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BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label Brave New Foundation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brave New Foundation. Show all posts
28 June 2013
BRAVE NEW FOUNDATION: BEYOND BARS (U.S. JUSTICE SYSTEM), CUENTAME (IMMIGRATION REFORM) & WAR COST (AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, DRONES) 28JUN13
HERE is an update from Brave New Foundation focusing on the media campaigns they have been running on immigration reform, the American justice system, War Cost, and the American military's and "intelligence" communities use of drones. I have donated to some of these campaigns (BNF has also taken on the koch brothers and their repiglican / tea-bagger allies ) and these media campaigns do have an impact. Check them out......
19 December 2012
Year End Summary from BRAVE NEW FOUNDATION 19DEZ12
2012 Brave New Foundation Campaigns
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04 October 2012
Video Shines Light On Drone Attacks 4OKT12
HERE is a different perspective on American drone strikes and how they are perpetuating the terrorist threat to the U.S. and American interest around the world. This is a huge moral, military and legal dilemma for everyone in the U.S. Nobody wants to kill innocent civilians. The USAF and CIA are already treating the pilots of the drones for psychological problems related to remote killings by their drones. The government of Pakistan is supposed to be an ally, but they are so corrupt and infiltrated with members or supporters of terrorist organizations they are unwilling to do anything about terrorist organizations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, so groups like the taliban, al-qaida and the haqqani network operate from save havens there. There are also American and International legal issues about war, war powers, and national sovereignty that are headed to courts in the U.S. and other countries. The situation is far from being black and white, and much needs to be considered. From Brave New Foundation's new campaign, WarCost....
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17 February 2012
Mitt's dog tells the REAL story, The Mutt Romney Blues 16FEB12
mitt romney still doesn't get it. Pets do not ride in their crates on the roof of a car. But he is still laughing about it, trying to make schluff the issue off as some humorous misunderstanding. From BraveNewFoundation.....
03 December 2011
A Little Straight Talk on National Defense 2DEZ11 & WATCH: Military Spending Doesn't Create Jobs—It Costs Them 3DEZ11
THE military-industrial complex is waging a full blow propaganda war to protect their profits and keep the American economy in recession. Greed, not patriotism is behind their campaign to prevent cuts to the Pentagon's budget. Defense spending does not create more middle class jobs than federal domestic spending, it creates less jobs and so makes our country weaker, not stronger. Consider this from Mother Jones and Brave New Foundation.....
Now that the budget supercommittee has failed in its mission to produce a $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan, the Department of Defense must automatically cut $600 billion from its budget within the next decade. As expected, the US defense industry is not happy about this, and its lobbyists have been scrambling for ways to convince Congress that the impending cuts are untenable.
So far, one major theme has emerged: Cut spending in our industry, and you cut hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Marion Blakey, CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, announced that "the cuts in the aerospace and defense portion alone could result in the loss of over 1 million American jobs."
But that's misleading, according to the Brave New Media Foundation. While the defense industry would lose some opportunities, military spending in fact amounts to a net loss of jobs when compared with government investment in other industries, according to the group's research. Pumping money into the green energy sector and education field creates far more jobs than defense spending does—in the case of education, twice as many.
Watch:
So far, one major theme has emerged: Cut spending in our industry, and you cut hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Marion Blakey, CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, announced that "the cuts in the aerospace and defense portion alone could result in the loss of over 1 million American jobs."
But that's misleading, according to the Brave New Media Foundation. While the defense industry would lose some opportunities, military spending in fact amounts to a net loss of jobs when compared with government investment in other industries, according to the group's research. Pumping money into the green energy sector and education field creates far more jobs than defense spending does—in the case of education, twice as many.
Watch:
Samantha Oltman is the Online Editorial Intern at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here. You can follow her on Twitter here.
A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division’s “Devil Brigade” aims his M240-B crew-served machine gun.
