RSN: Nearly 800 Dead Babies Found in Septic Tank in Ireland, Major Companies Distance Themselves From US Chamber Campaign Against Obama's Climate Plan, et al

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Bill Simpich | State Secret: The Framing of Lee Oswald

Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News
Simpich writes: "My new book, State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald, tells the story of a Soviet defector who returned to the United States and how he was closely watched over the final four years of his life."
READ MORE
Charles Pierce | The Bergdahl Chronicles: Murky Is as Murky Does
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The end of the day yesterday was enlivened by the news that several of the soldiers currently calumnizing Bowe Bergdahl were being prepped for the job by several ratfckers of the Republican kind, including a famous Twitter commando who once was tasked with keeping John Bolton's meds on schedule."
READ MORE
The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible
Cindy Cohn, Nadia Kayyali, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Excerpt: "If you hear any one of these in the future, you can tell yourself straight up: 'this person isn't credible,' and look elsewhere for current information about the NSA spying. And if these are still in your talking points (you know who you are) it's time to retire them if you want to remain credible. And next time, the talking points should stand the test of time."
READ MORE
Amy Davidson | Bowe Bergdahl and the Guantánamo Paradox
Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
Davidson writes: "Want to be more sure that the people now at Guantánamo stay prisoners for an extended period of time? Then convict them of something; give them a sentence."
READ MORE
Protesters Frack David Cameron's Home
Steven Swinford, Miranda Prynne, Telegraph.co.uk
Excerpt: "Environmental protesters this morning targeted David Cameron's home as the government unveiled new powers to enable fracking to take place under people's properties."
READ MORE
Nearly 800 Dead Babies Found in Septic Tank in Ireland
Al Jazeera America
Excerpt: "The Catholic Church in Ireland is facing fresh accusations of child abuse after a researcher found records for 796 young children allegedly buried in a mass grave beside a former orphanage for the children of unwed mothers."
READ MORE

Major Companies Distance Themselves From US Chamber Campaign Against Obama's Climate Plan
Josh Israel, ThinkProgress
Israel writes: "Leading climate-friendly members of Chamber don't want to be associated with its anti-climate report. Several member companies, contacted by ThinkProgress, declined to endorse the Chamber's efforts against the administration's move to address a direct cause of climate change."
READ MORE

Elizabeth Warren Warns That The Supreme Court Is Becoming ‘A Subsidiary’ Of The Chamber Of Commerce

If you care......

Elizabeth Warren Warns That The Supreme Court Is Becoming ‘A Subsidiary’ Of The Chamber Of Commerce

June 18th, 2013




Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) used her remarks at the 2013 American Constitution Society for Law and Policy National Convention to warn that the Supreme Court is being captured by interests representing America’s biggest corporations:

Take a look at the win rate of the Chamber of Commerce. According to the Constitution Accountability Center, the Chamber moved from a 43 percent win rate during the very conservative Berger Court to a 56 percent win rate under the very conservative Rehnquist court. And now they are at a 70 percent win rate under the Roberts Court. Follow this pro-business trend to its obvious conclusion and you will end up with a Supreme Court that’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber of Commerce is the nation’s largest business lobby. In 2012, it spent over $100 million on lobbying, according to OpenSecret.com. Aligned with the dark money “social welfare” non-profits of the Koch brothers and Karl Rove, the Chamber helped raise and spend about one billion dollars to influence the 2012 elections.

But elections are far less reliable an investment than focusing on the courts.

“All told, the Chamber of Commerce has filed a whopping 18 amicus briefs this Term – just below its record number of 21 in October Term 2010,” according to Doug Kendall and Tom Donnelly of the Constitution Accountability Center. “Overall, the Court will likely decide 76 cases this Term, meaning that the Chamber will have participated in roughly 24 percent of the Court’s decided cases.”
Conservative Justices side with the Chamber 82 percent of the time.



The cases that matter to the Chamber aren’t generally the high-profile cases about civil rights, but rather quiet victories that swing justice in favor of corporations. They seek to defeat clean energy requirements and make it more difficult for consumers to file class action lawsuits — and they usually win.

