Tuesday, August 23, 2011

They Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out: How the Banks Profit from the Lack of Jobs

Consumer borrowing hit its highest level since August 2007 this June; here's why that's not a good sign for the economy.
 
 
Amidst a lot of indicators that say we could be heading for another round of recession—before the so-called recovery even reaches most people, let alone our millions of unemployed—June saw a jump in consumer borrowing, three times as much as expected, according to Bloomberg News. The $15.5 billion increase in credit was the biggest since August 2007, and revolving debt, which includes credit cards, was up by $5.21 billion, the most since March 2008.
In a consumer-dependent economy, that's a good thing, isn't it? After all, borrowers must have some confidence in their ability to pay back their debt, right?
Not so fast.


During the debt ceiling drama, we heard a lot about the need for the government to “live within its means,” comparing the government's spending to a household shelling out money for unneeded things.
The analogy didn't work out too well—imagine a household spending half its income on defense, for instance—but it had another purpose. It reiterated the idea that working Americans, burdened with debt, were themselves to blame for their financial woes. Just live within your means, the argument goes, and you won't have those pesky credit card bills.
Of course, that's not even close to true. In an economy in which real wages have been stagnant or even in decline for years, credit has had to make up the difference. Banks and credit card companies have profited off the rest of the country's debt.

“America is a nation whose growth in recent decades has been predicated on a model of consumption. From a nation that used to save to invest, we now borrow to consume,” wrote Moses Kim at Naked Capitalism back in 2009.  
When credit froze up after the financial crash and working people could no longer borrow to spend, the economy took another hit. It doesn't take an economist to tell you that spending isn't back to where it was before the crisis. Catherine Rampell at the New York Times pointed out, “With fewer jobs and fewer hours logged, there is less income for households to spend, creating a huge obstacle for a consumer-driven economy.”


So why the jump in buying on credit, if people still don't have money to spend? Carlos X. Alexandre at Seeking Alpha explained:
“...the most logical interpretation is that as other sources of cash are drying up – jobs, equity lines, etc. -- consumers are now turning to credit cards for basic expenses, and as credit lines become exhausted another round of defaults is in store. Some may say that cash sales are not reflected in the data, but the American way of life and the core economic engine has been plastic-based for as long as we can remember, and is not about to change anytime soon.”
In other words, a jump in consumer credit isn't a sign of confidence, but of desperation.

“When you look at unemployment being above 9 percent, housing prices not really coming back to a good space, that will impact the mood and the consumer confidence,” MasterCard Chief Financial Officer Martina Hund-Mejean told Bloomberg. “It’s impacting it today and it will impact tomorrow.”
Hund-Mejean's company, meanwhile, is profiting handsomely, whatever the reasons for the uptick in consumer borrowing. Bloomberg notes that MasterCard, “[t]he world’s second-biggest payments network reported that its second-quarter profit rose 33 percent. Its U.S. debit- card spending surged 19 percent in the second quarter to $98 billion from a year earlier, and U.S. credit-card climbed 6.1 percent to $129 billion.”
Credit cards are far from the whole story. $10.3 billion of the rise in borrowing was in non-revolving debt, which includes student loans, car loans and mobile homes. (The report doesn't include mortgages and home equity credit.)
I wrote back in June about the student loan bubble:
“Those bright, shiny new degrees simply aren't worth the paper they're printed on all too often. The cost of a college degree is up some 3,400 percent since 1972, but as we all know too well, household incomes haven't increased by anything close to that number -- not for the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.Pell Grants for students have shrunk drastically in relation to the ballooning cost of a four-year college, and Paul Ryan wants to cut them even more, pushing some 1.4 million students into loans, more of which come each year from private lenders with little to no accountability."Getting a degree to get a better job or returning to school to ride out the recession won't help if there are no jobs to get when you get out, saddled with thousands in debt from private companies whose only interest is profit.
 Borrowing created the crisis, it's not going to make it better. But as long as we favor solutions that treat the ongoing economic slump as the fault of the individuals who borrowed, we're never going to get out of it. Mike Konczal wrote inJanuary:
“There’s a lot of morality talk about how American consumers overbinged on credit; but that makes no sense – they were rationally reacting to price mechanisms and increases in the supply of credit. The question is why did so much credit get lent out?”
The answer, of course, is profit—profits like those MasterCard, AmEx, and JPMorgan Chase are reporting. AmEx, which caters to more affluent customers, reported record spending by those cardholders, and is looking to expand beyond its wealthy base. (Even credit card companies eventually find that there's only so far they can grow depending solely on the well-off.)


Debt keeps American workers on the hamster wheel, scrambling just to make minimum payments on credit cards, student loans, and mortgages. As Konczal noted in the New York Times, credit lending now relies on fees, interest rate hikes, and lock-ins in contracts for its profits rather than just the interest it makes on your borrowing. “With a profit model that depends on people rolling over their debt endlessly (like a 21st century form of debt peonage), it is no surprise that savings rates are down — people’s “savings” mostly go towards maintaining debt.”
So working people wind up trapped, paying far more for goods and services than they would have if they'd had the cash to pay outright rather than deal with interest and credit card fees, and the economy, desperate for the consumer spending on which it is built, staggers. Credit, as before, fills in the space between wages and expenses, but now there's little extra spending to cut for families looking to “live within their means”.

