I know how Republicans love Ronald Reagan but sometimes I wonder why. I’m sitting here watching a speech he made back in the day; one in which he continually talks about raising taxes on the rich, and makes the point over and over that it is criminal that a bus driver or a teacher would pay a higher percentage of their wages than a millionaire. Sounds downright socialistic to me.
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The Republicans tell us that the government can’t create jobs; this despite the 1.3 million jobs saved or created by the financial package that saved the auto industry. Okay, let’s just overlook that, the way the Republicans do. But let’s not overlook our defense establishment and the jobs it creates. What you say, what has defense to do with government? Well, last time I looked the military was part of government, actually the biggest part financially, and since the Republicans want to cut the government that means that they should want to cut the defense budget, but somehow they never seem to get that. But does it mean that the Republicans think the government is so good at creating jobs that we can’t reduce the defense budget for fear that some of those defense jobs government has created will be cut?
Sure, it’s a specious argument but once in a while it’s fun to give the Republican’s a problem to solve and watch then chase their tails.
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The Right has moaned and whined about TARP and how it was a useless waste of money and not an acceptable way for government to spend taxpayer funds but the reality seems to be that those funds are in fact being paid back and may in the not too distant future show a profit. Who’d a thunk it?
Under its many programs TARP shelled out around $245 billion between 2008 & 2009. Accordingly to reliable sources; as of right now, all but 16% of that money has been paid back. Some of the money, like funds allocated to GM, and others aimed at helping banks modify mortgages were never intended to be paid back, so where we really are, is pretty close to scratch. Most of the money has come from banks and some even from AIG so it turns out that the bailouts the Right loves to hate were actually good for the economy.
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Experts tell us that there are currently about 7,000 languages spoken in the world. In addition they tell us that one language dies about every 14 days. What does one say, besides good riddance. There are a lot of people who would disagree with that statement. Right now the Chukchansi Indian tribe of California is donating $1 million of their casino earnings to Cal State Fresno to save their language from extinction. Why? Well, they think that if the language goes, they will lose their identity. It was thinking like this that made them attack the carbine armed white settlers with bows and arrows. Maybe, just maybe, the casino money could be better spent on some of the Native American reservations, fighting all the evils that make them models for fourth world countries. It seems there would be a lot better ways to spend that money than by trying to keep alive a language no one actually speaks.
In a world that is divided on multiple levels, language is one of the most divisive elements extant. One of the best things we could do for the world would be to decide on one language and get rid of all the others. Besides helping to eliminate fractionalism, it would demand of all humans who wished to communicate, a minimal experience with education, always a good thing. Not a good thing is the rationale of the leaders of the Chukchansi that their language is their identity. That’s pretty pathetic thinking guys. If the only thing you can cling to, as an identity, is an all but dead language it’s pretty much time to cash it in and give the casino back to the mob.
Outside of physical characteristics, which are the first things that are observable, language, because it inhibits communication from one group to another is very high on the divisive scale. Maybe we should all forget about learning old languages and try to all learn one; thereby enabling us to communicate with both our friends and our enemies.
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Watch TV, read a newspaper, listen to a pundit’ all the energy of this presidential campaign is being focused on eleven states; the swing states where there is no definitive political numerical advantage. What a curse. What a disaster for democracy.
Why do I say that? Because in concentrating on just eleven states, and not even the most populous states, the campaigners have abandoned the other 39 and all their voters. How did this happen? How has this attack on democracy been allowed to continue? What is the root cause?
The answer is very simple, it’s the curse of the Electoral College. The constitutionally created short cut to functionality that has become more outmoded than the gun interpretations of the Second Amendment.
Look, lets be clear. The Electoral College was created so that election results could be calculated in some kind of a timely manner in a world where it could take weeks for the vote count in a rural town to reach Washington. The College was merely a short cut to getting the numbers in a timely fashion. We no longer have that problem. Now, instead of taking weeks to get an election result our computers are predicting the final count as soon as the first few votes are cast. So what’s the problem?
