The corporate media usually don't give much coverage to stories which suggest that politicians should move towards the left. That's why this item on one of ABC News' blogs was quite refreshing. (bolding mine)

Here’s how: Current estimate is that 90 million people voted. Exit poll says 45 percent were Obama voters in 2008. That’s 40.5 million voters.

In 2008, Obama won 69.5 million votes. So about 29 million Obama voters did not show up in 2010.

Exit poll also says 45 percent of people who voted yesterday were McCain voters in 2008, again 40.5 million. That, vs. his nearly 60 million in 2008, means about 19.5 million McCain voters did not show up.

So Obama had nearly 10 million more no-shows.

Does this surprise anyone? Let's look at some things Obama did which discouraged Democrats and Democratic leaning independents from showing up to vote.

1) Continuing to practice torture at Guantanamo and throughout the world.

2) Dragging out the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

3) Fighting for the military ban and for DOMA in court, even to the point of making appeals that the Administration was under no legal or ethical obligation to make.

4) Comparing homosexuality to bestiality and necrophilia in court briefs defending DOMA.

5) Making banksters a much higher priority than jobs.

6) Refusing to prosecute criminals merely because they were rich and well connected (e.g., Bush Regime war criminals, banksters, brokesters).

7) Siding with British Petroleum against the environment and the people in the Gulf Coast.

8) Pushing through the same brutal wealthcare plan that the GOP would have passed if they were in control of Congress and the White House.

9) Doing nothing to protect the right to choose on abortion.

10) Expanding Bush's unconstitutional office of hate based initiatives.

11) Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in Cabinet level appointments.

12) Participating in the National Hate Breakfast and pandering to fundamentalist hate mongers like Rick Warren.

13) Sabre rattling with Iran and Venezuela.

14) Putting Global Warming on the backburner and making roads a higher priority than rail in the stimulus plan.

I could go on endlessly about the GOP policies that the President has continued or expanded on, but you get the point. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of the DC "Democrats" did everything they could to send a message to Democratic voters and liberal independents that voting makes absolutely no difference.

Roughly 29,000,000 Obama voters got that message.

 

Hat tip to Ten Percent for leading me in the direction of excellent reporting on "Transparency International" (TI) by Calvin Tucker in the Guardian 5/22/08. He exposes the factually in accurate claims TI made against the government oil company in Venezuela. Tucker also exposes the role of the Venezuelan opposition and Big Oil in influencing TI. It's important reading, but, rather than reinvent this wheel, I'll focus on TI and the United States.

You would think that an international NGO focused on government corruption and transparency would make its single biggest focus the Bush regime. That logical expectation certainly is not met by "Transparency International" which gets major media play in here the US corporate media.

Based on primarily on greed and naked political corruption, the Bush regime has gotten the US into a war in Iraq that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, over 1.2 million Iraqi lives, 4000 US troops killed, and tens of thousands of troops maimed and facing psychological injuries.

The fact that the Bush regime is illegally occupying the White House due to two stolen presidential elections is a rather potent example of the corruption in our government.

Numerous "signing statements" where the Bush regime asserts non-existent constitutional powers to be above the law are something that only the most corrupt of governments would engage in. Dick Cheney's illegal, secret energy policy meetings with energy company donors (including Enron) also show how spectacularly corrupt this illegitimate regime can be.

Some of Many Resources on Bush regime corruption:

- Dennis Kucinich's articles of impeachment against George W. Bush (After Downing Street)

- The Downing Street Memo (more information)

- 8.8 Billion Dollars in US funds "lost" by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

- Corruption in war contracting.

Where did TI put the US in its 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which it asserts as a measure of government transparency?

(A lower ranking number is meant to convey a less corrupt government.)

The Bush regime is tied for position 20?!?!?!?!?

This is less surprising when you follow the money. Take a gander at some of their major donors.

* Anglo American
* Ernst & Young
* ExxonMobil
* General Electric
* Merck & Co.
* Nexen
* Norsk Hydro
* Procter & Gamble
* SAP
* Shell International
* UBS
* Wal-Mart

...

* Credit Suisse
* HSBC Holdings
* KPMG
* XL Capital

That explains a whole lot.

Another major problem is their methodology:

Whose opinion is polled for the surveys used in the CPI?

The expertise reflected in the CPI scores draws on an understanding of corrupt practices held by those based in both the industrialised and developing world. Surveys are carried out among business people and country analysts. The surveys used in the CPI use two types of samples, both non-resident and resident. It is important to note that residents' viewpoints correlate well with those of non-resident experts.

It would be interesting to know who the "country analysts" are. The more transparently disturbing aspect is that they rely on surveys of "business people." Business interests are hardly going to provide accurate or meaningful results. They will only report corruption when it is not in their favor.

Corruption Iraq War contractors, Big Oil, and war profiteers will see the corrupt war in Iraq and the corrupt contracting practices of the Bush regime as fine and dandy. Drug companies whose products don't get adequate scrutiny from the FDA are delighted with the way their campaign contributions pay off. Monopolies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart (a major TI donor by the way) are not going to think that the lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws is a problem.