Defense hawks like to insist that we should judge the Pentagon budget as a percentage of GDP. The Bill Kristol contingent, for example, claims that we should never allow defense spending to fall below 4 percent of GDP. But is this a sensible way of looking at things? For some programs it is. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are both inherently tied to population growth and living standards, so as those go up so will outlays. But
in other areas this doesn't make so much sense. Do we need more embassies overseas just because our GDP has grown? Not really. There will be some increase in wages that's tied to economic growth, but that's about it.
National defense falls into this category. The United States is no harder or easier to defend when our economy grows, so it's foolish to pretend that defense spending as a percentage of GDP should remain constant. It should go up when we're at war, or when external threats are high for some reason, and it should go down in other times.
This is one of those other times. Despite the best efforts of defense hawks to jangle nerves over China, the plain fact is that China remains a minuscule military threat and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future. We aren't going to start a land war in Asia, after all. Spending on cybersecurity will increase in the future, but it's still a nit in the grand scheme of Pentagon spending. On other fronts, Al Qaeda is all but dead, and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. We'll continue to keep troops in the Middle East and (for better or worse) we'll continue with our drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. But those are pretty cheap. As scary as terrorism might be, the fact is that it's primarily an intelligence expense. On a pure military basis, it's simply not a big-ticket threat.
So can we afford to reduce defense spending to 2007 levels? Of course we can. The world is not more dangerous today than it was in 2007, and there's no a priori reason it should cost more to defend the security of the United States today than it did in 2007. We might spend that money differently, of course. Perhaps the Pentagon will decide it would rather have a thousand more drones instead of a single additional supercarrier group. That might well make sense since the mission of supercarrier groups is becoming fuzzier all the time in an era of primarily asymmetric warfare.
The supercommittee sequestration will require the Pentagon to find additional cuts of about $50 billion per year in its budget. To pretend that this would make us virtually defenseless is to insult our collective intelligence. We can make that cut and still have the most powerful military on the planet by a factor of five or six. If that doesn't make you feel safe, nothing will.
A Little Straight Talk on National Defense
A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division’s “Devil Brigade” aims his M240-B crew-served machine gun. The Economist's Roger McShane is unimpressed with all the doom-mongering over proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget:
So by how much will the defence budget decline over the next decade? That could be seen as a trick question, because in nominal terms it will grow. Prior to the supercommittee's failure, the defence budget was slated to increase some 23% between 2012 and 2021. Now, according to Veronique de Rugy, the Pentagon will have to make do with a 16% boost…Or to put it another way, as Lawrence Korb does, the "sequestration will return defense spending in real terms to its FY 2007 level, the next to last year of the Bush administration, when no one was complaining about devastating levels of spending."We could, of course, have thousands of ships and tens of thousands of warplanes if we wanted. But that would mean buying lots of PT boats and swarms of F-4s instead of a dozen Nimitz- and Ford-class supercarrier groups and a few hundred F-35s. We don't have a small number of ships and planes because we're too cheap to buy more, we have them because that's what the Pentagon wants. Modern war makes a small number of superadvanced weapons systems more effective than a bunch of cheap cannon fodder.
…But these numbers have not quieted the critics. And perhaps the most ardent among them has been [Defense Secretary Leon] Panetta. My colleague cites a statement from the secretary, in which he lists the tragic results of a 16% increase: "We would be left with our smallest ground force since 1940, the fewest ships since 1915 and the smallest Air Force in its history." Here's another fact: America already has the fewest ships since 1916, despite a 70% increase in defence spending between 2001 and 2010.
Defense hawks like to insist that we should judge the Pentagon budget as a percentage of GDP. The Bill Kristol contingent, for example, claims that we should never allow defense spending to fall below 4 percent of GDP. But is this a sensible way of looking at things? For some programs it is. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are both inherently tied to population growth and living standards, so as those go up so will outlays. But
in other areas this doesn't make so much sense. Do we need more embassies overseas just because our GDP has grown? Not really. There will be some increase in wages that's tied to economic growth, but that's about it.National defense falls into this category. The United States is no harder or easier to defend when our economy grows, so it's foolish to pretend that defense spending as a percentage of GDP should remain constant. It should go up when we're at war, or when external threats are high for some reason, and it should go down in other times.
