99% of the world is singing

Seven Billion

You Are Now One of 7 Billion People on Planet Earth

There are now 7 billion people sharing our little blue marble*, you and I included. That means 7 billion people who get hungry, need space, and disagree with things that the other 6.999999999 billion people say.
It means 7 billion people who want electricity, and who care first and foremost that they have it at all, not so much where it comes from.
It means 7 billion people who want to drive cars, and who will most likely use gasoline to fuel them. It means billions of people vying for oil, though experts believe supply will peak soon, if it has not peaked already.
It means 7 billion people who need clean water at a time when arid regions are becoming more so.
It means 7 billion people who are increasingly vulnerable to an increasingly ornery climate system that has been overloaded with a concentration of greenhouse gas emissions. There will be more floods, fires, and droughts, and there will be more people living in the areas impacted by them.
You are one of those 7 billion people, and you may or may not still want many of these things. The challenge of the 21st century will be meeting the demands of the 7 billion much more intelligently and efficiently than we have done in the past. If every nation consumed at the pace of the United States, we would need many more earths. We have the one. But we also have new tools.

That is a whole bunch of zeroes - in 7 billion. But we also have a bunch of zeroes in positions of planning, regulations, government...Also so many of us act like "zeroes' in our day to day lives. We must "live simply so others can simply live."

Comig Soon!!

Cannot wait!!!!

They need more and more

Exxon's Profits Hit $31 Billion So Far This Year, Yet Big Oil Subsidies Flourish

I'm not sure this can even be considered news anymore, given the regularity with which it happens: ExxonMobil has posted massive earnings. Again. The oil giant claims quarterly earnings of $10.3 billion dollars, bringing the yearly total thus far to $31 billion. And yet, this obscenely profitable company still gets annual federal handouts to the tune of billions of dollars a year. To make matters worse, leading GOP presidential candidates' energy plans include expanding federal handouts to Big Oil.

Hey, without the subsidies they may only make $8 billion.

Plumber's crack

Joe The Plumber

Sam 'Joe the Plumber' Wurzelbacher sat down with MSNBC Wednesday, fresh off his official entrance into the race for Ohio's 9th congressional district, and weighed in on some current events.
In his interview, Wurzelbacher was asked his pick of the GOP primary litter.
"I like Herman right now," he responded.

Wonder if he heard about the Godfather's trouble with taxes?

Herman Cain, the multimillionaire businessman who has made tax fairness a central part of his surging presidential campaign, missed paying his state income taxes for 2006 while undergoing treatment for cancer, prompting Georgia to file a tax lien against him that wasn’t settled until late 2008...

Okay, he was undergoing treatment. Sam and Godfather deserve each other.
Godfather doesn't appreciate the 99% and neither does Sam:

...he wasn't willing to endorse the broader movement because of supposed communist, socialist and anarchist actors within it.

Oil money

Mitt Romney's Energy Plan: Boost Big Oil, Slash Environmental Protections

Time to face the facts: Mitt Romney is going to win the GOP nomination. Barring some totally crazy left-field development, Romney is on track to become the Republican presidential candidate. As such, we should be taking his energy proposal seriously -- and it's 100% ugly.
Mitt Romney is the political establishment's best-known chameleon, so it should come as no surprise that his energy proposals merely echo and amplify the prevailing narratives crafted by GOP spin doctors. In short, it's this:
1. Give Big Oil, which already sucks down billions in subsidies every year, $4 billion more to play with.
2. Open up drilling just about everywhere. Alaska, the Gulf, everywhere! He'd also seek to...
3. Streamline and fast-track approval processes for drilling operations.
4. Do away with all of the environmental regulations Republicans have spent the year trying to do away with (despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly don't want them to). Which of course means...
5. Amend Clean Air Act to exclude regulation of carbon.

Great. We have oil man versus O who hasn't been very green lately.  Better than Mitt, but....

We need another choice!!!!

