Category: Politix

NOTE: I wrote this before the election. Obviously, things didn’t turn out the way I expected, but I think it shows that I am a man of courage and integrity that I’m leaving it here, whenI could have easily edited it to show that I knew what was going to happen.

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Now that it’s perfectly clear that Donald Trump is not going to be President of the United States, it’s time to reflect on what the next four years might be like.

Of course many of us are looking forward to the historic election of our First Woman President. I know I am, although I will miss the inspirational oratory of Barack Obama. But the Republicans in Congress are not going to back off their 8-year policy of total obstruction, which means Hillary Clinton won’t be able to get much done, even if Democrats take over both houses. The other side of that coin is that Republicans won’t either, as President Clinton will veto anything they try that’s truly damaging. In addition, the Republicans may lose their majorities in the House and Senate, or see them reduced reduced substantially, which will make the GOP even less effective in their crusade to:

• lower taxes on the super rich…
• …while allowing them to anonymously contribute any amount of money directly to their favorite political campaigns
• get rid of all trade barriers
• privatize Social Security
• make abortion illegal and
• prevent minorities from voting.

So expect another four or eight years of gridlock during a Clinton presidency, with a public more and more frustrated and angry about it.

But, you say, the worst fallout from the upcoming defeat of Donald Trump will come from the 25 million or so alienated and resentful die hard Trump supporters. They have shown over the past year that they don’t give a fuck about tradition, compromise or moderation. Trump is telling them now that the election will be “rigged,” meaning when Hillary Clinton wins on November 8th, she will have done so through chicanery, and will not be the legitimate president. These are people who are OK with Trump wanting to ban immigrants based on their religion; who believe it’s a good idea (or even feasible) to build a 2,000-mile wall across the southern border, and who beat up dissenters at Trump rallies. They have shown themselves to be animated by anger and they are potentially violent.

There’s been talk of Trump supporters going berserk if (and when) they lose the presidential election. Riots, insurrection, that sort of thing. And it’s probably true that many of those armed yahoos will be mad as hornets. It could be a real mess if they take to the streets.

But in the end, I believe they will just go home, turn on Fox News or the new Trump Network, and sulk. Once their leader — and their shot at taking the White House — is gone I don’t think they’ll be organized enough to accomplish anything really big. A lone wolf or two might attempt a “2nd Amendment remedy,” or burn something down, or occupy a federal building somewhere for a while, but as a movement, the wind will be out of their sails, and the Republic will stand.

On the other hand there are all those Republican leaders in Congress who have disavowed Trump. These traitors must be punished, and they surely will be, with ultra right-wing primary opponents in 2018. I have no sympathy for these establishment Republicans who are faced with the horrible choice of supporting Donald Trump or losing all of his fanatic supporters. They have used the crackpot wing of the party for decades to maintain power, and now the rabble has gotten sick of the false promises and has taken over the party. They may be ignorant, but they represent millions of votes. Establishment Republicans won’t ever again get those votes and will have to rely on support from moderates, including conservative Democrats. Conversely, Tea Party types will never get a vote from the moderates, and there you go: The GOP will be split in two. They will be the center right and the extreme right. Between the two of them they’ll probably keep control of the House and most state governments, but they won’t agree on much of anything, and unless they find a way to coalesce they won’t have a chance at the presidency.

I’m afraid that Donald Trump has poisoned the well that we all must drink from. His thoughtless, obnoxious rhetoric is “normalized” now, and President Clinton, who has been victimized for 30 years by false allegations, whisper campaigns, innuendo and phony investigations will face more of the same for four or eight more years. And Congress — spurred on by the angry, ignorant, resentful leftovers of the Trump campaign — will dutifully obstruct everything, cause debt ceiling and funding crises, vote repeatedly to “repeal” Obamacare, and generally make a nuisance of itself.

Buckle up, everybody.

It’s hard to imagine there’s anyone in the United States who does not know that Congress has been screwing around with the nation’s finances.

