21st Century

It’s Obvious

Sep 30

Reading time – 76 seconds . . .

Long time reader DL offered in a private email that he sees me as an iconoclast and that I help people to realize the obvious. That’s a compliment, right?

iconoclast – a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions. – Apple Dictionary, v2.2

I’m not confident that I attack cherished institutions, as I’m not sure that any institutions are cherished any longer. Okay, perhaps that last sentence did attack cherished institutions.

On the other hand, and as you already know, I commonly attack cherished beliefs, like the notion that there is anything of benefit to trickle-down economics, except to further stuff the pockets of the already wealthy. That cherished belief and many other common wisdom, common knowledge notions deserve to be skewered. We need for them to be sliced and diced and dumped into a landfill for ultimate decomposition so that they cannot be brought back and used to harm those in the future who will be sadly unaware of the destructive power of these harmful cherished beliefs.

And there are other cherished beliefs that I stab, like all religious extremist beliefs. People who hold these cherished beliefs are guilty of the murder of hundreds of millions of people and, oddly, people of most major religions are guilty of these atrocities. There is no more effective and motivated killer than one whose cherished belief is that God wants him to kill all who don’t see things in the killer’s delusional way. There are plenty of people who screech the message to kill, literally or politically, doing it from the pulpit and the airwaves and the halls of government.

Another favorite is the cherished and arrogant belief that, “I got it right, so if you disagree, you’re wrong. Maybe bad, too.” For clarity about the ultimate outcome of such thinking, refer to the paragraph above.

Consider the politics of destruction. And the rejection of science and learning. And the refusal to solve problems and instead to allow people to suffer and to die in favor of self-centered jockeying for political advantage.

And allowing big money interests to poison and subvert our democracy. We’ve gone through many iterations of learning this lesson, then forgetting and then re-learning it, then forgetting the lesson yet again. We don’t seem to be able to keep in mind how very harmful it is and to take steps to permanently slay this ruinous beast. There is more.

Like the much-too-human and completely predictable “it’s all about me” attitude of politicians and the certainty of the corruption of politicians by big money.

And the craziness of self-destruction through citizen laziness, sub-consciously assuming that someone else will handle things to our liking. Or that they won’t, but that we’re powerless, so there’s no use in taking action. Or that just being disinterested in broader issues and instead being focused solely on our over-filled lives somehow makes sense.

These cherished beliefs are the things I write about and they are real and they are harmful to us all, but you already realize that, because it’s obvious.

Thanks, DL, for your comments. To you and to all readers, put your thoughts in the “What Do You Think?” section below both today and in response to future posts (freebie subscribe on the right side of this column) in order to help all of us be better informed and to gain a clearer perspective on reality.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Imagine

Sep 27

Reading time – 2 minutes 31 seconds . . .

It was 1961 when President Kennedy proposed – challenged us, really – to send a man to the moon and bring him safely back to Earth by the end of the decade. It was a daring choice. At the time we didn’t have propulsion technology for the job. Not just the propulsion itself, the rocket engines, but the technology to construct the massive engines that would be needed. We didn’t have the metallurgy or computing capability that would be required and didn’t even know how we would provide food for astronauts on a lunar journey. We just had a bunch of people with slide rules, most doing things that had nothing to do with NASA and who weren’t prepared for such an enormous, complicated and dangerous endeavor.

And on July 20, 1969 Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put their footprints on the dust of the moon, as Michael Collins circled above in the command module. Imagine that.

Now we are faced with a far bigger challenge and we don’t have a choice on this one. The climate of the Earth is heating rapidly, perhaps as part of a natural cycle, but this time it is exaggerated because of human activity, largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels. The heating of the planet is making each successive year the hottest on record and it is already creating disasters of storms and drought. Sarah Palin, most of the Republican presidential candidates and the rest of the ostrich community may refuse to see that, but, as John Adams was fond of saying, facts are stubborn things. Things are getting worse regardless of whether the ostriches acknowledge that fact. Further, doing nothing about global warming is inherently self-defeating.

And that is a major driver of why Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) is promoting a bill to slash carbon emissions in California 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050, based on a 1990 emission levels baseline. He is being opposed by Republicans and some moderate Democrats in the California legislature who represent economically suffering districts in central California and who fear the impact on their communities and perhaps on their political careers.