Warren says that fighting back against the corporate takeover of the highest court in the land will not be easy.

“We are up against a conservative movement that for 30 years, since President Reagan, has dedicated itself to packing the courts with pro-business, anti-regulation conservative allies,” she said. “They are tough and they prepared.”

The fight begins, she said, with speaking out about what’s going on in the courts. The future of the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act and the country depend on it.




http://www.nationalmemo.com/elizabeth-warren-warns-that-the-supreme-court-is-becoming-a-subsidiary-of-the-chamber-of-commerce/

Becoming Tools For Hate

The problems of being used go far deeper than Carl Gibson imagines.
The Nazis successfully employed the hatred and blame techniques being employed.

Target a group, any group.

Blame your declining purchasing power on them.
It must be: the immigrants, the gays, the Muslims, the poor, the endless list of 'different' from you and me. Employ 'code words' for concealed racism.

Take every disaster, such as the Boston Marathan Bombing to stoke the flames of fear and hysteria, just as Hitler did: Reichstag Fire Decree. Conduct political discourse in inflammatory rage, appealing to hysteria rather than reason.

When you fail to learn from history, you are destined to become a tool that repeats it, which is why poor education is advantageous.  It also places the failures in the wrong places.

Corporate slaves. (photo: Peoples Voice.org)

Time to Abolish Left vs. Right

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

14 May 13

eeping our nation divided is an agenda supported by both Fox News and MSNBC. The media and the politicians both profit from Americans believing they should hate their fellow Americans. And oddly enough, the one thing that unites the traditional “right” and “left” in this country is our hatred for those same media organizations and politicians that make money by regularly lying to us. The best way to beat them is to find the things that bring us together in one common purpose and unite around that.

An article in the Atlantic last week talked about how the dominant liberal narrative is broken. The argument that government is inherently good and is necessary to provide things like Social Security, Medicare and national parks has some truth to it, and worked well for both parties in the mid-twentieth century. Democrats and Republicans from FDR to Eisenhower won landslide elections using the good-government narrative. But now that our government is captive to corporations and their lobbyists like the US Chamber of Commerce, Americans of all ideological leanings are united in the belief that our current government, as it stands, is completely out of touch and needs radical change from outside the political system to do it.

 

In this video Mark Meckler, a co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, talks about how he had a surprisingly pleasant conversation with several of the co-founders of MoveOn.org about crony capitalism. It was an incredibly populist speech about how they found themselves in complete agreement that big moneyed special interests have taken government hostage and have wasted billions of tax dollars on bailing out banks (like the Federal Reserve's $16 trillion in bailouts to both US and foreign banks that went entirely under the media's radar). He also talked about how it’s more profitable for the crony capitalist DC bubble and the media they control to keep us divided than it is for us to play into those forced divisions.

 

Another Tea Party founder lamented about how the raw populist energy that originally inspired the Tea Party back in early 2008 against the Bush administration’s bailouts of the biggest banks has been overtaken by Republican ideologues like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. Karl Denninger, a financial blogger who runs MarketTicker.com, said the Tea Party’s original message was against the big banks. After Obama’s inauguration, there was anger over appointees like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, who were the same bought-and-paid-for financiers who deregulated the banks during Clinton’s second term and brought about the beginning of the financial collapse. Denninger supported the Occupy Wall Street movement early on, saying it was picking up where the Tea Party left off before it was hijacked by the Republican Party.

 

Democrats and Republicans are using issues like gun control, Benghazi and gay marriage to continue feeding the illusion that there’s a difference between the two and to continue the flow of money to their corporate masters. Whenever a politician says "gun control," gun sales go through the roof. When the ruckus over Chick-Fil-A's disapproval of marriage equality became mainstream conversation, social conservatives formed lines that went around the entire block to make their political statement about marriage equality. After their much ado about nothing Benghazi hearings, GOP members of Congress are fundraising off of their witch hunt. In either instance, whenever you follow the money trail, gun manufacturers and allegedly gay-hating fast food restaurants made record sales and politicians raised more money. Money is the entire point.

