ThinkFast: September 2, 2009
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 3rd, 2009 4:34 am by HL
ThinkFast: September 2, 2009
The White House is “putting the final touches on a new strategy” to push health care reform that will have President Obama specifying what he “wants to see in a compromise health care deal and directly confronting other trouble spots.” “We’re entering a new season,” said senior adviser David Axelrod. “We’re going to approach it […]
The White House is “putting the final touches on a new strategy” to push health care reform that will have President Obama specifying what he “wants to see in a compromise health care deal and directly confronting other trouble spots.” “We’re entering a new season,” said senior adviser David Axelrod. “We’re going to approach it in a different way. The president is going to be very active.”
The Wall Street Journal reports today that the stimulus appears to be “helping the US climb out of the worst recession in decades.” Economists say that the stimulus funding is fueling growth well above where it would be without government action.
In “another piece of evidence that the economy was pulling out of recession,” the U.S. manufacturing sector grew in August after 18 months of severe struggles. President Obama called the numbers “a sign that we’re on the path to economic recovery.”
“Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage,” according to a new study of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. “The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.”
In a declaration to a federal court on Monday, the C.I.A. refused “to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program” by invoking national security. “There’s really no distance at all between this declaration and the declarations the C.I.A. was filing during the Bush administration,” said ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer.
57 percent: Americans who oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey. The number is a new all-time high, “up 11 points since April.” The opposition is highest amongst Democrats and independents, while Republicans strongly support the war.
A U.N. report released today finds that the opium cultivation in Afghanistan has fallen sharply. The report notes that the decline is largely due to “an excess supply” of the drug. The Obama administration has also “changed course on its opium policy here, moving away from eradication efforts favored by the Bush administration that senior officials now say wasted millions of dollars.”
The State Department has renewed a contract with controversial military contractor Xe, formerly known as Blackwater. Xe’s subsidiary Presidential Airways will continue to provide helicopter transport for embassy employees in Iraq as the State Department works to implement a new contract with another security organization, Dyncorp International.
And finally: Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker at the annual conference of CLSA, a Hong Kong-based brokerage. Many observers were questioning why Palin, who lacks significant foreign policy knowledge, would be invited. Business Insider now reports that CLSA — well-known for its “cheeky takes on investment research” — may be playing a practical joke. In the past, they’ve polled Asian fortune tellers for index targets” and “hired anime cartoonists to draw Japanese research. … They are a real research firm, it’s just that they love to sprinkle in some hilarity every now and then as a smart marketing gimmick.”
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Verizon Sponsoring Anti-Climate Rally Backed By Coal Giant Massey Energy
On Labor Day, tens of thousands of people will be gathering for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally” in Holden, WV. The point of the gathering is to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. It will feature right-wing guests such as Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent (who once ranted about killing Barack Obama and […]
On Labor Day, tens of thousands of people will be gathering for the coal-powered “Friends of America Rally” in Holden, WV. The point of the gathering is to rail against the Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. It will feature right-wing guests such as Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent (who once ranted about killing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), and is being pushed by mountaintop-removal mining company Massey Energy. Last week, Massey CEO Don Blankenship even recorded a video inviting people to attend the rally, saying they would learn about how “environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs.” Watch it:
The sponsors for the rally are mostly regional oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the list also includes the Science and Public Policy Institute — a fringe climate-denial organization — and Verizon Wireless. CREDO Action recently launched a campaign calling on Verizon to drop its sponsorship. CREDO Political Director Becky Bond contacted Verizon’s Vice President of Corporate Communications Jim Gerace to inform him that that CREDO would be launching a campaign against Verizon. Gerace responded by disparaging Bond:
This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the emails are coming from.
For the record, Bond never lived in a tree. Verizon’s vice president of federal government relations also sits on the board of the global-warming denier National Association of Manufacturers.
Blankenship recently gained attention because the Supreme Court rebuked him for buying West Virginia judges. He has called opponents of his coal “communists,” “atheists,” and “greeniacs” and labeled a cap and trade system a “Ponzi scheme.”
Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Laura Merritt told the Charleston Gazette that Verizon’s decision to sponsor the rally was made “at the local level to support the community.” “It wasn’t an effort to take a position on any particular issue,” she added. However, the pro-coal policies that Verizon is now sponsoring actually hurt communities in West Virginia. As the Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has written:
The coal-dominated economy of West Virginia is a troubling example of the cruelty of coalocracy. Despite $118 million in coal-mining annual income, West Virginia has the nation’s lowest median household income, worst educational services, worst social assistance, the highest population with disabilities, and nearly a quarter of West Virginia children in poverty.
Interestingly, Verizon brags that “environmental stewardship is ingrained in Verizon’s heritage, and the company prides itself on having a positive influence on the environment in which it operates.” It has a whole page devoted to its “green initiatives.” Take action here and tell Verizon that if it really wants to be green, it needs to stop sponsoring global warming denial rallies.