He is also opposed by the Western States Petroleum Association, which is airing fear mongering ads on television projecting awful things that they say will happen if this legislation is passed. All of this is detailed in a New York Times article which captures well the mindset of this organization, which at its core is designed to protect the profit of its fossil fuel selling member companies. The president of the association, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, is quoted:

“I can’t figure out any other way to reach a 50% reduction in that [time] frame without doing some pretty dramatic measures. If it isn’t gas rationing, what is it?”

“We think there should be a lot more detail and it should be articulated pretty clearly about how one thinks they are going to be about this super-aggressive mandate.”

And that’s it. Ms. Reheis-Boyd can’t figure it out. It’s simply beyond her; therefore, the legislators of California should scuttle Brown’s proposal. And she needs all the details before anything is done, so nothing should be done. It’s all about her and her limited abilities, so make this legislation go away, she tells us.

Compare that to President Kennedy’s challenge to America, when nobody had a clue how to do what he proposed, yet we proceeded anyway, figured it out and succeeded.

Here’s a piece of Human Being 101: Change always involves moving from what is known to some unknown future where we don’t know what the consequences may be. Change feels scary and is always resisted.

Here’s a piece of Albert Einstein: Insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results.

Here’s a piece of observation: When a group of 10 people are presented with a new idea, 8 will immediately explain all the reasons why it cannot be done. One will sit quietly with a deer in the headlights face. After all the naysayers have calmed down a little, the 10th will offer an idea for how to start.

We Americans are fond of seeing ourselves as can-do and proudly announce to ourselves and to the world our American exceptionalism. We have done wondrous things that have benefited not only ourselves, but the entire world and we continue to have the natural and human resources to do so much more. What is puzzling is how people with a big public voice can extol the wonders of our American exceptionalism and at the same time tell us how we can’t do anything about global warming. It is further puzzling that our fossil fuel industries, having such enormous resources, are doing nothing to create the new energy technologies that will be required when we run out of oil within the next 100 years. Where is the exceptionalism in that?

It is time to stop resisting change that is inevitable and to imagine a healthy, sustainable energy superstructure. It is time to imagine a planet that can sustain the billions of us who don’t want to die in a climate catastrophe.

To Ms. Reheis-Boyd, Sarah Palin and all the others with myopic vision or who willfully blind themselves: Stop resisting and instead, imagine.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Question

Sep 25

Pope Francis arriving in US – CBS News photo

Reading time – 72 seconds . . .

Pope Francis is visiting the United States this week and there is a question that begs an answer. Here are the facts.

By the time his visit is complete he will have been received at the White House and will have visited the homeless.
He will have addressed both a joint session of Congress and the United Nations.
He will have said mass multiple times for well over a million people, doing so both in English and in Spanish and he will have visited the birthplace of American democracy in Philadelphia.
He will have been serenaded by both Andrea Bocelli and Aretha Franklin and he will have visited prisoners in the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.
He will have gone on parade through Washington DC and Central Park in New York and hundreds of thousands of Americans will have seen him.

Not all the people who show up to see the pope will be Catholic. They are not all there to pay homage to their religious leader, yet they come by the hundreds of thousands. They inconvenience themselves, standing and waiting for hours, often in profound discomfort – some overnight – just to catch a glimpse of him.

The question is: Why do people do that?

The answer: hope.

You don’t have to be a Catholic to want a piece of what this pope represents. You just have to have a hunger for something that you can’t seem to find, something that gnaws at you and creates a hollow spot within that is frustrated for something substantial.

We’ve come to a time in America and in much of the rest of the world when our challenges seem overwhelming, when cooperation has been displaced by crude hostility. Neither our politicians nor those in Great Britain, Israel, Greece and many other countries seem to be able to carry on a civil conversation, much less solve problems.

We are far more than weary of the selfish, greedy posturing of politicians, lobbyists, and of slick marketing lies. We are far more than weary of self-destructive denials of reality and the rejection of learning. We are far more than weary of being marginalized and of seeing the hopes for our children crushed under the heel of brutes. Little wonder we feel nearly hopeless.

Pope Francis arrived in America with a message. It isn’t one of proselytizing or bible-thumping and, in fact, other than the masses he will say, his message isn’t particularly religious.

Even without saying a word his message is one of hope. It is a message we hunger to hear. It is a message we want our leaders to hear and act upon.

