack of commitment to the poor and deprived, at the same time that the wealthy become wealthier than ever before.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on trying to “fix” political results in the White House or Congress or the states, as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers and innumerable others are doing, as a result of the Citizens United Case of the Supreme Court two years ago, it would be so much more productive if wealthy people gave aid to what today would be called “community or neighborhood centers”.

But, of course, the fact that Barack Obama was a “community organizer” in Chicago is portrayed as if the future President was a Marxist, a Socialist, a radical, or a much maligned follower of Saul Alinsky, who has been demonized so much by Newt Gingrich, that if Alinsky was alive, he would have grounds to sue Gingrich for defamation of character.

In the midst of great deprivation, we seem to have no time to consider what poverty in America is like, what it is like to be an immigrant, what it is like to be stereotyped.

So Hull House’s demise is only a symptom of the crisis we face in an America that supposedly believes in equal opportunity and the “American Dream”, but does not practice it! Social Justice is the loser!

Wisconsin Recall Petitions On Governor Scott Walker: A Sign Of True Democracy!

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The movement to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who forced through cutbacks in state funding of education, and declared war on state government workers and labor rights last year in his first year in office, has led to more than one million people signing petitions for his recall, almost double the number needed to set up a recall election.

Never before have so many people in any state signed petitions for a recall vote for anyone, and only two governors in the history of the United States have been successfully recalled, but this threat to Scott Walker is real!

If the signatures are proved legitimate, at least half of them, then an election will be held in late spring or early summer, with recalls of the Lieutenant Governor and several Republican State Senators also in play.

This is a great moment of democracy, and shows that the Republicans are in danger, not only in Wisconsin, but other states that have “Bully Governors”, who have run rampant over taxpayers and workers. It is an assault on the Tea Party Movement as well, and on the power of the Koch brothers and other wealthy right wingers who think their money and the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court two years ago will be able to destroy democracy in America.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement and progressives all over the nation will fight to restore decency and humanity to politics, and the Republican Party will suffer in state after state, as well as nationally, as the people rise up against the injustices perpetrated on the middle class and the poor.

This is a moment of great triumph, but the battle has only begun, and must come in Florida with Rick Scott, Ohio with John Kasich, Michigan with Rick Snyder, and Maine with Paul LePage, and some other states as well!

The Keystone Pipeline Controversy: Crucial Issue For America’s Future

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The issue of promoting domestic sources of energy in a world where America depends too much on foreign sources of oil has led to the promotion by the Republican Party of the proposed Keystone Pipeline from Canada down to Texas as a major solution that must be approved by the federal government before it can move ahead.

But it is not all that easy and settled that the Keystone Pipeline is a good direction for American energy and the American environment.

Here are the facts:

The Pipeline would go from Alberta, Canada through Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, and Texas.

The chance of greenhouse gas emissions and oil spills in sensitive areas is worrisome, plus the reality of a seismic zone with earthquake activity as high as 4.3 magnitude in 2002.

The danger to one of the largest water supplies, the Ogallala Aquifer, a major fresh water source, which spans eight states, provides drinking water to 2 million people and $20 billion in agriculture in the major area of the Farm Belt, could devastate the Midwest economy and deny safe drinking water in case of a disaster similar to the Gulf Oil Spill.

The danger to the environment would include harm to migratory birds and other wildlife, and far more devastating damages from tar sands oil which is more polluting than regular petroleum, and could cause long term damage for centuries, all in the name of profit over safety.

The Republican Governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, has opposed the project because of concern as to its effect on Nebraska economically and environmentally. He has signed legislation to divert the pipeline away from sensitive areas in the state, because of concern over its long range impact. So it is not just Democrats who are concerned over the project.

The Koch Brothers, deeply involved in conservative causes, are a major influence on convincing the Republicans in Congress to pressure Barack Obama to agree to the project as part of a tax deal extension for the bulk of 2012, which means “blackmail” is being utilized in reality.

The idea of major employment growth is belied by the facts that only a few thousand permanent jobs would be created, having a negligible effect on the unemployment rate.

The effect on the entire energy picture in America would also be negligible, hardly a blip in the entire controversy over becoming less dependent on foreign oil. It is simply an attempt to force the pipeline on America despite its insignificant impact on both jobs and energy supply.

President Obama wants to delay the project decision moving forward to 2013, but it could become a hot political issue in 2012, and is a controversy which needs a lot more exposure and discussion before an agreement that could harm the long range future of the nation.

The Tea Party Put Into Action: The Tragedy Of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback

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Kansas is the state that helped to bring on the Civil War, due to bloodshed in that territory after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, allowing the possibility of the expansion of slavery into that Great Plains state.

Kansas was one of the centers of the Prohibition Movement, which led to the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, outlawing the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages in 1919, although Prohibition was ended by the 21st Amendment in 1933.

Kansas was the center of the segregation battles, as the only truly non Southern state to allow segregation of the races, becoming the center of attention in the Brown V. Board of Education Of Topeka, Kansas case in 1954, outlawing school segregation nationally.

Kansas was also the state of some of the major anti abortion battles, the murder of an abortion provider, Dr George Tiller, and the present attempt to prevent all abortions in the state, contestable in the federal courts right now.

And now, Kansas is the center of the greatest experiment of all in the promotion of the Tea Party Movement, with former Senator Sam Brownback now the new Governor of Kansas, and determined to promote its basic principles.

The goal of Brownback is to cut expenditures for education; take action against the Obama Health Care legislation; promote massive cuts in social service agencies and the arts; reduce the number of laws and regulations and state agencies; cut the number of state workers; and take advantage of the biggest Republican dominance in the state in a half century by working to eliminate even moderates in the party who oppose such drastic change.

Brownback is promoting the virtues of limited government, but his critics accuse him of “slash and burn” tactics, and a level of arrogance tied to his devout religious beliefs. The influence and support of the Koch Brothers, Charles and David, is clearcut in Kansas.

The critics believe Kansas will be damaged long term by what Brownback is doing, and that his hope of promoting economic growth in a state that has not seen for decades any major population surge will fail to be achieved.

Meanwhile, Kansas will continue to be at the center of some of the major controversies in the nation, as it has been since its beginning!

The Recall Effort Against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker Begins

Ronald 1 Comment

After success in a recall effort against two Republican state senators in Wisconsin earlier, the move is on to recall Governor Scott Walker, who has seen his public opinion ratings collapse, and his national image rapidly decline.

The labor movement and progressives in the state of Robert La Follette Sr., the state of progressivism, has begun the gathering of signatures to put the question on the ballot. A total of 540, 208 signatures are necessary by mid January to set up a special election at the end of February.

There have been death threats against some people collecting signatures, and one can be sure that Walker’s patrons, the Koch brothers, will use all the money they have to attempt to prevent the gathering of enough signatures, and/or the success of the recall process at a special election.

IF this movement succeeds, it would be a great victory and lead to attempts at similar action against other “Bully Governors” who have taken a stand against organized labor and the progressive movement.

Let us hope for its success as a true example of democracy in America!