NewsTrust - Business - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Energy Is Putting Power Back in the Hands of the People

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Heeten Kalan - May. 23 (Interview) - Danny Kennedy, Greenpeace activist, Project Underground founder and long-time campaigner, decided to apply his organizing skills to harness the sun’s energy. Choosing to do something about our energy crisis and climate change, he founded Sungevity with a small group of trusted friends in 2007. Now, Sungevity is one the world’s leading residential solar-energy companies and is the exclusive residential solar partner for Lowe’s.

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Editor of The Progressive Calls For Eric Holder to Resign Over Spying on Press, Occupy Protesters

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - May. 22 (Opinion) - As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department's spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists' online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We're joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, "Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street."

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Rise Up or Die

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

billmoyers.com - By Chris Hedges - May. 21 (Opinion) - What has taken place in these sacrifice zones — in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery — is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next. Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power.

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Corporations Are Stealing Billions in Tax Breaks, While the Confused, Screwed Citizenry Turn On Each Other

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Robert Reich - May. 20 (Opinion) - As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this.

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Being a Democracy Hating, Corporate Power-Defending Newspaper Owner Runs Deep in the Koch Family

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Yasha Levine - May. 19 (Opinion) - There’s a rumor going around that the Koch brothers are interested in buying up the Tribune Company, which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun… And there’s a lot of speculation about what would happen if they did. Some worry, and rightly so, that the Kochs—whose combined wealth makes them the biggest billionaires on the planet—would integrate the Tribune Co. with the rest of their free-market thinktank-industrial complex, and turn its newly acquired news media property into a gigantic business propaganda machine. Half the reporters at the Los Angeles Times even took a vote saying they’d quit if the Kochs bought the paper

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The IRS and the Real Scandal

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Robert Reich - May. 18 (Opinion) - Despite a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires using every tax dodge imaginable – laundering their money through phantom corporations and tax havens — the IRS’s budget has been cut by 17 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation. To manage the $594.5 million in additional cuts required by the sequester, the agency will furlough each of its more than 89,000 employees for at least five days this year.

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The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Beverly Bandler - May. 16 (Opinion) - the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the many important scandals that the media neglects

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Cyclists Aren't 'Special,' and They Shouldn't Play by Their Own Rules - Sarah Goodyear - The Atlantic Cities

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

theatlanticcities.com - May. 15 (Opinion) -

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IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal is Secret Money Influencing US Elections

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Ari Berman - May. 14 (Opinion) - The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people - “none of those groups were big spendes on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times—and wasn’t aggressive enough.

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Sen. Chase talks about the importance of fair trade - YouTube

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

YouTube - By Maralyn Chase - May. 08 (Opinion) - video

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The Cancer-Stage Of Capitalism

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

talkradionews.com - By Thom Hartmann - May. 06 (Opinion) - Unregulated capitalism is cancer on our nation. Like tumors, greed has metastasized, strangling once-healthy parts of our economy, and our social safety net. A new piece on Alternet lists several ways this cancer capitalism has taken hold. For starters, the hoarding of wealth by the banksters and the 1% has diverted resources away from nutritional aid programs. Twenty people in our country collected a whopping $73 billion in investment income – all taxed at a lower rate than working Americans. Compare that with the fact that President Obama couldn’t even get $1 billion to improve childhood nutrition in our schools.

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The Hollowing Out of Government

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Robert Reich - May. 05 (Opinion) - OSHA and its state partners have a total of 2,200 inspectors charged with ensuring the safety of over more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. That comes to about one inspector for every 59,000 American workers. There’s no way it can do its job with so few resources, but OSHA has been systematically hollowed out for the years under Republican administrations and congresses that have despised the agency since its inception. In effect, much of our nation’s worker safety laws and rules have been quietly repealed because there aren’t enough inspectors to enforce them.

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5 Ways That Raw, Unregulated Capitalism Is Acting Like a Cancer on American Society

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Paul Buchheit - May. 05 (Opinion) - The uncontrolled growth of investment wealth is diverting resources away from vital programs, effectively smothering them.

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NRA Leader Warns of Rising Cost of Senators

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Andy Borowitz - May. 05 (Comedy News) - "Over the past few years, we've seen the price of purchasing a Senator surge astronomically," he told the N.R.A. faithful. "Unless something is done to make Senators more affordable, the ability of a tiny lobbying group to overrule the wishes of ninety per cent of the American people will be in jeopardy." The days are over, he said, when "you could buy a Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for little more than pocket change."

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Let's Do It, Let's Repeal The Sequester!

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Jason Linkins - May. 04 (Opinion) - the happiest thing going on in the political discourse is how the whole fiscal discussion seems to be changing from hack-dominance to, potentially, something more sensible. The catalyzing event seems to have been the work of America's greatest graduate student, Thomas Herndon, who was afforded the opportunity to analyze the data set of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff -- whose very famous study, which contends that there are debt/growth tipping points, had become the urtext of the global austerity movement -- and very quickly determined that it was riddled with errata and LOLs.

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We Decide How to Share Gains

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Stan Sorscher - May. 02 (Opinion) - Multinational employers steadily move work offshore, and lay off thousands of workers. We've cut funding for education; student debt is over a trillion dollars. We've terminated pensions, weakened unions, made work more contingent and more precarious. Wal-Mart cuts hours to avoid paying for health care. Some elected officials demonize teachers, and public employees, and turn public opinion against any regular worker daring to hope for a higher standard of living. Globally, workplace insecurity and inequality are at historic levels.