This is one of those other times. Despite the best efforts of defense hawks to jangle nerves over China, the plain fact is that China remains a minuscule military threat and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future. We aren't going to start a land war in Asia, after all. Spending on cybersecurity will increase in the future, but it's still a nit in the grand scheme of Pentagon spending. On other fronts, Al Qaeda is all but dead, and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. We'll continue to keep troops in the Middle East and (for better or worse) we'll continue with our drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. But those are pretty cheap. As scary as terrorism might be, the fact is that it's primarily an intelligence expense. On a pure military basis, it's simply not a big-ticket threat.
So can we afford to reduce defense spending to 2007 levels? Of course we can. The world is not more dangerous today than it was in 2007, and there's no a priori reason it should cost more to defend the security of the United States today than it did in 2007. We might spend that money differently, of course. Perhaps the Pentagon will decide it would rather have a thousand more drones instead of a single additional supercarrier group. That might well make sense since the mission of supercarrier groups is becoming fuzzier all the time in an era of primarily asymmetric warfare.
The supercommittee sequestration will require the Pentagon to find additional cuts of about $50 billion per year in its budget. To pretend that this would make us virtually defenseless is to insult our collective intelligence. We can make that cut and still have the most powerful military on the planet by a factor of five or six. If that doesn't make you feel safe, nothing will.
11 November 2011
ARE THE KOCH BROTHERS DENYING YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE? 8NOV11
THE koch brothers continue their assault on American civil liberties with the intent of destroying our Republic and creating a Third World plutocracy. This from Brave New Foundation on voter restrictions and the petition drive calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to invoke the 1965 Voting Rights Act and stop these new restrictions on voting. Of special note, the citizens of Maine rejected the state government's repeal of election day voter registration and restored that right on 8NOV11. WAY TO GO MAINE VOTERS!!!!
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13 October 2011
CANCER RISK FOR KOCH PROFITS from BRAVE NEW FOUNDATION 13OKT11
BRAVE NEW FOUNDATION exposes the koch brothers AGAIN!!!! Check out the video report from The Young Turks and BNF, and try not to by georgia-pacific products......
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Foundation team
This is the report from The Young Turks
THIS is the complete video from Brave New Foundation
Our second victory comes after the release of "EXPOSED: Koch Industries and Cancer Risks." Through our webpage, more than 2,400 people left comments to show solidarity with Mr. Bouie and his neighbors, who have been tragically afflicted by Koch Industries. Mr. Bouie along with Cheryl Slavant of Louisiana Environmental Action Network will confront the Koch brothers with the thousands of messages posted by activists. With communities like West Crossett dying, we can no longer afford to let the Kochs buy their way out of environmental responsibility. Your support, coupled with unprecedented press coverage, is putting pressure on the Koch Brothers and policy makers who can make this right.
These two videos have garnered more than 113,000 views. Our impact would not be possible without your dedication and donations to this investigation. See how you are shifting the narrative by checking out other press from this release.
Thanks for everything you do to protect democracy,Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New Foundation team
This is the report from The Young Turks
THIS is the complete video from Brave New Foundation
PRESS
The Nation: The Kochs and Cancer In A Small Town
by George Zornick at The Nation One of the early storylines about Koch Industries involved its efforts to attack scientific evidence that formaldehyde causes cancer. It was first exposed by Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog last fall, and Jane Mayer’s seminal New Yorker story explored it as well. In short, while a member of George W. Bush’s National [...]