We need hope for a better tomorrow. It is the only way forward and every one of us knows that in our bones.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Coming Together for Survival

Sep 23

copy/paste into your browser: http://bit.ly/1ORt5Yu

Reading time – 41 seconds . . .

A while back we had some assurance that there wouldn’t be a nuclear war with the Soviets. It was called “mutually assured destruction” – acronym MAD – and, not surprisingly, the Soviets wanted to continue to live as much as we did. That calculus for the prevention of nuclear war fails completely, though, when those on the other side long to be martyrs. It’s like threatening a suicide bomber with capital punishment. It just doesn’t work.

That makes mandatory the continuing prevention of a nuclear capable Iran and it will take the best efforts the world can muster to accomplish that. We need people in Congress who will keep their eye on the ball. Otherwise, global warming, income inequality and the rest of the American political battlefields will become less than incidental.

Brad Schneider published an essay in The Times of Israel that speaks to this issue. His level-headed attitude and call for a coming together isn’t just sensible: it will be critical for survival. You can trust that people living just few hundred miles from Iran, which has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, are quite clear about that and intent on ensuring that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. And America – we – referred to as “The great Satan” by the Ayatollahs – are next on Iran’s hit list. See what I mean about survival?

Have a look at what Illinois 10th Congressional candidate Schneider has to say and see what you think.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

One More Time, Jeb

Sep 20

Jeb Bush Twitter feed – September 17, 2015

Reading time – 2 minutes, 19 seconds . . .

To you: Betcha you’re going to have an opinion on this.

To Jeb: You told the lie again, a lie that has been repeated since 2002, this time at the CNN Republican candidate debate. You defended your brother’s legacy by telling us that he kept us safe. Let’s check out your claim.

The attack on September 11, 2001 came on George W. Bush’s watch. 2,996 people died that day and 422,000 New Yorkers have suffered from PTSD because of that attack. It happened after he had been warned repeatedly about an imminent attack on the U.S. by Islamist extremists, warnings which he dismissed and ignored. Jeb, you might want to check with some of the survivors and family members of those who died on that awful day as to whether your brother kept us safe.

President Bush lied to Congress and to the American people, claiming that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda, something that is absurd on its face. al Qaeda membership was entirely religious extremists and Saddam was a secularist who hated them.

Your brother lied about a WMD threat from Saddam Hussein. Perhaps you recall his National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice stoking fear by telling us that the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud. And you might also remember the lies about the yellow cake (ref: Amb. Joseph Wilson’s report) and the aluminum tubes. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated those lies to the UN.

At the same time President Bush was calling for an authorization to use force against Saddam, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was calling for restraint. They were the experts doing the inspections and they were finding no weapons of mass destruction or even a hint of them, so, Jeb, your brother actually protected us from nothing at all.

Without question Saddam was a bad guy, but consider what had been going on in the Middle East and what the present world circumstances might be if we had not invaded and overthrown him.

Saddam’s army had fought a war with neighboring Iran for years and they were bitter enemies. Had Saddam been left in power he would have been a natural check on Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapon capabilities. He was brazen enough to have attacked Iran to protect himself from such a threat and we might not be concerned with a nuclear Iran today. Instead, we live with a negotiated agreement, hoping it will prevent an Iranian nuclear threat. By attacking Iraq, just how safe did your brother keep us?

Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he kept rival factions in check in the Middle East. Were he still in power there would be no ISIS/ISIL. There would have been no beheadings, rapes, torture, murders, destruction of ancient sites or any of the rest of the carnage. There would be no caliphate and Americans would not be getting recruited to join that savage bunch and wage jihad on fellow Americans.

6,855 American military people were killed in those unnecessary wars (counting all coalition forces the number is 8,301). About 2/3 were killed in Iraq and 1/3 in Afghanistan and over 300,000 American military people are suffering from PTSD. (Check here and here for more on that. Note that the estimate of the number of our military people with PTSD from those wars has grown significantly since the Rand Corporation report in 2008 and has been estimated at over 500,000.) And all that warring cost us trillions of dollars that we put on the national credit card for our children and grandchildren to pay and which will drag down our economy for decades. None of that would have happened without the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Your brother didn’t do a very good job of protecting our military folks or securing safety for our future.

