Blogwatch

The Tea Party movement’s dirty little secret is that its chief financial backers owe their family fortune to the granddaddy of all their hatred: Stalin’s godless empire of the USSR. The secretive oil billionaires of the Koch family, the main supporters of the right-wing groups that orchestrated the Tea Party movement, would not have the means to bankroll their favorite causes had it not been for the pile of money the family made working for the Bolsheviks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, building refineries, training Communist engineers and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure.

In the wake of last week's disaster at Massey Energy Company's Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, it's become increasingly clear that CEO Don Blankenship has gamed the loophole-laden mine safety enforcement system.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. government is sending $1.8 billion in stimulus money to overseas wind energy companies. Taxpayers ought to be furious at this revelation - I certainly am.

”Undercover Boss,” the new CBS reality show in which corporate CEOs don disguises and spend a few days experiencing what it's like to be a low-level worker at their companies, is the kind of popular entertainment that can morph into something that affects the zeitgeist by turning a spotlight on just how out of touch America's corporate chiefs are. And their cluelessness is not just about the jobs their workers do -- it's about the lives their workers lead. Maybe if our elected representatives went undercover for a little while and experienced the reality of the millions of American families that are measurably worse off because of Washington's actions and inactions, we might get some real change.