This story was first published on Alternet.org

California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein showed Californians who she really serves this past Thursday, when news emerged that she was trying to ram through a massive transfer of precious water out of the hands of millions of state residents, and into the private pockets of a clique of billionaire corporate farmers.

Here’s how the San Francisco Chronicle described the swindle: (more…)

This article was first published by AlterNet.

HESPERIA, CA—Say hello to the thing that could save our gas-guzzlin’ suburban lifestyle: affordable residential solar power that’s within reach of the most cash-strapped America consumer. This breakthrough is not a result of technological innovation, but a new financing scheme cooked up on Wall Street called a “residential solar lease,” a no-money-down, low-monthly plan that has made solar electricity cheaper than the stuff we get by wire. It’s an old approach to a new source of energy, and it is taking California by storm. (more…)

We’ve been lied to for years now about the severity of California’s water shortage. The media and state officials have been ringing the alarm,  warning that the state was in the grips of the quite possibly the “worst California drought in modern history,” when in fact the state nearly pulled in its average rainfall in 2009. The fearmongering is about to go into overdrive, as powerful interests start whipping up fears of drought to push through a $11 billion bond measure on the upcoming November elections, setting up the Golden State for a corporate water grab.

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This article was first published by TruthDig (truthdig.com)

Michele Bachmann has become known as the Queen of the anti-government Tea Baggers, protesting health care reform and slamming every other government handout as “socialism.” But what her followers don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is also a queen of another kind—a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money. (more…)

The problem with the water debate, to the extent there is one, is the way it’s spun. Long dominated by eco-warrior do-gooders, the fight for water has been framed as boringly and abstractly as possible. How is the “environment” supposed to register in our primitive brains when 1 out of 5 Americans still think the sun revolves around the earth? In fact, it’s pretty simple what the big struggle for water is all about: the rich fleecing the rest of the country. Fact is, they’ve been treating our water wealth like one giant personal trust fund. And it seems they’ve been hitting up the ATM so often that even NASA’s satellites can see the withdrawals all the way from space: (more…)

Article originally published by Vice magazine

Prospects have never been good for ex-cons. Even during good economic times they hover between 50 and 75 percent unemployment, and generally take home about nine grand a year. No wonder 70 percent of them wind up violating their parole and getting back in the slammer. Now, with unemployment rates hitting levels unseen since the Great Depression, we might just make it to 100 percent recidivism.

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This article was first published on AlterNet

What are we getting in return for the bailout? So far, predatory credit card rates, exorbitant bank fees and obscene Wall Street bonuses. But we’re being robbed in other, sneakier ways, too. It seems that taxpayers in the poorest, most vulnerable parts of the county are getting plundered by the same institutions they bailed out. One example is AIG’s underhanded fleecing of residents of rural Kentucky.

Middlesboro and Clinton are two tiny, impoverished towns in southern Kentucky with a combined population of 12,000. In 2008, Middlesboro’s per capita income was $13,189 a year, only a few hundred dollars more than the average worker earned in third-world Mexico. That is if they were lucky to even get a job. (more…)