Your brother’s administration ordered the torture of prisoners in full and obvious violation of international law and United States law. We are still detaining dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo and will never know what happened to so many who were sent to “black sites.” In the process of all that, we became despised by millions and the torture we did has been used as a recruiting tool for yet more religious extremists to volunteer to attack Americans.

Absent the dishonest invasion of Iraq there would be no flood of refugees from Iraq and somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis would still be alive. The number is uncertain because we made no attempt to measure either Iraqi deaths or the number of those who fled their homes to avoid war or those who are doing so now.

You tell us that your brother, the former president, kept us safe, yet you offer no proof or even a hint of support for your claim. It might be inferred, based on what has been said by former Bush administration people, that because there were no additional massive attacks on America like 9/11 that your brother kept us safe. Tell that, though, to the citizens of Madrid and London and to the people who were on the airplane with the shoe bomber.

2,996 people died in New York, 6,855 of our military are dead, hundreds of thousands are dead or displaced in Iraq, ISIS poses one of the greatest threats to humanity, Iran has made great progress toward getting a nuclear bomb to use on Israel and on the United States . . . the list of horrible things caused by your brother could go on and on and none would exist if we had not invaded Iraq.

Your brother kept us safe? It’s a great, chest-thumping bumper sticker, Jeb, but it’s a lie.

PS – pass this along to Dick Cheney.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Get Up

Sep 15

William McNary at the Justice Project 2015

Reading time – 47 seconds . . .

“Democracy is a verb.”

That’s what William McNary told us, speaking on July 26, 2015 on the Winnetka, IL Village Green at the 2015 Justice Day event. It was 50 years to the day since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to 10,000 people gathered in that same place for the North Shore Summer Project – 1965. The imperative to be vigilant in the fight for civil rights remains and will do so for a long time.

Think about that as you listen to the Republican presidential aspirants at the CNN debate on Wednesday, September 16. What kind of future for the American people do they envision and what will they do to create it? Do they appeal to our better angels or do they take the lazy route to a nomination by stoking anger, fear and hatred? Do they enlighten us or do they dumb us down?

Let your own vision for America, for an American Dream that you want to live and to leave to your children and grandchildren, guide your thinking. And for the sake of you, your children and your grandchildren, get up and get active.

Get up and get active, because we cannot afford more never-ending wars or more American children living in poverty (1 in 6 do now), more gun massacres and more Americans forced into bankruptcy because of catastrophic medical expenses. We cannot afford more American students unable to compete with their Asian rivals because of archaic, out-of-date and unequal education, or a planet ready to assault itself and us with acts that won’t be of God, but of us. And we cannot afford the more than 2.4 million incarcerated Americans, more than any other nation – ever.

Make your voice heard – for example, right here on this post in the “What do you think?” section below.

Pass a link to this blog to three others and insist that they subscribe and comment – that they get up and get active – because you and a lot of other people are counting on them.

Democracy is a verb. Get up.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

You’re So Smart

Sep 02

Sen. Martin Heinrich, (D-NM)

Reading time – 9 (not a typo) seconds . . .

The time is growing short for Congress to figure this out. Happily, you can help.

This is your time to be the smartest kid in class, the first in your neighborhood, the person in the know.

About the Iran deal.

Everything you need is right here, oddly in New Mexico.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Endarkened Right

Aug 23

Reading time – 54 seconds . . .

This is just too strange – read through to the end and you’ll see why.

And, yes, I know that “endarkened” isn’t a word. For now, though, let it stand as the polar opposite of “enlightened.” And let “right” mean not “correct,” but the stupidly polar opposite of stupidly polar “left.”

On May 11 Charles Murray’s essay was published in the Wall Street Journal and is entitled, Regulation Run Amok-And How to Fight Back. His contention is that there are just gobs of government regulations that are strangling the America out of America. Indeed, he tells us in what he appears to believe are self-evident terms,

“Then, with FDR’s New Deal and the rise of the modern regulatory state, our founding principle was subordinated to other priorities and agendas. What made America unique first blurred, then faded and today is almost gone.”

Gosh, that sounds as though instead of melting the Wicked Witch of the East, we liquidated Glinda, the bubble-traveling Good Witch of the North – on purpose. Note, too, how he invokes “the modern regulatory state,” as though it is some agreed upon, fact-worthy construction, like ancient Athens as a city-state. It isn’t.

