This week’s Ring of Fire, hosted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Sam Seder: Saturdays at 3 o’clock Eastern, rebroadcasts Sunday nights at 8 pm Eastern
This week on Ring of Fire: Mother Jones reporter Josh Harkinson will be joining us to talk about the latest developments with Occupy Wall Street, including his account of the eviction from Zucotti Park.
We’ll be talking with J.A. Myerson from Truthout about how the military industrial complex is helping keep the 1% rolling in the dough.
Attorney Jeff Anderson will join us to discuss the similarities between the Penn State child sex abuse case and the Catholic Church’s problems with sex abuse.
We’ll hear from documentary film writer and producer Serge Bakalian about his film Default – The Student Loan Documentary.
And attorney Chris Paulos will talk with us about the latest dangers that have been revealed about the birth control drug Yaz.
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I’d like to hear Bobby explain the Brightsource bailout with $1.37 Billion in taxpayer money just before they went public (IPO) when last year his company was $1.8 billion in debt?
You tell me how this is not crony capitalism.
Gee Ross, why don’t we talk about those corporate raiders like Mitt Rommey who buy up companies, fire the workers, selling off the assets, and put those companies into debt back in the 1980s. Or why don’t we talk about the Wall Street companies and the banks when they cook the books, sold toxic products and then gamble that the government would bail them out?
Ross,
It sounds like you might have been, wrongly, sort of implying that RFK Jr. owns Brightsource. He’s an investor in a different company, VantagePoint Capital Partners, a venture capital company, along with a lot of other people. By the looks of things on that company’s site, he’s not the biggest investor either … It’s a private company, but my guess is that the largest ownership is held by the two co-founders, not Kennedy or the many other investors.
Vantage Point Capital Partners provided seed money to BrightSource Energy who received funds from other sources as well, looking at their site.
Further, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the story generally as all I could find covering it were the likes of FoxNews and Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. And the book coming out with the story is edited by a Breitbart associate. But even if there is something to it, RFK Jr.’s importance is likely considerably less, especially financially, than the articles I read would leave one to believe.
http://www.vpcp.com/team_overview
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/about_us/investors
The Penn State situation has acted as a kind of Rorschach test, eliciting quite different reactions. I was surprised by some of them.
One in particular stands out to me. A liberal political radio talk show host, Leslie Marshall, stated that her grandfather came here from Sicily to escape prosecution for having killing someone who raped a child. She then said that if the Penn State victim sodomized in the shower was a kid of hers, she’d kill the guy who saw the act but didn’t immediately report it (not the guy who allegedly commited the act). The next day she reported that the guy who saw the act was getting death threats and wondered did she inspire them. This could be viewed as a form of stochastic terrorism. We saw a completed example of that in the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt, after she was targeted by Sarah Palin within a social climate of anti-nonRealAmerican hate fostered by right-wing hate-radio and Fox.
And Marshall wasn’t alone in what I saw as odd reactions among the punditry. Oh man the sports guys generally – wow are they a trip – the forerunners of hate-radio from whom I presume Limbaugh learned the potential for hate on political talk radio during his years in pro baseball.
But what really made me do a double take was when I told a friend whose politically aware, a liberal type like myself, what I heard on the radio, expecting a reaction similar to my own or at minimum surprise. Nope – he’d kill him too.
Here’s an article which I thought was very insightful. It tries to explain the variation in reaction psychologically.
http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/story/mike-mcqueary-what-angers-most-is-they-see-themselves-when-they-consider-his-actions-in-penn-state-sex-abuse-scandal-111711
The story Ross, the conservative troll, brought up and buggywhipper debunked is another example of a ‘controversy startup’ to make Robert Kennedy, Jr, and anyone associated with him in a return to McCarthyite guilt by association tactics, known more for controversy around their work than for the work itself lessening his economic and political influence. Electricity, heating and transportation fuels (energy) can be produced profitably and without changing the earth’s climate. The dirty fuels industry (coal, oil, nuclear, natural gas or King cong in a book “Solartopia”) rightly fears being put out of business if they don’t change their product and service mix in the free market capitalist economy we’re stuck in. Rather than reinvest their profits in the business (what high tax rates on the rich 1% used to incentivize) the rich ‘cong’ energy company owners spend their profits on personal not common good. The author of Solartopia was interviewed on Ring of Fire.
