The Curmudgeon Letters

Now they’ve gone too far and I have converted! I supported “gay marriage” long before California’s Proposition 8 insanity.  But I’ve come across some information that has convinced me that we must pass a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as “a legal agreement between two or more people that also may be celebrated by a religious ceremony* or a party―where ‘people’ does not include corporations (they can still ‘merge’ in the privacy of their own board rooms)”.

Lucky is Wendy Diamond’s** dog. Wendy just spent $15,000 for chemo and radiation therapy for Lucky’s spleen cancer. Wendy chose to do that rather than donate $15,000 to the Humane Society or someone who feeds starving children, because she loves animals sooooo much. So Lucky is lucky, she’s a cancer survivor! Watch for news about nationwide Susan Gee Come-in-when-you’re-called 7-Day Walk-your-dog-athons.

Now I understand the opposition! I thought that their silliest argument was the “slippery slope” crap. But, now I can see the problem. We have to draw the line at canines! Otherwise, felines will be having weddings. And, we all know how they cat around and how that will cause the average number of divorces and separations to sky rocket as a result!

*Any church or religious organization can of course refuse service to anyone, including those without shoes or a shirt.

**Don’t ask. I don’t have any idea who Wendy Diamond is, or why her name reminds me that I haven’t heard anything about Tuesday Weld in a long time.

Can We Make Our Democracy Work?

In the last TCL I said that I was considering building on the material in that TCL to produce a book. First I want to thank all of you who took the time to read that ‘tome’ and much bigger thanks to those of you that replied or commented on it. You guys are great!

In fact those comments, in spite of many of them that encouraged me to go on, have persuaded me to drop the book project. Basically it comes down to the fact my prescriptions for fixing our Democracy, is a list of several broad and deep issues that, under any approach, will take a long, long time to make any headway on.

So, thanks anyway.

But, What About November 2012?

I have come to believe that this next presidential election just might be the most important in the last 50 years or more. And, even though the Republican party has lost its mind, alienating women, the men who have sex with women, Latinos, and union supporters, I think they have a chance to win. Even though, the majority of the American people appear to be firmly behind Obama and the Democrats, the Republicans in state houses all over the country have redistricted, and passed voter registration laws that disenfranchise mostly Democratic voters. Remember the American people did not elect George W. Bush in 2000.

Republicans Are In the Process of Overthrowing Our Government

And I am terrified! Does that make them a "Terrorist organization" and their donors "terrorism supporters" under the PATRIOT Act?

The “Tea Party” has taken control of the Republican Party. Any Republican who is not an extremist is opposed and driven out during the primaries.  

Republicans have changed the Supreme Court.  The politicization of the Court appointed George W. Bush to the presidency in 2000. They have cemented the concept of corporations as people. They just invalidated the 4^th Amendment. They ruled, 5 to 4 of course, that a man who was arrested for a crime, for which he was innocent, taken to jail, strip searched and shuffled off to another jail, strip searched again and not released for 6 days.  Not only was he innocent, at the time of his arrest, he showed the arresting officers a letter from the state asserting his innocence (which was only a misdemeanor offense not punishable by confinement had he been guilty).

We have lost the right of habeas corpus to the PATRIOT Act, and even Democrats are unwilling to rescind it, because they know that if they protect us from indeterminate incarceration, they will vilified for “ being soft on Terrorism.”

Michigan

Benton Harbor and several other cities in Michigan have been taken over by a new law allowing the Governor to invalidate any and all elections of local government and turning full autocratic, dictatorial power to a “Manager” appointed by the Governor. Detroit may the next city in Michigan to go under to this usurpation of power.

Other states have passed similar dictatorship laws and others may follow.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin has essentially begun the destruction of labor unions. I believe that a very convincing argument can be made that the amazing development of the US during the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, can largely be attributed to the maturation of the labor movement in this country. Unions raised the income of what we now call the 99%. That not only helps 99% of us, but also the top 1%. This is bubble-up economics. It has been proven to work and trickle-down has failed miserably.

What to Do?

The items I cited above are just a small but representative sample of the intentions of the Tea Party dominated Republican Party. Imagine, if you will, a Supreme Court with 8 or even 9 extreme conservatives.

We must not get overconfident. The Republicans may have chased independents and even moderate Republicans away, but we must recognize that they probably will have disenfranchised millions of voters who would have voted against them.

We must get out the vote! We must register as many new voters as we can. We must vote!

Political Science from a Curmudgeon?

I know that this is a looooong TCL, but I would appreciate it if you would read as much as you can and give me any criticism or comments you have.

