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So you are telling me the leftist agenda does not promote (sources below are from left-leaning sites, and one centrist site):

Socialized/single payer medicine
Open borders
Controlling "Big Pharma"
Progressive taxation, especially on the rich

Because this is what the far left is pushing right now.

> Who'd have thought that employing people based on their genitalia rather than their skills would end so badly...

Uh. NO. I'll bite, since much is wrong with that flimsy cause-and-effect troll and it's a nice excuse to research for numbers:
1) 'They could allow hackers to steal sensitive data without users knowing, one of them affecting chips made as far back as 1995.'
SOURCE:
https://www.theguardian.com/te...

2) Give credit where credit is due. There are still more MEN in the workforce than women. There is still 60+% majority in the workforce. Pretending there is no lazyness in the white male 60% majority is naive.
SOURCE: https://www.americanprogress.o...

The totals for #2 are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2012. Considering past progressions, stats for 1995 when the chips were designed would show an even larger share --thus, onus-- towards that non-diverse group.

Samsung isn't a US company (the other 2 you mentioned are Californian). The world mostly looks at SJW concerns and laughs at the theatrics going on in North America.
The gender identity fight plaguing the US internet today is diversity politics. Funnily, the same source claims there's only 6.3% gay and trans employees in the US, with 7 of 9 million of those workers belonging to the private sector.

Another view of diversity is that of disabled persons. The same source in 2012 claims that while approximately 11% of americans have actual disability, almost 80% of those disabled folks are OUT of the workforce. This is leaving nearly 6 million present, in a world with a total 300million Americans (I don't have the numbers for total workforce participation out of that 300m)

What you read
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...

Few months later
https://unearthed.greenpeace.o...
http://www.dw.com/en/china-ind...

The spin (no really it is OK they are adding them)
https://www.americanprogress.o...

They are building them. Maybe not in China but all over the place. Their labor pool price is rising. So they are building them in Africa and India now.

If you cleaned up 10 rivers in the world most of the plastic pollution in the ocean would stop. Those rivers are not in the Americas or Europe.

They will be forced to clean up their act. But not by sanctions placed upon ourselves but by their own populace.

I can type MORE EFFICIENT in all caps too, but you will notice I already told you 'more efficient' numerous times. Never said it was clean. So strawman #1.

Adding more coal plants that are more efficient, does not mean more coal. Even if the old dirty ones aren't closed (which they are) more efficient means more efficient. Either less coal or more power or both.

You are still confused about capacity. If I burn a thimble of coal it will produce x amount of CO2. If I tip that thimble of coal into a big bucket first (much higher capacity) and then burn it, guess what still x amount of CO2. But China is not even doing just that, the new bucket is new technology and is much more efficient.

And here we go with strawman #2. You said American nat gas plants are so many times cleaner than the best China has to offer. And now for some reason instead of backing up your claim, you are trying to compare US gas to China coal.

So you don't like EIA estimates, show some estimates from sources you do like. Instead of these made up numbers you are so fond of using.

China has been, is, and will move to EV faster than the US. Your assertion that EV's in China produce more than the cars/busses they replace is just not credible. Peak coal is years in the past and renewables are increasing faster and faster.
The standards for new Chinese coal is European levels (better than the US). So again your assertion is not credible.

Again you are confusing capacity with use. America is closing old plants, not to be environmentally friendly, just because they are too old. Capacity will go down. But use of the remaining plants will increase. Number of plants is meaningless. China will have more newer much higher efficiency plants and will use the old dirty ones less. Much much more capacity, but only slightly more use/and falling coal consumption.

OK looking at your map, did you not notice all the cancelled retired and shelved? Compare that to construction and the red is tiny. Announced and pre-permit may never be built.
Just comparing cancelled and construction there is clearly more green, zoom all the way out to make it more obvious.
Also obvious if you do that and look at permitted and construction, is that there are nowhere near 700 plants but only 319. Yet you still claim 700 in every post.
You are also clearly bullshitting about most being 1+GW. Constructed and permitted total capacity is about 142GW according to that site, but remember there are 319 plants so only 0.45 on average.
Again though, whats the point in mentioning the size or number when only the amount of coal burned is relevant.
It's clear Science and English are not your forte, but simple addition shouldn't be too hard. Is 1+1+1+1+1 small plants burning 5T worse than a huge plant burning 5T ? The first is FIVE NEW PLANTS !! but the second is HUGE !!! you must be so confused.
Just for reference, your site mentions 296GW were cancelled 2010-2017 and 425GW was shelved.

I thought you were a reader? Did you not get to the bottom of your own link? The one that says

The astounding numbers go against the trend that has been happening throughout the year in China, where dangerously high pollution levels have forced the closure of hundreds of coal mines and a curtailment of steel mill output. Examples of China's domestic aversion to coal include:

Two days ago Taiyuan, the capital of China’s northern province of Shanxi, which is known for its coal production, banned the sale, transport and use

How does Windy's cock taste?
https://www.vox.com/energy-and...
https://www.americanprogress.o...

No. The reason for going with emissions/$, is that neither you nor I decide the co2. Gov and businesses do.

Really? The government forces you to eat steak, drive an SUV, Turn your heating and cooling way up high? Don't make me laugh.

Look until tesla, how many EVs were there in.the world? None of consequences. Heck Prius started after Tesla started their r&D to build out EVs. GM built EV1 to appease California, but Exon killed it. Had it not been for Tesla, we would have no EVs.

