When the 1 Percent Fails to Contribute Its Fair Share, Veterans Pay Dearly

Jon Soltz

Co-Founder of VoteVets.org, Iraq War Veteran

 

Over the last few weeks, thousands of people from across the country have taken to the streets to demand the biggest corporations in the U.S. pay their fair share of taxes. Last week, Bank of America was the latest corporation to face the wrath of shareholders and protesters for its business practices; this week,it’s JPMorgan Chase, which is at the center of shareholder anger after losing $2 billion in investments, and Morgan Stanley, which has slashed jobs and rewarded its executives with lavish pay and bonuses despite its role in thefinancial meltdown.

The America that allows huge corporations to cut jobs here at home and get large tax breaks in the process is not the America I fought for. What has happened to basic fairness in our economy when so many troops come back from their service, unable to find a decent job, yet still pay more in taxes than the likes of billionaires or huge corporations like GE?

Veterans have served our country at considerable sacrifice. No one enlists to become rich or famous. We’ve spent significant time away from our families and worked in life-threatening situations. We care about our country and we invest in it every day with our time and expertise. We work hard and play by the rules. Along with almost everyone else in this country, veterans pay our taxes so that our kids can go to school, so we have clean air and water, and healthcare when we need it. Veterans also pay our taxes to help provide people currently serving in our military with the resources they need, both in the field and when they come home.

As it turns out, big corporations aren’t playing by the same rules — and our communities are paying for it. Families are struggling to stay in their homes, facing joblessness and cuts to vital services. Our children’s schools are crumbling and the American Dream — a good life for those who work hard and play by the rules — is receding further and further out of sight.

Many who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were part of the National Guard. While they can’t be laid-off while deployed, there was no guarantee the company or small business they worked for would exist when they came home. Military families are particularly hard-hit, often having to make do with less income while loved ones are deployed, and expenses like child care increase in a temporary one-parent household. They need relief.

Yet corporations like General Electric, Wells Fargo and Bank of America rake in billions and get away with paying no federal income taxes, or are taxed at a lower rate than those serving in the military. Their refusal to pay their fair share has cost our economy billions of dollars that could fund Medicare, education, veterans’ services, and create jobs for men and women returning from service.

Tax-dodging General Electric was once a shining example of American enterprise, providing good jobs that could support families. Entire towns and cities grew around GE plants and generations of families worked for GE for their entire lives. Innovation and job creation went hand in hand and as GE grew, so did our economy.

Now, GE is the poster-child for corporate tax-dodging. GE keeps billions offshore, avoiding U.S. taxes. It lavishes millions on executives while cutting tens of thousands of jobs, and employs an army of tax attorneys and political lobbyists like Capitol Tax Partners (which also lobbies for Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, State Street Corporation and other Wall Street giants that crashed the economy) to buy influence, invent and lobby for corporate tax loopholes, and keep GE ahead of its tax bill.

From 2008 to 2011, while hundreds of millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, and their dreams, GE made $10.5 billion in U.S. profits. Rather than pay federal income taxes, GE received $4.7 billion from U.S. taxpayers. We pay income taxes even on our unemployment insurance, but GE got away with paying a scant 2.3 percent in taxes over the last decade.

GE claims they’ve used these loopholes to create jobs. But that’s not true. Since 2004, GE has cut 32,000 jobs, even though the corporation’s board of directors is stacked with “job creators.” Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for the youngest age bracket of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans topped 20 percent last year.

Those of us who served this country didn’t do so in order to safeguard tax loopholes for the wealthiest 1 percent and giant corporations. We have a deep sense of duty and loyalty to our communities, to our children’s futures, and to seeing our fellow Americans achieve their dreams.

It is time that those of us who served our country, and those we served for, join together to demand an economy and an America that work for all of us.

Jon Soltz is an Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org.

150 Achievements Of Liberalism That Conservatives Seek To Destroy

 