Koch Industries plant linked to cancer epidemic in Arkansas community (video)
by Sue Sturgis at The Institute for Southern Studies/Facing South A new video from Brave New Films is drawing attention to an unusual number of cancer cases and other serious health problems in an Arkansas community next to an industrial facility owned by Koch Industries. The Kansas-based oil and chemical conglomerate is owned by the [...]
The Young Turks: Koch Brothers Exposed for Cancer Causing Pollution
The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur on a shocking report from Koch Brothers Exposed on how the billionaire Koch Brothers efforts to increase their profits may have increased cancer deaths in Arkansas.
Thom Hartmann The Big Picture: Koch connection to cancer deaths?
Robert Greenwald, Filmmaker, political activist and founder of Brave New Foundation joins Thom Hartmann on RT America/The Big Picture. Robert says the Koch brothers have been linked to political bribery, funding right wing think tanks, financial ties to foreign businesses and now…cancer!
Film exposes cancer epidemic downstream from Koch Industries plant
by David Edwards at The Raw Story Residents of a small Arkansas community say that the toxic pollutants being dumped for years by a Koch Industries plant is killing them. Only 15 families reside around Penn Road and already 11 people have died of cancer. Even more are sick. In a new documentary by Brave [...]
New Film Exposes Connection Between the Kochs and a Small Community Dying of Cancer
by Tara Lohan at Alternet A new video from Brave New Foundation shows how people are paying the ultimate price for the Koch brothers’ politics and profiteering. The many sins of the Koch brothers have been keeping Robert Greenwald and his crew at Brave New Foundation busy. Since January they’ve been working on their Koch Brothers Exposed video investigations, [...]
Thom Hartmann & Robert Greenwald – Killer Koch Cancer Connection
Thom Hartmann talks with Robert Greenwald, Filmmaker, political activist and founder of Brave New Foundation, about Robert’s latest documentary that exposes a connection between the Koch brothers and a small community dying of cancer.
Film Shows Epidemic of Cancer Downstream from Koch Industries Plant in Arkansas
by David Dayen at FireDogLake A provocative new video from Brave New Films exposes what appear to be serious environmental crimes in Crossett, Arkansas, caused by waste product at a Georgia-Pacific plant. Georgia-Pacific is owned by Koch Industries. In the video, the citizens of Penn Road, a residential neighborhood behind a channel into which the Georgia-Pacific [...]
Koch Brothers Exposed: Cancer Risk In Crossett Arkansas Blamed On Georgia Pacific
by Brendan DeMelle at DeSmogBlog The Brave New Films project may ring a bell with DeSmogBlog readers. Earlier this year, I wrote about a previous installment in the series taking a look at how the Kochs stand to profit from the construction of the Keystone XLpipeline, if it is ever built. (That video is even more interesting [...]
Robert Greenwald on The Young Turks – Koch Brothers Exposed Update
Robert Greenwald joins Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks to discuss Koch Brothers Exposed and the Bloomberg Markets exposé.
PUBLIC-SCHOOL RESEGREGATION LOSES! Victory Against Koch Brothers from BRAVENEW FOUNDATION 13OKT11
VICTORY!!!! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!!! Here's an update on the battle against the koch brothers and their involvement in their attempt to destroy public education in Wake County, NC followed by my original post on this story "WHY DO THE KOCH BROTHERS WANT TO END PUBLIC EDUCATION? & HOW THE KOCH BROTHERS FUNDED PUBLIC-SCHOOL SEGREGATION" ON 19AUG11. This is another example of how regular people can prevail when their cause is just if they work together. WAY TO GO WAKE COUNTY VOTERS!!!! This from Brave New Foundation.....