Kudos Willie

And another one from the champion of the family farmer:

Feeling sorry for the children

You WIll Probably Live to See 'Dangerous' Levels of Climate Change

As far as Americans are concerned, climate change is a perpetually distant and ambiguous threat. Some glaciers thousands of miles away might melt, some poor people might suffer through droughts in Africa, some polar bears might drown. Et cetera. This 'distance effect' is, partly, what drives global warming to the bottom of our priority lists time and again. It's an amorphous problem, ever-looming. That's what it seems like, anyway.
Yet two recent studies published in Nature reiterate a warning scientists have been issuing for years: if greenhouse gas emission trajectories remain as rapidly ascendent, we'll likely see "dangerous levels" of climate change by midcentury. That means a good many of us reading these very words will be alive and well by the time climate change begins to reach what are commonly referred to as "catastrophic" levels.

2 degree rise in 20 years - only the start unless we act. Imagine what it will be like in 40 years.
We need to apologize now to our children.

Mmmmmmm Beer!

Drinking Fluids Could Decrease Men's Bladder Cancer Risk: Study

Drinking plenty of fluids helps to keep us from becoming dehydrated -- and a new study suggests it might also help to protect men from bladder cancer. The study, conducted by Brown University researchers, shows that men who drank large amounts of fluids (more than 10 1/2 cups) a day over a 22-year period had a 24 percent decreased risk of bladder cancer.

Just in case you really needed a reason to drink that IPA.

Thanks Pete

Just say no, O

Why Obama May Be About to Give a Giant Handout Out the Billionaire Koch Brothers

The brothers control nearly 25% of the tar sands crude that is imported into the US and own mining companies, oil terminals, and refineries all along the Keystone XL route.
Right now, President Obama is faced with the most crucial environmental decisions he is going to face before the 2012 election: whether or not to approve the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700 mile fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the continent, the Canadian tar sands. The Keystone XL isn't just an XL environmental disaster -- the nation's top climate scientists say that fully exploiting the tar sands could mean "essentially game over" for the climate -- it also happens to be an XL sized handout to Big Oil and, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch. You want fries with that?
President Obama can deny the permit, right now, and shut down this flow of cash to the Kochs. In doing so, he'll show that our national interest isn't always determined by the 1%, in this case a few big oil companies and the Koch Brothers, but by the 99% of us who have to pay the price for their greed.

It's up to you Mr. Prez.  Cow-tow to the interest of a few  or take the health and concern of the people as the only priority.

Let's hope the decision is the latter.  Sure the Koch Bros have mucho bucks to influence all in DC.  Let's hope the "Yes We Can" guy comes back to his senses and says no to the Bros.

Story of...

The latest (Story of Broke) is coming November 8. Just a little tease:

The next "Stuff" covers the terrible Court decision making a corporation equal to you or me. But since they have much more money, their influence is of course greater.

Until now...Now we have the hope of Wolf-PAC.

Our politicians are bought. Everyone knows it. Conservatives know it. Liberals know it. The Democrats are bought. The Republicans are bought. They don’t represent us. They represent their corporate donors who fund their campaigns and promise them well paying jobs after they leave office. We have taxation without representation. Our democracy is in serious trouble.
So what can we do to regain our ability to make our votes count and take back our democracy? We have to concentrate all of our resources into one single attack – making sure we take corporate money out of politics. The only way to do that is to bypass the corporate owned Congress and the Supreme Court – and pass a Constitutional amendment. We must pass an amendment saying that corporations are not people and they do not have the right to spend money to buy our politicians.
The objective of Wolf PAC will be to raise money and raise an army for the sole purpose of passing this amendment. We need a Constitutional revolution to get unlimited corporate money out of politics. Please join us and help retake our democracy.

