Media Narratives: Non-Profits and Coal

I've been listening carefully and waiting for the local Christian news to report on the modified situation with regard to the improper IRS investigations. It has come out that many liberal groups were targeted as well. They were both indignant and gleeful when reporting the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, but now they don't seem to want to talk about the issue anymore.

Frankly the whole tax-exempt issue has spiraled out of control. There are many groups receiving this status which do not deserve it. And in addition, there's a point very few people are talking about. With Citizens United the floodgates have opened. You can now basically have a tax-exempt organizations operating in the shadows that can take in massive amounts of more or less unreported money. Not only has this turned the entire political process on its head but there are voices out there who are concerned with where the money is coming from. How do I know this? I went looking.

I thought 'wow', this could be quite a mechanism for moving money around and basically having no way to track it. You could even move money from overseas accounts. Isn't this kind of like money laundering? And yes, there are a few others who have raised this concern. There are rules to these transactions but you're hard pressed to find anyone who can explain them. Apparently even the local IRS agents are struggling to understand how all of this works in a post-Citizens United age.

We've fallen into these little traps. Political activity is not eligible for non-profit status, so we have numerous lobby groups and political factions operating as 'ministries' and 'social welfare' organizations. It's a big game.

All I can say is that if there was some kind of Muslim equivalent to the Tea Party, many on the Right would want the IRS all over their books and literature and certainly want copies of their donor and member lists.

The entire system needs to be overhauled and Citizens United which more or less equated money with speech was on the whole a mortal wound to any concept of democracy. This country is strange. In some ways democracy and the Constitution live and in other ways they are long dead and buried. It is strange dynamic situation that lives on in name but has actually been recast numerous times.

I found it so ironic to listen to Breakpoint today...

http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/22605

and to hear Metaxas go on about how people will only see what they want to see and think what they want to think. Basically people allow their narratives to guide their thinking.

Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?

Take for instance the whole issue right now with coal. While Obama is certainly no friend to the coal industry I happen to know some folks involved in the coal orbit and being good Christoamerican Republicans they blame the demise of their industry on his policies.

Really? Well, for years I've been listening to numerous financial podcasts and consuming material from all over the place online and the verdict is virtually unanimous. Obama isn't doing much to help the coal industry expand but the real reason their market is in decline is due to the abundance of cheap natural gas resulting from the latest method of hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking' as it is commonly known. This is a hot topic around here. We live in the Marcellus Shale region and fracking was really taking off around here...but suddenly the market was glutted and now many wells are sitting idle. Natural Gas prices have plummeted.

We bought our present house in 2004. At the time Natural Gas was sky-high and people were talking about the demise of the industry. When we moved into this house we went with almost all electric appliances. Since then our electric rates have almost tripled and our gas bills have plummeted.

What's my point? Christians have their narrative concerning Obama and his extreme environmentalism and that 'must' be the reason why coal is suffering. It's just not that simple and yet they refuse to see it and certainly will not in their choices of news and information. In addition if they would bother to look at 'Leftist' news they would find out that the Green movements are furious with Obama. He has betrayed them just as he has betrayed the Left on almost every other issue.

http://www.theinternational.org/articles/314-obamas-environmental-legacy-the-good-t