Money in politics

Crunch Time For Illinois Residents

May 27

There are times that require that we stand up and say what we stand for. This is one of those times in Illinois.

I’ve written extensively about big money being the mother lode driving the dysfunction in our politics and this is a critical time for doing something about that.

We are very close to Illinois becoming the 15th State to pass a formal resolution to demand the overturn of Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that is eating at the core of our democracy.

With the help of so many Illinoisans, Senate Joint Resolution 0027 (SRJ0027) passed both the Illinois State Senate and the Illinois House Judiciary Committee and is on the way to the floor of the House for a vote. We need only one more vote to pass the resolution and send a powerful message to Congress that we want our America back. With your help, we’ll be able to start solving our very large challenges, like getting Congress to pass meaningful gun legislation, as 90% of Americans want.

Please call your Illinois state representative (not your state senator) and ask him/her to VOTE YES ON SJR0027 when it comes up for a floor vote, which may happen in the next 24 hours.

If you don’t know who your state representative is:

In Cook County, go to: http://www.cookcountyclerk.com/elections/deo/Pages/default.aspx and input your address (number, street name and zip only). Then scroll down to the Illinois House of Representatives section to find contact information for your representative.

In Lake County, http://www.lakecountyil.gov/IWantTo/Find/Maps/Pages/ClosetoHome.aspx. Follow the 4-step process to find contact information for your representative.

THEN PICK UP THE PHONE AND TELL THEM YOU WANT YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TO VOTE YES ON SRJ0027.

Thanks for all you do!

“If someone like you doesn’t care a whole lot,
nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss

It Ain’t Easy – And Their Mothers

May 11

Before you decide that those who see the immigration issue quite differently from the way you see it as having brains operating at sub-optimal levels, consider a few things.

First, let’s be clear that the issue is about non-citizens who are in America without the legal right to be here. Many of them are people who arrived with a valid visa and stayed beyond the expiration of their documentation. Some arrived without the legal right to do so. Likely, there are other descriptors for these folks, but all share an important characteristic: They broke the law.

It doesn’t matter if they did it with that intention before entering America or things changed once they were here and they did not want to or could not leave. All of those are simply stories of explanation and they do not change the fact that they broke the law.

There is a substantial imperative from our sense of right and wrong that wrongdoing deserves consequences. Our sense of right and wrong is offended when a wrongdoer gets away with it. Doubt that? Consider your feelings about the Goldman Sachs creeps who promoted worthless mortgage backed securities to their clients while at the same time dumping their own holdings of those securities. That’s called fraud, but not one of those guys has been prosecuted. One more time: How do you feel when wrongdoers get away with it?

Of course, our immigration issue isn’t that simple. If the estimates are correct we have somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million people here without permission. Catching, prosecuting and deporting that many people is simply not do-able – that’s a limit of logistics. Sure, we can make a show of it, but that would be substantively meaningless.

The 14^th Amendment to the Constitution says that people who are born in America are American citizens, regardless of the nationality of their parents. What will we do with the Made-In-America children of our non-citizens? We tried to take a step forward on that with The Dream Act, but the knuckle-draging, fanged droolers in Congress shot it down. Do we prosecute and deport the parents, leaving their minor children to be wards of the state? Do we deport the kids, too, even though they are American citizens?

The people who are here illegally are paying Social Security tax, Medicare fees, sales taxes, real estate taxes and they help to support our communities in many ways. They contribute to society as friends and neighbors and many of them do jobs that you won’t do, but which need to be done. That complicates things.

But what about the people who have been standing in line for a long time, following the rules to become naturalized Americans? How could it be fair to them to allow those who broke the law to have the same opportunity and to be in line with them? It seems that there are a lot of balls to juggle to arrive at a solution that is fair and reasonable to everyone.

And there is one more aspect to consider – it’s found in the mirror.

We have all been complicit in allowing people to be here illegally because we have liked and benefited from the low skill jobs that get done because there have been people here we could exploit. We haven’t prosecuted employers for knowingly employing those folks and paying them poorly. We’ve made stabs at requiring employers to verify the right to work of employee candidates but at the same time we have prevented employers from being able to access the information necessary to know whether they are complying with the law. We have consistently refused to dedicate the necessary resources to stop people from entering this country illegally. To put all the blame and consequences onto those here illegally is hypocrisy.

