A Democratic Manifesto – Why Democrats Must Prevail in November

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

~ George Orwell, 1984

Democrats typically don’t turn out to vote in great numbers for mid-term elections. This year must be different. Here’s why…

History’s dictators all came to power the same way, by dividing citizens against one another. They used fear and hate to pit ethnic, religious and racial majorities against minorities, siding always with the majorities. Trump isn’t a dictator, not yet, but he wants to be. He has even speculated about possibly becoming President for Life on day. Accordingly, he’s doing what any would-be dictator would do. With him in the White House we are becoming more and more divided every day. Events are being staged and the media is being manipulated to distract us from the worst of what’s really going on, namely the wholesale destruction of our representative form of democracy. Government no longer represents the people; it represents corporate interests and those who have the money to buy legislative favor. This, my fellow citizens, defines Fascism.

Think about it. The same thing happened in Lenin’s Russia, in Hitler’s Germany, in Franco’s Spain, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Zedong’s China, in Hussein’s Iraq, in Pasha’s Turkey, in Gaddafi’s Libya, in Kahn’s Pakistan, in Assad’s Syria. It matters not whether their regimes were Communist, Fascist, Monarchy or Military, all were authoritarian regimes, all were dictatorships.

Trump, in a revolutionary move supported by a foreign power — Russia, has taken over the Republican Party. This party, since the Equal Rights Amendment, has become predominantly white and holier-than-thou, Evangelical Protestant and Mormon. It’s not the party it was when I was younger — when I was still trying to decide which party best aligned with my beliefs. It has become the party of militant, phony patriotism — the party of anti-intellectuals — the party of anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-choice and anti-labor. It’s the party that was long ago co-opted by wealthy industrialists. With Donald Trump now at the head of the party, with both houses of Congress under Republican control, and with conservative justices dominating the third branch of government, the Supreme Court, the revolution has accelerated. Corporations are now people with an unfettered right to buy political favors. The Voting Rights Act is now history, states are free to disenfranchise whole groups of people at will. Now, with Brett Kavanaugh confirmed, the highest court in the land is primed and ready to decide whether a sitting President has absolute pardoning authority and is above the law – immune to indictment.

The Republican Party no longer needs to pretend to be the party of fiscal responsibility, or even the party of family values. The Republican Party can ignore Trump’s many impeachable offenses to include: obstruction of justice, human rights violations, suspected campaign finance law violations, conspiracy to interfere with states’ free elections, and violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

The revolution to which I am referring is not the typical blood-bath type of revolution. There has been no armed insurrection, no open warfare between the people and government. Up until recently, it has largely been a quiet, long drawn-out, political revolution with corporate interests gaining more and more influence on our two major political parties, Democrat and Republican, especially Republican. The revolution was put on-hold by mutual agreement between all parties involved during the Second World War. But it started up again soon afterward with the Republican Party making a brilliant move, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The Republican party controlled both houses of Congress then, as it does now, and so, it had enough votes to override President Truman’s veto. With the Act made law, individual states were given the latitude to impose Right-to-Work laws on labor unions. Workers over time lost the right to organize and collectively bargain for fair wages and working conditions, a right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and parts of the Federal Anti-Injunction Act of 1932.

The revolution continues today, one political faction against another, corporate interests against individual citizens’ interests. And Donald Trump has come along at an opportune time to accelerate things to his personal advantage.

No, the Republican Party isn’t against everything, seemingly implied by me in a previous paragraph. No, the party is for some things: lower taxes, especially for the rich who are ostensibly our job-creators; for corporate subsidies and high defense expenditures, even for new weapons systems that the military neither wants nor needs; for laissez-faire free trade (deregulated capitalism), and; for stand-your-ground, open carry gun laws. The party protects the Second Amendment they say, so that we can protect ourselves against all-comers, including the “deep-state” government. Unfortunately, this means that we have to have the highest, by far-and-away, gun violence rate per capita of any civilized country in the world. But that’s just the price of freedom, the price of protecting the Constitution.

The party exploits our fears of drug gangs, of bad hombres, of foreign-born and native Muslims (terrorists), and especially our fear of big government, i.e., creeping socialism and a takeover of our freedoms.

The Republican Party exploits passions as well as fears. The Christian majority among the religious in America has been conditioned over recent years to assail against a woman’s right to choose, her right to decide whether to allow a zygote to develop into a fetus and mature into an unborn. But being anti-abortion has not always been a GOP tenant. Republicans supported legalized abortion before the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. Letting women, not lawmakers, decide whether to give birth was in line with their ideological affinity then for individual rights and small government. Republicans were also more likely to prefer abortion over subsequent years of taxpayer-funded support for poor women and children. Moderate Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was a main force behind his state’s abortion reform law in 1970, just as Ronald Reagan, a leader of the party’s rising conservative faction, signed a similar bill in 1967 as governor of California. But, once the school segregation issue was resolved by the Civil Rights Act in 1964, superseding all state and local laws requiring segregation, the party needed a new moral issue for the influx of Evangelical Southern whites. Aided by the strict edict against abortion by the Roman Catholic Church, abortion fit the bill after the Roe v Wade decision was made, and moderate Republican politicians toed the line.

The Republican Party generally gives tacit support to other passions of Evangelical Christians. One of these is to allow, even require, prayer in public schools. Another is to permit religious displays on government property, thus blurring if not eliminating entirely the Separation of Church and State. Some within the party would reverse the recent federal decision to make same sex marriage legal, and they would reinstate the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell guideline for gays serving in the military.

There was a time when, for Republicans, the national debt was a major concern of the party. At least they claimed it was. Party leaders blamed Democratic Tax-and-Spend fiscal policy for it. But the facts did not fit their narrative. When Democratic administrations used expansionary fiscal policy (deficit spending), it was when the economy was left in deep recession by Republicans’ “trickle-down” tax cuts and deregulation. In each case, when Democrats took the budgetary helm, the economy rebounded generating increased tax revenues. So, Republicans cannot make this claim, not with evidence to support it, and especially not since the most recent Republican tax cut. The top 1 percent of Americans will derive over 80 percent of the benefit American Jobs and Tax Cut. The CBO and the Treasury Department are both projecting annual trillion-dollar deficits as a result of it. To bring budgets back into some semblance of balance, Trump’s proposed budget for 2019 makes massive cuts to social programs, even Medicare and Medicaid, programs he pledged to protect before the 2016 election. Now Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is pushing to revise Social Security, increasing the retirement age and reducing benefits.

So, why is the Democratic Party a better choice? Here are thirteen reasons off the top of my head:

1. Democrats don’t want to live in the past.  The party isn’t as progressive as some younger voters would like, but it’s moving in that direction. We don’t want to make America Great Again. We want to make America Greater, not just for some but for everyone, making our nation a land which is truly one and truly indivisible, with liberty, justice and opportunity for all. Democrats, for the most part, believe the mantra, Greed Is Good, represents an economic ideology which will never advance this goal.

2. Democrats believe in democracy. We believe in a democratic form of government, one that exists to achieve, as a community, state and nation, what we cannot achieve as individuals. We believe too that government must serve all its citizens. Now, while by our Constitution, ours is a “representative” form of democracy, we cannot fairly and equitably be represented if citizens are not allowed to vote. But Republicans have no problem with, through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws, disenfranchising people of color, Hispanic heritage and culture, and economic disadvantage, from registering to vote, accessing polling places and having their vote considered with diminished weight.

3. Democrats believe in responsible fiscal policies. Congress and the President are responsible for fiscal policy, which is laws on taxation and government spending designed to influence the economy. Fiscal policy is always in place; that is, there are always laws in effect that determine tax levels and government spending. Fiscal policy which rewards businesses and upper the upper echelons of society in the short term and at the expense of average tax payers is irresponsible. This is not just what Democrats believe. It’s what the majority of economists believe, and for good reason; time and again we have seen what policies like this precipitate — time and again, Democratic Presidents and lawmakers have had clean up the mess that Republican administrations have left in their wake. Trickle-down, supply-side fiscal policies and deregulation are components of a sinister, corporate con game.

4. Democrats are not xenophobic. Democrats recognize and celebrate the fact that, except for the few remaining Americans which are one hundred percent Native American, if there even are any left, we are all immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants.

5. Democrats are not homophobic. For the most part, Democrats believe the science on gender identity which affirms that LGBTQ are who they are, not by choice but by nature. According to a Gallup estimate, 4.5 percent of American adults identify as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The percentage works out to be more than 11 million U.S. adults. Accordingly, these persons are very much a part of our society and they deserve to treated with the same rights, privileges and respect as the rest of us.

6. Democrats are not racist. Not that all Republicans are racist, but, according to Pew Research, 83 percent of all registered voters who identify as Republican are non-Hispanic whites. Many Democrats used to be, the so-called Dixiecrats. But, since the Civil Rights Amendment, they’ve all become Republicans. People do not usually proclaim their racist attitudes. Sometimes they do, like when those “fine people” among the Alt-right and KKK members who marched in the torchlight demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Recall their chant: “Jews will not overcome us!” But my go-to argument du jour for why I believe so many Republicans are racist is that they cannot understand and will not accept that the “Take a Knee” demonstrations by NFL players are acceptable, Constitutionally-protected protests about Black Injustice, protest that have merit with so many young, unarmed black men being killed by police.

7. Democrats support greener energy. We believe the consensus of climate change scientists. Their prognostications of dire consequences for our planet if we do not step up our collective efforts to reduce the warming of our atmosphere scare us to death. ‘Nuf said.

8. Democrats acknowledge the Separation of Church and State. America is not a Christian nation; The Constitution says so. The First Amendment guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition. It forbids Congress from both promoting one religion over others and also restricting an individual’s religious practices. It guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely. It also guarantees the right of citizens to assemble peaceably and to petition their government. Literally the First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

9. Democrats support equal pay for women. Women in the U.S. who work full time, year-round are paid only 80 cents for every dollar paid to men — and for women of color, the wage gap is even larger. It’s long past time to close the gap. The free market has no incentive to make this happen. So, if women will ever be treated fairly, equitably in America, government must. But Republicans will never do this.

10. Democrats support a minimum wage increase. It’s been nearly 50 years since the last time the federal minimum wage peaked. This was way back in 1968. That was the last time the then-current federal minimum wage was on par with the rate with inflation, even though the minimum wage rate was raised back in 2009 to $7.25. Nobody can live on today’s minimum wage, and the free market has little incentive to raise it. So, if we are a society that truly cares about people, believes that corporations should not be allowed to exploit the disadvantaged, then government must raise the minimum wage and index it to the rate of inflation. But Republicans will never do this.