The problem is simple. In slipping the Electoral College neatly between the voters and the result, we have negated the votes of every citizen who lives in an electoral district with a distinct majority from the other party. It is no longer one man-one vote but one district-one vote. The result of this is that in states with sweeping majorities like New York or Georgia the votes of the dissenting voters are trashed. Those votes don’t count, because they have been replaced by an elector, who represents only the majority vote. If a district on the upper West Side of Manhattan votes 80% democratic and 20% republican, it creates one Democratic electoral vote in the College. One vote not 4/5ths of a vote so the 20% of Republican voters votes, are not counted in the final result. That’s just not fair, nor is it in line with our way of life.
It’s time this ridiculous situation was ended. We have to dissolve the Electoral College and actually bring this country to a one man, one vote platform
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Taxes- Bank subsidies; JP Morgan Chase gets about $14 billion a year due to lower interest rates on all money they borrow. Last year their subsidy came to 77% of what they made which means that the loss they took on their gamble as well as their management bonuses were paid for by US taxpayers. How do you like them egg rolls? The entire banking industry got about $76 billion which is more than we spend on education or a lot of other essential services every year.
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In another example of Christian Charity, Trinity Church and its Episcopal clergy have taken it upon themselves to push the prosecution of the OWS demonstrators who occupied an unused piece of land that the church owns in lower Manhattan. This is another bunch of hypocrites who preach one set of values from the pulpit on Sunday to keep those donations coming, and, just to prove they can be as cynical as the Catholic, Jews and Muslims, live another set the rest of the week.
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I’ve had a lot to say about politicians, especially Republicans, lying to the American people and this Sunday I saw the perfect example. Rick Perry was being interviewed on face the Nation and in the first thirty seconds of his interview he made 4 flat out lies. Now we all know Perry isn’t the brightest bulb in the room but doesn’t he have someone on his staff who can tell him that when he makes a prepared statement on TV, it should contain some grain of truth? We all know that Hitler invented the big lie. It seems that the current Republican Party is striving to perfect it.
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We must always protect whistle blowers for they are the ultimate source of transparency in government. Julian Assange & Bradley Manning are heroes, not traitors for they have sought to show the American people and the Citizens of the world, how the Pentagon and its government associates try to hide what they are doing in the name of corporate power. I understand perfectly why the Pentagon wants to crush Assange and Manning but if we ever want to have any assurance that our government is acting according to the principals that we espouse, we must make sure that people like them are not quieted. They do what they do because the media has abandoned its franchise to its corporate sponsorship, and is no longer the medium that guarantees transparent government. The Woodward’s and Bernstein’s are gone. All we have left are the Manning’s and the Assange’s.
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Everyone, sooner or later will, in the course of their lives, need health care. It is not an isolated need like owning a boat or flying a plane. Therefore since we will all need it, it is in the general interest for all of us to have it, and it is also in the general interest that by all sharing the cost, no individual or group will have to pay for anyone else.
The Right has long had, as one of its basic arguments against poverty programs, an opinion that we should not have to pay for freeloaders who scam the system by being too lazy to work. What I am talking about above, works the same way. Those who don’t want to buy health care despite being able to afford it are worse then the people who scam poverty programs because they are not basically poor, they are well off and still don’t want to pay their fair share.
Of course the other way to treat the mandate, is not to force people who don’t want healthcare to buy it but to ban them from joining later when they are older and then to charge them whatever hospital costs occur when they need the care. After a few well off dead-beat accident cases find themselves losing their homes to hospitals for emergency and operating room costs, maybe the rest of them will get on the wagon.
Of course there is another way. That is to cut out the inflated profits of individual insurance companies by having a single payer system. If the Right could get over their hatred of big government and understand that sometimes being big is government’s job, we might get to a functioning health care system.