Over and over for the past couple of years, legislation has been proposed, talked about in the press, debated in the Capitol, and then dropped, usually without a vote. The extreme right wing of the Republican party doesn’t want to do anything that looks like a tax increase. As a lifelong taxpayer myself, I applaud the sentiment, but I also live in the real world, and I know that when you are trying to run an operation the size of the United States, you have to fund it.

The right wingers in the House are the ones blamed for (or credited with) repeatedly blocking votes on compromise legislation. Many of them are beginners, having just been elected in 2010. They don’t know that you can’t have things 100% your way on every issue, so they “just say no” to any bill that doesn’t meet all of their ideological criteria. But they don’t vote “no.” They simply let the House leaders know that they will vote “no.” The leadership doesn’t want to risk defeat and public embarrassment, so the bill doesn’t come up for a vote, the pending compromise is scotched and everyone goes back to the drawing table, the problem still unsolved.

This process protects the naysayers, because they remain in the back of the room and never have to go on the record. They get to block whatever bill they don’t like while avoiding responsibility for doing so. They are a shadow Congress, setting the agenda and dictating to the real Congress which laws can pass and which ones can’t.

But who are they?

I’d like to know their names, their districts, their party affiliation, and when they are up for reelection. Most of all I’d like them to explain their reasons. If they don’t want to vote on certain legislation, I’d like to know why. I’d like them to stand up and explain how they think we can cut our way to prosperity, or why so-called investment returns should be taxed at less than half the rate most of us pay, or why people earning eight or nine thousand dollars a week should not step up and contribute a little more when our country is in trouble and millions of citizens are out of work, out of money, and nearly out of time.

28 people dead in Newtown today, including 20 little kids, shot in their classroom.

It’s such an outrage that there will certainly be calls to restrict gun ownership or ban them altogether. I’d happily go along with that, but thanks to the gun lobby we can’t even speak the word “ban.” We can’t even have a conversation about gun control. The debate is so warped in our country that — and I can guarantee this — there will be those who say that teachers should be armed, and that would prevent these types of murderous rampages. See the logic? More guns=less shooting. Me neither.

Few civilized societies in the world today tolerate the kind of firearm profusion that we do in the United States. As of 2009 there were 310 million non-military guns in the U.S., one for every man, woman and child, including newborns. That year there were 17,000 homicides in the U.S., 12,000 of them by firearm. In fact, with that many guns floating around, you could say that there is no solution to the problem of folks going crazy and shooting up their schools, their workplaces, theaters, malls and neighborhoods.

Maybe you’d be right.

I won’t try to fight the NRA, the gun manufacturers or the cranks who think they need guns to protect themselves against being herded by the federal government into concentration camps in the Mojave desert. Their twisted logic has so permeated the culture that there’s no percentage in debating it. But I’m ready for our government — city, state and federal — to take some action.

I propose a ban on assault weapons and big ammunition clips. Much heavier penalties for possession or modification of fully automatic rifles. Deep background checks (paid for by the prospective purchaser) on anyone who wants to buy a gun of any kind, and a good long waiting period. Licensing of gun owners. Serious penalties on gun owners whose negligence allows their weapons to fall into the hands of unauthorized or unlicensed others. And a high enough tax on gun purchases to create a fund to help rebuild the lives of the inevitable victims and their families, as we have done with cigarette taxes.

There are so many guns already out there, legal and unregistered, that anything we do to curb their proliferation will not begin to be effective for generations. But in 85 years it will be the turn of the century again, whether or not we start now trying to fix this problem. Most of us won’t be around by then. I wonder if those who are will thank us for our foresight, or curse us for our stupidity.

So we have given the President a second term in office.

Serious political observers have known for some time that the election would turn out this way. For the past two weeks supporters of Mitt Romney have been talking optimistically about his chances. Dick Morris and Karl Rove, for example, were “predicting” a sizable Republican victory. But it felt hollow, as if they were only trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. By yesterday reality had set in and the happy talk (and the trash talk) had died.

I’m relieved that Obama won reelection, but I’m not elated. Generally, I believe the Democrats are on the side of regular folks like me, while the Republicans are on the side of transnational corporations, arms dealers and big-money donors. There are exceptions, of course, but in the big picture the two parties do break down like that.