11. Democrats believe that, under most conditions, military action should be the last resort not the first. We believe that we have been too quick in the past to assert our influence on foreign nations by military invasion and occupation. Our invasion of Iraq during the Bush administration, is one such example. Yes, we toppled a brutal dictator. But, in so doing, the world is now reaping the consequences of instability in the Middle East and a widening of International terrorism.

12. Democrats support stricter gun control. The Constitutional right to own and “bear” arms is not absolute. The Supreme Court long ago decided this. But Republicans, under considerable influence by the National Rifle Association (NRA) would like to change this. The new SCOTUS may do so despite the fact that multiple studies from researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that such “permit to purchase” laws, which include a particularly strong background check, reduce homicides, suicides and gun trafficking. Literature reviews that examine a wide range of gun policies throughout the U.S. also consistently find that these laws save lives.

Research also shows that domestic violence restraining orders with the teeth to remove firearms from abusers reduce intimate-partner homicide. Likewise, banning high-capacity magazines would likely reduce the deadly outcome of shootings. Australia’s ban and buyback of semi-automatic firearms significantly reduced gun deaths in that country.

13. Democrats believe that healthcare is a basic human right. The United States and Mexico are the only countries of the 34 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that do not have universal health care. We believe that this is deplorable.

On December 10, 1948, the United States and 47 other nations signed the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document stated that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including… medical care.” In 2005, the United States and the other member states of the World Health Organization signed World Health Assembly resolution 58.33, which stated that everyone should have access to health care services and should not suffer financial hardship when obtaining these services. According to a 2008 peer-reviewed study in the Lancet, “right-to-health features are not just good management, justice, or humanitarianism, they are obligations under human-rights law.”

As I said in my introductory paragraph, Fascism already has a foothold in our nation. Government no longer represents the people; it represents corporate interests and those, including corporations now, thanks to Citizens United, who have the money to buy legislative favors. But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way; we can restore our democracy and prospects for the future of our children and grandchildren. Whether you subscribe to all or any of the above reasons that I believe in the Democratic Party’s platform, believe this:  Fascism is here and it is supported by the Republican Party. We can defeat it, Fascism, again like we did during WWII, not with military might this time but with the exercise of our civil right to vote.

If we do not take up this challenge, if we do not turnout in large enough numbers and cast our votes for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, dictatorship will almost certainly follow. Independent and third-party candidates won’t be able to make a difference; they can only caucus with one of the two major parties, Democrat or Republican. Republicans aren’t going to stand in Trump’s way either. GOP party leaders, in my opinion, are implicated in the conspiracy with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to install him in the White House.

Please feel free to post a comment, pro or con.

Published in: on October 11, 2018 at 1:58 pm  Leave a Comment  

The Unvarnished Hypocrisy of the Religious Right

The Bible says, “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” ~ Isaiah 1:17 (ESV)

hypocricy Hypocricy is a common theme in the Bible. We all behave hypocritically at times; it’s human nature. But Jesus and all the prophets admonish us when we do. The thing is, most of us recognize when we are behaving hypocritically and we stop, we apologize to those whom we have offended, and we strive to behave more justly in the future. True hypocrites deceive themselves — they either don’t realize what they are doing, how they are thinking, or they rationalize away their sin. Here is what the Bible has to say about hypocrisy.

I know that I should follow the good advise of a much revered person in my family, my wife’s late father, Popo. Popo used to say, “If you can’t say something nice, keep your mouth shut.” He was right, you know; there are consequences for speaking one’s mind, and I anticipate that this piece will offend a lot of people, some of them my friends. But I have to say it. I have to proclaim the truth as I see it… I call my Evangelicals brothers and sisters, fundamentalist Christians who are on the political right, hypocrites — and I very much doubt that there are many Evangelicals today who are not on the political right. Four-fifths of self-identifying Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the last Presidential election.

How can anyone who loves and reveres the teachings of Jesus Christ support and defend someone with the morals demonstrated by Donald Trump: his affairs, his penchant for lying, his hateful, braggadocios, obviously racist comments, his business practices – multiple bankruptcies and legal judgments against him settled out of court? It’s not just his personality, it’s his character. So, there you have it — hypocrisy.

The Evangelical label says something more to me about a person than just the fervor of his or her religious beliefs. It speaks to me about how that person thinks — not just what they believe but how they come to believe what they do. Their thinking is hypocritical — privileged thinking, and it is unvarnished. It’s unvarnished because it’s in plain sight for everyone else to see. They, of course, cannot see it in themselves or in others who share their beliefs. If they could, they would not be true hypocrites. They can’t see their hypocrisy because they suffer from cognitive dissonance. We all suffer from this to some extent. But thinking critically can get us past our biases to recognize truth, or a better version of it.

When confronted with facts that contradict our personal beliefs, ideals, and values, cognitive dissonance causes us to find ways to resolve the contradiction so as to reduce the incongruity, the discomfort that we feel from it. But rather than adjusting, adapting or changing beliefs, Evangelicals and other “conservative” thinkers will ignore or rationalize away the new information to protect the biases that they so strongly hold. Despite verifiable facts, they are sincere and resolute in what they have chosen to believe. Evangelicals can read the Scriptures as well as I or anyone else can. But despite reading and actually saying aloud, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” the message eludes them. It goes right over their heads and bypasses their hearts. They understand that love, as used in this context, is an action word, one compelling us to do as the Prophet Isaiah admonishes us to do. But they choose to blame the poor for their own plights, they shun sojourners, and they support the withholding of tax dollars from social safety net, education and public assistance programs that help lift the disadvantaged out of poverty. They confess how regrettable it is that refugee children have been separated from parents and held in cages. But they say in response to this, “Well, it’s their own fault; the parents brought it upon themselves. They just better stop coming here!”

The Bible and Christian tradition have much to say about loving the stranger, welcoming and caring for refugees and foreigners. Indeed, a strong argument can be made with scriptural support for permeable borders and for a more compassionate approach to immigration, including a pathway to citizenship for young, undocumented persons who were brought here as children. But these arguments would unlikely convince evangelical Christians in America, Christians who are predominately white and who either grew up in the South or were nurtured by the culture that was Jim Crow, a culture which has dispersed throughout the land. Yes, these people, though most of them will deny it, are more likely to hold racist views.

While Evangelicals, those who claim to hold the Bible in highest regard, are more supportive than not of immigration reform, they have more negative views about immigrants than any other religious demographic. This is despite the advocacy efforts of many evangelical organizations and prominent leaders. In fact, the Bible appears to hold little sway on evangelicals when it comes to immigration. A LifeWay Research poll conducted in 2016 found that 90 percent of all Evangelicals say that Scripture has no impact on their views toward immigration reform. They are equally as supportive of measures to strengthen border control — building a wall — as they are for having a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are already here. Many Evangelicals call this amnesty, and they are adamantly opposed to it.

Evangelicals, it seems to me, are not basing their views on Scripture or on rational thought. Instead, they are acting out of a powerful, cohesive worldview — an ideology that is at the heart of their religious, cultural and political identities, an ideology that is influenced by conservative media sources and deeply rooted in their own cultural traditions. Rather than love, it seems to me, that fear and hate, xenophobia, homophobia and self-interest are the more motivating emotions.

Let me say here that conservative is a word that I have trouble using in a political context anymore. I have trouble using it because it connotes moderation. Conservatives in today’s political environment, many or most of them, are anything but moderate in my opinion.

The hypocrisy of the religious right even hurts them in their own pocketbooks. But they fail to appreciate the backfire. The reason for this myopia is fear… in this case it’s fear of what they consider to be a “foreign” ideology: socialism. Because of this fear, it is easier for them to believe in “trickle-down” economic theory, which they associate now since the Reagan Revolution, actually consider it to be part and parcel with, capitalism. Trickle-down is the belief that when the rich are rich enough, they will create opportunity. It’s easier for them to believe this and in limited government than it is for them to believe in nurturing human infrastructure — loving our neighbors.

In 1978,” according to Robert Reich, “a typical male worker made $48,302, while the typical top 1 percenter earned $393,663, more than eight times as much. In 2010, even as overall gross domestic product and productivity increased, the average male worker’s wage fell to $33,751. Meanwhile, the average top 1 percenter was making more than $1.1 million — 32 times the average earner.” But while U.S. corporations have been raking it in at the expense of middle America, the religious right in America seems only to care about abolishing Roe vs. Wade, getting prayer back in public schools, and discriminating against people who have gender identities differing from the bodies that they were born to and/or are homosexual.

In the 1950s, according to Forbes, a typical corporate CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. In 2016, CEO pay at a typical S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times than the average rank-and-file workers in the same company, or pay of $13,940,000 a year. I can hardly wait to read next year how much this disparity will have increased thanks to this year’s Republican tax cut favoring the rich.

Republican evangelical voters, where is the justice in all this?

One might wonder what happened circa 2001, 2 and 3 that so significantly changed the relationship between corporate profits and average wages. Aside from the fact that large corporations typically surge after the bloodletting that takes place during recessions, consider this: George W. Bush was President during the 2001 recession. It was a short, relatively mild recession compared to the big one at the end of his tenure. But, on the heels of the recession, the Bush administration’s economic footprint was made manifest by significant income tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, the implementation of Medicare Part D in 2003, increased military spending for two wars, a housing bubble due to banking deregulation which contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008, and the Great Recession…

George Bush embraced a governing philosophy of deregulation. This philosophy trickled down to federal oversight agencies, which in turn eased off on banks and mortgage brokers. Yes, Bush did push early on for tighter controls over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he failed to move Congress on this. After the Enron scandal, Bush did back and sign the regulatory Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But it was largely toothless — a political, slap-on-the-wrist response. SEC head William Donaldson tried to boost regulation of mutual and hedge funds. But he was blocked by Bush’s advisers at the White House as well as other powerful Republicans. So he gave up trying.

In 2013, the CBPP (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) estimated that, when the associated interest costs are taken into account, the Bush tax cuts (including those that policymakers later made permanent) would add $5.6 trillion to deficits from 2001 to 2018.

The hypocricy of the religious right plays well into the hands of the political right. Because evangelicals are less prone to be critical thinkers, they are more easily swayed to accept political protestations, talking points rather than historical and scientific facts and statistical evidence on a host of social, environmental and economic matters. Small government (low taxes and lax business regulations) and immigaration are just two of them. Take for example: gun control, climate change, environmental policy, healthcare, and foreign policy. This is why, in my opinion, so many who vote Republican believe what they hear from talk show hosts, politicians and people like Donald Trump rather than scientists and legitimate news agencies.

