The Evil Twin...

As lawmakers in Washington continue to ignore the most pressing issue facing our planet today - climate change - we are about to pass a very disturbing environmental milestone.

The CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii will likely soon reach 400 ppm, which could spell further disaster for our planet.

Named after Charles Keeling, who started measuring CO2 air concentrations in 1858, the Keeling Curve measures the concentration of CO2 in the air in parts per million.

Since measurements started at Mauna Loa in 1958, there has been a steady increase in CO2 concentration.

In fact, since 1960, CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa has increased by almost 28%.

Thanks to our society’s toxic addiction to fossil fuels, unprecedented levels of CO2 are being pumped into our environment each and every day.

But why have CO2 concentrations increased so much over the past few decades?

Part of it has to do with increased industrialization and reliance on dirty fossil fuels, but part of it also has to do with the world’s oceans. 

According to Richard Bellerby, Research Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, the oceans have “been performing a huge climate service over the last 200 years.”

That’s because oceans have the ability to absorb CO2, which prevents it from escaping into the atmosphere and hastening the process of climate change.

In fact, the world’s oceans, especially the coldest waters, have absorbed 50 percent of the CO2 that we have emitted, and continue to take up 25 percent of the CO2 that we produce.

But, we, as a global community, have abused the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2, and now the oceans and the ecosystems within them are paying the price.

As the world’s oceans absorb more and more CO2, they become more and more acidic, and, according to a new study released yesterday by the Norwegian Institute for Water Research at the International Conference on Arctic Ocean Acidification, the rapid acidification of the Arctic Ocean has pushed us beyond “critical thresholds,” and it’s likely that widespread impacts will be felt for “tens of thousands of years” even if  we stopped all carbon emissions today.

Dubbed “climate change’s evil twin”, acidification of ocean surface waters has increased by around 30 percent over the last 200 years, with the highest levels of acidification occurring in the Arctic and the rest of world’s coldest waters.

Richard Bellerby, the chief scientist on the report, said that, “Arctic ocean acidification is happening at a faster rate than found in other global regions. This is because climate change such as warming and freshening of the oceans is acting in tandem with the enormous oceanic uptake of C02.”

And Bellerby told BBC News that “continued rapid change is a certainty.”

Another researcher on the study, Sam Dupont of the University of Gothenburg, told the conference that, “something really unique is happening. This is the first time that we as humans are changing the whole planet; we are actually acidifying the whole ocean today.”

According to the study, it’s quite possible that, within a few decades, the world’s oceans will be two times more acidic, and the situation could be even worse in the Arctic. 

So what are the impacts so ocean acidification?

Well, to start, the oceans are able to absorb less CO2, which means more of it enters our atmosphere and helps to hasten the processes of global warming and climate change.

But more importantly, ocean acidification can lead to mass ocean species extinction. 

One example of a possible species extinction that the scientists at the conference gave was of the brittle star.

When exposed to the ocean acidification conditions that can be expected in the decades to come, the eggs of the brittle star died within days.

If the brittle star dies off, than the species that feed on it could die off as well and there would be a massive chain reaction of oceans species extinctions.

And if the ocean dies, we die.

It’s that simple.

The bottom-line here is that our toxic addiction to fossil fuels rooted millions of years in the past is not only polluting our skies and wreaking havoc on our climate, it’s also destroying our oceans and the species in them.

It’s time to ditch the fossil fuels, make the switch to cleaner and greener forms of energy, and save the world’s oceans, before they die and we go with them.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What do you get when you have a for-profit healthcare system, like the one we have here in America, that not a single one of the 33 other OECD countries has?

You get one hospital in Washington, D.C that charges $115,000 to keep a patient on a ventilator, and another hospital in that same city that charges just under $53,000 for the same thing.

You get one hospital in Miami that charges over $166,000 for treating a heart attack with four stents and major complications, and another hospital in that city that charges around $89,000 for the same thing.   

For years, we weren’t able to get a clear picture of what various hospitals charged for similar procedures. 