In 2008 I thought that President-elect Obama might find a way to change the way things are done in this country. I thought he had enough support from a war-weary, skeptical nation battered by a brutal economic downturn. I thought he might parlay that support into a transformational administration. But he did not. He began dealing with our economic problems by appointing as his financial team the very same people who caused the meltdown. He addressed universal health care by handing 50 million new customers to insurance companies, who have long been the problem. WTF? He has become the only Nobel Peace Prize winner with a kill list.

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have liked a Romney/Tea Party presidency, but I am only cautiously optimistic about a second term for Barack Obama. Now that Mitch McConnell can’t make good on his threat to make him a one-term president, maybe they’ll find a way to compromise and get some work done, and move the country forward, not just economically and militarily, but morally.

Fingers crossed.

I was not happy about the Affordable Care Act when it was finally passed in 2010, after nearly two years of wrangling in Congress.

I thought President Obama had sold out, that he should have at least urged a discussion of single-payer or a public option. In the end I felt like the insurance companies had won a great victory, and I still think that. Since then I’ve tried to soothe my outrage by looking at the good points of the finished legislation: Insurance companies can’t refuse coverage because of preexisting conditions or drop you when you get sick; the “lifetime limit” on coverage is banned; kids can stay on the family health plan until age 26; seniors get help paying for their prescriptions. I told myself that, after a hundred years of inaction it was a start, and it could be improved over time.

I should have known better.

I still don’t know why there was a popular outcry against the bill. I assume it was uninformed cranks or people who just hated Obama. Why would you not want affordable health care for everybody? But then the state attorneys general got into the act, and now the Supreme Court is deliberating. Once the court challenges began I knew it would end up with the Supremes, and I was sure they would uphold it. I still think they will, but I’m no longer certain, and neither are most court watchers.

Here are two reasons why I think the law will be substantially upheld:

• There are four right-wing extremists on the court, plus Justice Kennedy, who is pretty conservative. Their questioning during the arguments this week indicates that they are viewing this case through the most partisan of lenses. They seem to have made up their minds, and are looking for a way to strike down the law. But… like most extreme right wing politicians, they are controlled by rich people and corporate interests. They know their job: Make life better for Exxon, Halliburton and United Heath Care. Right now, this bill feeds 40 million new customers to the U.S. insurance industry. Strike down this bill and the industry would have to spend untold millions of dollars over several decades to gain that much new business, and it’s possible that they never would. I don’t think the corporatists on the court will let that happen.
• The right wingers on the court are worried about the requirement in the bill that everyone must purchase insurance. They think it’s too much government intrusion. Fair enough, but if they invalidate the health care bill and put the nation right back where it was — near the bottom among developed nations in medical outcomes and near the top in medical spending — there will still be a health care crisis and a desperate need for reform. And version 2.0 of that reform will very likely be a single-payer system administered by the government and paid for with taxes. This would be unarguably constitutional, but a nightmare scenario for the right. I believe that someone will mention this to the conservatives on the court in the next few weeks, and that it will make them stop short of striking down the bill.

That’s what I think, anyway. But lately the right wing has become sort of unhinged. They do things based on a perceived ideological mandate rather than practical considerations of moving the nation forward. We can’t always predict what they will do. So they might shoot this down.

In the chaos that will ensue, I hope none of them sprains a wrist high-fiving each other, because there will be a long wait to get treatment at the emergency room.

The Postal Service is one of the finest institutions we have.

Personally, I think forty-four cents to mail a letter to anyplace in the country is the bargain of the century. And they will take that letter to any address, no matter how far out in the sticks it happens to be.

But have you noticed lately all the talk about how the Post Office is a basket case, inefficient, poorly managed, and unable to pay its bills? According to this drumbeat they have to shut down a bunch of offices and lay off tens of thousands of workers, and even then they will have to reduce services to make ends meet. They just can’t compete with the leaner, smarter, market-driven private delivery services.