1. The 40-hour work week.

2. Weekends

3. Vacations

4. Women’s Voting Rights

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964

6. The right of people of all colors to use schools and facilities.

7. Public schools.

8. Child-labor laws.

9. The right to unionize

10. Health care benefits

11. National Parks

12. National Forests

13. Interstate Highway System

14. GI Bill

15. Labor Laws/Worker’s Rights

16. Marshall Plan

17. FDA

18. Direct election of Senators by the people.

19. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Workplace safety laws

20. Social Security

21. NASA

22. The Office of Congressional Ethics. Created in 2008.

23. The Internet

24. National Weather Service

25. Product Labeling/Truth in Advertising Laws

26. Rural Electrification/Tennessee Valley Authority

27. Morrill Land Grant Act

28. Public Universities

29. Bank Deposit Insurance

30. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

31. Consumer Product Safety Commission

32. Public Broadcasting/Educational Television

33. Americans With Disabilities Act

34. Family and Medical Leave Act

35. Environmental Protection Agency

36. Clean Air Act

37. Clean Water Act

38. USDA

39. Public Libraries

40. Transcontinental Railroad and the rail system in general

41. Civilian Conservation Corps

42. Panama Canal

43. Hoover Dam

44. The Federal Reserve

45. Medicare

46. The United States Military

47. FBI

48. CIA

49. Local and state police departments

50. Fire Departments

51. Veterans Medical Care

52. Food Stamps

53. Federal Housing Administration

54. Extending Voting Rights to 18 year olds

55. Freedom of Speech

56. Freedom of Religion/Separation of Church and State

57. Right to Due Process

58. Freedom of The Press

59. Right to Organize and Protest

60. Pell Grants and other financial aid to students

61. Federal Aviation Administration/Airline safety regulations

62. The 13th Amendment

63. The 14th Amendment

64. The 15th Amendment

65. Unemployment benefits

66. Women’s Health Services

67. Smithsonian Institute

68. Head Start

69. Americorps

70. Mine Safety And Health Administration (This has been weakened by conservatives, resulting in recent mining disasters.)

71. Food Labeling

72. WIC

73. Peace Corps

74. United Nations

75. World Health Organization

76. Nuclear Treaties

77. Lincoln Tunnel

78. Sulfur emissions cap and trade to eliminate acid rain

79. Earned Income Tax Credit

80. The banning of lead in consumer products

81. National Institute of Health

82. Garbage pickup/clean streets

83. Banning of CFCs.

84. Erie Canal

85. Medicaid

86. TARP

87. Bail Out of the American Auto Industry

88. Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act

89. Wildlife Protection

90. End of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

91. Established the basis for Universal Human Rights by writing the Declaration of Independence

92. Miranda Rights

93. Banning of torture

94. The right to a proper defense in court

95. An independent judiciary

96. The right to vote

97. Fair, open, and honest elections

98. The right to bear arms (Do you really think extreme right wingers would allow anybody besides themselves to have firearms if in power?)

99. Health care for children and pregnant women

100. A stable and strong government established by a Constitution

101. The founding of The United States of America

102. The defeat of the Nazis and victory in World War II

103. Paramedics

104. The Brady Handgun Act

105. The Glass-Steagall Act (It has since been repealed and we’ve been paying the price for it.)

106. Oil industry regulations (The Gulf paid the price after conservatives tore many of these regulations down.)

107. The Affordable Care Act which makes insurance companies more honest and fair.

108. Woman’s Right to Choose

109. Title IX

110. Affirmative Action

111. A National Currency

112. National Science Foundation

113. Weights and measures standards

114. Vehicle Safety Standards

115. NATO

116. The income tax and power to tax in general, which have been used to pay for much of this list.

117. 911 Emergency system

118. Tsunami, hurricane, tornado, and earthquake warning systems

119. Public Transportation

120. The Freedom of Information Act

121. Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery

122. Antitrust legislation which prevents corporate monopolies (These laws have been savaged by conservatives, which is why corporations are getting huger and competition is disappearing leading to less jobs and high prices.)

123. Water Treatment Centers and sewage systems

124. The Meat Inspection Act

125. The Pure Food And Drug Act

126. The Bretton Woods system

127. International Monetary Fund

128. SEC, which regulates Wall Street. (Conservatives have weakened this regulatory body, resulting in the current recession.)

129. National Endowment for the Arts

130. Campaign finance laws (Conservatives have gutted these laws, leading to corporate takeovers of elections.)

131. Federal Crop Insurance

132. United States Housing Authority

133. Soil Conservation

134. School Lunch Act

135. Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act

136. Vaccination Assistance Act

137. Over the course of nearly 50 years, liberals contributed greatly to the eventual end of the Cold War.

138. The creation of counterinsurgency forces such as the Navy Seals and Green Berets.

139. Voting Rights Act, which ended poll taxes, literacy tests, and other voter qualification tests.

140. Civil Rights Act of 1968

141. Job Corps

142. Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965

143. Teacher Corps

144. National Endowment for the Humanities

145. Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966

146. National Trails System Act of 1968

147. U.S. Postal Service

148. Title X

149. Kept the Union together through Civil War and rebuilt the South afterwards.

150. Modern Civilization

A Confederacy of Censors by Brian LaSorsa 

 

I’m living in North Carolina right now. When I first moved here, I thought I’d see people hanging out on their front porches, drinking whiskey with a splash of sweet tea, holding double-barrel shotguns close to their hearts, and proudly waving Rebel flags. I assumed the Southern girls would have that “girl next door” look but would feel no shame in clawing out their enemies’ eyes.

Sadly, I have seen nothing of the sort.

Yesteryear’s states’-rights, secession-prone freedom fighters have been replaced by watered-down tools who attach anti-smoking stickers to their Prius windows and vote Democrat.

These days you can hardly mention the Confederacy without the maggots crawling all over you. The public schools’ modern version of American history focuses on slavery’s continued existence during the Civil War and ignores the federal government’s aggression before the battles began. They’re creating a generation burdened with “white guilt.”

“It is almost as if Abraham Lincoln is giving us the finger from the grave.”

Luckily there is still a strong group of people who question whether it was necessary to kill over 600,000 Americans to abolish slavery, something plenty of other countries managed to do without such carnage. One such individual is Texanna Edwards, a senior at Tennessee’s Gibson County High School who made headlines last week for wearing a prom dress resembling the Confederate battle flag and then getting turned away by school bureaucrats who insisted the dress was too offensive.

