This is a trailer for a documentary coming out Friday about the "pinkification" of breast cancer. Could it be any more timely, considering the exposure of the Susan G Komen Foundation as a right-wing tool? So much information has emerged, so little time. With many thanks to those who contributed links to my original post on this topic, I'd like to suggest that we support this film, and all efforts to marginalize the SGKF's hijacking of women's health for right-wing causes.

Things to Read

Via BigDaddyMalcontent, MoJo reports on founder Nancy Brinker's ties to the Republican party. BigDaddy also dropped this link to Barbara Ehrenreich's article for Harper's tracing the incestuous relationship between SGKF and AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company. Kate points us to the long list of 1 percenter corporate sponsors of the SGKF. Howard Dean puts everything in perspective.

Things to Do

• Sign the Credo Action petition to tell the SGKF not to throw women under the bus.
• Join the Facebook Group to De-Fund SGKF
• Donate to Planned Parenthood

Credit where credit is due, I'm amazed that Fox didn't actually censor this from airing. There are few bleaker indictments on corporatism with a rather pointed finger specifically at Fox than this.

How did “The Simpsons” manage to track down Banksy, the pseudonymous British artist, and get him to create the powerful opening-credit sequence from Sunday’s episode, which seems to reveal the torturous sweatshop responsible for the show’s creation? And how, after all that mockery, have the producers behind that Fox animated series been able to retain their jobs? Al Jean, an executive producer and the longtime show runner of “The Simpsons,” pulled back another layer of the curtain and explained the stunt to ArtsBeat on Monday afternoon.[..] Q. Were you concerned that what he sent you could get the show into hot water?

A. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it for a little bit. Certainly, Fox has been very gracious about us biting the hand that feeds us, but I showed it to Matt Groening, and he said, no, we should go for it and try to do it pretty much as close as we can to his original intention. So we did. Like we always do, every show is submitted to broadcast standards, and they had a couple of [changes] which I agreed with, for taste. But 95 percent of it is just the way he wanted.[..]

Q. And even that closing shot of the 20th Century Fox logo surrounded in barbed wire?
A. Approved by them. Obviously, the animation to do this was pricey. I couldn’t have just snuck it by Fox. I’ll just say it’s a place where edgy comedy can really thrive, as long as it’s funny, which I think this was. None of it’s personal. This is what made “The Simpsons” what it is.

I'm curious what C&Lers thought about this sequence. The longer I live, the more damage I see all around me from rampant corporatism. I know in my house, this segment was pointed enough to have my kids ask me about it and it sparked an interesting conversation about merchandising and the conditions that our dollars support. I'd like to think that this will stay with them and raise their consciousness a little.

Apparently, there's a profit center in causing an ecological catastrophe:

Transocean Ltd. [..], the owner of the rig leased by BP [..] which is currently leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico, made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster, the Sunday Times reports.

The amount, revealed during a conference call to analysts, was made because its insurance policy for Deepwater Horizon rig was greater than the value of the rig itself, the paper reports. The Times says Transocean has already received cash payment of $401 million and the rest is due in the coming weeks.

Unbelievable. Of course, that money has been turned around as part of a nice, fat $1B dividend to stockholders.

That was a damn fast turnaround on the insurance too. Have any of the families of those killed during the explosion seen insurance payouts yet? I don't believe so.

The story behind the oil spill is one of such gross negligence and choosing shortcuts to safety in the name of profits that it's absolutely disgusting to see Transocean profit this way, when we all will be paying the costs of their negligence for years and years to come.

Meanwhile Senate Republicans have stalled legislation that would require oil companies to pay fully for their accidents. Listen to Senator Inhofe (R-Oil Companies) push for Big Oil's ability to make obscene profits over safety:

You gotta love how these "Oh noes! Obama wants us to be socialists!" Republicans have no problem with a multi-national oil company privatizing their profits and socializing their costs. Why aren't the protesters who scream about bailouts not screaming about this?

Obama made a statement expressing his frustration:

"I am disappointed that an effort to ensure that oil companies pay fully for disasters they cause has stalled in the United States Senate on a partisan basis. This maneuver threatens to leave taxpayers, rather than the oil companies, on the hook for future disasters like the BP oil spill. I urge the Senate Republicans to stop playing special interest politics and join in a bipartisan effort to protect taxpayers and demand accountability from the oil companies.”

McCain and Obama debate the economic crisis' effect on national security.

We're already in a situation that no matter what gets done, the economic meltdown is going to drag a lot of people worldwide under. We're in the same situation with global warming - in that case quite literally. Now Republicans and their energy lobbyist friends are saying we're going to have to choose which one sinks most.

As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has burst.