A new recession, Rampell points out—and we should add, another freeze on credit-- “would force families to cut from the bone.”
Another slide for the economy, and more people wind up out of work, dependent on their credit cards for necessities, racking up more debt.
But Citigroup (bailed out for $45 billion of taxpayer dollars) and JPMorgan Chase (bailed out for $25 billion) are reporting billions in profits on credit cards, so why worry?

5 Reasons Capitalism Has Failed


We live in interesting times. The global economy is splintering. U.S. voters hate all politicians and there's political unrest throughout the world. The root cause of this turmoil is the failure of the dominant economic paradigm -- global corporate capitalism.

The modern world is ruled by multinational corporations and governed by a capitalistic ideology that believes: Corporations are a special breed of people, motivated solely by self-interest. Corporations seek to maximize return on capital by leveraging productivity and paying the least possible amount for taxes and labor. Corporate executives pledge allegiance to their directors and shareholders. The dominant corporate perspective is short term, the current financial quarter, and the dominant corporate ethic is greed, doing whatever it takes to maximize profit.
Five factors are responsible for the failure of global corporate capitalism. First, global corporations are too big. We're living in the age of corporate dinosaurs. (The largest multinational is JP Morgan Chase with assets of $2 Trillion, 240,000 employees, and offices in 100 countries.) 

The original dinosaurs perished because their huge bodies possessed tiny brains. Modern dinosaurs are failing because their massive bureaucracies possess miniscule hearts.
Since the Reagan era global corporations have followed the path of least resistance to profit; they've swallowed up their competitors and created monopolies, which have produced humongous bureaucracies. In the short-term, scale helps corporations grow profitable, but in the long-term it makes them inflexible and difficult to manage. Gigantism creates a culture where workers are encouraged to take enormous risks in order to create greater profits; it's based upon the notion that the corporation is "too big to fail."
Second, global corporations disdain civil society. They've created a culture of organizational narcissism, where workers pledge allegiance to the enterprise. Corporate employees live in a bubble, where they log obscene hours and then vacation with their co-workers. Multinationals develop their own code of ethics and worldview separate from that of any national state. Corporate executives don't care about the success or failure of any particular country, only the growth and profitability of their global corporation. (Many large corporations pay no U.S. income tax; in 2009 Exxon Mobil actually got a $156 M rebate.)

Third, global corporations are modern outlaws, living outside the law. There is noinvisible hand that regulates multinationals. In 1759 Philosopher Adam Smith argued that while wealthy individuals and corporations were motivated by self interest, an "invisible hand" was operating in the background ensuring that capitalist activities ultimately benefited society. In modern times this concept became the basis for the pronouncements of the Chicago School of Economics that markets were inherently self regulating. However, the last five years have demonstrated that there is no "invisible hand" -- unregulated markets have spelled disaster for the average person. The "recovery" of 2009-10 ensured that "too big to fail" institutions would survive and the rich would continue to be rich. Meanwhile millions of good jobs were either eliminated or replaced by low-wage jobs with poor or no benefits.

Fourth, global corporations are ruining our natural capital. Four of the top 10 multinational corporations are energy companies, with Exxon Mobil leading the list. But there are many indications that our oil reserves are gone. Meanwhile, other forms of natural capital have been depleted -- arable land, water, minerals, forests, fish, and so forth. Multinational corporations have treated the environment as a free resource. When the timberlands of North America began to be depleted, lumber corporations moved to South America and then Asia. Now, the "easy pickings" are gone. Global corporations have ravished the world and citizens of every nation live with the consequences: dirty air, foul water, and pollution of every sort.
Fifth, global corporations have angered the world community. The world GDP is $63 Trillion but multinational corporations garner a disproportionate share -- with banks accounting for an estimated $4 trillion (bank assets are $100 trillion). Global black markets make $2 trillion -- illegal drugs account for at least $300 billion. In many parts of the world, a worker is not able to earn a living wage, have a bank account or drive a car, but can always obtain drugs, sex, and weapons. And while the world may not be one big village in terms of lifestyle, it shares an image of "the good life" that's proffered in movies, TV, and the Internet. That's what teenagers in Afghanistan have in common with teenagers in England; they've been fed the same image of success in the global community and they know it's inaccessible. They are angry and, ultimately, their anger has the same target -- multinational corporations (and the governments that support them).
We live in interesting times. The good news is we're witnessing the failure of global corporate capitalism. The bad news is we don't know what will replace it.

Why Is the Military Spending Millions on Christian Contractors Bent on Evangelizing US Soldiers?

August 21, 2011

When the average American thinks of military spending on religion, they probably think only of the money spent on chaplains and chapels. And, yes, the Department of Defense (DoD) does spend a hell of a lot of money on these basic religious accommodations to provide our troops with the opportunity to exercise their religion while serving our country. But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the DoD's funding of religion. Also paid for with taxpayer dollars are a plethora of events, programs, and schemes that violate not only the Constitution, but, in many cases, the regulations on federal government contractors, specifically the regulation prohibiting federal government contractors receiving over $10,000 in contracts a year from discriminating based on religion in their hiring practices.