China has more electric cars than the US, and also has double the market share % of new electric car sales, and also faster growth of that market share %..

Likewise, it has taken businesses and gov to push solar and wind. You and I did not create the market.

China is massively into solar and wind. Everyone knows this.

So, it comes down to decisions by businesses and gov, not ppl.

Complete bullshit. People choose what they want to do, what they want to consume. How they want to live. What lifestyle they lead.

The only way to push them is via emissions /GDP. They only care about the almighty buck. So, by normalizing on gdp and dropping emissions limit yearly, this forces all gov/businesses to change.

You live in a democracy and are free to spend your money how you like. If you want government to force people and businesses to use less CO2, vote for a government that will make those changes. Have a carbon tax if you like. Seems like a sensible way to put a price on polluting. But people will have to want it, America isn't a dictatorship. People choose not governments. Similarly businesses only do what the government allows them to do (again people) or what will sell in the marketplace, again people choosing to purchase/participate.

As it is, China's emissions are disastrous and America's sux as well. In POF, most of Europe sux as well.

All 3 regions are higher than the world average so I kind of agree here. More needs to be done. But it's unfair to place all of the burden on China where they are a much bigger country and are still climbing up the development ladder. You are still giving rich countries a free pass just because they got rich first. I will still argue only per capita makes sense, as all the things people do add up to the total. More people will do more things, travel, spend, waste, live.
But even if you think per GDP is a useful measure, China is already improving, and improving faster than America or the EU because their economy is growing much faster than the CO2 is increasing. Also America is much worse than Europe even on a per GDP measure. Why is that? Governments, businesses, or people making the difference? Even with America's tiny improvements it will take decades to reach European levels. China may even race you there by then.

Europe's and America's are headed in.the right direction, but we need to get all nations on the same track.

America is too slow to be meaningful over any relevant timeframe, China is predicted to be leveling off and decreasing soon too.

New coal plants need to be stopped, except to replace an old one. For example, china replacing an old one, with a new one that has full pollution controls AND will only burn the same amount of coal, or less, is great. But that is not what china is doing, and therein lies the problems.

This is exactly what China is doing. China's coal plants are the most efficient in the world. China's capacity is going up but a lot of that capacity will ne

You still fail to explain why China should be cutting faster and more than America when America is over twice as polluting? Facts are facts, China has over a billion more people than the US.
China has 4 times the population, but only twice the CO2. Even if China went further than your prediction and doubled it's coal use, it would still be less polluting per person than America.
But the fact is China's coal use has already peaked.
It peaked a few years ago, and the coal that is being used now is also being used much more efficiently.

Trumps National Security & Foreign Policy Failures - Year One

Trump and [Rex] Tillerson seem determined to tear down the U.S. Department of State, an irreplaceable pillar of American influence around the world, saving a few dollars in the short run at the cost of a more dangerous world.

Downgrading diplomacy: The secretary of state is deconstructing and downsizing the State Department. Secretary Tillerson has pursued a “reorganization” that has delivered little and lost the trust of U.S. diplomats, while pledging to cut the department’s budget by nearly a third even before his initial review of the department’s missions was complete.

Diplomats racing for the exits: Senior career officers have been forced out, numerous senior jobs remain vacant, the incoming class of new officers has been cut back, and the department’s influence on foreign policy in Washington is the lowest in modern memory.

Simply put, American diplomacy is weaker under Trump and Tillerson, and it will take many years to recover after they are gone.

I don't know about "AmericanProgress" as a source, but most of the content of the article in question meshes with the news that I have watched and read over the last year from Axios, NYT, WSJ, WashPo, Reuters and others.

Now I doubt you actually want facts, as it's easy enough to look this state of affairs up.

Reports of China's coal-fetish are greatly overstated.

https://www.americanprogress.o...

TL;DR version is that a lot of those plants won't get built or will be white elephants. China is aiming for 1000GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030 as part of its Paris agreement, although so far they are exceeding that by a wide margin.

Same with their nuclear programme. Basically everything that wasn't already being built has been cancelled. As their battery production ramps up basically everything other than renewables is looking shakey, with profitability looking increasingly unlikely.

And even the coal plants they are building are better than the US ones, because they have stricter emissions standards for them.

China is getting aggressive towards cleaning up their act.

FWIW, in January China cancelled 104 new coal power plants with a capacity equal to one-third of the current coal capacity in the US.

Also, their emissions requirements for coal plants are so strict that by 2020 exactly zero US coal plants would be clean enough to legally operate in china.

The truth is that the intermittency problem with wind and solar is so severe that when you get more than a few percent tied into the grid it actually has negative value.

Only if you do it stupidly. California is already seeing days where renewable make up 50% of their electric usage and their problems with negative value are relatively small, manageable and are in the process of being mitigated. BTW, the term for what you call intermittancy is the duck curve.

The smart way to do it is:

1. Improve the grid so that, for example, when the wind stops blowing off the east coast you can bring in electricity from the plain states to fill the gap.
2. Build natgas plants that can easily and rapidly spin up and down to also buffer the supply.
3. Include storage as part of the plants. California has recently added that to the law regulating all new forms commercial power generation in the state.

What you can't do is rely on baseload power (like nukes and coal) which get tons of subsidies in the form of guaranteed returns.

What's more, most of the energy used to PRODUCE solar panels, and much of the energy used to produce wind turbines, comes from soot-belching, coal-fired power plants in China, and most of the energy REPLACED BY these devices would have been produced in clean power plants with state-of-the-art "scrubbers" in North America, Europe & Australia.