G, buggywhipper, and Jon in MD, thanks for explaining the REAL stories behind the synthetic trash that corporations have been producing over the past 30 years. It’s like when Gordon Gekko said “I create nothing – I own!”
BTW, does anyone know about the credibility, or lack thereof of the right-wing website “Zombie Time” (or “Zombie blog”) which the other internet troll Scott sometimes posts here on ROFR?
As for the energy front in America, I’m sure what Carter said in his Crisis of Confidence speech in 1979, credit to him is long past due. It’s good to minimize use of the thermostat and wear a warm sweater in the winter and open the window (or turn on a fan) in the summer. Also, it’s too bad that the energy panels that were made by Americans for the WH were taken down when Reagan took over. Now with Obama, and with the relationship between America and China being so problematic, we have energy problems such as “Solyndra-gate.”
I think the show may be going off the rails. Where’s the edge lately? To me ROFR should lead, not try to recap the weeks hot stories. I for one want to hear guests who are unafraid to be wrong and have a passion. People who think for themselves. People you might not hear anywhere else talking about things nobody else is talking about.
Seems to me they have to decide do they want to follow or lead. The two are not very compatible.
Bottom line, I think they should forget about who’s in power and just tell the truth and let the chips fall as they may. As it is, the party’s are making monkeys of us, playing good cop/bad cop, all the while dancing us closer and closer to the cliff’s edge.
As much a sevice to the country ROFR did standing up to the Bush administration when few would, I think by concentrating on the flaws of the Dems in the House, Senate and Presidency, from a left perspective, you would be doing an equally great service as there is again a paucity of critisism the average person can easily hear. This time not out of fear of retaliation but a misplaced loyalty to politicians who have shown little loyalty to us, their bosses.
This is not a football game. There are, now and much more soon, real tangible consquences from weak-kneed bipartisanship. We need a whip, not another cheerleader.
@NR, yeah that Gordon Gecko, life imitates art. Hollywood should have cast a fat old bald guy.
@Jon in Maryland, “controversey startup” how about that, it must be going on so much they had to give it a name.
You’re right buggywhipper. I wasn’t sure what his connection was other than he had a big financial interest in it. Turns out, his venture capital company was the largest ‘investor’ that Brightsource had.
But y’all would be amazed at the precense of Soros-backed organizations.
In June, BrightSource Chairman John Bryson, was nominated by Obama as his commerce secretary pick.
KleinOnline reported in June that Bryson co-founded an environmental activist group that is a member and funder of the controversial Apollo Alliance.
For example: http://bit.ly/sUpiEW
And especially this:
[s]tart with the fact that the principal investor in BrightSource is VantagePoint Partners. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a Venture Partner in VantagePoint. But BrightSource had an even more valuable contact than that:
Sanjay Wagle…was one of the principals in Kennedy’s firm who raised money for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.
http://bit.ly/rKvtCL
—
I mean, is that cool or what?
Ross, you want to talk about crony capitalism, look at the relationships between the government officials and business leaders during the Reagan Administration and the Bush, Jr. Administration. We all know that Dick Cheney uss his office to give his former company Haliburtion a total lock, stock, and barrel on the private contracts in Iraq. And then Cheney came back to his former company after he left office.
To me another kind of crony capitalism is where you have CEOs siting on each other companies boards of directors and give each other salaries and bonuses no matter how bad they perform and they will not do anything about it because they need each other to give them jobs when they leave their companies.