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U.S. Judges Admit to Jailing Children for Money

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

inquisitr.com - Apr. 30 (Opinion) -

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Explaining the upper crust’s preference for austerity economics

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

seattletimes.com - By Paul Krugman - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - At this point, the austerian position has imploded; not only have its predictions about the real world failed completely, but the academic research invoked to support that position has turned out to be riddled with errors, omissions and dubious statistics. Yet two big questions remain. First, how did austerity doctrine become so influential in the first place? Second, will policy change at all now that crucial austerian claims have become fodder for late-night comics?

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Mark Zuckerberg's Political Group Is Trashing Obama And Obamacare And Promoting Oil And Gas Interests

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

businessinsider.com - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - If you want to get a feel for how American politics really works, as opposed to the way they tell you it works, look no farther than what's going on behind the scenes at the new political action group started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and dozen

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Charts: How Much Danger Do We Face From Homegrown Jihadist Terrorists?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dave Gilson - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - More MoJo coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings Perhaps the most unusual thing about the Boston Marathon bombing is that it happened at all. While we've seen all manner of terrorist bomb plots since September 11—the Times Square bomber , the underwear bomber , even the guys who fantasized about destroying the Sears Tower —all have been thwarted by the FBI, the perpetrators' own bumbling, or both . If one or both of the suspects in last week's attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were motivated by radical Islamic beliefs , then they will have the dubious distinction of being the first domestic jihadists to have set off a bomb on American soil since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While America has been fixated on the threat of Islamic terrorism for more than a decade, all but a few domestic terror plots have failed. Between September 11 and the end of 2012, there were no successful bomb plots by jihadist terrorists in the United States. Jihadists killed 17 ...

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Why American CEOs Get Paid Way More Than CEOs Anywhere Else (Hint: It's Not Performance Based)

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Dean Baker - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - in the last three decades, the pay of CEOs has gone from just being high -- say 30 or 40 times the pay of typical workers -- to being in the stratosphere. The pay of CEOs at major corporations now averages several hundred times the pay of ordinary workers.

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GOP Goes Hunting For EPA Emails About Turducken

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Tim McDonnell - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - Earlier this month, when a burst pipe spilled thousands of gallons of heavy oil into an Arkansas suburb, the message from the White House went something like: "Everybody chill, the EPA has it under control." But reporters on the scene found the cleanup orchestrated by the same company, ExxonMobil, that allowed the spill, and heard only crickets when they asked the EPA about its involvement. Turns out, on some of the nation's most pressing environmental health issues, the EPA's transparency record isn't exactly crystal-clear. So with a vote on President Obama's new pick to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy, coming up as soon as next week , it perhaps isn't a surprise that Congressional scrutiny of her nomination has centered more on the agency's secret-keeping habits than on its environmental enforcement goals. At a hearing last Thursday before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, McCarthy got grilled on EPA's transparency record by Republican members, led by Louisiana's David Vitter. ...

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Meet the 45 Senators Who Blocked Background Checks

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Dana Liebelson - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - An amendment proposed by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to require background checks for commercial gun sales (but not for sales between "friends and neighbors") was shot down Wednesday afternoon in a 54-46 vote, failing to capture the 60 votes it needed to advance. The bill would have been a modest victory for gun control advocates, while ceding numerous concessions to the gun lobby (the NRA initially called it a "positive development.") Nevertheless, only four Republicans voted for the proposal, with 41 voting against it. Five Democrats rejected the proposal as well (Reid was a special case; see below). Standing with families of Sandy Hook victims, President Obama said that "there was no coherent argument for why we wouldn't do this. It came down to politics." Here's a list so you can see how your Senator voted: Republicans Who Voted for the Proposal Susan Collins (R-ME) Mark Kirk (R-IL) John McCain (R-AZ) Pat Toomey (R-PA) Democrats Who Voted Against the ...

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Not Every Republican Hates Obama's Progressive Labor Secretary Nominee

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Adam Serwer - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division and President Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Labor, is getting some support from unexpected corners: Republicans, particularly in his home state of Maryland. "I think he's going to be a very fine secretary of labor for us," says Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee who first met Perez when he was a member of the Montgomery County Council and Steele was Lt. Governor of Maryland. "He's honest, direct, approachable and willing to work hard to get it right." Steele isn't the only Maryland Republican praising Perez. "He's just a trustworthy guy," says John Kane, a former chair of the Maryland GOP. "If I had to put a trust together to manage my affairs after I was gone, Tom would be one of the top three guys I would pick to do that, even though I disagree with him more than half the time." Monday, John R. Dunne, a Republican who was head of the civil rights division during the ...

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10 Reasons the Background Check Bill Means Victory for the NRA

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Gavin Aronsen - Apr. 17 (Opinion) - Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) have been forced this week to consider further retooling their bill for expanded gun background checks, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Tuesday still lacks the 60 votes it needs to overcome a filibuster. The National Rifle Association and senators opposed to the bill continue to argue that it would unfairly burden lawful gun owners while doing nothing to prevent future tragedies like the one in Newtown. In fact, the bill does an awful lot that should please the pro-gun lobby. Which helps explain why, on Sunday, the gun-rights group Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms endorsed the bill and the "numerous advances for our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms that it contains." (Even the NRA, consulted during the compromise talks, initially called the bill a "positive development," as opposed to the stricter gun-control plan initially proposed by Sen. Chuck Schumer; the NRA later backtracked, ...

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