Please feel free to post a comment or rebuttal.

Published in: on September 12, 2018 at 11:31 am  Comments (3)  

The Demise of Democracy in America and the Election of Donald Trump

Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of it. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and you allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

~ Sam Shepherd

demiseThe polarization of political thinking in America, with conservative thinkers on one side of the political divide and liberal thinkers on the other side, culminated with the demise of democracy and the election of Donald Trump. This happened in stages over time. Most historians tell us that it got started long, long ago. They trace this separation of thinking back to the very beginning of our country, to the thinking of our nation’s Founding Father’s. Among them were Federalists and Anti-Federalists.

Stage I — The Federalists felt that the addition of a Bill of Rights wasn’t necessary. They believed that the Constitution, as it stood, only limited the government not the people. The Anti-Federalists claimed that the Constitution gave the central government too much power, and without a Bill of Rights, the people would be at risk of oppression. These Founders, the Anti-Federalists, tended to be slave owners. They feared that a strong Federal government would eventually outlaw slavery as was being done at that time by European governments.

Stage II — In time, we had to fight Civil War over this, a war to end slavery. But the war did not end the cultural attitude of racial bigotry which was engrained into the hearts and minds of former slave owners and into the hearts and minds of their issue over the generations since.

Stage III — Then came the Civil Rights movement during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in the 1960s. Eventually, we got the Civil Rights Amendment. Before this, racist sentiment in America was dispersed among the general population, but largely found among Democrats, Southern Democrats. The Civil Rights Amendment, the end of Jim Crow and the integration of black children with white children in public schools, drove these Southern Democrats into the waiting arms of the GOP.

Stage IV — Then Nixon’s Southern Strategy, recognizing how strong the feelings of fear and hate are among conservative thinkers, capitalized on the racism in the South and conservative thinking throughout the nation to cement the emotional appeal of social separation of the races and Goldwater-style conservative thinking into a political strategy. Nixon, elected in 1968, resigned in 1974 rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

Stage V — In the late 70s, industrialists and libertarian economists found the perfect actor to promote their vision for expanding the nation’s wealth and concentrating it among the wealthy few. This actor was Ronald Reagan who was elected in 1980. The effects of their vision, trickle-down economics with tax cuts favoring the wealthy and deregulation for businesses, exacerbated the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. But the widening gap was mostly felt by the working poor and minority members of society. So long as it wasn’t too painful for white, middle-class Americans and they were able to feel progress on social issues that they most cared about, gun rights, abortion, and immigration, they were able to rationalize the economic injustice. It became easy for them to believe that the poor are poor because they are lazy or stupid.

Stage VI — Then came 911, the War on Terrorism and the Great Recession during the Bush years, 2001 through 2008. Reeling from social and economic pain caused by another round of trickle-down tax cuts and deregulation, the invasion and occupation of Iraq and subsequent human rights atrocities (recall Abu Ghraib and the enhanced interrogation techniques), we elected Barack Obama, our first black President. He turned our economy around. He saved the auto industry, forged alliances with other nations to address climate change, got Affordable Healthcare passed, relieved deportation fears of the Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, and he improved our standing with other nations and peoples. To this day he remains the most respected and admired man on earth. But having a black man in the White House was just too much for some Americans. It drove the craziness of racial bigotry to a fanatical level among many Republicans.

Stage VII — On January 21, 2010, in a case brought forward against the government by the conservative, non-profit organization, Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. Overturning the bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, this made it legal for corporations, not just voting citizens, to use their general treasuries to fund “electioneering communications,” broadcasting advertisements mentioning particular candidates.

Stage VIII — It was to the fanatically racist base within the Republican Party, the basket of deplorables that Hilary Clinton spoke about during her 2016 campaign for President, that Vladimir Putin and his Russian oligarchs played, and the GOP welcomed their help to defeat Clinton. They colluded with the Russians (yes, I believe the collusion went beyond Donald Trump and his election campaign). The conspiracy was engineered to divide the liberal vote and exploit an aspect of the Founding Fathers’ Constitutional genius, the Electoral College. The Founders meant the Electoral College to prevent the election of a charismatic despot. But it had a much different effect.

All three branches of our nation’s government are controlled today by one party, the Republican Party. Congress is controlled by big-money special interest dollars funneled through Political Action Groups (PACs) and the National Rifle Association (NRA). So, with Citizens United now being law of the land, campaign contributions are the votes that really count. Election shaping by states with gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws have been deemed constitutional, and we have a charismatic, narcissistic puppet of a foreign power in the White House. The most unpopular President ever, this person, an unindicted co-conspirator, some say traitor, is systematically destroying our economy, our defense, trade and other treaties with our traditional allies, our confidence and reliance in the free press to keep us informed, our collective sense of human decency, our respect in diplomatic circles elsewhere in the world, and our civil discourse here at home. He has obstructed justice and violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend. He my even be personally responsible for violation of campaign finance laws. Yet Congress, with the power to impeach him for these crimes, is loath for political reasons to hold him accountable. This makes those in Congress who are preventing a vote on the articles of impeachment put forward by Democratic members of the House, guilty of aiding and abetting the President’s crimes.

What a sorry state of affairs. With the Senate likely soon to confirm a judge who, as a Supreme Court Justice, would rule that a sitting President is immune to indictment, we may indeed be just a proverbial inch away from totalitarianism. This is an American tragedy and Vladimir Putin, no doubt, is well-pleased with his man’s progress do far.

Please feel free to post a rebuttal or other comment.

Published in: on September 7, 2018 at 9:32 am  Comments (2)  

Mr. Wasden Was Wrong About the Electoral College

The Electoral College is an antiquated aspect of the Constitution of the United States. It no longer serves it’s intended purposes, if in fact it ever did, and it stands as an impediment to true democracy. It is long overdue for revocation, but will probably survive as long as the union itself survives.

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It was 1956. I was twelve years old and in the 6th grade. Mr. Wasden was our teacher, my first male teacher, and he was a bigger-than-life role model for me. He was tall, a strappingly handsome, square-jawed, third-generation immigrant of Swedish extraction. In the neighbourhood of my youth, which was in South Salt Lake City, Utah, many were also descended from Scandinavian pioneers. So he was very relatable and, given that ours was a Mormon community, he could have sasily been blood-related, an uncle or distant cousin. In hind-sight, he was the physical personification of the 1960s cartoon character on TV, Dudley Do-right. Never mind that Do-right was a Canadian Mountie. I wanted to be as much like Mr. Wasden as I could.

We were learning about U.S. history and past Presidents. It was after our return from Christmas vacation that year and could have been close to either Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthdays. Maybe that was why Mr. Wasden had chosen to teach us about this. This was years before the two calendar holidays were combined to officially commemorate Presidents’ Day as a single national holiday. It was also soon after Dwight D. Eisenhower had won his second term as President of the United States, a heady time for most Americans. Eisenhower, a national hero of the Second World War, was very popular. He had won 58 percent of the popular vote and carried 41 states. You may recall, if you are old enough, that there were only 48 states back then. I know I’m right about that. I just looked it up.

I remember, just like it was yesterday, how astonished we all were when Mr. Wasden told us about the Electoral College. None of us wanted to believe that a presidential candidate could win an election without winning the most popular votes. “But don’t worry,” he said. “It’s only happened twice before in the entire history of the United States, and it’s not likely to ever happen again.”

He was wrong wasn’t he? Not only had he forgotten about the election in 1824 when the House of Representatives met to elect John Q. Adams over Andrew Jackson. It has also happened twice recently.

The election of 1824 was the only time in our history that the House had had to elect the President under provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The vote was held on February 9, 1825. Although Jackson had received more popular votes than Adams, neither candidate had a majority of electoral votes.

“The President was last chosen by electors over the popular vote back in 1888,” Mr. Wasden told us. “That’s the year that Benjamin Harrison was elected president even though Grover Cleveland had won the popular vote. Before that, it happened the first time in 1876 when Samuel Tilden beat Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote but Hayes had won the Electoral College vote.”

Since these three historic happenings, it’s happened twice again… once when George W. Bush won over Al Gore in the 2000 election and again in 2016 with the upset win of Donald Trump over the favored-to-win candidate, Hillary Clinton. Of course, Donald Trump claims that he would have won the popular vote too had there not been so many, over three million of them, illegal immigrants fraudulently voting for Clinton.

The electoral system, for those of you who do not know, is a legacy of the Constitution. It was part of an agreement between the states, including Southern states that had more slaves than free men who were eligible to vote. The Constitution was proposed over the existing Articles of Confederacy to better unite the country. This was during a period of time when most citizens lived far from the few larger cities that existed back then. The Framers of the Constitution rationalised that few citizens of the new country could be expected to know much about the leading political figures of the time, or much at all about issues that involved the nation as a whole. So they decided to leave the “official” decision about who should be President to wise elites like themselves. The Framers thought that they would be a check on demagogues and popular passions of the day. The system also served to ally fears that they knew smaller-population, slave states had about Northern states making future decisions for them. Accordingly, they considered it necessary to ensure the Constitution’s ratification.

The system seems antiquated today. Does it not? Of course, citizens of smaller-population states argue that it protects their interests over the bigger states like California, New York and Texas. But, more than just protecting their interests, it gives these states a decided advantage in Presidential elections. As such, their argument is based on the belief that “the ends justify the means.” In my opinion, the idea doesn’t work like the Founders thought it would. Because of it, we have a would-be demagogue in the White House, the most unpopular President ever, and one that was elected largely based on popular passions of the minority.

My conclusion is that the electoral system is outdated. It is highly unlikely, in my option, to ever be abandoned, however. This is because it serves the political purposes of States Rights people. Notwithstanding, it should be abandoned by Constitutional amendment to make manifest true democracy in America — One Man, One Vote.

Please feel free to post a comment on this, whether you agree or disagree.

Published in: on August 24, 2018 at 12:17 am  Leave a Comment  

America, Are We Not Still Great?

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National pride is a good thing. We all want to feel proud of our country. Donald Trump knows this, so his campaign for president is appealing to this desire. He has based his campaign on the idea that our country isn’t great anymore, that eight years of Obama in the White House and Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State are the reasons why. He promises, that he, and only he, can restore us to greatness again. His campaign motto is, Make America Great Again. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is countering this message with the idea that we are still a great nation but acknowledges that we do have problems. Her campaign promises that, by working together, we can address these problems — make progress toward a brighter future for all. Her campaign motto is, We Are Stronger Together.