Hospitals have gone out of their way for years to protect their procedure price lists, almost as if they were national secrets.

But not anymore, because the cat is finally out of the bag.

Today, the Obama administration and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a database that reveals, for the first time, how much the vast majority of hospitals in our country charge for the 100 most common inpatients procedures billed to Medicare.

The data released today covers claims that were filed in the fiscal year 2011, and includes over 163,000 individual charges recorded at more than 3,300 hospitals in 306 metropolitan areas.

While the mountains of data appear to be daunting at first glance, the numbers paint a picture of a very nonsensical US healthcare system, where prices for the same exact treatments vary wildly, and at random, at hospitals sometime just a few city blocks from each other. 

Let’s look at hospital costs in and around New York City.

The Huffington Post compiled data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report to make a map of hospital costs for treating chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, in the New York City metropolitan area, and the range of costs to treat the same exact disease is mind-boggling.

At the Bayonne Hospital Center just over the Hudson River in New Jersey, treatment of COPD costs a staggering $99,690. Right across the river, back in New York City and at a hospital on the tip of Manhattan, the cost for treating COPD is just over $11,000.

Looking at the entire New York City metropolitan area, the cost of COPD treatment ranges from $7,044 at a hospital in the Bronx, to the $99,690 charged at the Bayonne Hospital Center.

In major cities across our nation, the range of prices for similar or the same medical procedures looks more like the ups and downs in the wildly volatile stock market.

It’s important to note that the prices revealed in the data do not reflect the prices that Medicare and insurance pay for the various procedures. Medicare and insurance companies pay negotiated rates for the procedures

The data does represent what the 49 million uninsured people in our country would have to pay for the various procedures out-of-pocket.

The data represents the dilemma these Americans face when trying to decide between life-saving health procedures and living a life of poverty while being buried in mountains of debt.

It’s also important to understand that when Americans are forced to go to hospitals, much of the time they are transported to them via ambulances. And when that happens, Americans don’t have a choice of which hospital to go to. They can’t look up on their smartphone which hospital will charge the least for the treatment that they will need.  That’s why this new data is that much more powerful.

But the real takeaway from this new data should be just how absurd and crazy it is to have a for-profit healthcare system. 

America used to have not-for-profit hospitals and insurance companies. These were mainly required by the states that at hospital and insurance regulation boards.

Then, in 1980, Ronald Regan stepped into The White House and everything changed.

Insurance companies and hospitals began turning into for-profit money making machines.

Doctors began forming their own practices, and physician costs began to soar.

Prescription drug companies began their efforts to squeeze every last penny out of the American public, and the costs of just about every other aspect of healthcare in America skyrocketed.

Now, what we are left with is a for-profit healthcare system that charges inexplicable rates for common every-day procedures and lets prescription drug companies fleece the wallets of Americans, while millions are forced to decide between life-saving healthcare and a life of poverty.

If healthcare were part of the commons, none of this would be happening.

We wouldn’t have a hospital in the Bronx, New York charging $7,000 for a treatment, and a hospital a few miles away charging thousands of dollars more for the same procedure.

It’s time to take the American healthcare system out of the hands of corporate profiteers and Wall Street tycoons, and put it back where it belongs, in the hands of the American people.

Sorry I'm Not Sorry?

Yesterday, the U.S. marked the 10^th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. And, over the course of the past ten years, we’ve learned more and more about how the war with Iraq actually started.

While it’s incredibly easy to blame the Bush administration for its lies that led us into Iraq, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company weren’t the only ones who played an integral role in convincing this nation that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and that WMD’s were a forgone conclusion.

In the days and weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, mainstream media – particularly on the right - was abuzz with the talking points of the Bush Administration, echoing claims that Iraq had its hands on “yellow cake uranium” and that it had a massive arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Thanks to the mainstream media’s repeated claims that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were immediate threats to our nation, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, nearly three-quarters of Americans legitimately believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks of 9/11.