There is a good chance that Congress will either find a compromise that satisfies nobody and frustrates everybody or it will do its now-familiar polarization dance, with the knuckle-dragging, fanged droolers once again trying to sound like tough, patriotic Americans, but succeeding only in preventing us from solving our problem. Whatever we decide to do and whatever your point of view on this issue, just get that immigration is a lot like many other issues, in that it is more complex than we’d like it to be and a simple black-and-white analysis is willfully blind and of no value.

Okay, this is switching topics – slightly – but it may help to understand the black-and-white types in our midst.

That “no value” part of a simple black-and-white analysis is true, unless you’re up for re-election. Then doing whack-a-brain stupid stuff like casting a polarized vote that goes against the will of the American people may get you lots of special interest campaign cash. Think about that the next time some American flag pin wearing legislator googles their eyes and proudly froths out dingbat stuff. How proud their mothers must be.

The Best Thing That Could Have Happened

Apr 21

Sure, it was very simple and would have made only marginal improvement in violence reduction. Of course, we can characterize it as something that would have been nearly pointless. Still, the bill went down in defeat and it’s the best thing that could have happened.

Let’s start with what it was and what it was not. The vote was not on whether to close the so-called “gun show loophole” and require background checks for all sales of firearms. It was not a vote on whether to create a national registry of gun owners. It was not a vote on the Second Amendment. It was a vote on whether to override a Republican filibuster that was preventing even a discussion of the proposed background checks bill. The gun thumpers won and the rest of us lost.

That’s “lost,” as in putting something ahead of protecting our children. That’s “lost,” as in cowardice replacing courage. That’s “lost,” as in willfully refusing to do the job one was hired to do and even lying about it.

The lying is a big piece of what gets under our skin, because it violates our sense of right and wrong. Sometimes it’s covert, like Wayne LaPierre and his National Rifle Association forcing a watering down of the bill, then lobbying against it, saying that it’s too wimpy to accomplish anything. Slimy, sneaky stuff like that.

Sometimes the lying is overt, like saying that the bill would create a federal registry of gun owners, which they claim is the next step toward taking guns away from citizens. Ignore for the moment the good sense of knowing who has which guns. Focus on this simple fact: the proposed bill imposes a $15,000 fine on anyone attempting to create such a registry. That means that all the fools telling us that the bill would create a gun registry were either willfully ignorant or they were lying to us. How does that feel under your skin?

The 46 senators who voted against defeating the filibuster (same as blocking the bill from a vote) had their reasons. Perhaps some are true believers in the unintented-by-the-Framers meaning of the Second Amendment. Maybe they imagine that Second Amendment actually has something to do with anything other than the brand new United States of America needing an army in 1776 and not having the resources to equip it. Perhaps they get some kind of proud, testosterone rush and a swelling in their chests of patriotic fervor just by thinking about their right to own a semi-automatic Bushmaster assault rifle. Or maybe it was something else.

Maybe it was their share of the $25 million that the NRA spent on campaign contributions in 2012 and their fear that a challenger would get that money in the next election cycle. Maybe it was the direct and indirect money they benefited from due to the generosity of Colt Industries and the rest of those in the private citizen killing business. Maybe they figured that they’d get primaried by a screwball even more Neanderthal than they are, so they did what they did for “the greater good.”

All that rationalizing comes down to this: Those 46 senators decided that their careers are more important than the lives of our American children. They see their financial well-being following their senatorial days, as they shift to become highly paid lobbyists, as being more important than the 3.5 Americans who are killed by gun violence every hour of every day of every year.

And now you know. Now the 90% of Americans who want our communities to be safer know. And now we have the leverage to do something about it.

There will be a general election in just over 18 months. That is when we get to tell our legislators exactly how we feel about their cowardice, their self-centered focus and their contempt for the American people.

That is when we get to elect people who will scrap the pitiful bill that was just rejected and replace it with a bill that has a hope of beginning to reduce American gun violence. We can enact legislation that will require background checks on all transfers of firearms, even those between Grandpa and grandchild, because one of those grandchildren might be like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine infamy. We can enact legislation that denies assault weaponry to child killers in Newtown, CT. We can eliminate 33-round clips and 100-round drums of ammunition that were so deadly in a movie theatre in Aurora, CO. And we can even do something positive to help our mentally ill citizens.