That's all bullshit of the highest degree.
The energy required to manufacture wind turbines is recouped within about 6 months of operation.

And, in case anyone is interested:
The energy required to manufacture solar panels is a tiny fraction of how much they will generate over their lifetime.
In Middle Europe, where irradiance is about equal to that of Alaska, PV panels built with 10 year old manufacturing technology reached a net energy cost of zero within 3 years. In Southern Europe it was between 0.5 and 1.5 years.
Furthermore for every doubling in solar manufacturing capacity energy used to produce solar panels decreased by 12-13 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 17-24 percent. Over the last decade, solar manufacturing capacity has increased 10x.

As for "scrubbers" and coal, China is way ahead of the US.
China recently cancelled construction of 104 new coal plants equal to one third of the US's total installed coal capacity. Even then, China's coal regulations are so much cleaner than the US's that by 2020 not one single US coal plant would be clean enough to legally operate if it were in China.

The jobs aren't coming back. If coal production increases, the jobs that come back are going to Wyoming, not Kentucky, because the coal mining there uses fewer people and thus costs less.

"Uses fewer people and thus costs less" means "the jobs move there, but there aren't going to be very many of them."

Look at this one for data: Complex Market Forces Are Challenging Appalachian Coal Mining: https://www.americanprogress.o...

>No matter where you stand on climate change, linking it to the above is more than a bit of a stretch.

Likely your bias contributed to your reading into this a claim never made, and that is that all climate change = Man made Global warming. Some are related, but if you re-read this article with that difference in mind, it is then true. That small localized changes will get worse as the world gets hotter is made more important by understanding how vulnerable the world is to small changes in local climates.

I think too many people just don't get that ag societies still exist, and need to be informed that it often doesn't take much to trigger a flare up when you have so many people living in poverty. It may be wrong to conflate climate change of the past (regional droughts, water shortages, poor crops due to weather variations.) as closely with man made global warming, as this article hints. But it would be difficult or impossible to say localized climate change didn't contribute some to all of those uprisings.

https://www.americanprogress.o...

"A once-in-a-century winter drought in China contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices in Egypt, the worldâ(TM)s largest wheat importer." (Sternberg, p. 7)
"Of the world's major wheat-importing companies per capita, "the top nine importers are all in the Middle East; seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011." (Sternberg, p. 12)
"The world is entering a period of `agflation,` or inflation driven by rising prices for agricultural commodities." (Johnstone and Mazo, p. 21)
"Drought and desertification across much of the Sahel-northern Nigeria, for example, is losing 1,350 square miles a year to desertificationâ"have undermined agricultural and pastoral livelihoods," contributing to urbanization and massive flows of migrants. (Werz and Hoffman, p. 37)
"As the region's population continues to climb, water availability per capita is projected to plummet. Rapid urban expansion across the Arab world increasingly risks overburdening existing infrastructure and outpacing local capacities to expand service."(Michel and Yacoubian, p. 45)
"We have reached the point where a regional climate event can have a global extent." (Sternberg, p. 10)

That isn't right - businesses have more stakeholders than simple investors and there are frequent cooperatiosn between Unions and management to maintain operations and training.

Perhaps things are improving then. However, the question remains why fossil fuels...one of the most profitable industries...is getting *any* subsidies. At what point do they no longer need help to make billions annually?

I found this which finds a number of 2.4 billion in subsidies annually which I've seen in a number of places. One phrased it as 24 billion over a decade and I had misread that as they annual figure.

The point of a subsidy is to give a company help. The Oil companies do not need this help. Renewables still do as until CO2 release is priced in, Oil/coal is still fundamentally an unfair comparison.

> If you take out the liberal run towns with the highest gun violence, you'll find that gun deaths are indeed fairly rare.

Ah, there it is, that's the real reason for your argument. See I was missing how you were equating identity theft (which while a headache is less of a headache than death) with getting shot, but then I realized that this was your opportunity to take a jab at liberals.

You're twisting information to suite your narrative. You've also neglected to mention that (based on whatever uncited source you're claiming to get your information about gun crimes from) that Republican led states have much higher levels of crime than Democrat states. This information was based off of the analysis of the 2008 Uniform Crime Reports. You can find that analysis here: http://editions.lib.umn.edu/sm...

Of course there's also more recent studies (seen here: https://www.americanprogress.o...) that show a link between lax gun laws and higher gun crime rates. More directly it shows that states with the highest gun crimes (which are typically conservative states) have the highest crime rates. In fact Alaska, Louisiana, Montana, and Alabama rank higher (per capita) in firearm deaths than Democratic states. For comparison while all of the above states were at least 4 points above the national average of 10.26 deaths/100,000 people Illinois was ~2 points LOWER than the national average.

I suppose it's easier to just throw out random uncited sources and half-baked facts without researching the overall data. Especially when your entire goal is to slander a political view that you apparently disagree with. But the short of the long is that none of the above discussion is a valid answer on why everything should be black and white. I personally think you're just trolling -- even if it's not a conscious decision to troll.

When have government ever gotten science right?
Really? The fact you would even ask that shows your ignorance.

Setting aside crank politicians who pass laws saying "abortion is reversible", or bring snowballs to show and tell on the floor of the Senate, the answer is "nearly always". The majority of research in this country is backed by the government in some way.

We know how and why aircraft fly because of extensive research by NACA (and no, it's not that stuff you were taught in school about Bernoulli), who then became NASA. the same NASA that then perfected spaceflight, put us on the moon, and is even responsible for a large share of the research and data gathering on climate thanks to their extensive collection of science satellites.