One of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War was Bill O’Reilly.

Nearly every day leading up to the invasion of Iraq, O’Reilly used his pedestal on Fox News to preach the talking points of the Bush Administration.

In March of 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, O’Reilly interviewed actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo, about her opposition towards going to war with Iraq.

O’Reilly asked Garofalo if she would apologize to President Bush if she was wrong, and if it turned out that the United States went into Iraq, was met with jubilant America-loving crowds of Iraqis, and in fact found “all kinds of bad, bad stuff.”

Garofalo responded that she would gladly go to the White House, get on her knees, and apologize to Bush if she were wrong, but added that she didn’t think she would be. 

Guess what. She was right. And O’Reilly, as usual, was wrong.

Our soldiers were not met by throngs of Iraqis who loved America. And we certainly didn’t find “all kinds of bad, bad stuff.”

So the real question here is, ten years after being so wrong, why hasn’t Bill O’Reilly apologized to Garofalo, and to the American public, for misleading us so badly?

In 2004, O’Reilly was on ABC’s Good Morning America, and offered a half-hearted apology for being so wrong. He said that, “Well, my analysis was wrong and I'm sorry.. I was wrong. I'm not pleased about it at all.”

But shouldn’t O’Reilly get down on his hands and knees, and offer a real apology to all of us, for being a mouthpiece of the Bush administration’s deeply misguided mission to invade Iraq?

And why stop there? O’Reilly shouldn’t be the only one apologizing to the American people.

After all, O’Reilly wasn’t the only one in the far-right realm of mainstream media to make the case for war with Iraq using the Bush administration’s faulty information.

Another one of those who acted as a shill of the Bush administration was Sean Hannity.

On a February 19^th, 2003 episode of Hannity & Colmes, Hannity told Fox News contributor Ellis Henican that, “We're going to go in and we're going to liberate this country in a few weeks and it's going to be over very quickly. No, it's going to be over very quickly. And what I'm going to tell you here is, you're going to find, I predict, mass graves. We're going to open up those -- hang on, let me finish -- those gulags and those prisons and you're going to hear stories of rape and torture and misery, and then we're going to find all of the weapons of mass destruction that all of you guys on the left say don't exist.”

Clearly, Hannity was wrong about the war. Shouldn’t he apologize to the American people?

Then there’s Steve Hayes, a Fox News contributor and writer for the conservative publication The Weekly Standard.

He repeatedly used his columns in the The Weekly Standard and his time on Fox News to further the now debunked myth that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were inextricably linked.

In fact, Hayes even wrote a book about the so-called link, called “The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.”

But as we all know, he was wrong too. So where’s his apology?

Then there’s Hayes’ colleague at Fox News, Charles Krauthammer.  At the time of the war, Krauthammer was a Fox News contributor and columnist for the Washington Post.

And, much like Hayes, he used his power of the pen to argue that the Iraq War would usher in unprecedented levels of democracy in the Middle East.

In April of 2002, he wrote in the Washington Post that, “Time is running short. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He is working on nuclear weapons. And he has every incentive to pass them on to terrorists who will use them against us. We cannot hold the self-defense of the United States hostage to the solving of a century-old regional conflict.”

Krauthammer is just another right-wing media mainstay who was 100 percent wrong about the Iraq War.

Finally, there’s MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough. He was one of the strongest proponents of war with Iraq outside of Fox News.

In March of 2003, he repeatedly made claims that toppling Saddam Hussein would “mean the end of his weapons of mass destruction.”

In April of 2003, Scarborough said that, “For six months now, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been telling the world that the people of Iraq needed to be liberated from Saddam Hussein's bloody reign. The past three weeks have shown us just how right these three men have been.”

In that same commentary, Scarborough pondered whether “journalists at The New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”

Well Joe, turns out they were right, and you were wrong. So where’s your apology?

The bottom-line here is that, ten years after going to war on faulty information, and after thousands of American lives have been lost, the majority of the right-wing media has yet to offer any semblance of an apology for being so wrong, and for listening to the Bush administration, no questions asked.