Sigh.

The upshot is that TI is primarily an advocacy group for the interests of corporations and their wealthy owners. The next time a news outlet cites TI as an information source, you know to take what they say with a grain of salt.

 

This AP piece on the MSNBC website is typical of how most of the coverage of soaring gas prices mentions little about causes and censors the biggest ones. Here is the lonely paragraph on the rise in oil prices on the world market.

Skyrocketing oil prices are largely to blame for the surge. Soaring demand in Asia and elsewhere ensures global supplies remain tight even as Americans cut back; recent figures from the U.S. Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration showed U.S. gasoline demand actually fell 1.4 percent over the last four weeks.

Here is the single graph from the CNN.com story.

The $10.75 gain was the biggest one-day advance in dollar value ever, nearly doubling the previous mark of $5.49 set Thursday. Weakness in the dollar, geopolitical concerns and an analyst's prediction of $150-a-barrel oil by July 4 helped spur Friday's advance.

The specific nature of the "geopolitical concerns" were left to the reader's imagination.

Although the San Jose Mercury is usually a relatively good newspaper, their reporting of the story omitted any mention of some of the specific causes of rising crude oil prices, and thus gas prices.

Why aren't these top causes of rising fuel prices getting mentioned?

1) The War in Iraq

2) Bush's saber-rattling with Iran.

3) Bush's saber-rattling with Venezuela.

4) Israel's government's threat to attack Iran. (They are backing away somewhat from it now.)

One interesting thing is that news prepared for business audiences is a bit more honest. This iStockAnalyst.com story, for instance has the title OIL SURGE:Iran-Israel Tensions To Keep Weighing On Oil-Experts. You don't see much of this kind of coverage in corporate media stories targeting general audiences:

Israel's Transportation Minister, Shaul Mofaz, said in a newspaper report that the country will have "no choice" but to attack Iran if it doesn't stop its nuclear program, sparking fears of a military strike. The statements came as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated Tuesday that Israel is "doomed to go." The remarks, combined with Iran's push to develop a nuclear program, triggered new fears the country could launch a nuclear bomb on Israel if it is in a position to do so.

Amidst these statements, current U.S. president George W. Bush, U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and his Republican counterpart, Sen. John McCain, all said in recent days that Iran's nuclear program poses a threat to global security - also sparking speculation the U.S. could back an attack on Iran.

Such an attack would trigger dramatic jitters in international oil supplies. The Islamic Republic is the second largest exporter in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. In addition, experts have feared that Iran may close the Strait of Hormuz - the southern end of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world's oil supply travels - were it to enter into a direct military confrontation with the U.S. A U.S. government study earlier this decade concluded that a shutdown of the Strait would cut off about 17 million barrels a day of crude supply.

This is an example of why people who don't own stock need to follow the business news. You need to in order to find out what corporate interests and their government flunkies are doing.

 

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has sunk to a new low, launching an irrational attack on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose only “offense” was to mockingly criticize George W. Bush. It was bad enough that she pandered to the Bush regime, but she even resorted to a racial slur, calling Chavez a “thug.”

Pelosi's race-baiting is disgusting enough, but it becomes even more reprehensible when it is done in the context of pandering to a brutal autocrat like George W. Bush. Pelosi would rather grovel to an unelected politician like Bush, rather than support, or merely leave alone, a democratically elected and widely popular leader like Hugo Chavez. While Chavez respects human rights, Bush has people arrested without charge and tortured, both at home and abroad. While Chavez has respected press freedom in Venezuela, Bush has bombed Al Jazeera and his administration has threatened to prosecute US journalists who reported on illegal NSA spying on Americans.

Democrats continually promise us that so much will change if we throw the Republicans out in the Congressional elections. But, in so many cases (e.g., Terri Schiavo, the Alito filibuster, the Roberts nomination, Bush's illegal and unAmerican war in Iraq), far too many Democrats offered the Bush regime critical support to carry out its hateful and unAmerican agenda.

The Green Party looks better and better with each passing day. It is not enough for the Democrats to be somewhat different than the Republicans. Democrats need to provide vigorous and fearless opposition to what is being done to America and the rest of the world.

Media critic Jeff Cohen has come up with a brilliant idea of how to stand up for democracy in Venezuela. He has called for a buycott of Citgo gas stations. According to the Citgo Web site:

The company is owned by PDV America, Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

Venezuela is the same country whose democratically elected government has been the target of an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Bush regime.

Buying gas from Citgo stations can help accomplish three important goals:

-supporting democracy in Venezuela and throughout the world>

-opposing the tyrannical and unelected Bush regime

-keeping money from going to the terrorist regime in Saudi Arabia

Related articles:

Bush Administration Behind Failed Military Coup in Venezuela

Coup-making in Venezuela: the Bush and oil factors

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team