But did you know that beginning five years ago during the Bush Administration, a law was passed requiring the Postal Service to fully fund its pension plan 75 years into the future, and that they are required to accomplish this feat within the next five years? In other words they have to be 100% ready to pay a pension to workers who have not yet been born. And this at the same time that UPS and Federal Express are lobbying strongly to be allowed to use their pension funds today as operating money, claiming that it will enable them to be more profitable, thus “saving” their pension funds.

Meanwhile, the “bankrupt” U.S. Postal Service is sitting on 47 billion dollars, much of which won’t be needed for decades, and instead of being allowed to use it, they are told to sell off property and fire workers.

Put those facts together with the fact the the Postal Service is the second largest employer in the country, with by far the largest unionized work force, and I don’t know about you, but I smell something fishy. The drive to crush the labor movement and decimate the middle class would certainly count it as a major victory to see the Post Office dismantled, its workers laid off, its union shut down, its buildings and equipment sold off and private, anti-union, companies taking over the delivery of mail in the U.S. The nonsensical requirement that it overfund its pension and medical benefits plans so far into the future makes it little more than a large beautiful animal with broken legs, unable to defend itself as the hyenas of greed eat it, bite by bite.

Make no mistake — if we lose the Postal Service, we lose a precious American institution. The centuries have shown that the delivery of mail is a proper function of government. Privatization would put us at the mercy of delivery services which would no longer have to compete. Prices would rise, and with no mandate to deliver the mail, services would surely be reduced — except for those who could pay for them.

One step toward saving our Post Office (and the union, and all those jobs and all that tradition, and all those services) is House Bill 1351, which reverses the 2006 law mandating the benefits plan overfunding. You can read the bill here (PDF) and see some TV coverage of the subject here. If you care, consider contacting your member of Congress and asking them to support this bill.

Jones’ Law Number 2: The superrich get their wealth in one of two ways. They steal it, or they inherit it from someone who stole it.

You can argue with the semantics, and you might even be able to point out an exception or two, but basically if you want to acquire great wealth in this world, you have to take it from someone who is weaker or stupider than you. This is what all the great wars and conquests of history have been about: the spoils.

So now in the 21st century, as the governments of the world morph into giant international corporation-states, we shouldn’t be too surprised to see that the pillaging continues. In the United States and around the world, elites live in regal opulence isolated in fortress-like security, many of them so rich they can’t remember how many homes they own. Bankers and hedge fund managers earn sums that are literally unimaginable. Corporate CEOs pay themselves hundreds of times what their average worker makes, often while the company tanks and jobs are moved overseas. Politicians have been “supported” by corporations for so long now that they have forgotten that they are being bribed, and they look the other way as corporate lawyers and lobbyists write bills legalizing the ongoing money grab. When this corruption occasionally brings down the house, as it did in 2007-08, the corporate-owned government uses taxpayer money to make whole the criminals who caused the crash, and when the bailout money runs out, severe austerity is imposed on the people, as in Britain, Greece, Argentina, and soon the United States. Meanwhile the superrich culprits skate.

Nor, it seems to me, should we be very surprised when people take to the streets in mindless rampage, trashing everything in their path and grabbing for themselves anything of value they can get away with. After all, isn’t this the example they have been seeing at the highest levels of society? When shady-but-legal Wall Street shenanigans have ruined the economy, taken the incomes and homes of tens of millions and wiped out retirement savings and college funds, what’s a few big-screen televisions or a whole boxcar full of tennis shoes? When the bankers have escaped to their mansions with all your money, why not torch the bank?

I am getting nervous about what seems to be developing in this country. Billionaires have usurped the government, leaving no force in its place to temper their greed. The economic and social distance between those at the very top and the rest of us has grown so great that there is no more communication. The story we tell ourselves of justice and equality for all is now mere myth. Some tea partiers have already shown up at Presidential events carrying guns. The violence in the human heart has been amply on display in past decades: the Watts Riots in 1965; in Detroit in 1967; back in Los Angeles in 1992; London just last week. Worldwide there have been literally hundreds of civil disturbances since the middle of the 20 century, with an increasing number of them in the United States.