In truth, most of us, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens and Independents alike, have awakened to the realization that we really aren’t as great a nation as we once thought we were. Only the reasons that we aren’t are not the same reasons that many die-hard Trump supporters believe. We don’t fall short of true greatness because our military is weak or our economy is not strong and expanding. It’s not because we are compassionate and tolerate millions of undocumented immigrants to remain and do work in our country that most of our citizens won’t do. It’s not because we allow LGBTQ persons equal protection and liberties under law. Neither do we fall short of true greatness because we have expanded access to health care for twenty-plus millions of our citizens. It’s certainly not true because we have an African American president. It is true, however, that we aren’t the greatest nation by many empirical measures.

According to the World Economic Forum‘s Global Competitiveness Report (2012-2013), the U.S. ranks as #1 on only 4 out of the 117 different factors that are rated, and each of these 4 factors reflects merely the sheer size, the hugeness, of the U.S. economy. These four factors might thus collectively be identified as the Hugeness components: “GDP,” “GDP as a Share of World GDP,” “Available Airline Seat Kilometers,” and “Domestic Market Size Index.” Other than Hugeness, the results for the U.S. are not at all outstanding. They are metrics of mediocracy.

Health Care shows the U.S. ranking as #34 on “Life Expectancy,” and as #41 on “Infant Mortality.” (And, of course, unlike the “Infant Mortality” rankings from UNICEF, this ranking is among 144 countries. Thus: some underdeveloped countries actually have higher life-expectancy than does the U.S.)

Education in the U.S. is also apparently mediocre. On “Quality of Primary Education,” we are #38. On “Primary Education Enrollment Rate,” we are #58. On “Quality of the Educational System,” we are #28. On “Quality of Math and Science Education,” we are #47. On “Quality of Scientific Research Institutions,” we are #6. On “PCT [Patent Cooperation Treaty] Patent Applications [per-capita],” we are #12. On “Firm-Level Technology Absorption” (which is an indicator of business-acceptance of inventions), we are #14.

Trust is likewise only moderately high in the U.S. We rank #10 on “Willingness to Delegate Authority,” #42 on “Cooperation in Labor-Employer Relations,” and #18 in “Degree of Customer Orientation” of firms.

Corruption seems to be a rather pervasive problem in the U.S. On “Diversion of Public Funds [due to corruption],” the U.S. ranks #34. On “Irregular Payments and Bribes” (which is perhaps an even better measure of lack of corruption) we are #42. On “Public Trust in Politicians,” we are #54. On “Judicial Independence,” we are #38. On “Favoritism in Decisions of Government Officials” (otherwise known as governmental “cronyism”), we are #59. On “Organized Crime,” we are #87. On “Ethical Behavior of Firms,” we are #29. On “Reliability of Police Services,” we are #30. On “Transparency of Governmental Policy Making,” we are #56. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Challenging Regulations,” we are #37. On “Efficiency of Legal Framework in Settling Disputes,” we are #35. On “Burden of Government Regulation,” we are #76. On “Wastefulness of Government Spending,” we are also #76. On “Property Rights” protection (the basic law-and-order measure), we are #42.

We fall short of true greatness, in my opinion, because: (1) we allow the greed of a few rich and powerful families to control our government; (2) we emphasize the acquisition of wealth over the equitable sharing of proceeds with those who labor; (3) we fail to prioritize for the funding of education, programs to alleviate suffering, and programs to lift struggling families out of poverty; (4) we protect industries that poison and pollute our environment, even subsidize their business practices, rather than promote sustainable technologies and practices; (5) we believe that “for-profit” solutions are superior to public solutions for healthcare, education, and incarceration; (6) we protect free-speech at the expense of truth. And we have allowed our basic freedoms under the Constitution to make us less well informed, less safe, less equal, less democratic, and more divided.

To improve on the measures cited above, we truly do need to come together. No one and neither major political party can alone fix what’s wrong. We don’t all have to think alike. That would be asking way too much. But we can at least stop politicizing every issue. We can at least stop with the exceptional, elitist and “hell-no” obstructionist attitudes and work to find common ground. No one, and no political party, is right all the time.

Please feel free to comment on this. I would enjoy discussing it with you, especially if you disagree with any of it.

Published in: on October 12, 2016 at 10:03 am  Comments (3)  

Transgender Discrimination ~ Understanding The Bathroom Wars

It’s a distraction from real problems, honey — problems like poverty, injustice, public safety. Some in government don’t want to talk about these things because realistic ideas to make them better conflict with their ideologies and other agendas.

Sometime ago I promised my preciously little great grand- daughter that she could ask me anything and that, to the best of my ability, I would always answer her honestly — but appropriately. Honesty has not proved to be a challenge for me. Coming up with age appropriate answers sometimes have been, however; she is, afterall, only seven. Take for example the time she asked me from where babies come out of their mommies’ bellies. Fortunately, she had already figured this out for herself and answered it in the phrasing of her question to me. She was just seeking confirmation. Whew!

Recently, after I had been back from our month-long trip to Asia only a day or two, my little darling was dropped off by her mother for Opa-provided daycare. I was still kicked-back in my recliner after having just finished my morning walk with Benji, my dog. My little darling crawled up in the chair with me for some morning snuggle time. What a joy. Then, after a few minutes of quiet time, her attention was drawn to a huge stack of magazines on our coffee table. Funny that we still call it a coffee table since we never drink coffee in the front room where it rests. The table is just for walking around — where we stack magazines and yet-to-be-read mail after separating that which might matter from all the junk that shows up daily. My little darling slipped down from my lap and stood looking at something on the coffee table for a few moments. On top of one of the stacks of magazines, my stack of ‘The Week’ magazines, was a recent edition featuring an illustration showing the back of a little girl’s head, her hair in pigtails. The little girl’s image was facing two restroom doors, one with the ubiquitous male symbol and one with the equally ubiquitous female symbol. The symbols are both ubiquitous because they appear everywhere and always side-by-side or across a hall from one another in public places. The symbols were shown throwing rocks at each other. Above the magazine’s cover illustration was the title of a highlighted article found within, “Bathroom Wars”.

“Opa, what does bathroom wars mean?”

Oh, my God – now how do I explain this?

“Come here, honey,” I said. “Sit on my lap, I’ll try to explain.

God makes girls and God makes boys. But sometimes boys don’t feel right about being boys; they want to be girls. Sometimes girls feel this way too; they don’t feel right in girl bodies and want to be boys. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. People have different opinions about why this happens. Some say it’s just a mix-up; the natural feelings these persons have just aren’t correct for the bodies they were born with – that it’s not a choice they can make. Others say that it’s a perverted or bad choice that these persons make.”

“Really?!?!”

“Yes, honey. Really.”

“But what does this have to do with bathrooms?”

“Well, everybody needs to use the bathroom from time to time. And those who have or once had boy bodies but now look and act like girls need to go too.”

“Well, I don’t see what difference it makes, Opa.”

“I don’t either, honey,” I said. “But some people really think it does. Some people are making a big fuss about it.”

“Well, Opa. I’ll promise you one thing: I’ll always want to be a girl.”

With that, my little darling’s curiosity was satisfied – the issue was settled. But I can easily image that, had she been a bit more inquisitive, a bit more adult, our dialogue might have continued as follows…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Why, Opa? Are boys and girls only now feeling confused?

“No, honey,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that there have always been persons who haven’t felt right in the bodies with which they were born. But our society is just now learning to accept these persons as natural children of God. Sadly, some people will never be able to. They think that they can force these persons to behave the way they think they should behave by forcing them to dress appropriate for the bodies they were born with and to use correspondingly appropriate bathrooms. They are justifying laws restricting non-gender appropriate bathroom use by claiming that these persons are a threat to children. But I think this is just scare tactic politics.”

“Why, Opa?”

“It’s a distraction from real problems, honey — problems like poverty, injustice, public safety. Some in government don’t want to talk about these things because realistic ideas to make them better conflict with their ideologies and other agendas.”

“Doesn’t God love these persons who aren’t happy with their bodies?”

“Yes, honey, God loves all His children.”

“Then why did he create them to be so confused? And if God didn’t create them to be confused, aren’t they sinning?”

“Good question, honey. But there’s a Bible passage that might help us to understand. It’s in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 9, verses 2 and 3… ‘His disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’

‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus. ‘This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.‘

“I’m still confused, Opa. What does being born blind have to do with this?”

“I don’t blame you, honey. This is a very difficult issue to understand. Someday you will have your own understanding. Mine is like this: All babies are born different, some pretty like you, some not quite so pretty. Some are born with deformities, like being blind, or without arms or legs. But this does not make them bad persons. Persons born with a disconnect between their physical selves and their sexual identity aren’t bad people either – not as I understand the passage in the Book of John that I just shared. To me, ‘the works of God,’ some translations read, ‘workings of God should be manifested,’ refers to how we are to relate to people who are born different from ourselves. God works through us. He, I think, challenges us to show grace, to love others despite how they are different from us.”

After thinking this over awhile, my little darling said, “Well, I love everybody, Opa. But some are more special to me.”

“I know, honey. Some people are more special to me too!”

Please feel free to comment on this post. Use it, if you wish, but please let others know from where you got it.

Published in: on June 26, 2016 at 3:16 pm  Leave a Comment  

Democrat vs. Republican ~ Liberal vs. Conservative

This is an update of my original post (Dec 31, 2006) on this same subject.

As a former social studies teacher, I was often asked by my students what the real difference is between Democrats and Republicans. They seemed to sense that parents and other authority figures extol the virtues of one political party, the one to which they subscribe, and vilify the other. Accordingly, I attempted to teach the subject in as balanced a manner as possible.

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All of what follows, save for my own observations, is readily available elsewhere on the Internet. However, I’ve never been able to find a good, unbiased source that compares and contrasts the two major political parties in the United States today. Accordingly, I have endeavoured to create one. Since my original posting, December 31, 2006, there have been significant changes within the Republican Party. It is owing to these changes that I have been prompted to do this update.

Political parties exist for the singular purpose of installing people to positions of power and influence in government. It is the same all over the world and has always been so. To do this they compete with the opposition for support of the electorate by inciting passion over issues of the time. Whether the issues have to do with the economy, national security, individual liberties, the environment, Constitutional interpretations, or matters of moral and social conscience, parties stake claim to various convictions then pretend, as necessary, that they have always been philosophically faithful to their positions. But this is done more often than not to simply gain support in terms of dollars and votes for their own candidates. Additionally, many people are attracted to particular parties over single wedge-issues like abortion or gun control and discount other party positions. So the association of any party over time with a particular political philosophy is problematic at best. Follow along and see if you don’t agree.