I am considering building on the material in this TCL to produce a book. And, that’s why I would greatly appreciate any comments you might have on that topic.

Can We Make Our Democracy Work?

Everyone seems to agree that our political system is “broken” but I haven’t seen anything that I believe would fix it. Part of the problem is that it is a very complex and complicated system of interdependent subsystems and the solution(s) will not be simple.

Uninformed Voters
I think that the foundation for a genuinely successful democracy is a well-informed electorate. And we get an informed electorate only to the extent that we educate our populace. And I mean ‘educate’ not ‘train’, e.g. teaching physics rather than phys-ed, communication instead of English, how to think clearly rather than how to do arithmetic and problem solving rather than test-passing.

We are spending less (per student) and falling further and further down the ranking of how well-educated we are among nations. We have seen a decades long attack on teachers and our education system.

“A recent study (included in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2, edited by Susan Neuman and David Dickinson) shows that while in middle-income US neighborhoods the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in low-income neighborhoods the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children. … Over 80% of preschool and after-school programs serving children from low-income families have no age-appropriate books for their children.” – the Hunger Site

We must recognize that there are more low-income voters than upper-income voters. Politicians and advertisers don’t have to fool all of the people even some of the time. Politicians just need to fool enough people once every 2 to 6 years to tip the scales to their candidates/positions/petitions.

We also need to change our societal view of the value of teachers, education and intelligence. Sayings like “High intelligence is very close to insanity” or “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach”, are quoted by those who don’t know and never learn! Young people hide their intelligence because it makes them unpopular.

In today’s society, those who can’t or won’t read cannot be informed voters.

Respect for Government
Since Ronald Reagan, the American people have steadily bought in to the nonsense that “government is the problem!” A few weeks ago, when Rick Perry and Ron Paul were shouting that they would eliminate the Department of Energy, Rachel Maddow presented a list of things that are done by DoE. It included many important things, e.g. managing the destruction of nuclear weapons!

We must find a way to promote the understanding of the federal government and its proper roles in our country. It’s interesting that the public has also been persuaded to believe that state governments are a part of the solution (states rights, 10^th Amendment, etc.).

I think that we must include this kind of “understanding” of the federal government in our public education system. Do we still have “social studies” or “political science” classes in our schools?

A User’s Manual for Owners of a Human Brain – A Guide to Clear-thinking
I have only researched it briefly, but from what I have found, I don’t mean a text book for a course in “Critical Thinking” as taught almost exclusively today in the US. Primarily, I mean understanding language, not understanding something written in a language, but how language works in a human brain.  Creative advertising professionals and political campaign professionals are skilled users of language to obscure, persuade, confused and befuddle customers and voters. For example, consider the difference between  “sharing the pain” as an argument for increasing the tax rate on the 1 percent, rather than talking about how the “take home pay” for the 99 percent compares with the 1 percent. “Sharing the pain” makes people think that we are causing pain, while “take home pay” emphasizes the how little pain would be caused to the 1%. Mitt Romney and his wife in 2011 had a taxable income (i.e. after deductions) of $2.73 million, and are paying 13% in taxes. His “take home pay” was $18.27 million. If we increased his tax rate to 30%, he would pay $6.3 million and be left with only $14.7 million. A couple who earned (by actually working for it) $32,000 will be taxed at 15% ($4,800) and their take home pay would have been $27,200. That would be about $83/month above the 2011 Federal Poverty Level.

Clear-thinking, informed voters never cast a protest vote. Actually, if they are very confident that the best candidate will be elected anyway, they may cast a protest vote. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 because of protest voting and if George W. Bush was elected (not appointed by the Supreme Court) in 2000, he was elected because of protest voting. Those are probably the two worst US Presidents in the last 100 years, and the damage done to our country by the Supreme Court justices that those two Presidents appointed is immeasurable. As a result, we now live in a country in which the expressed (not necessarily actual) suspicion of sympathy with, or “support” of a terrorist is all that is required to imprison an American citizen forever without charges or a trial. I think that is a useful definition of a totalitarian dictatorship.

If we want a government “of, by and for the people”, then the people―each of us―must come to relish our responsibility to study, research and think clearly about the issues, carefully and thoroughly evaluate the candidates (or propositions) and vote. We should strive to reach the point that the expected turnout for an election is the literacy rate―and then we should increase the literacy rate.

Capitalism and Money In Politics
Corporate management, in the US, is required by law to do everything they can to increase profits and, even worse, to limit long-range planning to one fiscal year.