About a year ago, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) began an investigation into just how much money the DoD spends on promoting religion to military personnel and their families. What prompted this interest in DoD spending on religion was finding out what the DoD was spending on certain individual events and programs, such as the $125 million spent on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and its controversial "Spiritual Fitness" test, a mandatory test that must be taken by all soldiers. The Army insists that this test is not religious, but the countless complaints from soldiers who have failed this "fitness" test tell a different story. The experience of one group of soldiers who weren't "spiritual" enough for the Army can be read here.


But the term "Spiritual Fitness is not limited to this one test. The military began using this term to describe a variety of initiatives and events towards the end of 2006, and this `code phrase' for promoting religion was heavily in use by all branches of the military by 2007.


Although it was clear from the start of MRFF's investigation that determining the total dollar figure for the DoD's rampant promotion of religion (which is always evangelical and/or fundamentalist Christianity) would be next to impossible, as this would require FOIA requests to every one of over 700 military installations to find out how much each is spending out of various funds at the installation level, one thing we could look at was DoD contracts, so that's where we started. What we've found so far is astounding.

Even though this is still an ongoing project, and we'll certainly be finding much more, I thought that given all the current brouhaha over what should be cut from the federal budget, people might be interested to see some of examples of how the DoD is spending countless millions of taxpayer dollars every year to Christianize the military.

As mentioned above, what MRFF is looking at does not include chaplains or chapels -- not even the excessive spending on extravagant "chapels" like the $30,000,000 mega-church at Fort Hood, or the "Spiritual Fitness" centers being built on many military bases as part of what are called Resiliency Campuses. The examples below are all strictly from DoD contracts, with the funding coming out of the appropriations for things like "Operations and Maintenance" and, somehow, "Research and Development." (Summaries of all contracts referenced below are publicly available atusaspending.gov)

Evangelical Christian Concerts Under the Guise of "Spiritual Fitness"


One of the most direct expenditures of money on religious proselytizing, under the guise of "Spiritual Fitness" spending, is the funding of concerts with the top evangelical Christian performers. These concerts are most prevalent on Army posts, although they also occur on installations of other branches of the military. One concert series that stands out, both because soldiers were punished last year for not attending one of the concerts and because of the cost of hiring the musical acts, is the "Commanding Generals' Spiritual Fitness Concert Series" at Fort Eustis and Fort Lee in Virginia. This is not a chapel concert series, but a command sponsored "Spiritual Fitness" program, paid for with DoD contracts.
All of the performers for these Spiritual Fitness concerts so far (this concert series is ongoing) have been evangelical Christian artists. 

Not only is the music itself overtly Christian, but during the concerts there are light shows of large crosses beamed all over the stage, and the performers typically give their Christian testimony or read Bible verses between songs. Some of these performers have Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts good until 2012 or 2013, indicating that this concert series is planned to continue at least through the next two years. The total amount of money awarded so far for this concert series, including the amount remaining on Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts, is $678,470. This figure is only for the performers fees, and does not include all the other expenses associated with putting on concerts on the scale of those being held at these Army posts.
The following are the amounts of the contracts awarded to Christian talent agencies and bands for this "Commanding General's Spiritual Fitness Concert Series."
- Street Level Artist Agency: $153,000 spent to date, $22,000 remaining on a $50,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2012) - Gregg Oliver Agency: $46,000 spent to date, $54,000 remaining on a $100,000 Indefinite Delivery Contract (good until 2013) - James D Griggs: $9,900 to date, $141,100 remaining on a $150,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2013) - Titanium Productions, Inc.: $33,470 spent to date, $100,000 remaining on a $100,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2012) - SonicFlood: $24,000 spent to date, $76,000 remaining on a $100,000 Indefinite Delivery Contract (good until 2012) - The Samoan Brothers LLC: $20,000 spent
(For these talent agencies and bands where the "amount spent to date" and "amount remaining" on the Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts are not equal, it is because these talent agencies have been awarded more than one contract. For example, Titanium Productions, Inc. had contracts totaling $33,470 that were separate from the $100,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement for future concerts in this concert series.)

Evangelical Christian Facilities for Strong Bonds and other "Spiritual Fitness" Retreats


According to an Army spokesperson on the Pentagon Channel, the Army's Strong Bonds program receives at least $30 million a year in DoD funding. This program of pre- and post-deployment retreats for soldiers and their families are often evangelical Christian retreats, many held at Christian camps and resorts, with evangelical Christian speakers and entertainers.
A search of DoD contracts for the last few years shows that at least 50 of the locations where Strong Bonds and other Spiritual Fitness retreats are regularly held are evangelical Christian camps, resorts, and conference facilities.
The site regularly used by Fort Sill, for example, is Oakridge Camp & Retreat Center, which has received over $500,000 in DoD contracts and has hosted approximately 60 retreats.

Oakridge not only requires its employees to be Christians, but even goes as far as requiring on its employment application that the applicant state their views on issues such as abortion and homosexuality. While a private religious organization is free to impose a religious test on its staff, it is quite a different matter for a DoD contractor to do this. And, in the case of Oakridge, it is not only the facility's staff who must adhere to the its Christian beliefs, but all of its guests as well, including the soldiers attending Fort Sill's Strong Bonds and Spiritual Fitness retreats.
For example, the first paragraph of Oakridge's "Policies & Guidelines" for its guests states: "Oakridge is a private Christian retreat center, not a hotel. Therefore, there may be some guidelines and policies that may not seem `hotel-like.' This is our purposeful intent. Oakridge does not serve the `general public,' but only those interested in a Christian camp perspective." Moreover, guest groups must attend an "Oakridge Orientation," and it is stated in the "Policies & Guidelines" that "prayer will be offered for all groups at every meal in Jesus' name."