There's the National Institute of Health, the CDC, and other medical research entities of the government.

There's the Pie in the Sky crazy projects division we know as DARPA. That would be the same DARPA responsible for the internet you are now using, space based data sensors to monitor the planet, GPS, nuclear launch detection, extensive material science breakthroughs, and computer science, and a few thousand other things we now take for granted. In fact, a large portion of the science and engineering occurring even in private industry in the 70's occurred as a result of a "brain drain" from DARPA, when many of its engineers and researchers left the agency as a result of budget cuts; those people went on to push the limits at Bell Labs, Xerox, 3M, and others.

Really, the list is HUGE.

Airplanes, cancer, space, lasers, computers, networking, cryptography, robotics, cars, agriculture, genetics, climate science, physics, chemistry, materials science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, archaeology, medical imaging, data storge methods....and I've probably only covered less than 1% of the achievements of government led research.

Government rarely gets science right you say?
No son, Government rarely gets it wrong.

And when it does, it's usually because of undue influence and meddling like this here "secret science" bill.
---

Government's Greatest Achievements of the Past Half Century: http://www.brookings.edu/resea...
Why Do Basic Research: http://publications.nigms.nih....
The High Return on Investment for Publicly Funded Research: https://www.americanprogress.o...

You understand that there is essentially no correlation between school spending and student achievement?

https://www.americanprogress.o... or try some googling.

The inflation-adjusted cost of schooling has tripled since 1970, with no discernible improvement in education outcome.

Young black workers were affected by many factors. An "anti acting white culture", poverty left over from slavery, systemic racism in hiring, promotion, and housing.. and most significantly for the last two generations has been the "drug war".

In some states, almost ALL people incarcerated for drug crimes are black- yet the majority of people committing drug crimes are white. Blacks are more likely to be stopped-- then to be searched when stopped- then to be a arrested if something is found- then to be convicted when tried- and finally to be sentenced to much longer sentences when convicted.

Quote:
According to the Sentencing Project's website, the rate of incarceration for white Connecticut residents in 2005 was 211 per 100,000 people; for black residents it was 2,532 per 100,000. The Sentencing Project reports that the national incarceration rate for whites in 2005 was 412 per 100,000, and the rate for blacks was 2,290 per 100,000 people.

Also according to the Sentencing Project's web site, in seven states (Iowa, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota) the black to white incarceration ratio is greater than 10 to one.

1. about one in every 33 black men was a sentenced prisoner and the rate for white men was about one in every 205, for Hispanic men about one in every 79; and

2. black men represented the largest proportion of sentenced male inmates at yearend 2006 (38%); white men made up 34%; and Hispanic men, 21%.

More reading here...
http://www.cga.ct.gov/2008/rpt...

http://www.americanprogress.or...

http://socialistworker.org/blo...

It's very difficult to predict which areas of science are likely to produce valuable discoveries. However, due to the incredible success of science throughout the last century (at least) it's quite a safe bet to invest in science and technoloy.

Here's an interesting link about the economic effects of publicly funded science: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/technology/report/2012/12/10/47481/the-high-return-on-investment-for-publicly-funded-research/

That's a wonderful report let me ask you did you see what was missing in it ?

Think about it, what is needed for that report to be valid in a discussion of using public funds for science ?

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Did you get it ? Well if not you need to ask where are the baseline returns and just how much of those industrial returns have been recaptured. Just from your link we got "optical digital recording" I read that and see wow my tax dollars went to build china and japans DVD business. Look again at your same report, It's claiming "750 billion dollar return on the human genome project" that's flat out bullshit.

However, science can take a while to pay off, so at the moment, the LHC doesn't look good value, but who knows what we'll be up to in 50 years time?

It's very difficult to predict which areas of science are likely to produce valuable discoveries. However, due to the incredible success of science throughout the last century (at least) it's quite a safe bet to invest in science and technoloy.

Here's an interesting link about the economic effects of publicly funded science: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/technology/report/2012/12/10/47481/the-high-return-on-investment-for-publicly-funded-research/

However, science can take a while to pay off, so at the moment, the LHC doesn't look good value, but who knows what we'll be up to in 50 years time?

Well I can't speak for parent, but honestly this has been the case since political power overtook that whole tribal test of strength thing back in the days. Submit a single instance where those who held the highest concentration of resources (money, slaves, oil (crude or olive), land, etc...) didn't use them to get favorable status from those who represented the people and then we'll talk.

Yes, wealth leads to a democratically dispropotionate influence over politics. That's why it matters how skewed the wealth distribution is. The more skewed it is, the larger fraction of power will be in the hands of the few rich. Inequality in the USA is rising, and the problem did not use to be as bad as it is now. In the 70s, the United States had a significantly lower Gini coefficient (though still much higher than most European countries), but it has been rising since then:
http://www.americanprogress.or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Inequality is also different from country to country. Again, due to the natural tendency for the rich to dominate, one expects that on average democracies with higher economic equality should be healthier. The USA does quite poorly on metrics of income inequality lately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So I agree that the huge influence of people like the Koch brothers is not that surpising in light of the huge income inequality in today's USA. But it's still scary, and should not be taken for granted. It can be fought, and the most obvious way of fighting it is by reducing the different between rich and poor. Saying that "this has always happened" ignores that the degree to which it has happened has changed and can be changed.