The Democratic Party, claiming a position on the left of the political theory continuum, has been labeled “liberal,” both by supporters and detractors alike. The name is derived from the Latin, liber, which means free. And until the end of the eighteenth century, it simply meant “worthy of a free man”. It is from this sense of the word that we speak of “liberal arts”, “liberal sciences”, “liberal occupations”, etc. Then, beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century, the term came to imply the qualities of intellect and behavior that were considered to be characteristic of those who occupied higher social positions, whether because of wealth, education, or family relationships. Thus, an intellectually independent, broad-minded, magnanimous, frank, open, and genial person was said to be liberal. The suffix, “ism,” added to descriptive words produces nouns that mean a belief, an ideology, or study, as to be immersed in. “Liberalism” then connotes a political system or tendency that is opposed to centralization and absolutism. However, the word liberal is generally used in a derogatory way today by those who subscribe to more conservative philosophies. For them, a liberal is someone who believes in big government and wasteful, giveaway social programs (background/definition).

Most who have political persuasions to the right on the political theory continuum label themselves, “conservative.” According to Webster, being conservative means a tendency to conserve or to hold back. But this understanding of the term does not necessarily apply to all who consider themselves to be Republicans today. Since the end of the Civil War in America, conservatives have tended toward resisting change and preserving established institutions. Thus, a conservative person would be one who would tend to be more moderate or cautious. But it was Republicans, as we all recall, who brought about the end to slavery in America though the Civil War years and the adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments during Reconstruction – this was major social change (background/definition and History of the Republican Party)!

The Republican Party today attracts many different groups, including sportsmen and other gun owners who consider their right to bear arms to be under attack, business corporations (particularly defense, energy, and pharmaceutical industries) and wealthy individuals who benefit from limiting social programs, limiting regulations, and reduced taxes, as well as various fundamental or evangelical Christian groups who are lobbying for social change.

Although some will argue that this is not true, the Tea Party, which has never been a viable political party in it’s own right, and Libertarian politicians who once ran for office under the Libertarian Party banner, have now merged with the main stream Republican Party. This, in my opinion, has pulled the party to the ideological right and away from moderation, thus making it more difficult for lawmakers in the U.S. Congress to reach across-the-aisle accommodation on issues. While this merger has resulted in increased Republican representation in Congress, at the same time, it has made it more difficult for the Republican Party to field competitive candidates for President and Vice-president.

The Republican Party had its roots in opposition to slavery when, in 1854, former members of the Free Soil Party, the Whig Party, the American Party, and some Democrats came together in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have allowed these territories to enter the Union as slave states. Party founders adopted the name “Republican” to indicate that it was the carrier of “republican” beliefs about civic virtue, and opposition to aristocracy and corruption (History of the Republican Party, Republican Party Today, and Reconstruction Period).

In western democracies the terms, “conservative” and “right-wing” are often used interchangeably, as near-synonyms. This is not always accurate, but it has more than incidental validity. The political opposition is referred to as the political left (although left-wing groups and individuals may have conservative social and/or cultural attitudes, they are not generally accepted, by self-identified conservatives, as being part of the same movement). On economic policy, conservatives and the right generally support the free market and side with business interests over rank-and-file workers and environmentalists. This is less true of conservatives in Europe and in places other than the United States. Attitudes on some moral issues, such as opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia, are often described as being either right-wing or conservative. Liberals, on the other hand, have traditionally drawn much of their support from labor unions, small farmers, civil servants, environmentalists, artisans, academics, philanthropists, immigrants and such – the “huddled masses”. Collectively, liberals pretty much agree today that government should be a force for social change, to improve the lot of the disadvantaged and to protect the individual rights of all Americans, regardless of their race, sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Liberals would tend to agree that all should have affordable access to quality education and health care (Right-wing, Left-wing).

The Democratic Party in the United States traces its roots back to the early 1790s, when various factions united in opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal policies, which included a strong central treasury and new taxes to pay-off the states’ debts. Back then it was called the Anti-Administration Party, its subscribers were called Anti-Federalists. For a time, this movement was added to other minor parties to form the Democratic-Republican Party under Thomas Jefferson. Yes, in some ways, if not in name only, the two major political parties of America were combined. Then, after the War of 1812, the party split over whether to build and maintain a strong military. Those favoring a strong military, especially a modern navy, came to be called the Old-Republicans. Then, during the administration of Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party was reborn, appealing, as had Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, to the largely agrarian society of the times and to the common man. At that time, the Old Republicans strongly favored states rights, while Jackson, even though he was a Southerner, put down the Nullification Crisis which threatened to divide the nation – North and South (History of the Democratic Party).

So, the distinction between liberal and conservative political philosophies and the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States, over time tends, to blur. Philosophies and allegiances have switched back and forth over the years. For example, after the Civil War, most whites in the South became Democrats (Southern Democrats), known then unofficially as the “White Man’s Party“. Then, following the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many of these Democrats switched over to support Republican candidates.

And so it goes; political parties come and go. Sometimes the names stay the same, but the philosophies and respective positions on issues change according to the winds of war and fortune. As I tell my students, it is impossible to separate politics from economics. It’s all about power and influence.

For the latest on what U.S. political parties and individual candidates believe, see http://www.ontheissues.org/Quiz/Quiz2010.asp#sec0. At this site you may also test yourself and your beliefs to determine your closest party match.

For more on what I personally believe and how political parties have performed in recent years, see Americans’ Political Persuasions ~ Based More on Myth than Fact?

I invite your comments whether you agree or disagree with the content of this post.

Published in: on April 22, 2015 at 10:17 pm  Comments (2)  
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Cynicism in Today’s Political Landscape and the Demise of Democracy

High school and higher-educated citizens in America used to turn-out for congressional (mid-term) and presidential elections in much greater numbers. But participation in the political process has dropped precipitously in recent years.

I am hearing more and more these days, especially from younger adults in America, that it doesn’t matter whether they vote or not, that the system is rigged. How cynical. Even more cynical in my opinion are those saying things like, “Neither political party represents me,” and, “Politicians are all the same; all they care about is getting themselves re-elected.” I have even heard the idea recently expressed that not voting is actually an alternative way of voting — expressing one’s dissatisfaction with the political system’s status quo.

My reaction to all of this is concern, fear actually, about what this means for democracy in America as we older citizens, the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers, decline in numbers. Combined with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which not only allows but encourages greater influence on state and federal governance by corporations and other special interests, this trend points to the end of government-of-by-and-for-the-people (if ever it truly existed at all) and the ultimate establishment of a plutocracy, worse yet, maybe even a new version of Fascism.

a2-educationalHigh school and higher-educated citizens in America used to turn-out for congressional (mid-term) and presidential elections in much greater numbers. But participation in the political process has dropped precipitously in recent years. Where 80 percent or better used to turn-out for national elections, now the percent has dropped to 50 or less. Compared to the rest of the world’s countries in which people vote, even where voting is not compulsory, Americans are far less likely to be involved in the political process. But why?

Statistically speaking, in any election with twenty or more votes being cast, the chance that any one vote will determine the outcome is extremely low — virtually nil. Studies show too that a single vote in a voting scheme such as the Electoral College in the United States has an even lower chance of determining the outcome. Further, studies using game theory, which takes into account the ability of voters to interact, have also found that the expected turnout for any large election should be zero. So, one might ask instead, why should we even bother?

The factors in deciding whether or not to vote are: P (the probability that an individual’s vote will affect the outcome of an election), B (the perceived benefit that would be received if a person’s favored political party or candidate were to be elected), D (originally stood for democracy or civic duty, but today represents any social or personal gratification an individual gets from voting), and C (the time, effort, and financial cost involved in voting). P times B plus D must be greater than C before a person will vote. (The basic idea behind this formula was developed by Anthony Downs in An Economic Theory of Democracy. published in 1957.)

Obviously P is a non factor. Further, considering the ensuing deadlock in Washington on issues that Americans care about, things like immigration, tax policy, equal rights for women and gays, and gun control, B has lost ground as a factor too. That leaves D, the sense of civic duty or the social and personal gratification that one derives from voting, as the prime factor in countering C, the inertia factor.

One could argue that D, the sense of social and personal gratification that African Americans derived from voting in the last two presidential elections, was the reason that Barrack Obama, the first African American to be nominated for President, handily won the White House for two terms. A large segment of voters was motivated to get off the couch and go stand in long lines to cast their votes as never before. It could be too that Hillary Clinton, because she is a woman and likely to be the first of her gender to be nominated by a major political party for President, will likewise be elected.

I believe that this factor, the social and personal gratification that one derives from voting, is at least in part the motivation for Republican controlled states to pass voting restriction laws and modified/reduced early voting dates and the numbers of polling places in urban areas, thus impacting voters who would most likely favour Democrats. Republican politicians have actually admitted this.

Can one be justified in believing that neither of the major political parties in the United States, the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party, represents them? No, not in my opinion. Believing this is simply a choice which rationalises one’s cynicism. One has only to compare the political platforms of each party, if they are inclined to do so, and assess which one aligns more with one’s beliefs and priorities. That neither party seems to be able to advance change, to move the ball down-court in the current political environment, does not mean that neither party conforms all in in-part with one’s beliefs. There is something for everyone in one party platform or the other.

Does not voting, in and of itself, constitute a vote, protest or otherwise? No, in my opinion, choosing to believe that it does is just more rationalisation for cynicism. Choosing not to vote is not a protest, not in my opinion. It is submission to the rigging of the system that we all abhor — at least those of us who have had nothing to do with the rigging. So, if one lacks the requisite sense of civic duty or the sense of social or personal gratification that comes from participation in the political process, one might more honestly just say, “I don’t care.”

Are all politicians the same? Are all motivated only by getting themselves re-elected? Of course not. But I would agree that too many are motivated primarily by personal interest. It is a human failing.

Given the political landscape in the United States, it is easy for me to understand the cynicism of many citizens, especially those among the gen-Xers and millennials who tend to be more cynical anyway. But can we allow this trend of decreasing voter turn-out to continue and risk the demise of democracy altogether? Yes we can. We can allow special interests, corporations and the wealthy to take total control of our elections. But should we? I say no. Emphatically, I say NO! That is why I think that we should consider the following: restoring the Voting Rights Act in its entirety, which the Supreme Court has recently all but nullified; reversing Citizens United which declares corporations to be citizens too; redefining what and how redistricting can be done by the states, and; amending the Constitution to implement term limits for Congress. We should also make voting universally easy for citizens — all citizens. I would not even oppose some form of compulsory voting, for when liberty and equality are in peril, extreme measures become necessary. The question is, are we at that point yet?