If she’d worn an image of Che Guevara—much like how Johnny Depp and Carlos Santana do with impunity—she probably would have danced the night away without incident.

It leaves you assuming that public schools do not allow the celebration of any mainstream culture for fear that minorities might feel isolated.

 

Two years ago, administrators at California’s Live Oak High School were perfectly OK with students waving Mexican flags around the campus on Cinco de Mayo, but when five students arrived at school wearing American flag shirts, they were promptly told to take them off or risk suspension. One of the students in question explained, “They said we could wear it on any other day, but [Cinco de Mayo] is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it.”

Ironically, Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of Mexico’s victory against the French military in 1862. Napoleon III controlled France at the time and had been supplying the Confederacy’s soldiers with the weapons and money they needed to secede, so Mexico’s victory was the end of one of the Confederacy’s most important relationships.

Heaven forbid I wear a Thomas Jefferson shirt during Black History Month next year and a liberal judge uses legal precedent to ban me from McDonald’s.

To leftists, only minorities have rights. Culture is only to be celebrated if you’re a minority; otherwise it’s plain racism. This is why the government and its willing enablers suspend students for waving American flags, remove teenage girls dressed in Southern-designed prom dresses, and conceal religious symbols at Catholic universities.

It is almost as if Abraham Lincoln is giving us the finger from the grave.

 

 

Author, End This Depression Now! Paul Krugman

The following is excerpted from “End This Depression Now!” available now from W.W. Norton & Company.

 

CHAPTER ONE: HOW BAD THINGS ARE

 

I think as those green shoots begin to appear in different markets and as some confidence begins to come back that will begin the positive dynamic that brings our economy back.

Do you see green shoots?

 

I do. I do see green shoots.

–Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, interviewed by 60 Minutes, March 15, 2009

In March 2009 Ben Bernanke, normally neither the most cheerful nor the most poetic of men, waxed optimistic about the economic prospect. After the fall of Lehman Brothers six months earlier, America had entered a terrifying economic nosedive. But appearing on the TV show 60 Minutes, the Fed chairman declared that spring was at hand.

His remarks immediately became famous, not least because they bore an eerie resemblance to the words of Chance, aka Chauncey Gardiner, the simpleminded gardener mistaken for a wise man in the movie Being There. In one scene Chance, asked to comment on economic policy, assures the president, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden. . . . There will be growth in the spring.” Despite the jokes, however, Bernanke’s optimism was widely shared. And at the end of 2009 Time declared Bernanke its Person of the Year.

Unfortunately, all was not well in the garden, and the promised growth never came.

To be fair, Bernanke was right that the crisis was easing. The panic that had gripped financial markets was ebbing, and the economy’s plunge was slowing. According to the official scorekeepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the so-called Great Recession that started in December 2007 ended in June 2009, and recovery began. But if it was a recovery, it was one that did little to help most Americans. Jobs remained scarce; more and more families depleted their savings, lost their homes, and, worst of all, lost hope. True, the unemployment rate is down from the peak it reached in October 2009. But progress has come at a snail’s pace; we’re still waiting, after all these years, for that “positive dynamic” Bernanke talked about to make an appearance.

And that was in America, which at least had a technical recovery. Other countries didn’t even manage that. In Ireland, in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, debt problems and the “austerity” programs that were supposed to restore confidence not only aborted any kind of recovery but produced renewed slumps and soaring unemployment.

And the pain went on and on. I’m writing these words almost three years after Bernanke thought he saw those green shoots, three and a half years after Lehman fell, more than four years after the start of the Great Recession. The citizens of the world’s most advanced nations, nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge–all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all–remain in a state of intense pain.

In the rest of this chapter I’ll try to document some of the main dimensions of that pain. I’ll focus mainly on the United States, which is both my home and the country I know best, reserving an extended discussion of the pain abroad for later in the book. And I’ll start with the thing that matters most–and the thing on which we’ve performed the worst: unemployment.

The Jobs Drought

Economists, the old line goes, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And you know what? There’s a lot of truth to that accusation: since economists mainly study the circulation of money and the production and consumption of stuff, they have an inherent bias toward assuming that money and stuff are what matter. Still, there is a field of economic research that focuses on how self-reported measures of well-being, such as happiness or “life satisfaction,” are related to other aspects of life. Yes, it’s known as “happiness research”–Ben Bernanke even gave a speech about it in 2010, titled “The Economics of Happiness.” And this research tells us something very important about the mess we’re in.

Sure enough, happiness research tells us that money isn’t all that important once you get to the point of being able to afford the necessities of life. The payoff to being richer isn’t literally zero–citizens of rich countries are, on average, somewhat more satisfied with their lives than citizens of less well-off nations. Also, being richer or poorer than the people you compare yourself with is a fairly big deal, which is why extreme inequality can have such a corrosive effect on society. But when all is said and done, money is less important than crude materialists–and many economists–would like to believe.