Increasing the minimum wage will do a few things:

1) Drive the economics of automation and productivity increases which will create more unemployment of unskilled workers, not less. Although this might be good for the economy broadly but its not good for the group minimum wage increase advocates claim to seek to help.

2) It will raise costs which will be reflected in consumer prices, effectively raising the cost of living. Lowering the quality of life the slightly more successful enjoy. In otherwords its an attack on the middle class.

Nice try, except there is no evidence for either of those things happening when reviewing past minimum wage increases. Try using facts & real math instead of right-wing talking points.

http://www.cepr.net/documents/...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

"The studies find minimum-wage increases even provide an economic boost, albeit a small one, as strapped workers immediately spend their raises. A 2011 paper by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that a $1 minimum-wage increase lifts household income by about $250 and increases spending by about $700 a quarter in the following year. The spending increase is driven by a small number of households that primarily buy vehicles. "

http://www.americanprogress.or...

"There is no evidence to support the claim that a higher minimum wage will lead to less employment. Businesses can easily absorb a higher minimum wage—with a small price increase or a small reduction in already very high profits, for example. The argument that a higher minimum wage will be a job killer simply doesn’t pass the sniff test of basic economic arithmetic, and is contradicted by reams of serious economic research."

The percentage depletion allowance: This lets oil companies deduct about 15% of the money generated from a well from its taxes. Eliminating it would save about $1 billion a year.

The deduction essentially lets oil companies treat oil in the ground as capital equipment. For any industry, the value of that equipment can be written down each year.

But critics say oil in the ground is not capital equipment, but a national resource that the oil companies are simply using for their own profit.

The foreign tax credit: This provision gives companies a credit for any taxes they pay to other countries. Altering this tax credit would save about $850 million a year.

Foreign governments can collect money from oil companies through royalties -- fees for depleting their national resources -- and income taxes.

A royalty would be deducted as a cost of doing business, and would likely shave about 30% off a company's tax bill. Categorized as income tax, it is 100% deductible.

Foreign governments long ago grew wise to the U.S. tax code. To reduce costs for everyone involved and attract business, they agreed to call some royalties income taxes, allowing oil companies to take the 100% deduction on a bigger slice of their bill.

Intangible drilling costs: This lets the industry write off about $780 million a year for things like wages, fuel, repairs and hauling costs.

All industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year.

Here's the practical outcome of these policies: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/12/20/81497/baucus-tax-reform-cuts-46-billion-in-oil-breaks/

The oil industry has prospered over the past decade, thanks to high oil and gasoline prices. The five largest companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell—earned more than $1 trillion. In the first nine months of 2013, these five companies earned a combined $71 billion in profits. Certainly, these companies and other large oil companies will prosper without $40 billion in special tax breaks over the next decade.

The tax subsidies for renewable energy are dwarfed by the tax subsidies for oil and gas. The oil and gas production industry is hugely profitable. When an industry has the top five companies making a trillion dollars profit over ten years why do they need any tax breaks that other businesses don't get?

The real rich bastards are the oil company executives. You know how they spend that vast profit? Stock buybacks. About 25% of big oil company profit is going into stock buy back programs, which is more then they spend on exploration and acquisitions. Because of way that executive compensation is structured with stock options and deferred payouts, this ends up being a huge multiplier payout multiplier for the executives. They get their stock at a ridiculous discount, pump up the value and realize vast personal wealth.

All the investors are happy because they see their valuation go up as well so they don't complain. It's short term gain over long term profit. According to this 2007 Bloomberg article, the big oil companies are effectively liquidating themselves over the longer term.

If Chevron Corp. keeps buying back its stock at the current rate, the com

Oil Subsidies That Should Be Removed

First, let’s take a look at oil subsidies that are obvious and unnecessary. Congress should eliminate the following subsidies: Government R&D. The Department of Energy (DOE) has spent taxpayer dollars on oil research and development, including funding for unconventional oil, gas, and coal. Although President Obama’s FY 2012 budget request significantly cuts funding for the Office of Fossil Energy, decreasing its size by $417.8 million below the FY 2010 appropriation, it does not go far enough. The only funding in this area should maintain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, for which the President’s budget requests an appropriate $121.7 million. Eliminating all other fossil energy funding would save $399 million.
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Tax Credit. Oil producers receive a 15 percent tax credit for costlier methods and technologies, such as injecting liquids and carbon dioxide into the earth. Many EOR processes are no longer in use, and the tax credit applies only when the price of oil falls below a certain level.
Marginal Well Production Credit. Marginal wells produce 15 or fewer barrels of oil per day, produce heavy oil, or produce mostly water and fewer than 25 barrels of oil per day. The marginal well production credit is another safety-net tax provision. This is another preferential tax credit that Congress should repeal.

Applied research of any kind—not just oil research and development—is better left to the private sector. The private sector should not be subsidized because of market conditions, as happens with the so-called safety-net tax credits that kick in if the price of oil falls below a certain level.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/05/whats-an-oil-subsidy

I'm not sure why global job movement is such a sensitive subject to the Trolls, but...I know: Don't Feed the Trolls... so, in the interest of education of those who aren't trolling and don't already know, here is just one of many many sources of information about the link between China, the WTO, and Bill Clinton and Congress' year 2000 activities and the subsequent fallout -

...Bill Clinton, the country's most ardent booster of opening trade with China, looks especially imprudent 10 years later. During a press conference on March 29, 2000, Clinton said that granting China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR), which allowed China to gain entry into the WTO, would be a great deal for America. "We do nothing," Clinton said. "They have to lower tariffs. They open up telecommunications for investment. They allow us to sell cars made in America in China at much lower tariffs. They allow us to put our own distributorships there. They allow us to put our own parts there. We don't have to transfer technology or do joint manufacturing in China any more. This a hundred-to-nothing deal for America when it comes to the economic consequences."