Whether you agree with me on this topic or not, I would very much like hear your opinion. Please feel free to post a comment.

Published in: on April 13, 2015 at 12:03 am  Comments (4)  
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Lies About Obama ~ Character Assassination in Politics These Days

Some people refuse to consider facts after they’ve made up their minds. These people are called conservatives.

Opa_IIThings really really haven’t changed much in politics over the years, except that they have become more virulent with the advent of electronic media.  One of the few things Charles Krauthammer has said that I agree with is this: “Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country — and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.”

All politicians lie, or at least they get their facts wrong from time to time. But according to a new study from the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, Republican politicians are significantly more likely to lie than Democrats http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-lie-more-than-democrats-study-finds/. And those who vote for Republican candidates are more prone to believe their lies — confirmation bias. This is because conservatives think conservatively; they are more resistent to change and chalenges to their beliefs, or so the study’s authors say.

Giving credit where credit is due, I borrowed the portion of this post that follows which is in quotes. I borrowed it from a Facebook post that showed up on my news feed. It, in turn, had obviously been borrowed (there’s a lot of this going on in social media these days) from another Internet source; I had to do considerable text and spacing clean ups plus grammar edits before I could use it. Attempting to discover the original source, I did a text string Google search. This led me to http://first-thoughts.org/on/President+Obama/. But the original author’s thought, if in-deed this was the original author, was anonymous.  Therefore, my thanks to whomever it was that first put this together. Yours truly provided the reference links checking the liberal facts.

“Conservative: Obama is not an American so he’s not fit to be president.

Liberal: The Supreme Court, and EVERY investigative Congressional body in charge of determining a president’s eligibility, has said that he IS an American… and eligible. http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/indeed-born-in-the-u-s-a/

Conservative: Well… he’s a socialist and he wants to redistribute the wealth.

Liberal: Taxes have been the way wealth has been redistributed ever since taxes first started in this country — before Obama was even born. Redistribution is a common American practice. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005921.html

Conservative: Well… he’s a Muslim and shouldn’t be president.

Liberal: A person’s religion has no bearing on their eligibility for president, according to the Constitution, and in any case – President Obama is a professing believer in Jesus Christ. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/aug/26/18-percent-american-public/obama-muslim-no-hes-not-evidence-has-not-changed/

Conservative: Well… he’s ungodly because he supports a woman’s right to choose and because he supports gay marriage.

Liberal: The Supreme Court ruled that abortion is legal and gay marriage is considered a civil right now in several states… and since he swore before God and men to support and defend the Constitution (not the Bible), he has a legal and moral obligation to support these things. http://www.factcheck.org/2010/04/the-abortion-issue/

Conservative: Well… his Obamacare is gonna destroy America by raising health care costs through the roof.

Liberal: Actually, the states that have accepted the tenants of the Affordable Care Act have seen SIGNIFICANT decreases in health care costs, and costs are going to fall even more as the ACA expands according to the CBO. http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/05/24/unexpected-health-insurance-rate-shock-california-obamacare-insurance-exchange-announces-premium-rates/

Conservative: Well… he is exploding the size of government.

Liberal: Actually, the size of government is smaller under Obama than it has been in about 20 years… and it is getting smaller. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/business/economy/government-is-getting-smaller-in-the-us-off-the-charts.html?_r=0

Conservative: Well… he has exploded the deficit and spent more money than any other president.

Liberal: Actually, Obama has spent the LEAST of any president since Eisenhower and has already decreased the deficit by about $300 billion and, since the start of fiscal year 2011, President Barack Obama has signed into law approximately $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction for the years 2013 through 2022. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/01/22/515537/obama-spending-eisenhower/?mobile=nc

Conservative: Well… he’s responsible for a cover up in Benghazi.

Liberal: There was no cover up in Benghazi… So far there have been six Congressional Investigations and none of them have found anything that is even close to a cover up… except some Republicans who changed the talking points in the emails that they accused Obama of changing – In any case, Benghazi was a CIA Outpost… not a state department operation. The CIA had operational jurisdiction… it was THEIR call what went out to the public in the talking points.  http://www.politicususa.com/republican-desperation-grows-benghazi-backfires-scandal-talk-fizzles.html

Conservative: Well… he’s responsible for the IRS cover up.

Liberal: Actually, there was no cover up. The State Department has had the IRS under Investigation for their illegal activity since 2012… and the Republican Congressmen who are accusing Obama of a cover up were aware of it because they were Informed in 2012.  http://www.politicususa.com/republicans-suggested-irs-cover-up-turns-darrell-issa-knew-2012.html

Conservative: Well… Obama was illegally investigating the media for leaks of Confidential information.

Liberal: Actually, it was the Republican controlled House of Representatives that DEMANDED the investigation into media leaks that were endangering national security, this after accusing Obama of allowing the media to perpetrate the leaks.  http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/morning-media-newsfeed-obama-troubled-by-leak-four-bidding-on-hulu-martin-joins-nyt_b83301

Conservative: Well… IMPEACH OBAMA!”

I invite your comments on this post whether you agree with it or not.

Published in: on May 31, 2013 at 9:59 am  Comments (7)  
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Texas Going Down the Tubes

Texas Governor, Rick Perry, may not be ashamed. But, as a citizen of this state, I sure am.

Opa_IIApril 17, 2013 — I think it’s an interesting coincidence that Texas Governor, Rick Perry, announced his intention this week to travel to Illinois in an attempt to convince the leadership of corporations headquartered there that they should move to Texas — this in the same week that the Texas Legislative Study Group updated its Texas On The Brink report, a periodic collation of state rankings on public policy issues. The report makes Texas look so bad this year that it should probably be renamed, Texas Going Down the Tubes.

After reading this report you might wonder why anyone would want to come to Texas to live. Unless they are a high-placed corporate executive, someone firmly-established in the upper to upper middle class with a guaranteed source of income, or a professional with qualifications that are in high demand, it beats the hell outta me why anyone would. The blue bonnets in Springtime and relatively mild winters here in Texas are just about the best the state has to offer for everyone else.

I am continuing this post borrowing heavily from Janes Moore’s article in Huffington Post, Texas vs. America, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/texas-versus-america_b_3088725.html, and other sources as noted.

If you do decide to come to Texas, don’t consider failing. There is no safety net here unless you have family able and willing to pick you up when you fall. If you remember nothing else from this year’s update of the Texas on the Brink report http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2013-04-15/texas-on-the-brink/, take with you these two simple facts about the state’s generosity to the less unfortunate: First, the average monthly benefit per person, for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) recipients in Texas is $29.30. That’s the WORST in the nation — not even enough for tuna and crackers from a governor who spends millions on his traveling security entourage. Second, the maximum Temporary Assistance for Needy Families grant for a single-parent family of three is just $263 per month. So, if you don’t mind eating Ramen noodles for dinner every night and living in a shack, Texas has you covered.

20130417-135801.jpgTexas “firsts” and “worsts” that have occurred during the 13 years of the Rick Perry administration in Texas are even more astonishing than Perry’s lack of concern about the poor in this state. In his last legislative session, the Texas governor led a reduction of $5.5 billion in public school funding even though the state ranks dead last in the percentage of population that graduates from high school. According to the Texas on the Brink report, Texas also leads the nation in the percent of the population uninsured as well as the percent of non-elderly that are uninsured.

Here are some highlights from the new Texas On The Brink report:

Education –
• Elementary and Secondary Public School Enrollment — 2nd
• Average Salary of Public School Teachers — 31st
• Percentage of Population Graduated from High School — 50th

State of the Child –
• Percent of Uninsured Children — 2nd
• Percent of Children Living in Poverty — 7th (tied)
• Percent of Children (19-35 months), Fully immunized — 23rd (tied)

Health Care –
• Percent of Population Uninsured — 1st
• Percent of Non-Elderly Uninsured — 1st
• Percent of Low Income Population Covered by Medicaid — 48th

Environment –
• Amount of Carbon Dioxide Emissions — 1st
• Total Amount of Toxic Releases into Water — 4th
• Amount of Carcinogens Released into Air — 4th
• Amount of Hazardous Waste Generated — 1st
• Industrial Toxic Air Pollution — 10th

Democracy –
• Percent of Voting-Age Population Registered to Vote — 47th
• Percent of Voting-Age Population that Votes — 51st

You may download the entire report at http://www.austinchronicle.com/documents/Texas%20On%20The%20Brink%202013.pdf.

Rick Perry may not be ashamed. But, as a citizen of this state, I sure am.

To many, it is a mystery why Texans continue to vote for a governor and a legislature that care so little for the majority of its citizens. Psychologists, however, tell us that it’s human nature. The reason they cite is something called cognitive dissonance http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html. This is the distressing mental state that people feel when we find ourselves doing things that don’t fit with what we know or believe. We all experience it to varying degrees; we all want our expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium. Accordingly, we will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance. In other words, we’d rather be stupid than wrong.

Please feel free to leave a comment whether you agree with my reasoning or not.

Published in: on April 17, 2013 at 11:43 am  Comments (5)  

Socialism vs. Fascism

Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but it seems to me that America is moving away from democracy and toward fascism rather than flirting with socialism as many on the far right are claiming.

Opa_IIApril 11, 2013 — With all the name calling going on by political media show hosts/pundits and politicians these days, people seem not to know the difference between socialism and fascism. Despite what some have said and written to confuse us for political purposes, the difference is as stark as it is simple. Under socialism the government owns the major industries, not the capitalists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism. Under fascism, wealthy capitalists/corporations basically own the government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism. History makes this clear.

Coming to power during the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler targeted the Communist and Socialist Parties in Germany for elimination. At first, however, Hitler claimed socialist views to gain popular support, hence the name National Socialists. But he was never truly a socialist. Once in control of the party, he, with Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler at his side, moved it away from its original leanings and Germany ended up fascist. Big capital was allowed to operate profitably provided it cooperated with the state, and workers were completely excluded from power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler’s_rise_to_power.

Tell me if you think I’m wrong, but it seems to me that America is moving away from democracy and toward fascism rather than flirting with socialism as many on the far right are claiming. Why? Look at all the influence wealthy capitalists and corporate interests have with Congress. Consider how the Koch brothers and fossil energy industries have essentially squashed any meaningful efforts to address global warming by promoting skeptic/deniest arguments. Consider the significance of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Citizens United case — declaring that corporations are people. Consider the NRA’s influence with Congress to squash any meaningful measures to reduce gun violence in America notwithstanding massive public support for them. Consider how Big Pharma was able to protect themselves from lower priced drug imports from Canada. Consider Wall Street’s efforts through Congress to prevent enforcement of new consumer rights regulations. Consider too how the party of big business has in recent years elevated gerrymandering in Republican controlled, Right-to-Work states to new levels, effectively denying the poor, the elderly, minorities and young voters equal representation during elections. Is this not excluding workers from power/participation in the democratic process?