That’s not to say, however, that economic affairs are unimportant in the true scale of things. For there’s one economics-driven thing that matters enormously to human well-being: having a job. People who want to work but can’t find work suffer greatly, not just from the loss of income but from a diminished sense of self-worth. And that’s a major reason why mass unemployment–which has now been going on in America for four years–is such a tragedy.

How severe is the problem of unemployment? That question calls for a bit of discussion.

Clearly, what we’re interested in is involuntary unemployment. People who aren’t working because they have chosen not to work, or at least not to work in the market economy–retirees who are glad to be retired, or those who have decided to be full-time housewives or househusbands–don’t count. Neither do the disabled, whose inability to work is unfortunate, but not driven by economic issues.

Now, there have always been people claiming that there’s no such thing as involuntary unemployment, that anyone can find a job if he or she is really willing to work and isn’t too finicky about wages or working conditions. There’s Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for the Senate, who declared in 2010 that the unemployed were “spoiled,” choosing to live off unemployment benefits instead of taking jobs. There are the people at the Chicago Board of Trade who, in October 2011, mocked anti-inequality demonstrators by showering them with copies of McDonald’s job application forms. And there are economists like the University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan, who has written multiple articles for the New York Times website insisting that the sharp drop in employment after the 2008 financial crisis reflected not a lack of employment opportunities but diminished willingness to work.

The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”

Quite. Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings. Roughly a million people applied.

If you have any familiarity with the world, in short, you know that involuntary unemployment is very real. And it’s currently a very big deal.

How bad is the problem of involuntary unemployment, and how much worse has it become?

The U.S. unemployment measure you usually hear quoted in the news is based on a survey in which adults are asked whether they are either working or actively seeking work. Those who are seeking work but don’t have jobs are considered unemployed. In December 2011 that amounted to more than 13 million Americans, up from 6.8 million in 2007.

If you think about it, however, this standard definition of unemployment misses a lot of distress. What about people who want to work, but aren’t actively searching either because there are no jobs to be had, or because they’ve grown discouraged by fruitless searching? What about those who want full-time work, but have only been able to find part-time jobs? Well, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tries to capture these unfortunates in a broader measure of unemployment, known as U6; it says that by this broader measure there are about 24 million unemployed Americans–about 15 percent of the workforce–roughly double the number before the crisis.

Yet even this measure fails to capture the extent of the pain. In modern America most families contain two working spouses; such families suffer, both financially and psychologically, if either spouse is unemployed. There are workers who used to make ends meet with a second job, now down to an inadequate one, or who counted on overtime pay that no longer arrives. There are independent businesspeople who have seen their income shrivel. There are skilled workers, accustomed to holding down good jobs, who have been forced to accept work that uses none of their skills. And on and on.

There is no official estimate of the number of Americans caught up in this sort of penumbra of formal unemployment. But in a June 2011 poll of likely voters–a group probably in better shape than the population as a whole–the polling group Democracy Corps found that a third of Americans had either themselves suffered from job loss or had a family member lose a job, and that another third knew someone who had lost a job. Moreover, almost 40 percent of families had suffered from reduced hours, wages, or benefits.

The pain, then, is very widespread. But that’s not the whole story: for millions, the damage from the bad economy runs very deep.

 

 To Be Continued…

The Enemies Within: The 20 Most Dangerous Conservatives And Their Organizations

 

America has enemies. Not just abroad, but within our shores as well. And our domestic enemies, as it turns out, are MORE dangerous and destructive than the terrorists could ever hope to be. Because while the terrorists want to destroy us, the following people and their organizations are doing far more damage.

1. Roger Ailes: The President of Fox News keeps the right-wing mouth piece biased and unbalanced. He literally proposed a right-wing news network as a propaganda tool to use during the Nixon Administration. And now, Fox News makes every effort to slander Democrats, lie to the public, and support conservative groups, activists and politicians at all costs.

Want to tell Ailes what you think of him? Feel free to contact Fox News Channel by mail, phone, or email.

FOX News Channel
1211 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-301-3000
Web: www.foxnews.com

2. The Koch Brothers: Yes, there is more than one Koch brother, but rather than jotting down the same paragraph twice, it makes more sense to combine the two. Charles and David Koch are the owners of Koch Industries, a private oil and chemicals company. They have spent big money in elections and have pretty much bought and paid for all of Republicans that sit on the energy committee. They also have ties to The John Birch Society, of which their father was a founding member, and several other conservative think tanks and organizations including, Americans For Prosperity which David Koch leads as chairman, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Cato Institute. They helped create and fund the Tea Party and have been very influential in the watering down of environmental laws and the destruction of unions. If you really want to see the scope of their influence look at what is happening in Wisconsin and in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I know you must be dying to contact Koch Industries to give them your opinion, so here’s how you can do that.

Koch Industries, Inc.
P.O. Box 2256
Wichita, KS 67201-2256
Phone:316-828-5500
Fax:316-828-5739
info@kochind.com

3. Dick Armey: His FreedomWorks organization helped to create the Tea Party and he has worked closely with the Koch brothers. Armey’s organization seeks to deregulate and tear down reform. He opposed health care reform and is largely responsible for hatred, paranoia and anti-government sentiments displayed at town halls during the health care debate.