Sunday, August 21, 2011

How Much Money Could the Department of Defense Save if it Stopped Trying to Save Souls?

When the average American thinks of military spending on religion, they probably think only of the money spent on chaplains and chapels. And, yes, the Department of Defense (DoD) does spend a hell of a lot of money on these basic religious accommodations to provide our troops with the opportunity to exercise their religion while serving our country. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the DoD’s funding of religion. Also paid for with taxpayer dollars are a plethora of events, programs, and schemes that violate not only the Constitution, but, in many cases, the regulations on federal government contractors, specifically the regulation prohibiting federal government contractors receiving over $10,000 in contracts a year from discriminating based on religion in their hiring practices.
About a year ago, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) began an investigation into just how much money the DoD spends on promoting religion to military personnel and their families. What prompted this interest in DoD spending on religion was finding out what the DoD was spending on certain individual events and programs, such as the $125 million spent on the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and its controversial “Spiritual Fitness” test, a mandatory test that must be taken by all soldiers. The Army insists that this test is not religious, but the countless complaints from soldiers who have failed this “fitness” test tell a different story. The experience of one group of soldiers who weren’t “spiritual” enough for the Army can be read here. But the term “Spiritual Fitness is not limited to this one test. The military began using this term to describe a variety of initiatives and events towards the end of 2006, and this ‘code phrase’ for promoting religion was heavily in use by all branches of the military by 2007.
Although it was clear from the start of MRFF’s investigation that determining the total dollar figure for the DoD’s rampant promotion of religion (which is always evangelical and/or fundamentalist Christianity) would be next to impossible, as this would require FOIA requests to every one of over 700 military installations to find out how much each is spending out of various funds at the installation level, one thing we could look at was DoD contracts, so that’s where we started. What we’ve found so far is astounding.
Even though this is still an ongoing project, and we’ll certainly be finding much more, I thought that given all the current brouhaha over what should be cut from the federal budget, people might be interested to see some of examples of how the DoD is spending countless millions of taxpayer dollars every year to Christianize the military.
As mentioned above, what MRFF is looking at does not include chaplains or chapels — not even the excessive spending on extravagant “chapels” like the $30,000,000 mega-church at Fort Hood, or the “Spiritual Fitness” centers being built on many military bases as part of what are called Resiliency Campuses. The examples below are all strictly from DoD contracts, with the funding coming out of the appropriations for things like “Operations and Maintenance” and, somehow, “Research and Development.” (Summaries of all contracts referenced below are publicly available at usaspending.gov)

Evangelical Christian Concerts Under the Guise of “Spiritual Fitness”

One of the most direct expenditures of money on religious proselytizing, under the guise of “Spiritual Fitness” spending, is the funding of concerts with the top evangelical Christian performers. These concerts are most prevalent on Army posts, although they also occur on installations of other branches of the military. One concert series that stands out, both because soldiers were punished last year for not attending one of the concerts and because of the cost of hiring the musical acts, is the “Commanding Generals’ Spiritual Fitness Concert Series” at Fort Eustis and Fort Lee in Virginia. This is not a chapel concert series, but a command sponsored “Spiritual Fitness” program, paid for with DoD contracts.
All of the performers for these Spiritual Fitness concerts so far (this concert series is ongoing) have been evangelical Christian artists.

Not only is the music itself overtly Christian, but during the concerts there are light shows of large crosses beamed all over the stage, and the performers typically give their Christian testimony or read Bible verses between songs. Some of these performers have Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts good until 2012 or 2013, indicating that this concert series is planned to continue at least through the next two years. The total amount of money awarded so far for this concert series, including the amount remaining on Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts, is $678,470. This figure is only for the performers fees, and does not include all the other expenses associated with putting on concerts on the scale of those being held at these Army posts.
The following are the amounts of the contracts awarded to Christian talent agencies and bands for this “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series.”
  • Street Level Artist Agency: $153,000 spent to date, $22,000 remaining on a $50,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2012)
  • Gregg Oliver Agency: $46,000 spent to date, $54,000 remaining on a $100,000 Indefinite Delivery Contract (good until 2013)
  • James D Griggs: $9,900 to date, $141,100 remaining on a $150,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2013)
  • Titanium Productions, Inc.: $33,470 spent to date, $100,000 remaining on a $100,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement (good until 2012)
  • SonicFlood: $24,000 spent to date, $76,000 remaining on a $100,000 Indefinite Delivery Contract (good until 2012)
  • The Samoan Brothers LLC: $20,000 spent
(For these talent agencies and bands where the “amount spent to date” and “amount remaining” on the Blanket Purchase Agreements and Indefinite Delivery Contracts are not equal, it is because these talent agencies have been awarded more than one contract. For example, Titanium Productions, Inc. had contracts totaling $33,470 that were separate from the $100,000 Blanket Purchase Agreement for future concerts in this concert series.)