Our government has not been effective in mitigating the current recession. Saying it’s over and things are getting better does nothing to calm the fear and anger of the common people, especially when unemployment and foreclosures are still at record levels while the upper echelons of society are clearly doing better than ever and seem completely unwilling to share in the burden of rebuilding the economy.

If your job is gone or you fear it might be; if your home has been taken away or you fear it might be; if your grown children are back living in your home because they are broke and unemployed after spending a hundred thousand dollars on a college degree; if you have sent out 500 job applications and got nothing back; if you are sick and can’t get medicine; if you are living in a shelter or a car; if your children are hungry; if your elected representatives bicker like children instead of working toward solutions — how much spark would it take to send you in a rage out into the street to take back what you thought was yours and to wreak vengeance on those who took it from you?

There are sparks every day in every city. At some point will the humiliated working class join the angry, armed tea partiers and the dispossessed Left and start to lash out blindly? I hope not. The people can’t win such a war, and neither can the elites.

As in all wars, there will only be losers.

Might as well add my two cents to this issue:

What’s going on in Wisconsin right now — the Republican governor and Republican majority in the state legislature attempting to cripple public employee unions — is not a political matter. It’s an economic matter. It’s another battle in the war on workers and the middle class that began in the eighties. It’s rich people and and rich corporations trying to get rid of labor unions and kill off the pesky middle class once and for all.

In the 2006 election the people of Wisconsin, like most voters nationwide, decided that the Democrats had had long enough to bring the economy back to life (two years), so they voted for Republicans instead. A lot of Democrats must have voted for Republicans, because Republican candidates can’t win with only Republicans voting for them. Whenever the voters do this, they live to regret it, although they rarely understand exactly how they got fucked.

Because the real constituents of the GOP — those rich people and rich corporations — don’t see anything wrong with the economy. They’re doing just fine, thank you, so what is there to “bring back to life?”

Understand, when I say “rich people” and “rich corporations,” I’m talking about unimaginable wealth. Unspendable amounts of money. Since Ronald Reagan got the ball rolling by destroying the air traffic controllers union in 1981, the working class in this country has seen their income stagnate or decline, while the upper class has taken most of that income and wealth for themselves. The top one hundredth of one percent of Americans now makes an average of $27 million per household, while the average income for the bottom 90% of us is a little over $31,000. Meanwhile, tax rates are currently at a 50-year low, and as billionaire Warren Buffet famously says, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary.

Yet these super rich don’t have enough. They have taken most of our jobs and sent them to countries where people are happy to work for a tiny fraction of what it costs to live in America, and now they say that American workers must “learn to compete in a global economy.” What they mean is we must learn to live on seven dollars an hour. In the future, even that seven bucks will be deemed too extravagant.

During most of the 20th century, the most prosperous century for the the most prosperous nation the world has ever known, labor unions have been the only protection the worker has had against powerful corporations, and so they are the natural enemy of the rich. The war has been going on for some time, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to strip public employee unions of the right to collective bargaining is only the latest battle.

But it’s not really Democrats against Republicans. It’s the upper class trying to see if the time might be right — after two generations of misinformation — to turn workers against themselves. Recent polling seems to indicate that a majority in Wisconsin is not OK with this union-busting plan, regardless of how they may have voted in the last election.

The Republican majority in the state government may listen to this majority, or they may not. They are, after all, contolled by powerful corporate interests. Either way, judging from the massive protests going on in Wisconsin, it seems that the time has not yet arrived when American workers are ready to submit to this type of outrage.

But the American worker is in disarray, confused, divided against himself. We have been fed a stream of lies for such a long time that it has become difficult for us to see the truth. Most of us don’t want or need to earn a hundred million dollars a year. We want fair pay for honest work, decent working conditions, the ability to raise our families, go to the doctor when we need to, take a vacation every now and then, and live out our last years in dignity. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask in this land of plenty.

Of course the upper class will fight us even in this modest ambition, because they and their corporations are programmed always to find ways to accumulate more and more money. They don’t “hate” the working class. But if the working class is comfortable, that means there is money on the table, and rich people will go after it.

They are well organized, smart, relentless and ruthless. I wonder if we are up to it.