Corporate managers cannot be “job creators.” In fact, every corporate manager is supposed to be striving to develop, produce, distribute and sell their products with $0 spent on labor. They call this high “productivity”.  They are professional job-eliminators. They are also motivated to strive for near, but not zero production costs with a finite but insanely large profit margin, e.g. $0.01 for labor,  materials and distribution costs and 5,000,000% profit margin (sale price $500). Note that internet information products can approach this ideal!

It’s a fact, trickle down economics been tried more than once and has never worked! “Under Democratic presidents since 1930 who have emphasized people programs and resisted tax breaks for the richest, annual growth in GDP has averaged 5.4 percent, according to Commerce Department and Office of Management and Budget statistics.

Under Republican presidents who enacted tax cuts for the rich, paralleling the policies being put forth by the current crop of Republicans, GDP has only grown by 1.6 percent.” See End Trickle-Down Economics to Pay Off Debt

Actually, trickle-down economics is just one of several deceits that maintain the power, position and wealth of the 1% and their domination of the 99%. But 99% is a majority! If we can become a clear-thinking, well-informed electorate, we can manifest our majority.

Religion in Politics
Clear-thinking does not allow arguments based solely on religious beliefs. We must as a society come to understand that religious beliefs―e.g. every human life from its beginning to its natural end is sacred―are non-factual and must not be enshrined in law. Note that this belief includes the belief that “beginning” and “natural end” are factual, i.e. that we can define a scientifically measurable and meaningful event for those terms.

A New, Generally Accepted, System of Ethics
It appears to me that essentially all of the ethical systems accepted in existing societies and cultures (but certainly in the US), are based largely on the religious belief I used as an example above―an individual life is sacred. However, we have entered a new phase in the history of our species, humans. We can now cause extinction of our own species. I think that it is unreasonable to take any risk of causing the demise of our species. We need a new ethical basis. We must make the survival of our species that basis. In my opinion the abortion question that has caused so much divisiveness in our society is moot. The question is not whether or not a fetus is or is not a “person.” It is about whether or not our world needs another person.

When someone argues that maybe global warming may not be happening or that we can’t do anything to stop it or that we shouldn’t do anything that would cause some people to lose their jobs or corporations to go bankrupt when it could lead to our extinction, they are arguing for unethical behavior. When someone argues that we should do anything to increase the birthrate (e.g. in vitro fertilization), they are arguing for unethical behavior. When someone argues that birth control and abortion should be prohibited, they are arguing for unethical behavior. All of these behaviors increase the risk of the extinction of the human species.

This raises the issue of why ethics is taught mostly by religions. Don’t we need substantial education in ethics taught in the public schools? Most people don’t even believe that “ethics” can be free of religious beliefs. And just because, essentially all religions contain the principle contained in the “Golden Rule” does not mean that it cannot be a principle in religion-free ethics. It’s a principle that makes our lives much more peaceful and pleasant―the essence of an ethical principle.

International Travel Is Now More Dangerous for Every American

Today a citizen of Mexico was executed in Texas. As a result if you get arrested in a foreign country, you probably will not be able to contact the US Consulate in order to try to get some help and even more unlikely to be told that under International Law, they have to tell you that you can, and allow you to do so, Why not? After all, we and essentially every other country in the world has signed a treaty that says they have do that for foreign nationals they have arrested.

Texas did not so inform the man they killed today. The Justice Department and the State Department fought all the way to the US Supreme Court to get them to reverse their decision to execute the Mexican today. It would not have meant that the man would have been set free. He could have been informed of his rights, allowed to contact the Mexican Consulate (who could not do more than provide better legal representation) and then retried him, convict him and kill him. Apparently those familiar with the case agree that there is practically no chance that he would not be convicted again.

This afternoon, the conservative majority, 5 to 4, of the US Supreme Court ruled that Texas (without seceding from the US) could cause us to violate an international treaty that we signed and was ratified in accordance with the US Constitution. Just another example of how conservatives are undermining the Constitution that they profess to love so much.

If you think it won’t cause you any problems because you won’t get arrested in foreign country, then you better stay home. Because you don’t have to actually commit a crime in order to get arrested (in this country as well or any other).

Rick Perry, the current Governor of Texas, could have stayed the execution and ordered the retrial, but of course he didn’t. And every American citizen, Texan or not, conservative or not, is a little less safe in the world now.

Meanwhile, we are waiting to see if the Republicans in Congress are going crush the middle class and drive us into a worse recession than 1929 in order to sabotage the reelection of Obama and destroy the idea that we are a country that cares about its less fortunate citizens. In spite of what they say, they love the idea of redistributing the wealth of this country! They just want to do it by shifting all wealth to the upper class. And what will that lead us to? History says violent revolution. I can only hope that it’s not in my lifetime.