According to an Army spokesperson on the Pentagon Channel, the Army’s Strong Bonds program receives at least $30 million a year in DoD funding. This program of pre- and post-deployment retreats for soldiers and their families are often evangelical Christian retreats, many held at Christian camps and resorts, with evangelical Christian speakers and entertainers.
A search of DoD contracts for the last few years shows that at least 50 of the locations where Strong Bonds and other Spiritual Fitness retreats are regularly held are evangelical Christian camps, resorts, and conference facilities.
The site regularly used by Fort Sill, for example, is Oakridge Camp & Retreat Center, which has received over $500,000 in DoD contracts and has hosted approximately 60 retreats.

Oakridge not only requires its employees to be Christians, but even goes as far as requiring on its employment application that the applicant state their views on issues such as abortion and homosexuality. While a private religious organization is free to impose a religious test on its staff, it is quite a different matter for a DoD contractor to do this. And, in the case of Oakridge, it is not only the facility’s staff who must adhere to the its Christian beliefs, but all of its guests as well, including the soldiers attending Fort Sill’s Strong Bonds and Spiritual Fitness retreats.
For example, the first paragraph of Oakridge’s “Policies & Guidelines” for its guests states: “Oakridge is a private Christian retreat center, not a hotel. Therefore, there may be some guidelines and policies that may not seem ‘hotel-like.’ This is our purposeful intent. Oakridge does not serve the ‘general public,’ but only those interested in a Christian camp perspective.” Moreover, guest groups must attend an “Oakridge Orientation,” and it is stated in the “Policies & Guidelines” that “prayer will be offered for all groups at every meal in Jesus’ name.”
While Strong Bonds is specifically an Army program, the rampant promotion of evangelical Christianity under the guise of Spiritual Fitness is going on in all branches of the military. As an example from another branch of the military, over $120,000 in DoD contracts have been awarded to the Williamsburg Christian Retreat Center, one of the facilities used by both the Army and the Navy for retreats. Another popular site in Virginia for the Navy’s Spiritual Fitness and “Personal Growth” retreats is the Peninsula Baptist Association’s Eastover Retreat Center, which has received $75,000 in DoD contracts. For its retreats in Rhode Island, the Navy also uses a Baptist facility, the American Baptist Church’s Canonicus Camping and Conference Center, which has received $53,000 in DoD contracts.
In addition to the constitutional issue of these military retreats being evangelical Christian retreats, any of the Christian facilities used for these retreats that receives over $10,000 in DoD contracts is in violation of the prohibition on federal government contractors discriminating based on religion in their hiring practices. They all hire only Christians, and many require in their employment applications that potential employees subscribe to a “statement of faith” and provide their Christian “testimony,” detailing when and how they were “saved.”

Evangelical Christian Performers for Strong Bonds and Other Events
Even retreats that are not located at religious camps regularly feature evangelical Christian speakers and entertainers. The contract amounts range from a few thousand dollars paid to each of a number of individual “motivational” speakers for single retreats to tens of thousands of dollars for evangelical Christian ministries and performers hired for multiple retreats.


For example, Quail Ministries, a Christian music ministry that provides performances “liberally seasoned with songs, stories, and anecdotal Scripturally-based lessons,” has received over $84,000 in DoD contracts for performances at about a dozen Strong Bonds retreats.
Unlimited Potential, Inc., a ministry “Serving Christ Through Baseball” by sending evangelical Christian major league baseball players to military events, received over $80,000 in DoD contracts for just two retreats, one Strong Bonds retreat and one Spiritual Fitness retreat. Unlimited Potential has been at many other military bases for various other events that do not show up in DoD contracts, presumably because these appearances were paid for with base funds.


DoD Funded Evangelical Christian Youth Programs
Service members are not the only ones targeted by evangelical Christian programs paid for with DoD contracts. Military children are also heavily targeted, both here in the U.S. and on bases overseas. Evangelizing the children of service members is one of the largest areas of spending.
The biggest ministry contracted by the DoD to target children is Military Community Youth Ministries (MCYM), whose mission statement is “Celebrate life with military teens, Introduce them to the Life-Giver, Jesus Christ, And help them become more like Him.” MCYM has received $12,346,333 in DoD contracts since 2000. One of MCYM’s tactics? Stalking “unchurched” military children by following their schools buses.
Ranking second is Cadence International, with over $2,671,603 in contracts since 2003. Cadence describes itself as “an evangelical mission agency dedicated to reaching the military communities of the United States and of the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” Cadence not only targets young service members and military children for conversion to evangelical Christianity, but also actively tries to convert members of foreign militaries in the countries where they operate under DoD contracts.
In addition to military youth ministries like MYCM and Cadence, military children are also targeted by military base Religious Education Directors, also hired with DoD contracts. These ministries and Religious Education Directors employ tactics that can only be described as “stalking” children, with some DoD contracts even requiring that the contractors identify and target the “unchurched” children at non-religious events and activities and get them into chapel programs, and to supply reports naming these children by name. 

Conversion by Temptation


As I’ve been sitting here writing this post, an email came in to MRFF from a soldier who is currently in Advanced Individual Training (AIT), the stage of training between basic training and and a soldier’s first assignment, where the soldier receives training in the particular job they will be doing. During AIT, soldiers are typically given a few privileges that they didn’t have in basic training, but not many.
This soldier’s email is a a great example of a common strategy that I call “conversion by temptation,” where the military ministries and the military itself tempt young soldiers and military children with fun or exciting things to lure them into participating in programs and events where they can be “saved.” What young soldier would pass up a vacation at a resort with their spouse that they could never afford on their military salary?