"Clearly it is somewhere down the totem pole given the economic realities we are facing," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., an electricity producer that has supported federal mandates on greenhouse gases. Duke is a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, an association of businesses and nonprofit groups that has lobbied Congress to act.

What they have the axe out for is "Cap and Trade", a policy plan whereby companies either reduce emissions or pay to pollute. The energy industry, of course, hates it - and now wants permits to pollute to be free. Their vest-pocket representatives on the Hill already have such a bill in the works and it's sponsored by two Dems - Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va and of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. Even that's not good enough for House Republicans. Oklahoman wingnut Inhofe says "The current economic crisis only reinforces the public's wariness about any climate bill that attempts to increase the costs of energy and jeopardizes jobs," while Texan Joe Barton says even the Boucher-Dingell bill could lead the country "off the economic cliff."

Other Democrats, however, see a cap-and-trade bill — and the government revenues it would generate from selling permits — as an engine for economic growth. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama supports auctioning off all permits, using the money to help fund alternative energy.

"If you see this as a job creation opportunity for the U.S. to develop the products that are then sold around the world, then you should be optimistic about what the impact of passage would mean for the American economy," said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

The energy lobby is apparently quite willing to cynically sacrifice lives to its members own pocketbooks, just as the financial sector is. Both are also willing to sacrifice national security on the altars of their own greed too. It's not too long since a Republicans were trying to sink the production of an NIE on the national security implications of gobal warming - even after a Pentagon report in 2003 (PDF) and a government-funded thinktank of retired military leaders in 2007 both called climate change a pressing threat to national security. More recently, even once-was-neocon Francis Fukuyama admits that the financial meltdown will have massive negative implications for America's place in the world and governments worldwide are publicly worrying about its effects on geopolitical stability.

Of course, we've seen this kind of corporate selfishness before - from the military/industrial complex Ike warned about so accurately. It's become obvious that the problem is any too cozy corporate/government symbiosis. Such relationships are bad for We The People, end of story.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Compassionate corporatism at work. As a devoted pet owner, this really chaps my hide:

DailyKos:

Time for a class action suit, folks:

A Chicago woman sued Menu Foods on Tuesday, alleging the pet food manufacturer delayed announcing a recall of 60 million containers of dog and cat food despite knowing its products were contaminated and potentially deadly.

Dawn Majerczyk, 43, said her orange tabby, Phoenix, fell sick last week just two days after he ate a single package of Special Kitty. It is one of 95 cat and dog food brands recalled by Menu Foods of Canada. Friday's recall came two weeks after nine cats died during routine company taste tests of its products, the Food and Drug Administration said.

This is outrageous! MenuFoods knew this product was deadly as early as last month! I am absolutely floored that they allowed deadly products into the marketplace after animals died during internal testing.

Thomas Frank writes an excellent article about the possible rise of the teabaggers. Paul Ryan, the man who takes more money than anybody from big business is trying to be their golden boy and he's using an ideology that is based on crony corporatism embedded with language that actually opposes the fundamental root of their philosophy.

They paint themselves as anti-corporatists and want to destroy the government for the benefit of the corporations they are supposed to hate. And if that doesn't work, then kill more government and give more tax breaks to the rich and make sure you hate brown people enough. It's all this twisted logic, but they make it work because of the influence of the right-wing media machine led by FOX News and have been making it work since the '80s in one form or another. Just ask Grover Norquist since he's an orchestrator of the K-Street project.

Thomas Frank:

It's easy to underestimate conservatism's chances in these dark days. Over the last year, the Republican Party has appeared to be either a gang of obstructionists or a confused relic of some prehistoric past; its thinkers seemed to do little more than repeat catch-phrases you've heard dozens of times before; even its most earnest activists sometimes appeared to be the pawns of lobbying organizations.

But the movement might stage a comeback yet. According to the demented logic of American politics, the world began anew with the Obama presidency, and so it is the Democrats who will have to go before the public this fall and defend the bailout of Wall Street. Similarly, it might be the Republicans who seize the opportunity to capture public outrage this time around, denouncing concentrated economic power, insisting on holding big business accountable, and promising to settle scores with the nation's erstwhile financial rulers. Given the GOP's doings over the past 30 years, such a reversal may strike you as implausible, if not downright ridiculous...read on

Read the whole article, because Frank knows as much about movement conservatism as anyone alive.

Digby has a great analysis of the article, and writes:

He goes on to explain that this is actually an old argument about how free markets keep business from gaming government and forming cartels. Indeed, according to this concept deregulation is the only way to control corporations. Isn't that convenient?