 

When it comes to Republican and Democratic Party officials’ deference to corporate money, they’re both nearly identical. The GOP-controlled House is pressing Obama hard to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would endanger an entire region's drinking water supply and create a negligible amount of temporary jobs. Harry Reid’s Senate voted overwhelmingly for a resolution supporting the pipeline in their budget. The Monsanto Protection Act, which was written by GOP Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Monsanto officials, quietly became law with the signature of a Democrat president after the approval of a Democrat-led Senate.

 

Both parties are captive to the for-profit war industry – the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about – and are united in their support for military intervention whenever and wherever possible. Our last Republican president waged wars in two countries without being attacked by either one. Our current Democratic president has extended one of those wars by another ten years and used drones to take military action in several other countries. Even Rand Paul, who made a name for himself filibustering Obama’s drone czar to lead the CIA, has made statements supporting drones to be used on Americans. Even though traditional Republicans are united against wasteful government spending, and traditional Democrats are united against austerity policies, both parties can agree that there’s entirely too much wasteful spending in Washington when it comes to an imperial military force with a bloated budget currently occupying over 130 nations with 900 bases around the world, and the multibillion-dollar security and surveillance state used to monitor peaceful protesters instead of terrorists. We can certainly find agreement that it would be much more productive to stop spending money on the dysfunctional F-35 jet, which even John McCain has criticized, than make cuts to early childhood education programs like Head Start.

Americans should be smarter than to allow ourselves to get thrown into the counter-productive left vs. right fight hyped by the corporate-owned media and our corporate-owned politicians. If we’re going to fight a binary struggle, it should be populist vs. corporatist. That’s the only real division in this country right now. Are you on the people's side, or on big money's side?


Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

 

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

A Former Tea Party Patriot Gives A Speech That Will Make Progressives Stand

Published on Apr 16, 2013

Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler (who has since resigned from the organization) might be a conservative at heart, but this recent exchange from Seattle's Citizen University conference is an inspiring reminder that "right" and "left" share a lot more common ground than people might think.

This video is an excerpt from a talk at the Citizen University conference in Seattle. Check out the full talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zejJ...

To learn more about the process Mark and Joan used to find common ground, check out Living Room Conversations: http://www.livingroomconversations.org/

The human cost of 'deregulation' and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Each time communities sustain major catastrophes, deregulation is the foundation.

People were sickened and died because of the Framingham Compounding Center's dirty practices....caused by negligence and lack of regulation. The owners were the folks who conducted a fund raiser for Senator Scott Brown who endorsed 'deregulation.'

Mayflower, Arkansas is contaminated because of lack of regulation and Exxon's cover up.

Are the right wingers making the connection between the loss of life, increased danger in the workplace because of inadequate inspection/regulation and gutting government?

Shouldn't we be responsible to protect each other at work and at home? Are we so ignorant of history that we fail to make the connection to the regulations workers fought for?

The Texas Fertilizer Factory explosion is beyond words.

Up to 75 homes, a large apartment complex, a middle school and a nursing home suffered major damage in West, Texas. (photo: NBC36TV/Twitter)

What Do the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Al-Qaeda Have in Common?

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

04 May 13

Answer: Both aren't above killing people to attain their goals.

n 2009, Congress considered a bill that would have strengthened safety standards at fertilizer plants like the one that recently exploded in West, Texas, killing dozens of first responders and leveling a nearby middle school and a nursing home 500 yards away. The 2009 safety regulations were staunchly opposed by the US Chamber of Commerce, multinational corporations' lobbying arm in Washington. The lobby spent millions to defeat it and labeled it a "key vote" that year. Even though it passed the House, the bill died in the Senate before even getting a vote.

Had those new regulations passed, the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, could have been prevented. But even though the plant dealt in highly-explosive materials like ammonium nitrate, it was only inspected once in its entire history, in 1985. Corporate lobbies like the US Chamber of Commerce prioritize profits and stock prices above safety of the surrounding community, and vehemently oppose environmental and safety regulations in all instances by spending millions of dollars to influence Congress and support candidates who promise to deregulate anything and everything.