We need a green leader

Not green as in "inexperienced" but green as someone concerned about Mother Earth. Someone concerned about food supplies. Someone concerned about our environmental health. clearly we have few elected leaders that fall into that category.
The Ungreening of Obama

Barack Obama was green when he entered the Oval Office. He was a relative newcomer to politics. He was also the most successful fundraiser in presidential history, hauling in more green than the two Democratic and Republican candidates in 2004 combined. And he was, more or less, an environmentalist.
Back in 2004, Amanda Little dug around in Obama's past and declared in Grist magazine that he was a "bona fide, card-carrying, bleeding-heart greenie" going back to his days as an undergrad "trying to convince minority students at City College in Harlem to recycle," and then as a community organizer in Chicago fighting for lead abatement in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. As the junior senator from Illinois, Obama got high marks from the League of Conservation Voters for his introduction or co-sponsorship of 100 environment-friendly bills from mercury reduction to raising fuel economy standards on cars.
Running for president, Obama promised to paint the town green. He proclaimed his "intergenerational" perspective, his recognition that "we are borrowing this planet from our children and our grandchildren." After years of supporting the coal industry back in Illinois, he turned around to identify climate change as "one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation" and supported cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. He put sustainable energy policy at the center of his economic renewal, pledging to derive one-quarter of all U.S. energy from renewables by 2025 and to improve the efficiency of federal buildings and all new construction. There would also be tighter regulations on emissions and a much greater commitment to conservation. These promises also had a price tag: $150 billion alone for renewable energy investments.
Obama did indeed keep some of these promises. Dealing with the enormous economic crisis gifted to him by his predecessor, Obama emphasized green jobs in his stimulus package, with $78 billion in clean energy investment and $500 million specifically for job training around energy efficiency. He boosted funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, put more money into the national park system, and worked to improve water quality standards. In July, the administration brokered a major deal with auto manufacturers and environmentalists to raise the fuel economy standard, saving consumers money at the pump and reducing carbon emissions. On some of the big issues, like climate change legislation, the president came up against considerable congressional opposition. Given the flaws of the cap-and-trade mechanism at the core of this legislative initiative, which would have established a dubious market in carbon credits, it was a bittersweet failure.
This record would suggest a president who desperately wants to be Mr. Green but faces the dual political challenge of climate change skeptics and pollution industry lobbyists. You might fault him for his backbone but surely not his heart. Here was a politician who'd seen the (green) light.
But recent moves by Obama suggest a different interpretation of his environmental record....
The real problem is not with Obama but with politics in general. The environment doesn't obey four-year cycles. Global warming could care less about democracy. And, in turn, snail darters and polar bears don't vote. Politicians who seek reelection want jobs now, not potential jobs, not future jobs, not if-everything-works-out-according-to-this-alternate-calculation jobs. Obama did invest in the new green economy, and that investment hasn't yet produced the 500,000 new jobs a year that he promised. And, because of the rush to produce results, the administration got sucked into a scandal involving the solar manufacturer Solyndra, which involved pumping money into a dying firm.
Ideally, our elected representatives would acknowledge that environmental issues should rise above politics, that the fate of the world should not be held hostage to lobbyists and election cycles. We have to take the long view. Of course we need jobs, and we need them sooner, not later. But the only job we create when we imperil the environment is the job of gravedigger. And when the grave you're digging is your own, there's certainly no future in that profession.

The brave 35

35 Congressmen Move to Kill $122 Billion in Subsidies to Big Oil

Who likes oil subsidies? Nobody! Nobody but the oil companies, that is. But as we know, these subsidies, which American taxpayers annually spend billions of dollars on, are extremely difficult to kill. But 35 US congressmen and women are going to try: They've just drafted a motion to the so-called 'super committee' charged with reducing the deficit, asking it to remove $122 billion worth of oil subsidies from the federal budget.

In the current budgetary environment, the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits and costing American taxpayers twice: at the pump and through the tax code. We urge the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to consider eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels as an excellent source of deficit reducing savings. According to a coalition of organizations, eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuels industry could reduce our national debt by up to $122 billion over ten years.

Why do I call them brave?  Because they knew they will be targeted by the oil companies, lobbyists and Koch Bros.  They knew when they drafted that motion that their next political opponent will be rolling the the oil-backed dough.