It didn't quite work out that way. Since 2000, the trade deficit with China has surged by 173 percent, from $83 billion in 2000 to $227 billion in 2009. The United States has lost more than one-third of all its manufacturing jobs -- 5.6 million; U.S. wages have declined; the country has suffered a financial meltdown; it has spent $14 trillion on economic stimulus, only to experience the highest unemployment rates in generations and annual federal budget deficits of more than $1 trillion. These trends are not "likely to end"..."

Further, a few more facts might help clarify things -

Data from the U.S. Department of Commerce showed that “U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.”...

...Private equity firms have increased the pressure to cut costs by any means necessary, leading to more overseas outsourcing. Steve Pearlstein, a professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University and a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist, details the overseas outsourcing done by private equity firms in the 1980s, beginning with:

A wave of corporate takeovers, many of them unwanted and uninvited. Corporate executives came to fear that if they did not run their businesses with the aim of maximizing short-term profits and share prices, their companies would become takeover targets and they would be out of a job. Overnight, outsourcing became a manhood test for corporate executives.

For the private equity firms that took over companies, “the standard strategy has been to load up company executives with so much stock and stock options that they don’t hesitate to make difficult decisions such as shedding divisions, closing plants or outsourcing work overseas.”...

I hope this helps.

Federal employees were not allowed to just get another job elsewhere in the meantime. many had to continue working, unpaid.

All those who had to continue working were getting paid. So your point is bogus.

Contrary to what you are lead to believe by the press, the government was not actually out of spending money.
Read and learn: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2011/03/21/9347/were-not-broke/

Espionage is an over charging, clearly. You've committed espionage when you've divulged state secrets FOR ANOTHER COUNTRY. So even though Israel is a friendly nation, we still kick their spies out and or jail them.

http://definitions.uslegal.com/e/espionage/

But Snowden didn't release state secrets to and for a foreign country. He did it for Americans.

It's prosecutorial overreach and worse for the prosecution, is likely to be perceived as such by potential juries. I feel an acquittal on the espionage charge forthcoming, even in absentia.

So the question arises at least in my mind- is this a dog and pony show, with Snowden perhaps unwittingly playing the role of a dog?

Is the government using Snowden to leak this information and if so, why?

To acclimate citizens to this level of scrutiny? To see if we'll swallow it? Maybe.

Or is it a bid on the part of , possibly some subset of, the intelligence community to get the program revised and toned down because they're afraid of the corrupting power unlimited access to the most personal secrets of lawmakers and other power players could put into the hands of a Cheney or a set of true believers like the neocons?

It's not that far fetched. Consider that the neocons twice now have attempted, once successfully, to foment wars based on false intelligence they produced through Team B efforts, efforts which the intelligence community deeply resented and still resent especially since many Americans wrongly cite the CIA as the producer of faulty intelligence in the run up to the war in Iraq.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/military/news/2004/08/18/988/its-time-to-bench-team-b/

http://www.proudprimate.com/Placards/teamb-cahn.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B

What this means is they're liars who will play WAY out of bounds to get their way, where WAY out of bounds includes LYING and DISTORTING intelligence and using intelligence to destroy domestic political opponents including exposing the identities of covert operators working for the CIA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame
see: Plamegate.

Historically, that didn't and can't now sit well with people at the CIA who consider accurate, unbiased intelligence assessments to be the crown jewel of nation's defense capability.

So is has the level of invasiveness which this program makes possible been gamed out somewhere at Langley, with one side playing the neocons and Cheney and using the techniques of deception, lying, distortion of information and targeting of dissenters through any means, legal or illegal, short (we think) of murder and the other side the CIA and other intelligence agencies upholding the letter and spirit of the law?

Perhaps such games revealed a gaping strategic disadvantage through which a coup by a Cheney and the neocons would be successful 100% of the time.

After all, we game out scenarios against all enemies foreign and domestic, if it's a threat to the US, it gets considered.

Perhaps one of the conclusions was- this intelligence program is a serious, mortal threat to the Republic.

Perhaps they took the result of this gaming to the President, who agreed with their conclusions. Perhaps a plan was hatched to subvert it, all the while making it look like they're only and intensely interested in doing the opposite.

I know it sounds too weird to be true, but this IS how intelligence agencies and covert missions work on a good day. This is the games they play.

If Obama tried to unilaterally quietly retire the program, it would just come back for the next administration who wanted it, and we know what admin would want it. Without the p

Here is a better overview of big-carbon tax loopholes, and what they cost. Some of these subsidies go back 100 years.

Big Oil’s Misbegotten Tax Gusher

Conservative media consistently cover-up for the oil industry. And people like you believe that someone the oil industry is a poor-begotten pillar of US society, and not just a seminal example of crony capitalism.

The US has huge institutionalized race problems.

Yep.

In an excellent primer, the Center for American Progress explains the stats behind the disparity:

        According to the latest data, which was collected from schools nationwide during the 2009-2010 academic year, black students were three and a half times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white classmates. What’s more, African Americans made up 46 percent of those students who were suspended more than once. During the 2009-2010 school year, 39 percent of all expulsions were of black students (in Polk county, FL that would be 3 times the percentage of the black population) even though they represented only 18 percent of enrolled students at sampled schools. These racial disparities in suspension and expulsion rates cannot be explained, as some contend, by socioeconomic status or by higher rates of misbehavior among students of color. Multiple studies confirm that students of color receive harsher consequences than their white peers for committing the same offenses.