As Frank points out, that cracked notion is "twisted and counterintuitive" and you'd think that after three decades of a mass experiment in government deregulation, privatization and "free" market ideology people would realize how cracked it really is. But Frank rightly understands that to the Republican base, it will all ring true: the problem with big business is big government.He goes on to say that for the disaffected Independent voters (the new electoral Holy Grail) the logic is less important than the sincerity of the emotion. I actually don't think sincerity is necessary at all and that the reason it will have salience is because all these DIVs will hear the comforting old saws about Big Gummint being the enemy and will breathe a great big sigh of relief that "somebody is finally talking some sense."

Frank predicts the future and I agree:

That's why we may be heading for the greatest burst of fake populism since those TV commercials 10 years ago that showed a mob breaking down the doors of a stock exchange—not because the revolution was on but because they wanted to trade like the pros, which the sponsor promised to let them do.

I know there is a lot of frustration in the blogosphere right now because President Obama has not been kind to liberals and progressives. And I understand the frustration of it all too well. I still can't figure out why Axelrod and the President don't seem to understand how important their base is. But as C&L and many other sites wrote during the primary, Obama was never a progressive, but a moderate Democratic politician. I've been blogging for five years non-stop to move this country away from conservatism that has been the great destroyer of our society. Chris Hayes at The Nation has a great article up describing the mess that is our political system and what we face as progressives:

System Failure

The corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest--and increasingly, that's the only kind of change we can get.

In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties. He was motivated by a simple question: why were parties of the left, those most ideologically committed to democracy and participation, as oligarchical in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right?

Michels's answer was what he called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy." In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes. "It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors," he wrote, "of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy."

Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. "After the old man's death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being."

"The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy," Michels wrote. "Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense."

Digby writes:

It's indisputably true that the political system is run by wealthy plutocrats and much of what passes for democracy is kabuki. Same as it ever was, I'm afraid. But that's not exactly the point. It's still worth participating, doing what you can, containing the damage, stopping the bleeding, fighting the fight --- for its own sake. After all, history shows that humans have managed, somehow, to actually make progress over time. You just can't know what will make the difference.

There's an impulse to say screw it all and not show up anymore because "they're all the same," but I can't do that. For the most part, politicians will let us down because they are...well, politicians, but they aren't all the same. There have been plenty of books written about Florida in 2000. If ballots had been properly labeled so that voters who wanted Gore instead of Pat Buchanan could have done so, we might have had a more fair election. And then the Supreme Court would have been left to watch election night like the rest of us and Bush wouldn't have entered the White House in 2000.

Think of what that would have meant for the country:

• The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would never have been a reality.
• I doubt we would have had the attacks of 9/11 because President Clinton warned that the greatest threat America would face was terrorism and Gore would have not ignored him like Bush did. But if we did get attacked, then you can bet that Gore would have handled it as an adult. He wouldn't sought "revenge" against Saddam Hussein and prioritized control of all that oil. Gore wouldn't have let Osama Bin Laden get away and the world would still be sympathetic to us.
• Our efforts to put Afghanistan back together would be finished by now, assuming we even would have tried nation-building there.
• More troops and people would be alive and we would have exited the Middle East with our heads held high.
• America would never have invaded and occupied Iraq and over 4,000 troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (if not millions) would be alive today.
• Abu Ghraib would never have happened.
• Terrorist recruitment would have stalled.
• Torture would not be part of the American lexicon and the likes of Dick Cheney and John Yoo would never have descended upon the offices of the VP and OLC.
• John Roberts and Sam Alito would not be on the Supreme Court and the makeup would probably be 6-3 against the radical Scalia-conservative agenda. A ruling on Citizens United is coming soon. Would the court ever have accepted that case? Not a chance and soon corporations will have a stranglehold on our election system much more than they have now.
• George Bush would have been back home in Texas leading the state into secession along with his pal Alberto Gonzalez.
• Nobody would have ever heard of Terry Schiavo.
• A much swifter and more effective response to Hurricane Katrina would have been implemented.

You get my point. These are but a few things that would have been different if conservatives didn't get their hands on the White House. Many of us are fighting for liberal and progressive values everyday and will continue to do so. But when our party fails us, I need to work harder to make sure the party stays on a liberal course, not throw up my hands and dismiss them as all the same.

And in the spirit of that though we need to hold the party establishment accountable. As Digby says there are a number of great progressive challengers already taking on DLC incumbents and we're going to send them a message that's loud and clear. Blue America PAC is already taking on this challenge.

Digby:

Blue America has helpfully set up an Act Blue page with all the progressive challengers who have announced and we'll add to it as more come forward. We're calling it "Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand."

If you want a Democratic scalp, these candidates are out there offering to do the work to get it done. And you won't be giving Adam Nagourney or Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck what they want in the process. It's a win that even the villagers and the party establishment can't spin as good news for Republicans.

We'll be having on many progressive challengers in the coming months on C&L and they will be explaining why progressives need to be elected if we want things to change for the better. The new Blue America PAC Act Blue page is called:

"Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand."

Please join us.