Wait a minute you say, is capitalism fascist then? No, not necessarily; it’s a matter of degrees. Neither is socialism communist. Communism is a form of totalitarian government employing socialism exclusively or with a limited amount of free enterprise called a mixed economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Capitalism is getting a bad rap lately, largely because of its success. Big-this and big-that, in my opinion, have eliminated so much competition and gained so much political clout that markets are losing self-discipline. Banks, oil companies, airlines and pharmaceuticals are colluding through mergers and lobbyists to force favorable legislation and looser regulations for their industries.

Socialism has an important role to play in any free society. It facilitates sharing resources and services: clean water, public utilities, police, fire and other emergency responders, public education, etc. But, as an economic system, a market economy with some degree of capitalism, is still the only way to go. The problem arises when the forces of competition and greed become greater than the people’s democratic government itself. Corporate success in the marketplaces of goods, services and ideas, must therefore be constrained with reasonable regulations to protect the very people that corporations claim to serve. And government must remain of, for and by the REAL people rather than the corporate people.

I invite your comments.

Published in: on April 11, 2013 at 8:28 am  Comments (1)  

The Politics of Hate and Fear ~ Who is the Most Hated President of All Times?

With the nation so divided politically, almost no one has a neutral opinion of president Obama; they either love and admire him if they are Democrat, or they hate and vilify him if they are Republican.

July 11, 2012 — When you google the question, “Who is the most hated president?” you get lots of different answers. Some say Abraham Lincoln, arguably one of our greatest presidents. But he was hated in his time by many for his stance on extending slavery to new western states. The South, and many in the North even, blamed him for our deadliest war, the Civil War. Some say Herbert Hoover because he was president when the nation slipped into the Great Depression. Some say George W. Bush because his administration’s fiscal and regulatory policies are held largely responsible for causing the Great Recession. There is, of course, plenty of blame to go around for the recession. But then there’s the two wars that many say were unnecessary and wasteful, not only of our fortune but of precious blood as well. But about half the answers you’ll get are, yes, Barack Hussein Obama. With the nation so divided politically, almost no one has a neutral opinion of President Obama; they either love and admire him if they are Democrat, or they hate and vilify him if they are Republican.

Democrats love him because they see him as an honest, affable, hardworking president who tries to achieve consensus with the Congress on measures to help the economy recover. They believe he earnestly seeks to restore our faith in America. They see him as working for the good of all people regardless of race, creed, national origin, sexual orientation, or social and economic status. They believe he wants us all to have better lives and equal opportunity. For many, he is a symbol of what is still possible in America for persons born to humble means. But why do Republicans hate President Obama so? THE FOLLOWING IS BASED ON A FACEBOOK POSTING BY ANTI-REPUBLICAN CRUSADERS:

They hate him because they are told that he is a socialist!…  which he isn’t — not even close. Socialism is something of which they thoroughly and proudly refuse to comprehend. But they call people socialists, almost as freely as they call all progressives liberals, because they’re sure these words mean something “evil”, something that deprives people of individual freedoms.

They hate him because they are told he is going to take away their guns!… which he isn’t. He hasn’t said a word about it, other than to offer the opinion that maybe people don’t really need to own militarized assault weapons. Given the number of people who have threatened him with assassination, maybe he should be saying more though.

They hate him because they are told he has raised their taxes!…  except he hasn’t; he has lowered them. But that’s impossible and irrelevant, they think. He’s a Democrat. Therefore he must have raised taxes, just as all the Republicans who have raised their taxes in the past really lowered them – because, well,  everyone knows it always works out that way. Democrats raise taxes, Republicans lower them.

They hate him because they are told that he is bankrupting the country… except that their party’s corporate welfare, tax loopholes and lowered tax rates for the wealthy, two un-funded wars, an unpaid for prescription drug law for seniors, and massive defense program spending did much more damage than unemployment extensions, a few road projects and some extra cash for states to keep our teachers, police and firefighters working ever did.

They hate him because they are told that he hates business and is killing jobs!… except he’s the only one who has managed to create any jobs at all. He’s been pro-business, anti-regulation and pro-reform to such an extent that many in his own party shake their heads in despair.

They hate him because they are told that he is trying to take away their freedoms!… though the only freedom he’s tried to reign-in is the power that Republicans have obtained over time for corporations. Denying civil rights, voting rights, and the right to make private, intimate decisions people for people who are different or think different doesn’t quite compute for Republicans as taking away freedoms. Obama doesn’t believe that human rights are fungible, dependent on the religious and political whims of the loudest group of people carrying signs. He understands that what they are allowed to strip us of now, we could strip from them tomorrow.

They hate him because they are told that he is obviously soft; he ended the war in Iraq, has set a deadline for our withdraw from Afghanistan, and appeases terrorists!… except he isn’t soft. He has been distressingly militant, taking down, one by one, the top echelon of those who have declared themselves to be enemies of America… along with more than just a few innocent bystanders along the way.

They hate him because they are told of all his horrible, dangerous policies, many of which were policies Republicans proposed themselves a few years ago and were cheerleaders for until he signed on to them.

They hate him because they are told he is a Kenyan!… except of course he’s not. No one even actually believes that anyway except the kind of people who are desperate to keep their masks on long after the costume party has ended. Others may say it, may answer that way on polls, but you can see in their eyes that they’re not really that stupid. They know it isn’t true.

They hate him because they are told he is Muslim!…  though he has attended a Christian church all his life, and which presumes that being a member of the Muslim faith is, in itself a reasonable cause to hate and revile him and millions of people on earth (whereas hating someone because they’re a hateful, close-minded Christian is just ridiculous).

They hate him because they are told he wants to murder babies!…  which to anyone who has ever seen him with children is just patently moronic. He’s the one trying to feed them and ensure that they receive health care regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances!

They hate him because they are told that he has made the world a more dangerous place…  except by every measure of every group except theirs, he hasn’t. In fact most of the rest of the world trusts him, finds him careful, reasoned, honest.

Why then do they really hate him, this quiet, smiling, thoughtful man? They will tell you that they hate him because he is too smart, too foreign, too divisive, and too savage, that he’s a communist, a fascist, a communist fascist. They hate him because he’s the worst president this country has ever had – how else would you describe a Kenyan Muslim socialist gun-stealing tax-raiser? They clench their fists and brandish their weapons and list for you a dozen different justifications for their hate based on a dozen different unprovable lies. Many will eagerly admit to thinking he is the anti-Christ or possessed by demons. Yes yes, they’ll cop to that one in a minute! But the one reason for their hatred that you must never, ever dare to suggest, the one most outrageous and over-the-top accusation which leaves them shocked and insulted and unable to figure out where you got such a ridiculous and untrue idea. They hate him for being the one thing he actually is. He’s black. Well, not really. He’s a half-breed, an embarrassment to white supremacists.

The bottom line answer to who is the most hated president of all times is, I’m afraid,  that we may never know. Everyone has an opinion and the next guy could trump them all. A better question might be, who was the worst president or who was the greatest. For that, there are experts to apply empirical measurements. See what the experts are currently saying here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States

Please feel free to post a comment whether you agree or disagree.

Published in: on July 11, 2012 at 11:49 am  Comments (7)  

Political Terrorism ~ A Troubling Analogy

No, I don’t think republican politicians are terrorists. I do believe, however, that they don’t realize their actions to resist progressive changes are tantamount to the same thing. 

July 8, 2012 — I usually don’t hesitate to share things on my Facebook page that resonate with me. But I thought better of it this morning. A post that compared current republican politicians to terrorists struck me as being over-the-top. I’m more used to seeing and hearing extreme rhetoric from the right. So I was bothered by this kind of thing coming from the left. Still, the rationale for the comparison was… well, troublingly sound. Mind you, I’m not making this argument myself, just throwing it out there for discussion. What follows is what my Facebook friend said.

“One of the more interesting questions is: What is the difference between crimes of omission and crimes of commission? Are there any? And if so, are they differences in degree or difference in kind? Is there any real difference between allowing people to die when you have the means of preventing their deaths at hand and killing them by your own hand?  If I know that you are going to die if you don’t get a certain medication and I have the money to buy that medication for you – and I don’t? Don’t I bear some responsibility for your death?

The GOP argument seems to be that it’s okay for us as individuals to save one another. That would be charity. But it’s not okay for society to do this as a matter of public policy. That, you see, would be socialism! Terrorists, republicans would say, are evil villains who kill innocent people in order to make a political point.  Republicans, however, call themselves compassionate conserv- atives who simply allow innocent people to die in order to make their political point. They don’t seem to notice that innocent people are dead, one way or the other.

We are the only developed nation that doesn’t practice socialism in its health care system. And if helping the sick and the dying with tax dollars is socialism, I say, let’s have socialism.”

Again, I’m not myself making the argument that current crop of republican politicians are terrorists. But wasn’t a health care concept involving an individual mandate to buy health insurance not first advanced by the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation?  Weren’t health care bills containing the individual mandate introduced and promoted in the Congress by republicans back in the 90’s as alternatives to the Clintons’ proposal for universal coverage?  http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004182

Why now are republicans so much against a health care plan for the nation that their own nominee-apparent for president, Mitt Romney, implemented in Massachusetts when he was governor there? Could it be that the sitting president, Barack Obama was in the White House when the republicans’ plan was finally passed (over their objections) and signed into law. Now, because it has a democrat president’s name associated with it, it’s suddenly socialism. Hmmmm?

Seems to me that republicans decided they didn’t like the idea of any kind of health care bill soon after President Obama was elected. Republican Senator Jim DeMint said, “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him” http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/scs-jim-demint-would-rather-bring-pain, and democrats are accusing republicans lately of seeking political gains over the good of the country. As evidence to support this, they point to McConnell’s quote from October 2010 in which he said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

No, I don’t think republican politicians are terrorists. I do believe, however, that they don’t realize their actions to resist progressive changes are tantamount to the same thing.

Recall that Congressional republicans held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage  last summer, threatening to impose fiscal catastrophe on all of us to achieve a specific (and unnecessary) policy goal. It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in terms of domestic politics, since the Civil War. Now they are gearing up to do the very same thing again http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/us/politics/gop-pledges-new-standoff-on-debt-limit.html. Now, if this isn’t terrorism, it’s terrorism-like. They might as well have held a gun to the president’s head last year.