Here’s how Gabby Giffords puts it:

“Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.”

That is why this cowardly filibuster override failure is the best thing that could have happened.

Steam Engines, Headnotes and 91%

Apr 01

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 and Section 1 of that amendment begins this way:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (bold and italics mine – JA)

Those are the “due process” and the “equal protection” clauses of the Constitution. Look at the date of the amendment and consider what the amendment says and you’ll be quite clear about its intent: This was entirely about protecting and advancing the condition of former slaves. In the wake of the Civil War many southerners did whatever they could to retain their former advantage, this to the extreme disadvantage of former slaves, now free in name only, so this amendment was both clear and necessary.

Eighteen years later a lawsuit appeared on the docket of the Supreme Court. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was a tax jurisdiction case that tested the provisions of then-new California laws against those of the federal government. The case was decided in favor of the railroad and, oddly, that turned out to be the least important thing associated with this lawsuit.

The court reporter for the Supreme Court was Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis. He, like other court reporters of his day, was far more than a stenographer for the cases presented before the court. Back then the job of court reporter was a most prestigious position and Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis was actually paid more money than Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite.

Recordings of the proceedings were made with up to-the-moment technology, ink pen and paper, and Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis had the good fortune to be allowed to publish his recordings of the proceedings and collect royalties for his efforts. Along with his best efforts to record the case by hand, he was allowed to publish what were called “headnotes”. These are comments of the court reporter and were not part of the court’s opinions or rulings, nor intended by the court as legal precedent. Indeed, headnotes were not even from the court proceedings, but were solely the comments of the court reporter.

Here is what Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote in his headnotes to the publication of the proceedings of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case:

“The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States . . . “

Corporate “personhood” was not tested before the court in this case; remember that this was a simple tax jurisdiction issue. That makes what followed Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis’ writings the strangest part of this case: Davis’ headnotes, his editorial opinion, has been cited as precedent for all of the efforts to give corporations the same rights as flesh and blood human beings ever since.

That’s right: A constitutional amendment that was designed to protect former slaves was and is being used to give artificial personhood to inanimate corporations. It is what is allowing billions of corporate dollars to influence our elections and bend legislation and regulation to the desires of those same corporations. It is what drives huge cash contributions to political candidates and influences voting in Congress.

Right now 91% of Americans want universal background checks and registration for all gun sales. Legislation to accomplish that is clumsily being cobbled together in Congress but getting our corporately influenced legislators to do the will of the people is proving to be really difficult. And to reemphasize the insanity causing that, the engine driving congressional intransigence is based not on the decision of a court, but on an editorial opinion of one court reporter

That strange and damaging precedent was set one hundred forty five years ago and we are still feeling its effect, perhaps now more than ever. Likewise, the decisions we make today will be felt by our descendents one hundred forty five years from now. That is to say, just as sure as the flow of impact from Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis’ headnotes to us, there will be an impact of what we do today on our great-great-great-grandchildren when they are adults just like you.

You can be passive and do nothing; that is your right as an American. After all, you have the right to vote, but not the legal obligation. You have the right to appeal to your elected officials to act as you prefer, but that is not a requirement of citizenship, either.

On the other hand, you might want to close your eyes and envision the America you want for your children, your grandchildren and, if you can see that far, for your great-grandchildren. Likely, if you do nothing, that’s not what they’ll inherit. Indeed, unless you speak up, the vision of people who want a very different America from the one you want will be the America of tomorrow, because those people will be the only ones talking.

Perhaps you really do have something to say to your legislators. Go ahead. Tell them. Now.

Human Being 101 – No, Really

Feb 13

83% of Americans – including NRA members – want universal background checks before gun ownership changes. That means mandatory background checks before sales at retail stores, at gun shows, private sales and even when Grandpa tearfully hands his lovingly preserved hunting rifle to his grandchild. We want to ensure that the recipient of the firearm isn’t a homicidal maniac.

Over 65% of us believe that climate change is both real and that human beings are contributing to it in significant measure. Two out of three Americans believe we should be taking action to stem the tides that trash our coastal cities and the drought that is scorching our fields and limiting our agricultural yields.

99% of Americans believe public education is both right and necessary for the future welfare of our children and our nation. 67% believe we need to expand pre-school education because studies have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that early childhood education leads to greater success in life. Not surprisingly, parents in America want that for their kids, regardless of their present economic situation.