WHY DO THE KOCH BROTHERS WANT TO DESTROY PUBLIC EDUCATION? & HOW THE KOCH BROTHERS FUNDED PUBLIC-SCHOOL SEGREGATION 19AUG11
THE koch brothers are evil. Only evil people would work to destroy a school system that does what a school system is supposed to do, educate all the community's children equally. The Wake County, N.C. public school system does that very well, in racially and economically diverse schools. The koch brothers are evil because they tried to destroy this through their proxy organization americans for prosperity which lead a campaign of deception, manipulation and fear mongering propaganda to gain control of the Wake County School Board and then begin the dismantling of a very successful public school system. Only the strength and resolve of a majority of the residents, students and teachers protesting at school board meetings as well as the threat of lawsuits and calls for the federal government to investigate has stopped the afp and koch brothers plans. The Brave New Foundation has documented what the koch brothers are trying to do in Wake County. Check out the video and linked articles and donate to BNF if you can, at the least share this with others so the koch brothers attacks on our public education system are exposed.
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/08/koch-brothers-school-segregation-americans-prosperity
[UDPATE: In an August 16 letter to Brave New Foundation Robert Greenwald, Dallas Woodhouse, Americans for Prosperity's North Carolina state director, attacked the premise of Greenwald's film, saying it "falsely claims" AFP was involved in the 2009 Wake County school board elections. Woodhouse asserts that AFP "did not spend a single dime on those elections" nor did it engage in any get-out-the-vote or voter education efforts. "AFP played no role in the 2009 WCPSS election," Woodhouse asserts. Read his full response.
In its response to AFP, Brave New Foundation stood by its story. BNF pointed to several statements of AFP-NC's in support of its claims, including a 2008 blog post of Woodhouse's saying AFP-NC "is on record as supporting the parents of WakeCARES, through significant financial contributions as well as other support." In the fall of 2009, WakeCARES endorsed the four school board candidates who opposed Wake County's busing policy, and a former AFP-NC director later credited WakeCARES with paving the way for the four candidates' victories. BNF alleged AFP "funneled" financial support to the candidates through Art Pope, a wealthy Raleigh businessman and an AFP national director, who gave more than $15,000 to the Wake GOP which in turn spent nearly all of its political donations in 2009 on backing the four conservative school board candidates. AFP-NC's Woodhouse also told Newsweek in January that his group did voter education and mobilized volunteers for the school board election.]
At first glance, the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers and the Wake County, North Carolina, school board couldn't be more disparate. Charles and David Koch, the brains behind the massive Koch Industries conglomerate and the funders of so many right-wing political causes, are national figures, credited with (or accused of, depending on your political persuasion) launching the tea party movement and waging war on the Obama administration and its agenda. The Wake County public school board is, well, just that.
In reality, there are deep connections between the Kochs and Wake County, and it's all about the money. The latest installment in the left-leaning Brave New Foundation's "Koch Brothers Exposed" video series reveals how a Koch-founded and funded outfit, Americans for Prosperity, fueled a campaign to "resegregate" the schools of Wake County, a prosperous area in central North Carolina that's home to the cities of Raleigh and Cary, among others.
Thanks to your support, I am happy to share two recent victories for the Koch Brothers Exposed campaign.
The video investigation "Why do the Koch brothers want to end public education?" revealed how the Koch Brothers, through the think tanks and front groups they fund, were able to support an insurgent school board majority that favored resegregating public schools. The Koch supported candidates described their plans as “neighborhood schools,” which we rightfully exposed as the old language of Jim Crow and segregationist Gov. George Wallace.
North Carolina voters headed to the polls Oct. 11 and defeated school board candidates sympathetic to the Koch Brothers and school resegregation. This is great news for the hundreds of thousands of families who were threatened by the Koch Brothers’ influence in their community. We are grateful for the part you played in the tremendous victory for this community as well as a larger victory for democracy that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%.