FreedomWorks
400 North Capitol Street, NW
Suite 765
Washington, DC 20001
Toll Free Phone: 1-888-564-6273
Local Phone: 202-783-3870
Fax: 202-942-7649

4. Tom Donohue: The US Chamber Of Commerce President gained a hell of a lot more power in the wake of the Citizens United ruling. The Chamber is the largest conservative lobbying group in the country. Representing big corporations more than small businesses, the Chamber opposed health care reform and Wall Street reform. The group is in favor of tearing down any and every law designed to protect the American worker. Donohue once stated that “there are legitimate values in outsourcing — not only jobs, but work….” and once told unemployed people in Ohio to “stop whining”. So, not only is he for deregulation, he supports job killing policies. That is a double dose of dangerous.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce
1615 H Street, NW
Washington, DC 20062-2000
Main Number: 202-659-6000
Phone: 1-800-638-6582

5. Tony Perkins: Perkins is the President of the Family Research Council, a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Council opposes abortion for any reason, believes homosexuality should be against the law, believes in teaching “intelligent design” in schools, and believes global warming is a hoax. FRC was listed as a hate group after it falsely linked gay males to pedophilia. It basically lobbies the government to make laws that govern our personal and private lives. The Council is a Christian Right-wing organization that has a heavy influence on the Republican Party, hence all the abortion laws being proposed by them.

Family Research Council
801 G Street, NW
Washington DC 20001
Phone: 1-800-225-4008

6. Pat Robertson: Robertson founded the Christian Coalition in 1989 and claims to be non-partisan. The problem with this claim is that it’s a bunch of crap. The Christian Coalition passes out “voter guides” in churches and yet is granted tax exempt status. It clearly supports a conservative agenda and is associated with Christian fundamentalism. It is yet another group that believes that America should be a Christian state. They are a threat to the Constitution.

Mailing address:
Christian Coalition of America
PO Box 37030
Washington, DC 20013-7030
Phone: 202-479-6900

7. Edwin Feulner, Jr.: Feulner is the President of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that took a leading role in the conservative movement during the 1980′s and continues to push conservative ideals today. The Foundation has strong ties to many Republican politicians, and many Heritage personnel members have gone on to serve in senior governmental roles. Not only does it stand by supply side economics and tax cuts for the rich and corporations which led to the current economic crisis, it also believes in a strong defense which has become more and more expensive. Heritage Foundation is also a part of the Koch Foundation Associate Program and is perhaps the most powerful public policy think tank on this list. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has taken money from the organization. It has far too much influence on American policy and that influence must be brought to an end.

The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999
Phone: 202-546-4400

8. Arthur Thompson: Thompson leads the radical right-wing John Birch Society, which is yet another organization that has Koch family connections. Founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, Jr., the John Birch Society is an anti-communism group that has pretty much denounced every liberal person and policy as socialist. It opposes the Civil Rights Act, the United Nations, and believes in immigration reduction. It aims to dismantle the Federal Reserve System and wants to return to the gold standard. The group is a sponsor of CPAC and is no longer exiled from the mainstream. Another interesting fact is that Fred Koch, father of the aforementioned Koch brothers, was a founding member.

John Birch Society
770 N. Westhill Blvd
Appleton, Wisconsin 54914
Phone: 920-749-3780

9. Rupert Murdoch: Known as “the man who owns the news”, Murdoch controls a vast media empire around the world including Fox News, The New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal here in America. Advertising his media outlets as “fair and balanced” Murdoch and his News Corporation relentlessly push conservative talking points and provide campaign donations to many Republicans running for various positions. News Corporation now has to answer for hacking cell phones and impeding investigations. Long the mouthpiece for Republican propaganda, Murdoch is a threat to Freedom of the Press and the foundations that keep America free.

If you want to contact News Corporation and tell them what you think of them, here is their contact information.

News Corporation
1211 Avenue of Americas
New York, New York 10036
Phone: 212-852-7000
Web: www.newscorp.com

10. Grover Norquist: Norquist is an especially dangerous individual. In fact, at the moment, he has the most influence on Republican congressmen. Republicans in the House and Senate refuse to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy and Norquist and his group, Americans For Tax Reform, have made sure Republicans continue to do so. 235 members of the House and 41 Senators signed the Norquist pledge to not raise taxes and now our economic future hangs in the balance. Norquist is basically calling the shots and holding America hostage on behalf of the rich. And he isn’t even an elected official.

Americans for Tax Reform
722 12th Street, NW
Fourth Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Office: 202-785-0266
Fax: 202-785-0261

11. David Bossie: Citizens United isn’t just a bad Supreme Court ruling. Citizens United is the conservative organization that the conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled in favor of in 2008. Founded in 1988, located near Capitol Hill, and led by President and Chairman David Bossie, Citizens United’s goals include withdrawal from the United Nations, and defeat of campaign finance laws, among others. They also produce “documentaries” that serve the conservative agenda. The group is mostly a threat because of their fight to allow corporate ownership of elections. The Koch brothers, and many conservative think tanks and organizations have flooded elections with cash since the ruling. The Supreme Court decision alone is enough to put this dangerous organization and Bossie on the list.

Citizens United
1006 Pennsylvania Ave SE
Washington, DC 20003
Office: (202) 547-5420
Fax: (202) 547-5421

12. Tim LaHaye and Kenneth Cribb: Once again, you’ll notice that two people occupy this spot. After some thought, I decided this was necessary to avoid repetition. Tim Lahaye founded, and Kenneth Cribb is the current President of, the Council for National Policy. The CNP is a conservative organization for social conservative activists. Described by The New York Times as a “little-known group of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country,” the organization is perhaps the most powerful group on this list. Members include many who are already on this list such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, and Edwin Feulner Jr. What makes this group particularly dangerous is that they support theocracy and Dominionism as national policy. They are also incredibly secretive and that’s scary all by itself.

CNP is apparently so secret that no address or phone number is available, so you’ll have to email them.
info@cfnp.org

13. Steven J. Law: Law is President and CEO of American Crossroads, a conservative organization that has raised and spent tens of millions of dollars to defend and elect Republican candidates to federal office, and was very active in the 2010 U.S. midterm elections. Basically, Law and his group are listed because they have taken advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision the most since the ruling. The Kochs and Karl Rove have connections with the group and are a major reason why the House is under GOP control.

American Crossroads
P.O. Box 34413
Washington, DC 20043
Phone: ( 202) 559-6428. info@americancrossroads.org

14. James Dobson: Dobson is the Family Talk radio personality and Family Research Council founder that contributes greatly to all the hate we see from conservatives. A frequent guest on Fox News, he is perhaps the most influential religious leader on the Christian-Right even though he has never been ordained. Dobson believes that women should only focus on mothering (and probably cooking too) and is totally against gay rights. He supports private schools and special tax privileges for religious schools. He opposes sex education and only supports abstinence as the only technique for pregnancy prevention. Dobson is on this list because he is the one that began all of the anti-gay, anti-women, and anti-education speeches that are now commonplace in the Republican Party.

Family Talk Radio
540 Elkton Drive
Suite 201
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
Phone: 877-732-6825

15. Phyllis Schlafly: She is the only woman on this list. Undoubtedly, you may have thought that Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin would be, but they are not. I consider Palin and Bachmann mere pawns compared to Schlafly. As founder and President of the Eagle Forum, Schlafly opposes feminism and equal rights for women. Eagle Forum promotes a pro-life, anti-gay, anti-sex education, and anti-vaccination agenda that has contributed to the current wave of social conservative extremism in the Republican Party. She believes women should remain in the home and that there is no such things as marital rape. She is certainly the most influential woman in right-wing activism and as such, the most dangerous one too.

Eagle Forum
PO Box 618
Alton, IL 62002
Phone: 618-462-5415
Fax: 618-462-8909 eagle@eagleforum.org

16. David Keene: Up to now David Keene led the American Conservative Union, which is the oldest operating conservative lobbying organization in the country. The ACU runs the event known as CPAC and spends money on lobbying and political campaigns. Keene is still the current President of the National Rifle Association. Which is also a strong lobbying group that is virtually an arm of the Republican Party that glorifies guns and believes that people should be able to carry guns anywhere they go, even near the President of the United States. Keene is mostly on this list because of the NRA. The NRA used to actually serve a valid purpose but has since become a pro-Republican political organization that has mixed guns and politics. It makes them a danger to the political process.

The American Conservative Union
1007 Cameron Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: 703-836-8602
Fax: 703-836-8606

National Rifle Association of America
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030
Phone: 1-800-672-3888

17. Tim Wildmon: Classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Family Association is headed by Tim Wildmon. AFA is just like every other conservative Christian group. It opposes abortion and gay rights, as well as other public policy goals such as deregulation of the oil industry and lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act. The group has actively boycotted just about any business that disagrees with them. In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, the AFA released a video in which “God” tells a student that students were killed in schools because God isn’t allowed in schools anymore and blamed the shootings on abortion and lack of prayer in schools. AFA is against all other religions and has an obsession with Christmas, often boycotting companies that do not mention Christmas in their advertising. AFA is here on this list because they represent one of the biggest threats to intellectual and personal freedom in America.

Want to boycott AFA? Send them a “friendly” letter.

American Family Association
P.O. Box 3206
Tupelo, MS 38803

18. David Barton: Despite not having any history or law credentials David Barton passes himself off as an expert in early American history. Most of his claims have been disputed and written off as false by real historians. Barton’s organization is Wallbuilders, which seeks to destroy one the basic foundations of American life: the separation of church and state. Barton’s mission is to revise history in an effort to turn America into a Christian state with Biblical law instituted as the law of the land. He has also created false quotes to justify his claims. Barton is a danger to the history of America, the Constitution, and education.

WallBuilders
PO Box 397
Aledo, TX 76008
Phone: 817-441-6044

19. Noble Ellington: American Legislative Exchange Council, also known as ALEC. The Council is basically a pay to play organization that carries the corporate agenda into state legislatures across the country. They work to end unions, end environmental and labor regulations, and end consumer protection laws. ALEC has been funded by the Koch brothers for two decades. The price for corporate participation is an ALEC membership fee of as much as $25,000. For that price, corporations are basically writing the legislation that you are currently seeing being proposed and implemented in Republican controlled states across the country.

American Legislative Exchange Council
1101 Vermont Ave. N.W., 11th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: 202-466-3800
Fax: 202-466-3801

20. Edward H. Crane: Crane is the founder and current leader of the Cato Institute. While they have supported some liberal policies and claim to abhor neo-conservatives, the Cato Institute does push many objectives that should make everyone cringe. Among the various policies that Cato supports, privatizing Social Security, abolishing the minimum wage, abolishing affirmative action, and some environmental regulations, are among them. Of course, it’s understandable why Cato holds these positions considering Charles Koch is chairman of the board and a major funding source. Even Rupert Murdoch had a place on the board at one point which connects the Kochs and the right-wing media.

Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington D.C. 20001-5403
Phone: 202-842-0200
Fax: 202-842-3490

And there you have it. All of these people and their organizations pose a serious threat to the American people. They target women, senior citizens, minorities, homosexuals, non-Christians, and American workers.   Edited By: Alexis Atherton

 

‘Beyond Debate’

 

Jose Padilla, the American citizen detained as an enemy combatant after he was arrested by the Bush administration in May 2002, was denied contact with his lawyer, his family or anyone else outside the military brig for almost two years and kept in detention for almost four. His jailers made death threats, shackled him for hours, forced him into painful stress positions, subjected him to noxious fumes that hurt his eyes and nose and deafening noises at all hours, denied him care for serious illness and more.

Boasting About Bin Laden

By ROSS DOUTHAT

 

Savvy politicians know that it’s usually a good sign when a political advertisement provokes cries of outrage from the opposition. The picture gets murkier, though, when that same advertisement prompts high-minded expressions of disappointment from the politician’s own supporters. Sometimes that’s a signal that the ad in question has overreached and risks a backlash. But sometimes it’s just a sign that those high-minded supporters don’t recognize the weakness that the ad is trying to exploit, or just don’t have the stomach for a necessary fight.

This is the dilemma the Obama re-election campaign faces with the ad it released recently suggesting that Mitt Romney might not have given the order to send Navy SEALS to kill Osama Bin Laden. The attack clearly touched a nerve with Republicans, but it also earned the White House a rebuke from several liberals, including no less a left-wing eminence than Arianna Huffington.

On the Early Show on CBS, Huffington called the ad “despicable,” suggested that questioning an opponent’s ability to serve as commander-in-chief is “not the way to run campaigns on either side,” and compared the attack to the “3 A.M. phone call” ad Hillary Clinton’s campaign released in 2008, which made a similar case against then-candidate Obama’s ability to make the toughest national security decisions.

When even Huffington thinks a Democratic attack goes too far, it usually has. And yet a moment’s scrutiny reveals that her argument doesn’t make much sense. Why do we have election seasons, after all, if not to argue about which candidate would be better-suited to making decisions that put Americans in harm’s way overseas? How can we not politicize national security, given how central it is to the work of the modern presidency, and how unconstrained the executive branch’s national security powers have become no matter which party holds the White House?

These are the arguments that Hillary Clinton partisans mounted in defense of that “3 A.M. ad,” and that George W. Bush’s partisans mounted in defense of his 9/11-centric 2004 re-election campaign. And those arguments were right! It’s one thing to say that candidates shouldn’t impugn one another’s patriotism. But impugning a rival’s judgment, as the Obama camp’s Bin Laden advertisement just did, is precisely what a presidential campaign is for.

Strategically, too, the White House has every reason to press these kind of arguments to the hilt. As I’ve noted in this space before, most of President Obama’s record is unpopular – sometimes deeply so – with the voting public. But the big exception is national security, where polls often show that Obama has built up a fair amount of credibility with voters. Foreign policy thus offers the White House its best (and perhaps only) opportunity to draw contrasts with Romney by highlighting the president’s actual accomplishments.

Whereas on domestic issues the Romney camp can answer almost every Obama attack by changing the subject to the unemployment rate, on foreign policy the Republican message is much more muddled and uncertain. In the usual order of things, Romney would be simply try to out-hawk the president, but this is not a hawkish moment in American politics. Outside of the most Republican portions of the electorate, the Iraq War is still widely regarded as a bad blunder, and even conservatives are increasingly supportive of a speedy exit from Afghanistan. Public opinion on Iran is unsettled, but there is next to no support for the kind of stepped-up American intervention in Syria that some Republicans have championed.

Meanwhile, by keeping much of the Bush-era anti-terror architecture in place and stepping up covert warfare from Waziristan to the Horn of Africa, the president has effectively undercut the soft-on-terror arguments that Republicans used so effectively against John Kerry in 2004. Indeed, the most compelling criticisms of this White House have come from libertarians and anti-interventionists on both the left and right, on issues ranging from the dubiously-legal “kinetic military action” in Libya to the White House’s willingness to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad.