Over four out of five Americans believe in a strong national defense, while at the same time they believe that we cannot and should not engage in continuous war. Over 90% of Americans believe that we spend far too much on military hammers, toilet seats, and unnecessary hardware and want to see a substantial reduction in those expenditures and a lot of common sense applied to the Pentagon’s activities.

Just short of 100% of Americans believe that we should stop granting tax exemptions to the world’s most profitable entities, like big oil, big finance and big anything with idyllic island locations to park their billions of dollars tax-free.

The frog boil of healthcare cost escalation that has run concurrently with a worsening of medical outcomes relative to the rest of western civilization has at last caught the attention of the majority of Americans. They want the system fixed, not more scary slogans. They want reasonably priced healthcare and world-class outcomes. They want an end to the one out of two personal bankruptcies that are caused by catastrophic medical bills. In short, they want what so many other western countries provide.

Q. What do all of these situations have in common?

A. Congress refuses to act in accordance with the will and desires of the majority of Americans.

Now, why is that? The people we send to Washington to represent us are privy to the same information as the rest of us. They certainly aren’t so bereft of intelligence that they don’t get it. So, what explains the refusal of congress to do our will?

Turns out that it’s all about Human Being 101 and its first imperative, preservation of self. To see how that works, you have to step through a logic tree. Here is how it works:

Politicians very often act like people, in that they focus on self-interest, which for them is to get elected and then stay in office.
A successful campaign requires lots of television and radio advertising, which is hideously expensive, so candidates must raise a lot of money.
It is very difficult to raise anywhere near enough money for a successful campaign through small, individual contributions, so candidates must solicit big contributions.
By far the biggest contributions come from corporations and big money individuals who can contribute unlimited “soft money” to SuperPAC’s, which will air lots of television advertising for its candidate.
The money from all of those people and corporations is necessary for the next election, too, so politicians, once elected, refrain from actions and votes that might be objectionable to the big bucks contributors.
Sometimes, that puts politicians at odds with the vast majority of Americans, as they vote in favor of the interests of people who are their big contributors, and against the will and interests of those who are not.

At root, if We The People want our will to be done, like the issues listed above, we have to remove the core driver of our political dysfunction. We cannot change human nature and politicians will continue to do what is in their self-interest. What we can do is to demand change to political fund raising, the engine of our national political dysfunction. Until we do that, we’re just swatting at symptoms.

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Editorial note: The statistics presented in this essay are approximate due to time limitations for sourcing. However, they are spot-on correct in their meaning. You can look it up. JA

O’ That Darned Long Term Reality

Dec 02

Nice election, but what if the real prize isn’t won? What if we have to do something more or we’re all screwed?

Look, it’s a fairly simple thing. George Will explained it years ago in clear terms, saying that we want about $300 billion per year more in services than we’re willing to pay for. Even 70% of self-proclaimed, hair-on-fire Tea Partiers want low taxes, our budget balanced, our debt reduced, Washington made irrelevant except for national defense and, oh, by the way, they want their Social Security and Medicare, too. Sadly, most of us are similarly wired.

We’ve been doing that kind of free lunch fantasizing for decades and have the national debt to prove it. While there always have been huge spenders and creators of enormous debt in Washington, we can attempt to point the finger of blame in any direction we like and it will always be a divining rod that points to us, because we as a society voted for the people who legislated the debt.

Now that debt is causing otherwise (sometimes) sensible people to suggest crazy things. It’s time for a national “get real” conversation about priorities and perhaps that is what is starting in DC. But we have to do more than hope that’s happening, which means that we all have to participate.

America needs a tax system that is congruent with what we decide to spend. Given that historically we’ve had top rates as high as 90% and still grew as a nation, a few points over the current marginal rate aren’t going to kill the golden goose and, really, they won’t make a dent in the lifestyles of the richest 2%.

Comment for the richest 2%: Please stop trying to sell the fiction that you’re the job creators and that trickle-down economics is anything other than a fraud. And tell your legislative buddies to do the same. The rest of us are tired of your 30-year attempt to manipulate us with those fictions.