 

The only problem with deregulating environmental and safety laws for corporations is that it opens the floodgates for environmental disasters and fatal catastrophes. Corporations successfully lobbied to deregulate offshore oil drilling in 2002 and 2003, successfully gaining an exemption from the Bush administration on having to install acoustic switches that would activate blowout preventers on oil rigs. Oil companies have to abide by that law in every country where they drill, except for the United States. The acoustic switch shuts off oil blowouts at the source, plugging the well before the blowout becomes too large to contain.

 

Even though it would only cost an additional $500,000 to install, business groups opposed the idea of oil companies posting record profits that year having to pay an extra cost for even such a basic safety measure. Yet after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf Coast, BP has had to pay out billions of dollars in fines and settlements. Clearly, the business model of hyper-deregulation is costlier not only in terms of dollars spent, but in lives lost, habitats ruined, and entire economies upended.

 

The explosion in Boston was defined as a terrorist attack, as Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev's actions were done with malicious intent and claimed 3 lives while seriously injuring hundreds of others. The two men selfishly chose to end the live of others to make whatever petty point they wanted to make. But the explosion in West, Texas, was also done with malicious intent.

 

Anyone with half a brain knows that it's incredibly dangerous for a place that manufactures explosive materials to operate under safety standards that are decades out of date. The wanton deregulation that inevitably led to that explosion was also done with selfish intent, as the US Chamber of Commerce chose to allow corporations to make more money rather than keep the community safe from harm. By that definition the explosion in West, Texas, was also a terrorist attack.

 

Corporate terrorists should be pursued just as much as religious extremists who commit terrorist acts.

 

And since the US Chamber of Commerce hasn't released a statement apologizing to the community of West for their reckless behavior that led to the deaths of dozens, it can be said that they will continue to commit acts of terror for selfish economic gain until they're indicted for their complicity in manslaughter, if not murder.

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Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at carl@rsnorg.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

 

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

This and That, Standing Up to Big Business....Like Toyota?

Elizabeth Warren: Consumers Must 'Get Up And Fight'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/03/elizabeth-warren-consumers_n_3208964.html

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) rallied a packed Cape Cod cafe Wednesday night, calling upon constituents to "get up and fight" big businesses, the Cape Cod Times reported.

"How do Fortune 500 companies pay zero in taxes while college loans go up to 6 percent?" Warren asked. "This game is rigged."

Warren told attendees at the local community development meeting that consumers must stand up against big businesses and "be there to fight."

The senator, who took office in January, has criticized big corporations for having an unfair advantage over smaller businesses and for having too much influence over government affairs.

She has also been vocal in speaking out against protecting "too big to fail" banks.

“It has been almost five years since the financial crisis, but the big banks are still too big to fail," Warren said in March. "That means they are subsidized by about $83 billion a year by American taxpayers and are still not being held fully accountable for breaking the law. Attorney General Holder’s testimony that the biggest banks are too-big-to-jail shows once again that it is past time to end too-big-to-fail."


"How do Fortune 500 companies pay zero in taxes while college loans go up to 6 percent? This game is rigged."

Shut The Chamber

Tom Donohue, president of the US Chamber of Commerce, has gone on record saying that sending American jobs overseas is a good thing. Pretty outrageous for an organization that has the word "JOBS" hanging on the front of its building.

Source: http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/10/ldt.00.html

 

Steve Marmel

"Crickett" brand guns help a kid kill another kid and suddenly their site is down for "routine maintenance."

You'd be surprised they wouldn't stand behind their toy murder machine. It's the only place it's safe.

The "Who Is" is still registered to you guys, you know. So the blood trail still leads back to your company, guys.

Http://Facebook.com/TheMarmelPage

 

Tar Sands Action shared Leslie Grable's photo.

Really, Exxon? And you still don't know what happened to the other 126,000 gallons of spilled tar sands oil?

Thanks to Leslie, The Other 98% and Oil Change International for the image!