The media failed us leading up to the Iraq War, and the consequences have been dire.

Never again can the media be allowed to convince an entire nation of something, without Americans standing up, and questioning the facts for themselves.

Back to...1948

Business Insider magazine recently polled a group of registered voters, asking them for their preferences on three different Congressional plans that have been floated to help the nation avoid the looming sequester.

The poll found that when the plans were stripped of their partisan labels, the policies that were most favorable to voters were those offered up by progressives in the Democratic caucus.

More than half of those polled favored “The Balancing Act” plan, proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Shockingly, 47 percent of Republicans polled preferred the House Progressive approach to the sequester than the across the board cuts proposed by Republican Congressional leaders.

According to Business Insider, the results show not only is America not a “centrist” country like is commonly believed, but that the policy ideas that are most attractive to voters are those that are often put on the backburner, receiving little attention and publicity.

Or, to put it simply, very few Americans like the ideas and policy proposals coming out of the Republican Party.  It’s clear that Americans can distinguish between ideas that will actually help the country, and bizarre Republican beliefs that only serve to help the billionaire class and corporate America prosper.

 

The situation that we find ourselves in today is very reminiscent of state of American politics in 1948 – when Harry Truman accepted the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

As Truman said in his famous acceptance speech, the reason that Americans prefer Democratic ideas over bizarre Republican beliefs is because, “the people know that the Democratic Party is the people's party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.”

Truman then went on to list the accomplishments of the Democratic Party at the time. He highlighted increased investments in the agriculture industry, increases in wages and salaries, and massive increases in the GDP. Truman told the crowd at the convention in Philadelphia that, “these benefits have been spread to all the people, because it is the business of the Democratic Party to see that the people get a fair share of these things.”

After highlighting how the Democratic party had helped Americans and worked wonders to improve the country as a whole, Truman then proceeded to list how Republicans had failed the country in the 80^th Congress (the Congress prior to his acceptance speech) and failed to look out for the well-being of the people. He argued that, “Ever since its inception, that party has been under the control of special privilege; and they have completely proved it in the 80th Congress. They proved it by the things they did to the people, and not for them. They proved it by the things they failed to do.”

Those things included failing to act on a housing bill, failing to enact “moderate legislation to promote labor-management harmony,” and tearing apart the Department of Labor. 

Republicans in the 80^th Congress failed to pass an increase in the minimum wage, and failed to provide funding for more public education and schools.  They failed to pass any sort of comprehensive health program, and more importantly, they failed to enact tax relief, so that those who earned more paid their fair share to help the country.

As Truman said, “Now everybody likes to have low taxes, but we must reduce the national debt in times of prosperity. And when tax relief can be given, it ought to go to those who need it most, and not those who need it least, as this Republican rich man's tax bill did when they passed it over my veto on the third try.”

From failing to fund our public schools, to trying to tear apart labor and keeping the wallets of the wealth elite padded, the parallels between Truman’s 80^th Congress and the 113^th Congress today are uncanny. And, in 1948, the American people realized how little the Republican Party had done for the country, and how the party only cared about the interests of the wealthiest Americans.

 

Truman ended up winning the Presidential election in 1948 because of the public’s sentiments towards the Republican Party, and Democrats were able to take back the Congress. More importantly, because of their bizarre beliefs and backwards priorities, Republicans didn’t regain the House for over 40 years.

As Truman closed his acceptance speech, he spoke of the 80^th Congress, saying that, “Now, what that worst 80th Congress does in this special session will be the test. The American people will not decide by listening to mere words, or by reading a mere platform. They will decide on the record, the record as it has been written. And in the record is the stark truth, that the battle lines of 1948 are the same as they were in 1932, when the Nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction.”

Today, the battle lines are drawn exactly as they were in 1948 and 1932.  Millions of Americans are struggling to survive, to get a proper education, and still struggling to receive comprehensive affordable health care, all thanks to Republican “misrule and inaction.”