Smoke that you SlashDotterers

As long as the wealth is created in a free market, that wealth is a reflection of merit

Bullshit.

The old adage "it takes money to make money" is true. If you aren't born wealthy, your chances of becoming wealthy are minimal.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2006/04/26/1917/understanding-mobility-in-america/

Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ... Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent

Being born to wealthy parents is not a reflection of merit, yet it overwhelmingly contributes to the likelyhood that you'll be wealthy yourself.

Forbes did an article last April about what some companies pay in taxes. Here's a few of the more recognizable companies.

Exxon Mobil - 42% ($27.3 billion paid on $41 billion in net income)

 
Any yet, failed to mention that in the years 2008-2010, Exxon Mobil paid an effective federal tax rate of just 17.6%. In 2009 they paid zero federal taxes.

Beep wrong answer in America...

Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave. Honestly, it is what it is, and this what Americans want. Hence this is what America gets.

I call bull. Please provide citation. The first numbers I got when I Googled it show that 75% of full time workers have sick days. Most part time workers don't get sick days, but then I can't say I really disagree with that. Those numbers are from The Center For American Progress, which is a very liberal organization. In other words, if they are reporting that 75% of full time workers get paid sick time, it's very likely that the number is actually significantly higher than that.

At my last job, we didn't get sick days. If we were sick, we didn't go to work, and we still got paid. We just didn't have any given number of days. Of course, if they noticed that you were abusing the system, they may ask you to start bringing in Doctors notes.

For most, setting aside luck, regardless of what you do, the class you were born in is the class you die in.

I can't bear to think about how horrible your world must be to live in.

The world he lives in is the one you and I you live in, where inter-generational class mobility in the United States is low compared to other developed countries. The outcome of your live is by-and-large a result of what opportunities the environment your are born into offers.

(Oh, and quoting a fan of Adolph Hiltler and notorious union buster doesn't really help your argument.)

Wow, are you likely to get an earful over this. Here's my perspective (not a neutral one):

The "individual mandate" part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires you to carry health care insurance. However, supporters claim that because the risk associated to insurers is now spread out over a much larger segment of the population (those who would normally decline health insurance are obviously less likely to need it), the cost to individuals in terms of premiums is likely to decline. In other words, they're betting that the cost of your insurance is likely to decline. Personally, I think that's likely... for insurers, anyway. Whether insurers pass these cost savings to individuals is a craps shoot. When Massachusetts (under, ahem, Governor Romney) passed a law with an individual mandate, premiums fell something like 40% at the same time that it was rising nationally.

Another big part of the bill is the "pre-existing condition" clause: basically, an insurer cannot deny you coverage because you already have a medical condition that they don't want to cover. There was some worry among ACA boosters that the court might strike down the "individual mandate" part without the "pre-existing condition" part, which would have been catastrophic to the risk pools: seven states have tried passing pre-existing condition laws without the individual mandate, and it went very badly for all of them. So if it turns out that you come down with some kind of chronic or severe condition, it can no longer be used as a reason for an insurer to deny you insurance.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/05/oil_company_subsidies.html appears to be a list of subsidies matching that criteria, but it should be noted they're listed as subsidies that were being targeted for elimination in the 2011 budget. I don't know if they've actually been cut.

You're really unaware of the oil-specific subsidies that have recently been debated in Congress?

Educate yourself, my friend

Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it.

I think it would be really interesting to research whether that financial incentive is actually real (i.e. actually working as an incentive). According to a study I recently read, vertical mobility in the U.S. is quite low, especially compared to other industrialized countries with a more functional welfare system.

I'm going to step over the profound ignorance of not providing even the "Po Folk" a grounding in the humanities, sciences, or enlightened discourse because this single point probably deserves an entire response of its own but I'll leave it to someone else.

Students around the country are being priced out of an education because an education is antithetical to an informed and responsible citizenry. It is inherently easier to manage a population of people who know only what you see fit to tell them. The cost of going to even the best of schools in the 50s and 60s was well within the grasp of anyone with a Veteran's Loan. Sadly, as young people started getting enlightened in the 60s (and began to comprehend the intent of our founding Fathers) they began to see the duplicity and hypocrisy of their government leaders and how the war on communism was as often as not a war on the Bill of Rights and the right of choice. So, the government decided to dramatically cut funding to colleges en-masse, and more and more colleges became self serving for profit institutions.

This is all above and beyond the fact that education in the United States is for all intents and purposes a monopoly. I've looked around, a person couldn't get the education you describe if they wanted to. Look high and look low, there is no "Billy Bob's College of Professional Knowledge". Part of that has to do with accreditation, and that's probably a good thing, but it also forces students to deal with the fact that all colleges even the Community Colleges are quickly becoming too expensive for the growing number of young people in serious poverty and unable to find work. Education has just become one more way that the class mobility Americans have always assumed as a personal right is quick vanishing. A recent study clearly indicates that its significantly easier for people in France and any number of other places in Europe to rise out of there current class than it is in America.

Franklin Roosevelt spoke of a "Second Bill of Rights" based on ensuring a healthy and vibrant middle class and a dynamic and productive democracy. Instead over the last 30 years we've watched the near total dismantling of the original "Bill of Rights" and an inequality of wealth greater than that preceding the Great Depression. The problem isn't and has never been poor college choice. It is a growing appreciation of just how seriously things have gotten out of hand in our country and how desperately we must act to put things right.