With regard to “actual” life-and-death matters, republicans argue that America has the best health care system in the world. Never mind that 45,000 Americans die every year, according to a Harvard Medical School study, for lack of insurance coverage http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/17/us-usa-healthcare-deaths-idUSTRE58G6W520090917,  Never mind that the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks our system only 37th in the world behind, not only the whole list of European “socialist” countries, like France, the Netherlands and Nordic countries, but countries like Colombia, Chile and Saudi Arabia too. Our system does rank first in something though, it’s first in cost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranking_of_health_systems.

Sure, for Americans and foreigners with money to spend, our system is great. For folks with premium insurance policies, it’s also pretty doggone good. Hey, on Medicare with an AARP supplement policy, I got a new knee last year and received excellent care from my surgeon, the hospital and the entire team of doctors and nurses. I got excellent physical therapy following the surgery too. I can now keep up with my great granddaughter on the playground (almost). The only cost to me was, and continues, to be the monthly premiums for my supplement. But I can afford it. For Americans who happen to be out of a job or working for minimum wage and without insurance, take a number and wait in emergency rooms while the cost for care grows at a rate of sixteen percent per year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States. You get no annual checkups and no preventive care unless you are a child on CHIPS or retired and on Medicare. This is the state of affairs that Obamacare is designed to correct.

When asked on Fox News recently what plans republicans in Congress have to cover the 30,000,000 uninsured people that Obamacare (which used to be their plan recall) will cover, Mitch McConnell gave the answer in this video.

Decide for yourself if republicans are acting in the best interests of average Americans, or whether they are just obstructing progress so that we can go back to good-ole-bad-ole days of deregulation and continue subsidies for big corporations and low taxes for the wealthy. Do they really want what’s best for America or are they convinced that their ends justify their means?

I think you know what I think, but I’m not calling anyone a terrorist. I am saying that any system that profits from deciding who gets care and who doesn’t is inherently evil.

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment in response to this, whether you agree with me or not.

Published in: on July 8, 2012 at 1:58 pm  Comments (3)  

Right vs. Left, Part II ~ Responding to Republicans’ Fears this Election Year

Under Obamacare, when it is finally fully implemented, every child will be covered regardless of paternity issues — PERIOD.

July 5, 2012 — Following up on my last post, I realize now that I failed to respond to all of my good friend’s recent comments and “implied” questions about the Affordable Care Act. In her email (see Right vs. Left ~ Responding to Republicans’ Fears this Election Year) she said that she thought the federal government should get out of the business of providing individual care – that states could do a better job.

Hmmm… I guess that would be the end of Medicare, at least as we know it. So, I have written to her the following.

“…. I thought you’d be interested in knowing that our grand- daughter applied for CHIPS over a month ago for her daughter. CHIPS, as you know, is administered by states under Medicaid, and, given our granddaughter’s income, our precious little great granddaughter would normally be eligible. However, the appli- cation is being held up “by the state” because neither Texas nor Louisiana, her daughter’s father’s home of record, has been able to find the man since he was released from prison. Our grand- daughter is being told that he must be served with a child support court order before they will process the application.

Now, how does that make any sense? Under Obamacare, when it is finally fully implemented, every child will be covered regardless of paternity issues — PERIOD.

Also, addressing your concern about the federal government taking money out of the economy, please understand that the government spends every red cent that it collects. That money goes back into the economy and everything spent eventually becomes somebody else’s income. That income, in turn after taxes, gets spent again, over and over, which creates demand for goods and services. Either this, or else it is saved. Spending and “some” investments stimulate the economy. But saving does nothing to help it (never confuse saving with investing). And wealthier folks save a whole lot more than we poor to middle class folks do.  This propensity for more saving by the wealthy is one the most important reasons why we have a progressive income tax system.

This spending cycle, described above, creates what is called the spending “Multiplier Effect.” For your reading enjoyment/ homework assignment, here is an economic letter by the Federal Reserve explaining in more detail what I have just explained: http://www.frbsf.org/publications/economics/letter/2012/el2012-04.html

Sorry if this sounds like a lecture on basic economic concepts. But I guess that’s what it is. Every economics text book from which I have studied or taught contains this same information on how things work. Despite what you might have heard from conserv- ative talk show hosts or read on-line from conservative think tanks like CADO or the Heritage Foundation, this is understood and taught by most schools of economic thought.

If you’re interested and have the time to find out how Obamacare will help small businesses here in Texas, check this out: http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/statehealthreform/texas.html.”

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment, whether you agree with me or not.

Published in: on July 5, 2012 at 9:39 am  Comments (3)  

Right verses Left ~ Responding to Republicans’ Fears this Election Year

Greed, which drives capitalism, must be constrained at some point. But market competition these days, given the demise of organized labor and the growth of oligopolies, is totally disinclined to do so.

July 2, 2012 — According to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, the president’s reelection chances are looking up slightly, especially in battleground states where he leads Romney 50 to 43 percent among respondents. The recent Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act, welcome news among liberals, could, however, work against him considering how it might serve to galvanize the law’s detractors behind his presumptive rival, Mitt Romney. Nevertheless, republicans are nervous given that it’s still a close race just four months prior to the election and that four more years for Obama could mean two moderate to liberal justices to replace aging conservatives. This could mean a liberal court for at least a decade. His reelection would most definitely mean the survival of his health care law and the full implementation of its provisions. Yes, the stakes are high.

I recently received an e-mail question from a lady who, although a staunch republican, remains one of my dearest friends, this notwithstanding our conflicting political views. She said, speaking of the Affordable Health Care Act, “Curious to know how you can justify this burden to small businesses in America.”

To her message she added a quote by a Texas Congressman, Kenny Marchant, which was made following the Supreme Court’s surprise ruling last week.

“The decision doesn’t change the fact that millions of small businesses are going to be deluged with new taxes and job-killing regulations imposed by Obamacare. It also doesn’t change the fact that Obamacare is bad public policy that imposes new taxes on all Americans. Because of the Court’s decision, the quality of health care for millions of Americans will be greatly diminished, employers will be forced to drop health care insurance for their employees, and small businesses will need an army of compliance officers to navigate the Obamacare bureaucracy. Obamacare is unsound policy and disastrous for our nation’s fiscal solvency.”

She concluded her message with, “I believe the federal government keeps getting bigger and bigger which only drains more $$. The feds need out of the taking care of individuals business. I am not ready for a socialistic society. I believe the states can do a much better job.”

Here’s how I responded: “… every republican politician and conservative talking head is saying these same things, over and over, almost as if from the same script. But saying them over and over doesn’t make them so. I am equally convinced that that this is not only the right thing for the American people, it will eventually prove to be what it was intended to be — the “Affordable” Health Care Act. This will not be a burden to small business. It will be a boon. Now people will be better able to pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions, free from the fear of losing their employer-provided insurance coverage. Small businesses will be more willing to hire young college graduates because they won’t have to offer them health insurance initially and, for businesses of fifty and fewer employees, these are exempt from the requirement to provide insurance. Further, there will be more competition between insurance providers and this will eventually bring premiums down.

Read this which contains pros and cons attributed to the new law: http://useconomy.about.com/od/healthcarereform/f/What-Is-Obama-Care.htm. The pros are according the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The cons are from the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. You can believe the claims made by whomever you choose. I chose to believe the non-partisan source.”

Now she’s telling me that this didn’t answer her question – “Just more one side against the other.” Her concern, she clarifies, is not just about Obamacare, it’s about everything – that the government keeps getting bigger and bigger draining more and more money from the economy. So, “Okay,” I answered,” define your terms. I want to be sure I answer your “actual” question. How do you measure the size of government?”

Thinking about how I might respond after she answers, I am anticipating that she might say government growth is measured by the amount of money it spends. Alternatively, she might answer that it is measured by the number of new government employees, or the number of new regulatory agencies, or the number of new regulations imposed on the private sector, and/or their cost burden. I don’t know how she might answer, so I’m researching each measure.

As to the first measure, the amount of money being spent: The Romney campaign would have us believe that government spending under Obama has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history. The truth is, according to PolitiFact, is that the rate of government spending growth has been lower under Obama than under any recent president http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/23/facebook-posts/viral-facebook-post-says-barack-obama-has-lowest-s/. It is true that spending, as a percent of our GDP is up, but let’s be fair. Revenues collected, because of the recession, the Bush tax cuts, and the president’s own tax cuts for the middle class to combat the recession, has been way down.

Now to the growth in the number of federal government employees. At the end of 2010, according to the U.S. Office of Personal Management http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables/TotalGovernmentSince1962.asp, there were 35,000 fewer non-military federal government employees than there were under the Reagan administration. Yes, the total has increased slightly since 2010. But there are still more than two million fewer federal employees than there were at the highest point in recent history. It has been during Republican administrations, not Democrat ones, that the size of government, by this measure, has increased the most.

Okay, now to the number of new regulatory agencies, the number of new regulations, and the economic burden they impose. According to the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank), citing Government Accountability Office statistics, there were 75 major regulations adopted in Obama’s first two years in office. This compares to 120 during Bush’s entire first term. Yes, fiscal 2010 saw a record 43 new rules adopted. But, were these new rules needed? Given what has happened on Wall Street in recent years, what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with the BP oil spill, the growing problems with air quality over major cities like Dallas, water pollution from drilling/fracking operations, and how insurance companies have been denying coverage and dropping that of policy holders when they most need it, I believe that they were needed.

Our current health care system, which costs us eighteen percent of our GDP, has been growing in cost by sixteen percent per year and is rated, according to the World Health Organization as only the 37th best in the world. It is inhumane and it’s well past time for us to change it. That’s my stand on the matter.

Greed, which drives capitalism, must be constrained at some point. But market competition these days, given the demise of organized labor and the growth of oligopolies, is totally disinclined to do so.

I agree that regulatory activity is likely to pick up in coming years as agencies start implementing two of Obama’s major initiatives — the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. There will be economic costs associated with these initiatives. But there will be economic benefits as well. The “net benefit” — savings plus other factors, such as the economic value of lives saved – cannot be accurately calculated.  But they can be anticipated. It’s not just whether and to what extent needed regulations impact corporate profits. What’s also important to look at, according to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Watch, is how these regulations improve peoples’ lives.

Please feel free to post a comment, whether you agree or disagree.

Published in: on July 2, 2012 at 1:50 pm  Comments (6)  
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