That’s how the Army’s Strong Bonds program gets many soldiers who would never attend an religious retreat to attend evangelical Christian retreats. What teenage kid would pass up a ski trip or week at the beach with the other kids? That’s how DoD funded military youth ministries like MCYM lure the teenage kids of our service members.
The email that just came in from the soldier in AIT was about the soldiers in training being granted extra privileges if they attend the programs on his post run by Cadence International. These privileges include being allowed to have pizza and soda on Friday nights if they go to the Christian “Coffee House,” even if they haven’t reached the stage of training where this is allowed, and being allowed to wear civilian clothes and engage in all sorts of fun activities if they go to Cadence’s on-post weekend retreats.

Ecstasy Could Treat Blood Cancers: Researchers

Researchers in Britain revealed Friday they are exploring whether the nightclubbers' drug ecstasy could be effective in treating blood cancers.
 
 
 
Researchers in Britain revealed Friday they are exploring whether the nightclubbers' drug ecstasy could be effective in treating blood cancers.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham in central England said modified forms of the drug boosted its ability to destroy cancerous cells by 100 times.
Six years ago, researchers found that cancers affecting white blood cells appeared to respond to certain "psychotropic" drugs.
These included weight loss pills, Prozac-type antidepressants, and amphetamine derivatives such as methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) -- commonly known as ecstasy.
The Birmingham scientists said their discoveries since then could lead to MDMA derivatives being used in patient trials.
The derivatives could be effective in treating blood cancers such as leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma.
"This is an exciting next step towards using a modified form of MDMA to help people suffering from blood cancer," said Professor John Gordon, from the university's School of Immunology and Infection.
"While we would not wish to give people false hope, the results of this research hold the potential for improvements in treatments in years to come."
The team found that the dose of MDMA required to treat a tumor would prove fatal, so they set about isolating the drug's cancer-killing properties.
They are now looking at ways to get MDMA molecules to penetrate cancer cell walls more easily.
Doctor David Grant, scientific director of the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research charity, which part-funded the study, said: "The prospect of being able to target blood cancer with a drug derived from ecstasy is a genuinely exciting proposition.
"Many types of lymphoma remain hard to treat and non-toxic drugs which are both effective and have few side effects are desperately needed."
The findings are published in the bi-monthly journal Investigational New Drugs.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

How the Head of Fox News Is Making Americans More Right-Wing, More Ignorant and Ever More Terrified

Even his boss Rupert Murdoch is afraid of Roger Ailes.
  
At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.


"It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. "It's like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders," says a former executive with the network's parent, News Corp. "There are people who turn people in."
The key to decoding Fox News isn't hosts Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn't even News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. "He is Fox News," says Jane Hall, a Fox commentator for 10 years, who defected over Ailes's embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. "It's his vision. It's a reflection of him."

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816m last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch's global haul. The cable channel's earnings rivalled those of News Corp's entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch's beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3bn writedown after acquiring the Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones newsgathering operation – Fox News has one-third of the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50%. Nearly half comes from advertising and the rest is fees from cable companies. Fox News now reaches 100m households, attracting more viewers than all other cable news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to "throw off a billion in profits".
The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. "Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all," says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp researching a biography of the Australian media giant. "People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News."


Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: his network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces such as the planned "terror mosque" near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Qur'an. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes's business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. "You know Roger is crazy," Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. "He really believes that stuff."
To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that is held to the same standard of evidence as a political campaign attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican party.

As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan's budding Alzheimer's in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail healthcare reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."
In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. "I quit politics," he has claimed, "because I hated it." But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the Republican party to bypass sceptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing US senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last autumn, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26m in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential Republican contenders on the Fox News payroll – including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012.

"Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he's now doing 24/7 with his network," says a former News Corp executive. "It's come full circle."
The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and funny. But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: "I only understand friendship or scorched earth," he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles, the venomous comic, and Don Corleone. "What's fun for Roger is the destruction," says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. "When the lightbulb goes on and he's got the trick to outmanoeuvre the enemy – that's his passion." Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by al-Qaida for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.
Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the "college boys" who managed the line. Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – haemophilia forced him to sit out breaktime at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car aged eight. His mother worked, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. "Television and I grew up together," he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – "I was hammered all the time" – Ailes said he "went to state school because they told me I could drink". In fact, his father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. "I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone," he recalled. "I never found my shit!" The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.
In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force reserve officer training corps but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in college productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured ageing stars such as Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, "like you're talking to someone who's been under a rock for a couple of decades".

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice-president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. "The camera doesn't like you," he said. Nixon wasn't pleased. "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected," he grumbled. "Television is not a gimmick," Ailes said. "And if you think it is, you'll lose again."
The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Mike Douglas and signed on as Nixon's "executive producer for television". For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. "I don't know anyone else around that I would have done it for," Ailes has said, "other than Nixon."
Like Nixon, Rupert Murdoch found Ailes captivating: powerful, politically connected, funny as hell. By the time the two men teamed up in 1996 both had been married twice and both shared an open contempt for the traditional rules of journalism. Murdoch also had a direct self-interest in targeting regulation-minded liberals, whose policies threatened to interfere with his plans for expansion.
Even before he hired Ailes, Murdoch had several teams at work on an early version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp affiliates. The false starts included a 60 Minutes-style programme that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social programme. "The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving," says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the "leftwing bias" of CNN. "There's your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda," says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. "That's its original sin."