It’s now our job to make sure that the political outcomes of 1948 repeats themselves.

It is our job to organize, to rally and to beat back the party of billionaires, fat cats and special interests. Let’s keep Republicans out of the House for another 40 years...

You Can't Vote for The President

As an American citizen, you do not have a right to vote for the President of the United States.

If you don’t believe me, ask the five right-wingers of the Supreme Court in 2000, who decided the infamous Bush v. Gore case. 

In their decision, Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas argued that, “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”

So what’s the rationale for this?

Well, unlike U.S. Representatives and Senators, the President of the United States is not directly elected by the people, and instead is elected by the Electoral College.

And while the Constitution doesn’t give Americans the right to vote for the President, it does give the states the power decide how their electoral votes are divvied up.

Currently, whoever wins the majority of votes in a state wins all of that state’s electoral votes, except in two of the fifty states. But, now that the Republican Party has been hijacked by the Billionaire Class, the party is taking unprecedented steps to abuse the Electoral College, and our current voting system.

In the first election after the Citizens United decision, hundreds of millions of dollars in outside spending by billionaires like the Koch Brothers put Republicans in control of traditionally blue states that they'd targeted for years, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan.

Once Republicans got charge of the state legislatures, they gerrymandered congressional districts to increase the number of safe Republican seats and get rid of safe Democratic seats. That's the main reason why House Democratic candidates received more than a million votes more than House Republican candidates around the nation last November, yet Republicans still hold onto control in the House of Representatives.

Republicans are now using these gerrymandered states to push their boldest step yet to rig the next presidential election, and have their eyes currently set on Michigan.

Instead of a winner-take-all system, Republicans want Michigan's Electoral College votes doled out based on which presidential candidate won each congressional district, with an extra two votes going to the state's popular vote winner. Republicans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are considering similar changes. And, Republican party officials like current RNC Chair Reince Priebus have thrown their support behind the election-rigging idea.

So just how big of an advantage would Republicans have if these election-rigging changes went through? Well consider this: President Obama swept the six main battleground states of Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin last election. And since it's a winner-take-all system, the President got all of these battleground states’ 106 Electoral College votes, and Romney got zero.

But if this new election-rigging scheme had been in place before the 2012 election, then President Obama would have only gotten 47 Electoral College votes from the battleground states, while Mitt Romney would have won those states with 59 votes, even though he got hammered in the popular vote in each of those states. And if all the states in the nation had gone along with this election-rigging scheme, then billionaire Mitt Romney would be our president today, even though he lost the national vote by millions.

Billionaires and Republicans know they're a minority in America. Their hard-right bigotry toward gays and women turns off young voters. Their xenophobia and mistrust of non-whites have turned off the growing minority electorate. And their economic principles, like Reaganomics and devastating austerity, are slowing destroying our country.

Today, we the people and the majority have to do something before the billionaires take over completely. And the best way to do this is to embrace more democracy.

When it comes to the Electoral College, we need to get rid of it altogether. Republicans all across America are trying to subvert the Electoral College so they can steal future Presidential elections, and keep Washington under Republican control for years to come.

We should replace the Electoral College with a system of more democracy – a national popular vote model that elects our President based on which candidate got the most votes nationwide, plain and simple, and more importantly, Republican rig-proof.

Nine states have already passed National Popular Vote laws, meaning that their electors will vote for whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, even if that candidate lost the state’s Electoral College vote. The nine states that have passed national popular vote laws, which include California, Illinois and Maryland, account for 132 electoral votes, nearly half of the 270 needed in the Electoral College to win the Presidency.

If the National Popular Vote movement continues to spread, and enough states sign up to bring their combined Electoral College votes to 270, then the Electoral College will be dead, along with Republican efforts to rig elections and corrupt our democracy.

This needs to be our game-plan from here on out.  Hard-working middle-class Americans are the majority in America, not democracy-destroying billionaires and their Republican cronies. It’s up to us, the 99 percent, to push back against this nation’s corrupt Conservative minority and their billionaire backers, and stop them once and for all from rigging elections in America. 

