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A Look at the Koch Brothers Dark-Money Network
An anonymous reader writes "The California attorney general and the state's top election watchdog named the 'Koch brothers network' of donors and dark-money nonprofits as the true source of $15 million in secret donations made last year to influence two bitterly fought ballot propositions in California. State officials unmasked the Kochs' network as part of a settlement deal that ends a nearly year-long investigation into the source of the secret donations that flowed in California last fall."
I love it how you're marked a troll when as somebody who lives in Colorado, and is a conservative, had a field day calling the liberals hypocrites when Bloomberg donated, what was it, $300,000 to try to stop the recall of one of the two liberal state representatives. Yeah, it's bad to have big money backings as long as it's the guy you don't support. And of course forget about the fact that in Boulder, CO, the town I live outside of is having a big pro-municiplization campaign of their power grid that had citizens united gone the other way, would be illegal. And of course, lets not forget that a lot of what the ACLU does would be banned had citizens united gone the other way. But hey, because they disagreed with that one case that was actually brought to court, who cares about the wider affects of the ruling and what they could have been.
I swear, liberals really can't see anything in the way of consequences past the end of their noses.
Especially considering the the California Teachers Union outspent everyone of contributions for California elections. These are the same people that make getting rids of child molesters from schools such a difficult task (see news reports about the difficulty in getting rid of truly bad teachers).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
As bad as it would be if you were used to living in a nice suburb and then ended up in something kind of like Detroit, how much worse would it suck if you were born and raised in Detroit and never acquired the net worth or job skills to be able to viably move somewhere else.
A whole buch of people on Slashdot, including myself, "viably moved" between nations, while not being insanely rich in the first place. An Indian or Chinese citizen faces a far more formidable barrier than a US citizen; and still, there are many Indian and Chinese computer nerds busy at work in US companies. Even an illegal Mexican risks his life by crossing the desert. A citizen of Detroit risks nothing.
Besides, how much money does it take for a poor Detroit resident to grab a bag with spare clothes, say goodbye to his parents, and just walk away if he can't afford even an old car? Leaving Detroit is certainly valuable because he'd be better off just about anywhere else. Most importantly, he leaves his old circle of friends, and habits, and places, behind - those were not good for him, generally.
Another factor in all this, that I'm not positive the upper class really understands: If the middle class goes completely under, it takes the upper class with them, because the upper class's investment income depends ultimately on the consumer spending of everyone else.
The upper class understands this very well. However the plan is to "fundamentally change America" from a free market society, where consumer thinks for himself and votes with his money, into a socialist paradise of mandatory spending. The taxation scheme was already in place. Now Obamacare is plugged in - another piece of HUGE cost. The free market is being converted into something else - into a system where government oversees a bunch of nominally independent companies who, in fact, are all alike and operate under the same set of rules (making their products similar.) This is how the industry of USSR was set up.
Why to bother with all these transformations? Because the USA is not sustainable. The USA lost too many positions on top - of largest industry, of most qualified workforce, of best talent, of best science (that one is still fighting,) the best medicine, and many more. Super high tech areas will hold the longest, but they employ only a tiny percentage of the population. Service industry is the only avenue that is open to the rest - but it is also shrinking, given automation and under the press of reduced income (so instead of a restaurant, a jobless person eats at home.)
If there are no jobs, the mass of unemployed (for all reasons) will be growing. The new balance will be established, with a few managers, a few techies, and with a lot of foreign workforce who telecommutes from their countries. Just look at property taxes - commercial real estate is too expensive; it is certainly not competitive against Chinese facilities. If you have to have so many unemployed, you might just as well put them on a specific program that keeps them alive. Otherwise they will riot, and that wouldn't be good. The intent is to maintain this new configuration as long as possible, and print new USD at ever increasing rate. When the world drops the USD then it gets pretty bad pretty fast. But the US government is an expert in kicking the can down the road. Nobody at the helm is looking at the problem long term - everyone is only measuring political activity in terms at the office.