Before signing on to run the new network, Ailes demanded that Murdoch get "carriage" – distribution on cable systems nationwide. In the normal course of business, cable outfits such as Time Warner pay content providers such as CNN or MTV for the right to air their programmes. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn't just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25m homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. "Murdoch's offer shocked the industry," writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. "He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice." Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch's "nerve", adding: "This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great."


Ailes was also determined not to let the professional ethics of journalism get in the way of his political agenda. To secure a pliable news staff, he led what he called a "jailbreak" from his old employers, NBC, bringing dozens of top staffers with him to Fox News.

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. "There was a litmus test," recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. "He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals." When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn't far enough to the right for his tastes, he'd spring an accusation: "Why are you a liberal?" If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place such as CBS – which he spat out as "the Communist Broadcast System". To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network's DNA. Reporters understood that a rightwing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. "All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom," says a former anchor. "But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your colour – and that your colour was red." Red state, that is.
Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and cubicle offices along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the "brain room" – that requires special security clearance to gain access. "It's where the evil resides," says Cooper, who helped design its specs.
It was the election of Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn't leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network's "decision desk" on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush's first cousin.
In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. "We at Fox News," he would later tell a House hearing, "do not discriminate against people because of their family connections." On election day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Fox News called the election for Bush at 2.16 am – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to "Bush Wins" headlines in the morning papers.
"We'll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not," says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. "But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical."
After Bush took office, Ailes stayed in frequent touch with the new Republican president. "The senior-level editorial people believe that Roger was on the phone every day with Bush," a source close to Fox News tells me. "He gave Bush the same kind of pointers he used to give [his father] – delivery, effectiveness, political coaching." In the aftermath of 9/11, Ailes sent a back-channel memo to the president through Karl Rove, advising Bush to ramp up the war on terror. As reported by Bob Woodward, Ailes advised Bush that, "the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible".
Fox News did its part to make sure that viewers lined up behind those harsh measures. The network plastered an American flag in the corner of the screen, dolled up one female anchor in a camouflage-print silk blouse, and featured Geraldo Rivera threatening to hunt down Osama bin Laden with a pistol. The militarism even seemed to infect the culture of Fox News. "Roger Ailes is the general," declared Bill O'Reilly. "And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll."
Ailes likes to boast that Fox News maintains a bright, clear line between its news shows, which he touts as balanced, and primetime hosts such as O'Reilly and Hannity, who are given free rein to voice their opinions. "We police those lines very carefully," Ailes has said. But after Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office and provided his spin on the day's news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day's news coverage according to the agenda of those on "the second floor", as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice-presidents are known. "There's a chain of command, and it's followed," says a former news anchor. "Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down." (Ailes and Fox News declined repeated requests for an interview for this piece.)
The more profits soared at Fox News, the more Ailes expanded his power and independence. In 2005, he staged a brazen coup within the company, conspiring to depose Murdoch's son Lachlan as the anointed heir of News Corp. Ailes not only took over Lachlan's portfolio – becoming chair of Fox Television – he even claimed Lachlan's office on the eighth floor. In 2009, Ailes earned a pay package of $24m – a deal slightly larger than the one enjoyed by Murdoch himself. He brags privately that his contract also forbids Murdoch – infamous for micromanaging his newspapers – from interfering with editorial decisions at Fox News.
Many within Murdoch's family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch's third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband's politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. PR man Matthew Freud, Murdoch's son-in-law, recently told reporters: "I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes's horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to."
"Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is," says Wolff, Murdoch's biographer. "Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert's children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself."
Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp pays to usher him from his $1.6m home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. Travelling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: "We come out of the building and there's an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We're ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox's offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive 'the package'. The package is taken in, and I'm taken on to my destination."
Ailes is certain that he's a top target of al-Qaida terrorists. Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, he keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. "What the hell!" Ailes shouted. "This guy could be bombing me!" The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. "Roger tore up the whole floor," recalls a source close to Ailes. "He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network."


Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network's viewers are old, with a median age of 65. Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, commercials for products such as Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical ("Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven't had since I started using catheters"). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38% of viewers are African-American. "Roger understands audiences," says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. "He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about." The typical viewer of Sean Hannity's show, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86%), Christian conservative (78%), Tea Party-backer (75%) with no college degree (66%), who is over 50 (65%), supports the NRA (73%), doesn't back gay rights (78%) and thinks government "does too much" (84%).

"He's got a niche audience and he's programmed to it beautifully," says a former News Corp colleague. "He feeds them exactly what they want to hear."
From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist and a 1960s radical. In early 2007, Ailes joked about the similarity of Obama's name to a certain terrorist's. "It is true that Barack Obama is on the move," Ailes said in a speech to news executives. "I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said: 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" References to Obama's middle name were soon being bandied about on Fox & Friends, the morning happy-talk show that Ailes uses as one of his primary vehicles to inject his venom into the media bloodstream.
The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. "Obama's election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before," says Burns, the network's former media critic. "Things shifted," agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. "There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable."


Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. "I see this as the Alamo," Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on 15 April 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties."
According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Sharia law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama's citizenship. At the height of the healthcare debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obamacare would lead to a "government takeover", provide healthcare to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland revealed that ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That's because Ailes isn't interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimisation.
"What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame," says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. "He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilises it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin's  politics of resentment. He's the golden thread."
Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America's most conservative voters. Republican candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as "matadors" who want to "tear down the social order" with their "elitist, horse-dung, socialist thinking". Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetises conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. "I'm not in politics," Ailes recently boasted. "I'm in ratings. We're winning."
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1bn in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-employees. Either way, he has put the Republican party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. "Now we're discovering that we work for Fox."

Monsanto's 5 Most Dubious Contributions to the Planet

There's a whole lot more than just GMO seeds. Let's take a quick look at some of the biotech giant's most dubious contributions to society over the past century.
 
 
Oh, Monsanto, you sly dog.
You keep trying to make us believe you are "committed to sustainable agriculture" with your canny advertisments on American Public Media, even as you force-feed farmers your lab-grown Frankenseeds that expire every year (which are, let's be honest, opposite of sustainable).
But we shouldn't be surprised by the mixed message, should we? After all, you've been doing this for decades. With long-running corporate sponsorships, like Disney's Tomorrowland, building reserves of goodwill as you spray us with DDT, it's clear you're entitled to send out products into the world with nary an environmental or health concern—just as long as you spend a bit of that hard-earned cash convincing us otherwise.

On that note, let's take a quick look at some of the biotech giant's most dubious contributions to society over their past century in business.
Monsanto burst onto the scene in 1901 with the artificial sweetener saccharin, which it sold to Coca-Cola and canned food companies as a sugar replacement.
But as early as 1907, the health effects of the sweetener were being questioned by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists.
"Everyone who ate that sweet [canned] corn was deceived," said Harvey Wiley, the first commissioner of the FDA. "He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact he was eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health."

After enjoying decades of unfettered consumption, the sweetener was slapped with a warning label in the '70s when it was found to cause cancer in lab rats.
A subsequent three-decade effort by Monsanto to reverse the decision finally won out in 2001. After all, how could a product derived from coal tar not be safe for consumption? 

By the '40s, Monsanto had moved on to oil-based plastics, including polystyrene foam (also known as styrofoam).
As most of us are aware by now, polystyrene foam is an environmental disaster. Not only is there nothing out there that biodegrades it, it breaks off into tiny pieces that choke animals, harm marine life, and release cancer-causing benzene into the environment for a thousand years or more.
"Polystyrene foam products rely on nonrenewable sources for production, are nearly indestructible and leave a legacy of pollution on our urban and natural environments," said San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin in 2007. "If McDonald's could see the light and phase out polystyrene foam more than a decade ago, it's about time San Francisco got with the program."
Despite the ovewhelming evidence against it, the noxious containers are still pervasive elsewhere around the country. Amazingly, they were even voted to be reintroduced into House cafeterias by Republicans earlier this year.
First developed as an herbicide and defoliant, Agent Orange was used infamously as a military weapon by the U.S. Army during Vietnam to remove the dense foliage of the jungle canopy.
In the process, they dumped over 12 million gallons of the potent chemical cocktail—described by Yale biologist Arthur Galston as "perhaps the most toxic molecule ever synthesized by man"—over towns, farms, and water supplies during a nine-year period.


"When [military scientists] initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide ... ," said Dr. James R. Clary, a former government scientist with the Chemical Weapons Branch. "However, because the material was to be used on the ‘enemy,’ none of us were overly concerned."

According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that lack of concern led to 4.8 million exposures to the herbicide, along with 400,000 deaths and disfigurements and 500,000 babies born with birth defects.



4) Bovine Growth Hormone
Did you know the United States is the only developed nation that permits the sale of milk from cows given artificial growth hormones?
With the lone exception of Brazil, the rest of the developed world—including all 27 countries of the European Union, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—has banned growth hormone use in milk destined for human consumption.
Why all the lact-haters? Milk derived from hormone-injected cows shows higher levels of cancer-causing hormones and lower nutritional value, leading even the most stubborn U.S. courts to rule in favor of separate labels for hormone-free milk.
"The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking without apparent harm for 2,000 years," said Harvard scientist Ganmaa Davaasambuu. "The milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food."
According to the Center for Food Safety, thanks to increased consumer demand (and certain movies), approximately 60 percent of milk in the U.S. is rBST-free today.
5) Genetically-Modified Seeds
Not content to do mere incidental damage to the environment, Monsanto decided to get to the root of the matter in the '80s: seeds.


But with much fuss being made over the company's aggressive scare tactics and rampant mass-patenting, the biotech giant has, true to form, fought back with a multimillion-dollar marketing and advertising campaign featuring smiling children and making outlandish claims that "biotech foods could help end world hunger."
"Unless I'm missing something," wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, "the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma...If we don't get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the Third World will go blind."
What's clear is that no matter what its justification, Monsanto is a) never giving away all these seeds for free; and b) rendering them sterile so that farmers need to re-up every year, making it difficult to believe that the company could possibly have the planet's best intentions at heart.
"By peddling suicide seeds, the biotechnology multinationals will lock the world's poorest farmers into a new form of genetic serfdom," says Emma Must of the World Development Movement. "Currently 80 percent of crops in developing countries are grown using farm-saved seed."
"Being unable to save seeds from sterile crops could mean the difference between surviving and going under."