WHY DO THE KOCH BROTHERS WANT TO DESTROY PUBLIC EDUCATION? & HOW THE KOCH BROTHERS FUNDED PUBLIC-SCHOOL SEGREGATION 19AUG11
THE koch brothers are evil. Only evil people would work to destroy a school system that does what a school system is supposed to do, educate all the community's children equally. The Wake County, N.C. public school system does that very well, in racially and economically diverse schools. The koch brothers are evil because they tried to destroy this through their proxy organization americans for prosperity which lead a campaign of deception, manipulation and fear mongering propaganda to gain control of the Wake County School Board and then begin the dismantling of a very successful public school system. Only the strength and resolve of a majority of the residents, students and teachers protesting at school board meetings as well as the threat of lawsuits and calls for the federal government to investigate has stopped the afp and koch brothers plans. The Brave New Foundation has documented what the koch brothers are trying to do in Wake County. Check out the video and linked articles and donate to BNF if you can, at the least share this with others so the koch brothers attacks on our public education system are exposed.
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How the Koch Brothers Funded Public-School Segregation
By Andy Krollhttp://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/08/koch-brothers-school-segregation-americans-prosperity
In its response to AFP, Brave New Foundation stood by its story. BNF pointed to several statements of AFP-NC's in support of its claims, including a 2008 blog post of Woodhouse's saying AFP-NC "is on record as supporting the parents of WakeCARES, through significant financial contributions as well as other support." In the fall of 2009, WakeCARES endorsed the four school board candidates who opposed Wake County's busing policy, and a former AFP-NC director later credited WakeCARES with paving the way for the four candidates' victories. BNF alleged AFP "funneled" financial support to the candidates through Art Pope, a wealthy Raleigh businessman and an AFP national director, who gave more than $15,000 to the Wake GOP which in turn spent nearly all of its political donations in 2009 on backing the four conservative school board candidates. AFP-NC's Woodhouse also told Newsweek in January that his group did voter education and mobilized volunteers for the school board election.]
At first glance, the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers and the Wake County, North Carolina, school board couldn't be more disparate. Charles and David Koch, the brains behind the massive Koch Industries conglomerate and the funders of so many right-wing political causes, are national figures, credited with (or accused of, depending on your political persuasion) launching the tea party movement and waging war on the Obama administration and its agenda. The Wake County public school board is, well, just that.
In reality, there are deep connections between the Kochs and Wake County, and it's all about the money. The latest installment in the left-leaning Brave New Foundation's "Koch Brothers Exposed" video series reveals how a Koch-founded and funded outfit, Americans for Prosperity, fueled a campaign to "resegregate" the schools of Wake County, a prosperous area in central North Carolina that's home to the cities of Raleigh and Cary, among others.
The story starts back in 2009, when elections were held for four of Wake County's nine school board seats—enough seats to dictate the public school district's agenda if all four board members wanted the same reforms. That's where Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, came into play. AFP swooped in to fund and organize on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district's policy of busing to ensure diverse, desegregated public schools. The AFP-backed candidates ran against what they called "forced busing"—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.
Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate busing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. "They're definitely pushing an agenda to resegregate these schools, but there's also a real push toward privatization," Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.
In the end, all four AFP-backed candidates won, and the school board has since begun to roll back its existing busing policies despite a wave of protest and outrage in the local community.
Robert Greenwald, president of Brave New Films, says he and his team zeroed in on the Wake County schools controversy as a way to illustrate just how powerful monied interests can be at the local level. "The fact that millionaires can put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a local election and essentially deprive people of their rights, in many ways, and mess with their school system," he says. "It seems to us one of the strongest examples of the really incredible way money takes away our democracy."
You can watch the video in its entirety above.
Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate busing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. "They're definitely pushing an agenda to resegregate these schools, but there's also a real push toward privatization," Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.
In the end, all four AFP-backed candidates won, and the school board has since begun to roll back its existing busing policies despite a wave of protest and outrage in the local community.
Robert Greenwald, president of Brave New Films, says he and his team zeroed in on the Wake County schools controversy as a way to illustrate just how powerful monied interests can be at the local level. "The fact that millionaires can put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a local election and essentially deprive people of their rights, in many ways, and mess with their school system," he says. "It seems to us one of the strongest examples of the really incredible way money takes away our democracy."
You can watch the video in its entirety above.
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