Hard work is all it takes for a black person to escape poverty? Bullshit.

Why not?

We figured back in 2003 that we could point our national "gun" at Iraq, and force them to be "free".

And that worked out so well too! And just like the Bush Administration predicted ( http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/priraqclaimfact1029.htm )- it only cost $60 billion, we were in and out of there in 6 weeks, and the oil revenues paid for it with zero lasting economic consequence. And they have a "George W Bush" square in Baghdad, and hold parades there where the children throw candies and flowers at the George W Bush statue.

I will counter you citations with these:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469
Sorry, there is no social mobility in America anymore.

And, I mean I'm sorry, but did you even look at those graphs? You can move around the bottom ninety percent all you want, it doesn't even matter. You are a peon if you aren't in the top one percent. And there is no way short of a miracle you or I are getting into the club that owns ninety percent of the wealth in this country. We're all fighting over table scraps.

Yes, they are the same people (or their direct descendants) who were there before. There is more social mobility in France than in the US. On average, it takes five generations for a poor family to become middle class. On average, children of the wealthy stay wealthy, children of the middle class stay middle class (or slip to poor) and children of the poor stay that way. The American Dream of a true meritocracy is a lie. You are like the prisoner Brian meets in the Roman Prison, in Life of Brian, who lauds the Romans while hanging upside down from his feet. A fair day's pay for a fair day's work, indeed.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html
http://www.economist.com/node/15908469?story_id=15908469

Normal countries, ones that are not run by kleptocrats, manage to defuse the power law problem. In America, we have far less social mobility than in any other first world country except the UK. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html And we should defuse the power law, it hampers innovation and excellence. If everyone just tends to go with what other people are doing or using, better alternatives get overlooked.

Do you really not understand the point I am trying to make, or are you being dense for rhetorical purposes? To the elite who control our country and take in ninety percent of the income, $250k/year is a joke, a sign that you aren't any sort of real player, but just a peon no different from the guy making $20k/year. If you are making $250k/year, some wealthier fellow is still eating most of your lunch.

Back to my original point, plenty of stupid people make more than enough money to blow $200,000 on a fake girlfriend and not even feel it. It does not take brains to make money, it takes connections and money to make money. Real money, that is. Brains and a whole lot of luck might get you into the $250k/year "Adorable Junior Capitalist Club" but without connections and a certain amount of sociopathic lack of empathy and remorse, you won't be making much more than that.

Simply put, there is no upward social mobility in America anymore. The children of the middle class are just as likely to make less than their parents as they are to make more, and things are even worse for the poor. We do not live in a meritocracy, that is my point. My point is not "$250k/year isn't that much to the average guy," of course it is! My point is that $250k/year isn't going to buy you a Senator, or even a Congressman, and therefore, is not real money to the people who can and do buy Senators and Congressmen.

And, more importantly, neither you nor anyone you know will never be one of those people, no matter how hard you try. If you want upward mobility, go to France. Or Sweden. Or, heck, almost anywhere but here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

There is no social mobility in America anymore.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2005/01/the_economist_o.html

and, from here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

The key findings relating to intergenerational mobility include the following:

*Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
*Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.
*Education, race, health and state of residence are four key channels by which economic status is transmitted from parent to child.
*African American children who are born in the bottom quartile are nearly twice as likely to remain there as adults than are white children whose parents had identical incomes, and are four times less likely to attain the top quartile.
*The difference in mobility for blacks and whites persists even after controlling for a host of parental background factors, children’s education and health, as well as whether the household was female-headed or receiving public assistance.
*After controlling for a host of parental background variables, upward mobility varied by region of origin, and is highest (in percentage terms) for those who grew up in the South Atlantic and East South Central regions, and lowest for those raised in the West South Central and Mountain regions.
*By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

Key findings relating to short-run, year-to-year income movements include the following:

*The overall volatility of household income increased significantly between 1990-91 and 1997-98 and again in 2003-04.
*Since 1990-91, there has been an increase in the share of households who experienced significant downward short-term mobility. The share that saw their incomes decline by $20,000 or more (in real terms) rose from 13.0 percent in 1990-91 to 14.8 percent in 1997-98 to 16.6 percent in 2003-04.
*The middle class is experiencing more insecurity of income, while the top decile is experiencing less. From 1997-98 to 2003-04, the increase in downward short-term mobility was driven by the experiences of middle-class households (those earning between $34,510 and $89,300 in 2004 dollars). Households in the top quintile saw no increase in downward short-term mobility, and households in the top decile ($122,880 and up) saw a reduction in the frequency of large negative income shocks.
*For the middle class, an increase in income volatility has led to an increase in the frequency of large negative income shocks, which may be expected to translate to an increase in financial distress.
*The median household was no more upwardly mobile in 2003-04, a year when GDP grew strongly, than it was it was during the recession of 1990-91.

How about John Boner's $450 million earmark spending the Pentagon's budget on a project it doesn't even want?

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2117312
http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Guide/Overview.html
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

Enjoy, there are lots more.

Lived there for 6 years, thanks, and it's not 'talking shit about us' it's telling the truth:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

for a review and statements like: "Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance."

That's very very very low social mobility. I'm sorry if the truth offends you, but research on the subject really does side with the statement.

the USA does a better job of meritocracy than most other countries.

Nope...not if you compare the USA against other OECD nations at least.

"By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States."
--Center for American progress