We really don’t need to spend more on national defense than the next 17 countries (some say all the rest of the world) combined. The Cold War is over and we don’t need to prevent a Soviet invasion of Europe. WW II has been over for 47 years and we don’t need to prevent a Japanese invasion of anywhere. The people in the Pentagon don’t want the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that they have refused every time they were asked, so congress can stop authorizing still more billions for it. You get the idea – we have to stop defending against threats that no longer exist and buying toys we don’t need. That’s just a starting short list for pruning our absurd national defense budget.

That “get real” conversation has to include our willingness to shift our national priorities from lots of guns to a reasonable consumption of butter. And as unrealistic as we Americans can be, we need to recognize that there are a few things we must do – these are not optional.

We absolutely have to encourage, support and advance education. Were we to follow through with the outrageous cuts that have already been made and make the other proposed cuts to our education system, we would be metaphorically eating our seed corn. We would be ensuring that we will be unable to compete in a world that is increasingly better educated than us, sentencing our young to a dismal future. And enough already with the bashing of teachers and teachers unions. It’s way past time to stop looking for a boogeyman and instead construct an education system that serves our young for generations to come.

We cannot let our infrastructure continue to deteriorate. If you have doubts about such a statement, check with Minneapolis residents about the importance of maintaining bridges for our interstate highways. All of the survivors and all the loved ones of those who died as a result of the I-35W bridge collapse a few years ago wish that we had done a better job of upkeep. You’ll wish the same if a bridge collapses near or on you, like one did on the Fourth of July this year in Northbrook, IL, killing a couple in their car beneath the bridge.

Here’s another way to look at our infrastructure: We can’t afford the 25% loss of electricity traveling through our grid. We need to build a smart, efficient way to transmit electricity. It’s a national priority if you’re going to be able to plug in your electric car, your computer, your blender, your cell phone, your lights, your dishwasher and everything else that runs on electricity and have them work at an acceptable power cost. And it’s critical to have that smart grid if we are to shift away from fossil fuels and stop hard boiling the planet.

About the global warming denial thing – the flat-Earthers need to get a handle on reality, because if we don’t do what is necessary to counter that global threat, we can kiss good-bye all of our cities along every seashore and much of our arable farm land.

Memo to those who want to curtail, cut, eviscerate, bend, fold and mutilate Social Security and Medicare: We as a society are going to pay those costs one way or another. If we kill Medicare we’ll take our seniors away from practitioners who would provide early treatment for seniors’ ailments. Instead we will send them directly to the emergency room. That way we will provide healthcare in the most expensive and least effective method on the planet. In addition, lots of those seniors will die much younger than they would have had Medicare continued to be available. Think: Pulling the plug on Granny. Social Security cuts will produce parallel results. If you want America to save money, forget about abandoning those programs.

Final question about Social Security and Medicare: Why are the richest people in America contributing $43 million to lobby against those programs? Crank your brainpower on that and get back to me with an answer that is sensible for America. Yeah, right.

All of those issues require our thinking beyond the near horizon. The upcoming sequester business is the foolishness of trimming a budget with a meat cleaver. We have to stop focusing on the short-term stuff that tweaks our current senses and instead we must do our best to imitate reasonable adult behavior and plan for our future, as this petition and this petition call on us to do.

Get real, America. Demand grown-up behavior from your legislators. Tell them to leave their tantrums behind them and start having the conversation about the future of America and do it on an adult level. Tell them you require them to make good choices for tomorrow, because it most assuredly will come. The only question is whether we’ll be ready for it.

It’s The System, Stupid

Oct 13

There was a small article in the September 25, 2011 edition of the New York Times reporting on demonstrations that are continuing around Wall Street. The piece was in a corner of page 18 and was short and bland. The protest was happening in Manhattan and arguably was a major event in the home city to The New York Times, yet the newspaper barely mentioned it and this apparently self-inflicted self-blinding was happening throughout our national media, as mention of the demonstrations was rare. That is in stark contrast to how extensive the coverage might have been had this been a Tea Party demonstration, given our national obsession with the radical right, and this vacuum of attention is significant.

The Citizens United v. FEC case, decided last year by a radical Supreme Court, has effectively made American politics exponentially more beholden to corporate influence, since we are now informed that corporations are people and have the same rights as those of us made of flesh and blood, especially the right to contribute boxcars of money to political campaigns. Of course, only corporations have the means to fill those boxcars, so America is now one giant step closer to becoming a de facto corporatocracy instead of a democracy and that is ominous, indeed, for actual human beings.