This explains why the Republican Party’s foreign policy rhetoric can seem so opportunistic and confused. The Rand Paul-led, anti-interventionist wing of the party arguably has a more coherent case against the president than the more hawkish wing, which often finds itself emphasizing what it has in common with the president – as Florida Senator Marco Rubio did in a widely-touted foreign policy address defending interventionism last week. (Tellingly, the word “Iraq” did not appear in his remarks.) Yet the hawkish line of attack is still the Republican default, and Mitt Romney’s case — to date, at least — against the president has generally circled back to its tropes and premises.

The result is an incoherence that James Poulos described well in a recent column in Forbes:

With Obama, the GOP has become like Woody Allen’s neurotic diner: the food is horrible, and such small portions! The president is condemned for leading and for leading from behind; for relying too much on talk and too much on drones; for slavishly kowtowing to foreign leaders and for arrogantly refusing to stroke foreign leaders. Obama’s foreign policy has paralyzed the GOP by laying bare just how much Republicans collectively refuse to fully commit to one grand, unifying possibility in international affairs — including the possibility of stepping away from sweeping principles and playing it by ear for a while.

Arianna Huffington’s qualms notwithstanding, it would be political malpractice for the president not to exploit this kind of confusion with national security attacks on his opponent. Indeed, Republicans who care about these issues should welcome them. Advertisements like the Bin Laden spot and political stunts like last night’s almost-victory speech in Afghanistan present a challenge to the right, but also an opportunity.

The rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign affords conservatives their best chance yet to come to terms with the Bush era in foreign policy and its aftermath — to figure out what they think about the recent past, where they stand at present and where they would have the country go from here.

 

Republicans way out of bounds attacking President Obama for ad on order to take out Osama Bin Laden    Mike Lupica

 

The political party of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003, the party that gave us George W. Bush as an adorable dressup fighter pilot, now accuses Barack Obama of “spiking the ball” because he runs an ad about the order to take out Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.

Are they kidding? If it had been Bush who ordered the hit on Bin Laden, the Republicans would have wanted to make the day it happened into an instant national holiday. Instead they send out Sen. John McCain to issue a statement about the President who kicked McCain up and down the Electoral College four years ago.

“Shame on Barack Obama,” McCain says, “for diminishing the memory of Sept. 11 and the killing of Osama Bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political ad.”

Listen: You don’t have to line up with Obama on health care or the stimulus program or bailing out the automobile industry. You can talk about how he hasn’t done enough about jobs, about the deficit, about him making the talk-show rounds. You can line up with all the bullhorn media yahoos obsessed with getting Obama out of office, and all the deep-pocket donors who will spend any amount of money to make sure that happens in November.

But the idea that this President isn’t allowed to remind people that nearly 10 years after Bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 of our own in New York and tried to blow up lower Manhattan it was his — Obama’s — order that finally took the guy out is plain stupid, even for a smart guy like John McCain.

I frankly don’t remember McCain being offended nine years ago when Bush made that jet landing on the Lincoln and stood in front of that “Mission Accomplished” banner and said, “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

After that day, after Bush took that victory lap, there were more than 4,000 more American casualties in Iraq and so many more wounded, and that is just the count of American dead and wounded. In a war Bush started. In a country that had nothing to do with Bin Laden or Sept. 11, 2001.

Bush was the one who declared that this country would get Bin Laden “dead or alive.” Only it didn’t happen on his watch, didn’t happen until May 1 of last year, didn’t happen until Obama gave the order and SEAL Team Six went up those stairs in Pakistan and took the bastard out.

Is this some huge pressing campaign issue in the America of 2012? It’s not. More than anything, Bin Laden’s death is just another reminder about how long a year is in politics, and especially presidential politics. On that Sunday night one year ago, when word began to get around about what had happened across the world in Pakistan, there was this cockeyed notion that the 2012 campaign was over before it had even begun, that it was game, set, match for Obama.

 

Can Obama run only on that in 2012? Of course not. But the Republicans also aren’t allowed to somehow use Bin Laden against him. It actually seems to make them a little crazy — or crazier — that they can no longer campaign against Obama with the idea that he is soft on terrorism, now that the opposite of that is true.

And by the way? The previous administration’s idea of an aggressive war on terror was to start a corrupt war in Iraq. Maybe Sen. McCain could be a little more offended about that, even late in the game, than he is about Obama using Bin Laden to make some political hay.

Barack Obama was the one who had to issue the order on Bin Laden and did, even as others in his administration were telling him it was a mistake, there was too much risk involved, that the downside of a failed mission for Obama — already being compared with Jimmy Carter — was him looking as bad as Carter had with the failed hostage rescue in Iran in 1980.

So Obama made the call, and Bin Laden was shot dead by Navy SEALs, and if it wasn’t the end of the movie, it was at least a form of closure for those who lost family or friends on Sept. 11. So this was an American President giving you a real mission accomplished, taking out a real weapon of mass destruction, not imagined ones.

And please imagine what the cheering from the other side would have been like if it had been Bush who made the call on Bin Laden, if Bush had still been President when it happened. They wouldn’t have just spiked the ball in the end zone, they would have started a conga line that stretched all the way down Pennsylvania Ave., would have danced all the way to Election Day.