The Everlasting GOP Stoppers

This Public Service Announcement is from our good friends at Political Loudmouth.

Veruca.

It isn't just that he's a hero.....

The Boston Marathon Bombing highlights the need for all Americans to have health coverage, in spite of the misguided opposition from those who don't want to support it.

In this case, Jeff Bauman has coverage, yet the additional costs and care are not covered.



Shut The Chamber

 The US healthcare system= where the guy who had his legs blown off and helped police identify the terrorist bomber who did it, has to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars online just to pay his medical bills.

If you prefer healthcare to remain a privilege for the wealthy instead of a right for all, thank the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

http://www.nationofchange.org/boston-bombing-hero-who-identified-suspect-resorts-online-fundraising-pay-his-medical-bills-13664703

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday, Jeff Bauman’s image was seared into the American consciousness. An extremely graphic photo of Bauman being escorted in a wheelchair with most of his legs blown off quickly went viral. Bauman’s stock rose even further after reports surfaced that he had looked into the eyes of one of the bombing suspects minutes before the explosion, and that the moment he awoke from emergency care, he gave law enforcement critical information that substantially narrowed their field of suspects. But while police continue to scour the streets for at-large suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 27-year-old Bauman is scouring the internet for donations to help pay for his outsized medical bills.

Bauman’s friends created the page “Bucks For Bauman!” on the gofundme.com crowdfunding service. The money raised through donations to the site are meant to help Jeff and his family pay the exorbitant costs of his surgeries, ongoing medical care, and physical therapy. Since Tuesday, when the site was launched, Americans from across the country have poured in $158,294 in donations — over half of the overall $300,000 goal.

Help us speak truth to power. Donate what you can afford to support NationofChange.

Bauman has been fortunate enough to receive an impressive number of donations to help him pay his bills, and his uncle plans to buy him his first pair of prosthetic legs. But many other victims in the Boston bombings may not be as fortunate. The cost of treating the bombing survivors’ injuries is expected to exceed $9 million. The out-of-pocket costs associated with that treatment could bury many of the victims financially, even if they do have insurance — unless hospitals, insurers, and charitable foundations swoop in to help, as they did after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

You can donate to Jeff Bauman’s recovery fund here.

Update:
The original version of this story stated that Jeff Bauman does not have health insurance. This is incorrect. That claim was based on a quote from Bauman’s uncle, Dale Maybury of Westford, that was cited in The Boston Globe on Thursday. Not only does Bauman have employer-sponsored health coverage through Costco — the company “is also matching donations made by colleagues at the chain’s Nashua location,” according to a more recent Globe article from Friday. Bauman is being forced to raise funds despite this assistance due to the extraordinarily high costs associated with the amount of current and ongoing care that he requires.

http://www.nationofchange.org/boston-bombing-hero-who-identified-suspect-resorts-online-fundraising-pay-his-medical-bills-13664703

Monsanto's Hero: Senator Roy Blunt [R-MO]

US Uncut shared Shut The Chamber's photo.

Another bombshell from Shut The Chamber. Monsanto gave this guy $64K in campaign funds, then he helped them out by writing the Monsanto Protection Act.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) helped Monsanto write the Monsanto Protection Act before he buried it deep inside a budget bill, which has since been signed into law. Mon...santo is Blunt's 6th largest campaign donor. Blunt also received a $1,000 campaign check from the US Chamber of Commerce in 2010.

http://www.ibtimes.com/monsanto-protection-act-5-terrifying-things-know-about-hr-933-provision-1156079#

http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2012&cid=N00005195&type=I

http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgot.php?cmte=C00082040&cycle=2010

Glenn Beck: The Communist Conspiracy

Glenn Beck says 350.org is part of a communist plot
by Bill McKibben

Say this for Glenn Beck: He works fast. Less than 48 hours after we at 350.org launched our campaign to let businesses say that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't represent them, Beck hit back. A true friend of Chamber (here's a picture of him broadcasting from the group's roof -- certainly worth the $10,000 he donated from his $32 million annual earnings), he put little old 350.org up on his notorious board Friday night next to a hammer and sickle. We were part of a communistic conspiracy that also included the Apollo Alliance and the Service Employees International Union.


In some sense, I guess, this pleased us. Right back to J. Edgar Hoover and his attacks on Martin Luther King, "communist" has always been the epithet of choice for any organizers who've shown signs of being effective. (Tea Partiers are obviously chagrined that actual working people in Wisconsin are upstaging them.) In another sense, it's just sad: Confronted with the hard choices posed by physics and chemistry, Beck (like too many others) tries to find some specter to blame.

But it's not worth getting mad about. Better to point out that there's something ... funny about Beck.

Hence this little essay I wrote for The Washington Post:

My life as a communist actually began without
me knowing it, on Friday evening, when Glenn Beck
spent his program explaining about a "communistic"
conspiracy that included 10 groups in America.
One was 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate
change that I helped found three years ago. He even
put our logo up on his whiteboard -- and next to it a
hammer and sickle.

Since I don't actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn't
know about it until e-mails began to arrive,
informing me that indeed I was a communist.
My first reaction was: I'm not a communist.
I'm a Methodist.

But then I reconsidered. What exactly was
I doing when those e-mails arrived? I was
downloading an iPad app, At Bat 11, which lets
me (for only $14.99) hear the broadcast of any
baseball game anywhere in the country. Since
I live in New England, I use it to track our
beloved Boston squad, whose moniker I had
never before deeply contemplated. Now --
well, enough said.

And the next morning, on my first full day as
a communist? I spent most of it outdoors, at the
annual New England festival for young cross-country
ski racers. More than 500 kids from across the region
were competing, and I was standing on the toughest hill
cheering. And here's the thing -- at least with the first-
and second-graders, I was cheering for everyone equally.
Not only that, but did you know where this particular
type of skiing was invented? Norway.

Some people laugh at Mr. Beck
-- earlier in the same week,
for instance, he'd ventured the opinion that "Reformed Judaism"
was pretty much the same as Islamic extremism.
Not 100 percent correct, but the next day he apologized,
and explained the research technique that had led to the
slight miss: "I had, was having a conversation with a few
friends the night before -- one of them, I trust on things like
this, and I'm not even sure if I misunderstood him, or
misheard him, or what." In my case, though, the evidence
seemed fairly damning.

Especially because, earlier in the week, I'd
written a
widely circulated essay that attacked the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce, which on its own website says that as
"the voice of business, the Chamber's core purpose is to
fight for free enterprise." And yet I scourged the group --
because it's spent the past few years opposing any action
on climate change. Indeed, it submitted a petition to
the Environmental Protection Agency arguing that the
agency should avoid regulating carbon emissions because,
in the event of global warming, "populations can acclimatize
to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological,
and technological adaptations."

To me that sounds absurd. Instead of the 16 companies
that provided more than half the chamber's budget
adapting their business models to a world of safe
renewable energy, they wished all people everywhere
and forever to change their physiologies. But now I see
that my protests can be read as a gesture of support for
human solidarity, with all that implies.

I should have known better
than to go after the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. After all, Mr. Beck just
last year held a telethon on its behalf, encouraging
listeners to send the chamber checks, and ponying up
$10,000 of his own $32 million in earnings.
"They are us," he'd explained -- and indeed, an
executive of the chamber called in to thank him.

The Chamber of
Commerce spends more money than
anyone else lobbying Congress. It dropped hundreds
of thousands on the last state elections in Wisconsin,
all of it for the side now standing up for union-busting,
I mean human freedom. Opposing it -- well, clearly I'm
hammer-and-sickle all the way.

I turned 50 last fall -- that's half
a century not
understanding who I really was. There's something
liberating about finding out. After all, it was Marx who
said that above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, we can't have a planet "similar to that
on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth
is adapted." No, wait, those were NASA scientists.
The same people who faked the moon landing. This is a
complicated world; I'm going back to the baseball game.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books on the environment, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org. He also serves on Grist’s board of directors.