W. Edwards Deming taught quality in manufacturing to the Japanese after WW II (after American titans of industry ignored him) and, to offer just one example of the result, the Toyota Camry has been the most popular sedan in America for decades. One of Deming’s most important lessons is that when there is a problem, we should look first not to the individuals involved, but to the system that drives individual behavior. That is precisely where we should look to remedy our political paralysis and the obsessive quest for dumb in Washington.

Our political campaigns are hideously expensive, so much so that our politicians and would-be politicians have to spend about half their time both during campaigns and while in office just raising money, which means that they are set up to be at the mercy of the donors of big bucks. No matter if every legislator inside the Beltway is an Eagle Scout or its equivalent, they cannot afford to stop searching for their mother lode of cash if they are to achieve office and stay there. That is simply how our system functions.

The most significant reason for our hideously expensive political campaigns is the cost of advertising on television, with cable companies and other major news and entertainment media outlets. They, of course, are corporations and serve their own interests. Should we do anything to curtail political spending with them, those media outlets would be financially harmed, so it’s not in their interests to change the system. Perhaps that’s why you’ve seen so little coverage of those Wall Street protests to do exactly that – change the system.

To state the obvious, corporations have more money than individual citizens. That results in the voices of the corporations being far louder than all the rest of us can shout. Some of the loudest voices come from Wall Street. That’s why those thousands of people are on the streets of so many cities all around this country, “occupying Wall Street.”

If we are to have a democracy in America we cannot have corporatocracy – the two are mutually exclusive. And if we don’t change the system, the future is both certain and very dark for Americans.

There are people who are going about finding ways to change the system and ensure our democracy and you can find an excellent review at this web site, and also at www.MoveToAmend.org.

You can also sign Dylan Ratigan’s petition to change campaign funding at:

Just understand that your choice is to live in a participatory democracy or to be a serf to the corporations. The good news is that you still get to choose. The bad news is that the clock is ticking.

Meals and Deals

Nov 05

You’re sitting at a window table of a delightful restaurant with a companion who is both interesting and interested and the conversation is engaging. Your waiter brings your food and drink at just the right times and everything is delicious and so satisfying that you don’t even notice your growing sense of contentment. Your belly is full and all is right in your world.

You glance to your right through the window and notice a man looking into the restaurant. His clothes are in poor condition, he has a plastic bag slung over his shoulder and his back is hunched as he peers through the glass. He looks hungry, but that is something that is difficult for you to understand, because you are anything but hungry. Indeed, empathy – feeling what another person feels – is very difficult when you are feeling the opposite and it’s almost impossible to imagine a homeless person’s feeling of hunger in that moment when you have just completed your meal.

So it is for the 1%-ers and their political pawns. Their lives are working quite well, they are more than content and, hard as some might try, there is not even a remote chance that they can feel what the members of a family feel as Mom and Dad lose their jobs, one because of a plant closure and the other to a layoff because business is depressed. It’s impossible for the 1%-ers and their political pawns to have even a remote understanding of the powerful feelings of the members of that family as they lose their house to foreclosure.

And when Mom and Dad join the local Occupy march, it is so easy for the 1%-ers and their political pawns to dismiss them as rabble, as lazy people and to blame them for their circumstances. According to Herman Cain, if Mom and Dad aren’t employed or rich it’s their own fault.

But here’s the thing: Mom and Dad played by the rules. They stayed in school and got an education. They got jobs and worked hard, paid their taxes, coached their kids’ soccer teams and went to their holiday pageants. They followed the American playbook, page by page, doing the right things and doing things right. And now they have lost everything and are wondering what happened to the dream they were promised.

The answer, of course, is that it was stolen from them by the big money interests who purchased their way into power and influence and who then rigged the game. They changed the playbook and didn’t tell anyone that they were gambling with the welfare of the entire world. They didn’t care about consequences because they would get their payday whether their bets paid off or lost, since all the rest of us would bail them out of their failed bets. They were confident of that bailout because they had a gun to the head of every one of us.

So much has crashed and burned and so many millions of people are suffering that it is a wonder that their cries aren’t heard. Yet what is happening instead is as predictable as the tides. Those 1%-ers and their political pawns aren’t even able to hear the cries of hunger of the millions because the rich have always just finished that metaphorical meal. Furthermore, they don’t want their world challenged or changed because it works so well for them, so they have their local muscle brutalize demonstrators, as though tear gas, nightsticks and rubber bullets might somehow make the challenge to the rich go away.