Murray goes through a litany of innuendo and shadow puppet notions to support his case and then tells us what we good Americans should do about all those terrible regulations: we should just ignore them. Civil disobedience. Do what makes sense to you, even if you break the law, he tells us.

No cars have come down your street for over five hours and it’s 3:30AM. Why in the world should you have to stop at that stop sign? Just blast on through the intersection.

You own the land, so you should be able to do what you damn well please with it. Those regulators can’t tell you what to do, by golly, so you build your boutique toxic chemical plant in your garage and if the stuff sometimes spills and runs down the driveway toward the sidewalk where the little kids are walking to school, no biggie.

Let ’em come after you, because you have your good sense to protect you against those annoying experts the regulators will call as witnesses when your delusional ass is hauled into court. But you’ll be okay financially, because Murray also proposes a Legal Services Corporation (his words) as a kind of people’s insurance against those pesky regulators who strangely think they are supposed to uphold the law.

Look, nobody thinks that we don’t have some stupid regulations and that some have long outlived their usefulness and may now be nothing more than foolish obstacles. But the way to correct those is not to create a nation of chaos-inducing vigilantes pretending that they know better than anyone else. It’s to change the law. Isn’t that what righties say when civil rights activists push the limits?

Can you believe it? As a left-of-center moderate, I’m giving “obey the law” instruction to an endarkened righty. Surely, we are living in strange times.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Nothing Has Changed

Aug 16

Reading time – 19 seconds; Listening time – 2 minutes . . .

Set aside the Republican circus sideshow barker for now, because he is exactly what Steve Schmidt labeled him: The candidate of middle finger Republicans. The reason his poll numbers don’t go down when he says offensive things is because his vulgarity feeds their hostility.

What is left is a field of 16 presidential wannabees who are essentially interchangeable with one another regarding what they would do to America if elected.

That notion brought me back to the 2012 election. Here’s a mock commercial I created for that contest. Listen to it and in your mind’s ear replace Mitt Romney’s name with that of any of the 16 current contenders and you’ll find that nothing has changed.

Note: Click near the left end of the black bar to play the audio.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Letter to the Editor, Chicago Tribune

Aug 09

Reading time – 52 seconds . . .

A recent poll showed that 96% of Americans deplore the influence of big money on our politics and want that changed. But that hasn’t happened and that big money is the mother lode that drives our national dysfunction.

After 20 little kids and 6 teachers were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary school nearly three years ago, 90% of all Americans and 80% of National Rifle Association members wanted universal background checks for all sales of firearms. We didn’t get what we wanted. The big money interests blocked the will of the American people.

Jeb Bush has raised over $114 million (“Jeb Bush, super PAC raise” July 9) and a Hillary Clinton fundraiser in Chicago cost $2,700 per seat (“Major donor to Obama, Emanuel to host Hillary Clinton fundraiser” July 21). Once they and other candidates receive these enormous sums, they are beholden to the wealthy who contributed and the candidates ignore the voices of regular Americans.

That’s why we don’t have laws to help small businesses and it is why our health care system caters to powerful insurance companies. It’s why we haven’t undertaken a critical updating of our education system and it’s why we wait for bridges to collapse and kill people before repairing our crumbling infrastructure. The list of serious problems ignored by Congress is long and ugly and our corrupt campaign finance system drives nearly all of them.

I’ve spoken to groups that span our political spectrum about our legalized bribery system that gives wealthy special interests an advantage and opens the door to corruption. Not once has anyone voiced any push-back. This is a bipartisan issue. We the People want reform.

As an Eisenhower Republican, my vote in 2016 will go to whichever candidates come out in support of fundamental election reform that truly puts government back in the hands of the people. In the 10th Congressional District, that rules out Robert Dold.

All candidates can show that they are serious about this issue by supporting the Government by the People Act (H.R.20). This bipartisan bill (with 160 cosponsors) will create a voluntary system of tax rebates and other incentives for small donors to have more of a voice in elections, including public financing of our elections. I hope the candidates campaign on this reform bill to ensure politicians are accountable to voters rather than catering only to a well connected few.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.

ACTION STEP: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe. Thanks! JA

Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler

It’s Obvious

Imagine

The Question

Coming Together for Survival

One More Time, Jeb

Get Up

You’re So Smart

The Endarkened Right

Nothing Has Changed

Letter to the Editor, Chicago Tribune

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