Just Ask Jamie

Have no fear. While millions of Americans are struggling to survive day to day, and the economy is in the tank, the big banks are doing just fine.

Just ask Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase. At JPMorgan’s investor conference yesterday, Dimon bragged to a crowd of uber wealthy investors that, “This bank is anti-fragile, we actually benefit from downturns.”

In other words, while millions of Americans are without jobs, and struggling to put food on the table and provide for their families, Dimon and his Wall Street fat cat buddies are doing just fine, profiting off of your misery.

But such an appalling statement really shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, numerous reports have suggested that JPMorganChase may have engaged in criminal activity, and it’s possible that Dimon did too.

Dimon and the rest of America’s big bank CEO’s need to be put in their place.  It’s inexcusable that these banks continue to rake in millions, after nearly destroying our economy and devastating the middle-class.  One way or another, the rampant corruption on Wall Street needs to stop.

That’s where Sen. Elizabeth Warren comes in.

Since Warren was sworn into the Senate less than two months ago, she’s been kicking butt and taking names.  Using her influential seat on the Senate Banking Committee, Warren has already rebuked the nation’s top financial regulators for failing to take Wall Street firms who broke the law to trial.

In a February 14^th hearing, Warren told regulators that, “We face some very special issues with big financial institutions. If they can break the law and drag in billions and billions in profits, and then turn around and settle — paying out of those profits — they don’t have much incentive to follow the law.”

Warren continued her assault on this nation’s corrupt financial industry yesterday, pressing Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about the risks and fairness of having banks that are “too big to fail.” Warren asked Bernanke, “We’ve now understood this problem for nearly five years. So when are we going to get rid of ‘too big to fail?’”

Warren also asked whether the big banks should have to repay taxpayers the whopping $83 billion a year they get from what is essentially a government subsidy. Interestingly enough, this amount nearly matches the big banks’ annual profits, and without it, CEO’s like Jamie Dimon wouldn’t be able to get their cushy bonuses and windfall payouts.

While Warren’s efforts to point out the corruption and greed on Wall Street are great, she’s only one woman, and she alone can’t take down the big banks and successfully regulate them.  The entire system needs to be changed.

For too long now, we’ve been following the Bush Administration approach to dealing with the big banks, and that’s basically let them be, let their corruption go unchecked, and bail them out without any assurance that they’ll change their ways.

When the banks began to freeze and the economy began to crash, the Bush Administration had two choices. One was taking the route that FDR took.  FDR put the safety and well-being of the American people and homeowners first, and soon the economy began to improve and the banks bounced back, with regulations.  Unfortunately, the Bush Administration chose option two: Bailout the banks with 700 billion dollars in taxpayer money, let them get back on their feet and hope for the best. We all know how well that’s worked out.

It’s time to stop propping up the banks, and allowing the “too big to fail” mantra to go unchecked. 

One way to do that is by bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act. Glass-Steagall limited commercial bank securities activities and affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms.  It prohibited national banks from underwriting or distributing securities, and also prohibited them from purchasing or selling securities. We need to stop letting banks that dabble in securities gamble with people’s safe deposits, and their livelihoods.

But Glass-Steagall may not be enough.  It might be time to use the Sherman Act to break up the big banks, and put competition back into the financial industry.  The bigger banks get, the more money they control, and the more influence they are able to exert on the market and on the government. And, with more money in their corporate coffers, the big banks become more willing to gamble away your lifesavings.  With more banks on Main Street, the influence that big banks have would dissipate, and so too would the rampant corruption that’s destroyed our economy.

We can’t let the 2008 financial crisis happen again and we can’t continue to allow big bank crony CEO’s like Jamie Dimon to pad their wallets at the expensive of our livelihoods.  It’s time to regulate the banks, and make them the boring and safe industry that they used to before Ronnie Reagan came along.