But they won’t. Swatting at symptoms never makes the root cause disappear.

The root cause is an unanswered human need for fairness. Until the game gets un-rigged and the promises kept there will be people in the streets and nearly everywhere else with the simmering anger of having played by the rules and in return gotten screwed.

There are consequences to treating people that way. 1%-ers and political pawns beware: You may not like what’s coming. Just know that you set it up to happen this way, whether you’re simply unable or, worse, callously unwilling to understand the hunger of the people.

Brilliant – And Monstrously Harmful

Apr 27

Republicans relentlessly attack Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and spending for nearly all purposes other than defense. It seems they will do and say anything, factual or otherwise, to kill these programs. Death through legislation has not worked, though, so a while back they switched their strategy starting with Ronald Reagan.

He could not have been more clear when he declared that, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem; government is the problem.“ His message was that getting rid of as much government as possible was the goal. But instead of moving to kill social programs through legislation, he and his Republican pals deviously began to spend as much money as possible.

Reagan took WW II battleships out of mothballs and did the same with other obsolete weaponry, all at fantastic cost. His run up in debt over the eight years of his presidency was staggering. In four of his eight years he set new debt records – that means record increases to the national debt – that eclipsed all former debt figures in US history. His spending was so massive that he managed to set those debt records even while increasing taxes six times.

As he spent mind-numbing sums of your money, Reagan forged ahead to deregulate the economy. Safeguards against such disasters as financial meltdown came under attack, with Reagan and his followers declaring that free market forces will always produce the best result and that government merely needed to get out of the way. All regulation, they told us, was bad.

George H.W. Bush came next and the amazing thing about him was that he put us under even higher piles of debt in two of his four years in office. In other words, in half of the twelve years of those two Republican presidents, from 1981 – 1993, the leaders who called themselves conservatives ran up the biggest debt ever seen in the United States. Actually, it was the biggest debt ever seen in the world. Clearly, there is nothing conservative about that, but there was far worse to come.

Starting in 2001, the unbridled spending mania of George W. Bush, coupled with huge, unwarranted tax reductions primarily benefitting the rich resulted in national debt increases that dwarfed all those that had preceded them. In all of US history, from 1776 to January 20, 2001, the total of all increases to the national debt was $5.6 trillion. In just eight years in office Bush ran up over $4 trillion on the government’s credit card. He did it with off budget, unfunded wars, an unfunded prescription drug plan, massive tax reductions and more. The resulting debt is so enormous that even if all debt increases were to end right now, our great- great- great-grandchildren will still be paying for Bush’s debt. That was supposed to be okay, though, because conservative Vice-President Dick Cheney told us confidently and boldly, that, “Deficits don’t matter.”

Bush left office, handing to President Obama a country mired in two wars and an economy in freefall as a result of decades of brainless adherence to Reagan’s polarized notion about free markets and deregulation. In addition, the new president inherited a congress that was intent upon stopping anything curative that he might propose, even if those same Republican legislators had promoted exactly the same things themselves. After thirty years of preparation, it was the perfect storm to eliminate all social programs and ensure long term Republican control of America.

The Republican strategy boils down to a simple mandate: Spend the country to the brink of bankruptcy so that there can be absolutely nothing we can do but to slash every government program, with the possible exception of mindless spending on defense.

How exquisitely simple and clear: Revolution through near-suicide.

This strategy is oddly compelling to Republicans and easy to enforce. Even normally sensible legislators can be brought to heel with simple, relatively cheap funding of their campaigns, along with the threat of that funding going elsewhere if they don’t comply with the near-suicide compact. That has become a self-sustaining program, with the government increasingly favoring the wealthy. Those wealthy people contribute to legislators who perpetuate the redistribution of wealth from poor and middle class people to the rich. That is to say, the wealthy fund their congressional lapdogs who create legislation to continue the reverse Robin Hood flow of money and to end anything that promotes the welfare of ordinary Americans.

All it took was the grand vision to spend America to near-suicide and leave us with no alternative but to go back to the dark days of robber barons and people suffering without medical care and dying in abject poverty.

Brilliant. And monstrously harmful.

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler