News To Make You Furious- Don’t be distracted by the bright shiny objects

The classic bumper sticker reads “If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention”.  But what are we paying attention to, and why?  We’ve all just been treated to 16 days of a hypnotic sideshow that totally dominated the news.  Fluff and nonsense, political grandstanding, base pandering… we’ve all been paying attention, so we’re all rightly Furious.  But while politicians with learner’s permits hijacked our national bus to drive it over a cliff, there was other stuff going on in the cars around us.

Here are two of the most important stories the media has been completely ignoring.  Why should you be Furious?  Because your time was wasted on vapid bull puckey rather than the real issues that will shape all of our lives for decades…

The fine folks who shut down our government, of course, didn’t call their actions petty, spiteful politics on behalf of rich backers and ignorant dupes.  They repeatedly, against all evidence, said that they were working on behalf of the vast majority of Americans who wanted Obamacare gone no matter the cost to our country.  They didn’t want to do it, but as abject slaves to the will of the American People they had no choice.  Well, two of the most unequivocally unpopular actions of government in the past decades have been NAFTA and Citizens United.  Public opinion might not support the repeal of these insane measures (although it would if the “will of the people” was actually the driving force of government) but it certainly indicates they shouldn’t be expanded!  Yet these two flamboyant belly flops into corruption are the springboards for these two sequels…

The Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a proposal for a “free trade” agreement among 12 of the nations around the Pacific Rim.  It’s a dream of the 1 percent being pressed by corporate America, and is being negotiated in secret with no releases of information and no public input.  What information has come out has only come in the form of leaks, but here’s a few of the things we know it would do so far…

• Offshore millions of American jobs
• Free national and international banksters from oversight
• Ban ‘buy-American’ policies
• Decrease access to medicine
• Flood the US with unsafe food and products
• Put new restrictions on the internet and intellectual property
• Reduce our already dwindling privacy protections
• And, of course, much, much more.

Who knows?  The TPP may be the best thing to ever happen to our country, and it may be the death knell of democracy.  The point is, rather than examining this radical and fundamental restructure of many country’s societies we’re watching Sara Palin salute the Confederate flag.  If the TPP sounds more important to you than splinter group photo ops, then here are several links for more information on it…

Office of the United States Trade Representative- The US in the Trans-Pacific Partnership

International Business Times- Trans-Pacific Partnership: A trade agreement you should care about

Public Knowledge- The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Citizens Trade Campaign- The Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement:  NAFTA for the Pacific Rim?

Electronic Frontier Foundation- Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Public Citizen- TPP:  Corporate Power Tool of the 1%

Just one of many other abominations masked by the shutdown debacle is McCutcheon vs. the Federal Election Commission, set to be heard by the Supremes during the current session.  One notion going back centuries is that governments are created by humans, and humans are fallible.  You might not believe it by watching the sterling professionalism of our elected representatives, but even some of them may be fallible.  It’s possible, just possible, that even their good judgment might be swayed by the temptation of money. That’s why, from the Federal government to small hamlets, various restrictions have been placed on who can contribute and how much they can contribute to political campaigns. Citizens United overturned those limits for corporate people, but restrictions remained on individuals.  With an ever-increasing amount of wealth being concentrated in the top 1% of our society, the danger to the democratic participation of the other 99% would seem obvious.  Individual contribution restrictions would seem self-evidently necessary to the continuation of democracy as we know it.

Unless you’re Shaun McCutcheon.  McCutcheon (that’s him in the photo at a University of Alabama tailgate party) contributed to 17 candidates in 2011-2012, and wanted to support 11 more with contributions of $1,776 each.  (Nice touch, Shaun). These contributions are all well under the per-candidate limit, but combined they would have exceeded the per-cycle limit.  That wasn’t enough democracy for Shaun, who sued saying that since the individual contributions had been found by Congress to be ‘non-corrupting’ there would be no corrupting influence of many small contributions.  The Republican National Committee jumped on board with him purely on the merits of the case and not because of any monetary interest, and Shaun and his new buds had oral arguments before SCOTUS on October 8.  The Supreme’s decision will be released sometime this year, barring any more shutdowns.