Damn, I'm Pissed!

How ridiculous is the person who, after I post reviews at Amazon, immediately swings by to vote "not helpful?" I thought it was particularly hilarious this last time as the book won't even be released until next month, and given that it's among the launch books for a new fiction imprint for a publisher previously best known for the Chicken Soup books, it's not as though readers the world over have been holding their collective breath for reviews to surface.

Speaking of ridiculous, that's the term I'd apply to yesterday's Glenn Beck march. Beck chose the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech to ask that his Tea Party followers "turn back to God," and focus on what we've accomplished in this country as opposed to our failures. Ironic much?

I was in a foul mood for most of yesterday, but it wasn't until dinner that I realized my mood was based on this march. Watching video clips of person upon person upon person decry how the U.S. has become socialist and that we need to "take back" this country, I wanted to shout at all of them, "You are nothing but a puppet on a string!"

How did we get to a place where so many people believe "We're socialist because Obama wants to spread the wealth"...ah, I think I understand now.

We can start with Rupert Murdock, who has used his Fox News Network (and I use the term very loosely), to promulgate his far-right agenda. I'm not name-calling here; I'm not particularly happy with anyone at end of the political spectrum. But even if you are not among those who believe the "news" they see on Fox is "fair and balanced," you may not know about the brothers Koch. Their combined wealth is surpassed only by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the U.S., and they have quietly bankrolled the "grass-roots" effort of the Tea Party by spending $100,000,000 so far to convince people that our president wants to destroy our way of life. Their efforts are not benign, and they most assuredly are not out to help the "little guy," whose strings they are silently pulling. In other words, moneyed interests, once again, have somehow managed to set themselves up as the champion of the working class when their true agenda is more basic: It's my money, and I will do anything to keep it. I don't want you to have any of it, but I'll do whatever must be done to convince you that I'm out to protect your interests.

The Koch brothers are particularly dangerous in that they combine greed with down-right scary beliefs, such as the abolition of public schools, the FBI and CIA, federal regulatory agencies - such as the EPA - and Social Security. Why? Because funding any of this causes them to pay taxes...or limits their business profits. For instance, they are working to prevent the EPA from classifying one of their products - formaldehyde - as a "known carcinogen."

The view that government is the root of all evil and business is the natural protectorate of the people has gained a great deal of traction since George Bush became president. It's as though the world turned upside down and we forgot what led us into the financial crisis we see today.

The Koch brothers don't like paying taxes, they don't like government impinging on their bottom line, and they think government regulations and safety nets are for pussies. Who needs unemployment protection? If you give somebody unemployment protection, he'll stop looking for work. Public health? I pay my own way...why the hell shouldn't you, even if you earn a subsistence wage? Global warming? Believe us when we yell Poppycock...even though we're in the fossil-fuel business! And so on and so on.

People with such one-sided belief systems used to be known as the "fringe." Not so anymore, if you consider the popularity of Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, that nut-job Sharron Angle, not to mention the perpetually orange John Boehner, who once handed out money on the floor of the House from tobacco lobbyists. No spending because it'll increase the deficit...but by golly, let's cut taxes. No more money for the unemployed, even though the "official" unemployment rate stands at 10% and doesn't include those who have been unemployed so long they've given up looking for work, the bums! Hold BP accountable for the mess in the Gulf of Mexico? So sorry, I apologize for so much as thinking of it.

Were the Koch's to have their way, those such as the man directly implicated in the recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning, long considered a habitual violator and forced to pay fines in the millions of dollars over the years, would go blithely unchecked.

I can't wait to see what they'll come up with next...abolishing child labor laws, perhaps?

NYT columnist Frank Rich writes that the brothers Koch "must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests." He doesn't let Murdoch get away unscathed, though. While his network lambastes the "Ground Zero Mosque" and points fingers at a Saudi Prince said to be contributing to it, that same prince is "not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News' parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corp.) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox." As I like to say:

Just
follow
the
money.

Before I sign off, just one more depressing item in the news. The Republicans, who smell victory in November, are preparing to launch a series of investigations against the White House similar to those which occupied most of the Clinton presidency. An aide to one of the congressman overseeing the groundwork has already mentioned impeachment. In a nation where 41% of Republicans believe Obama was "probably or definitely born outside the country" and roughly one-third think that Obama is a Muslim (so what if he is, and I ask this as a Jew?), anything's possible.

Damn, I'm Pissed!

A Rant of Major Proportions

My husband graduated UT with an honor's degree in government. My undergraduate degree is a B.S. in political science. He has a law degree from SMU, which is where I earned my master's degree in public administration. Needless to say, we are both too knowledgeable for our own good when it comes to the world of politics and government, and when the Tea Party started becoming popular, it prompted a series of "what if?" conversations at our dinner table. They always become undone, however, by my need to erase history versus his insistence that we begin in the here and now and move forward. Let me explain.

My argument derives from the fact that for many a Tea Partier, our government should never have grown or changed since it began. Okay...I actually "give" them the first ten amendments to our Constitution, then stop. He doesn't. He doesn't believe we need to remove the Civil War or woman's suffrage and instead can defeat them simply if we start from 2010 and move forward, mostly because none of us are used to paying the true price for anything, be it milk or gasoline, and that if the federal government wasn't providing those subsidies, we'd experience such a lowering to our standard of living that either we'd be begging for increased federal input or the Tea Partiers would next set their sights on their individual state governments, which would have had to have increased taxes to make up the losses.

If the argument is that the federal government exists solely to provide for the public defense, they get a "gimme" in the national highway system; the impetus President Eisenhower gave for their creation of our interstates is the movement of troops. Of course, given the post WW-II migration from urban areas to the suburbs, that wasn't his only reason, but I'm feeling generous this afternoon.

That's because I have the New Deal on my side. I know it's become fashionable on the far right to decry FDR's New Deal as a bad thing, and, yes, I realize that it was a combination of the New Deal and WWII that lifted us out of the Great Depression, but even forgetting such New Deal creations as the FDIC, which today we hold as sacrosanct and which equally obviously does not contribute to our nation's defense, what about WWII itself? In my view, we would have entered into a war with Japan after Pearl Harbor, but would not have joined the Allies in Europe. And had we not stormed Normandy and taken part in battles across Europe, the Germans probably would have won, and as a Jew, I might not actually be alive today to blog about this.

I could go on and on...our dinner table discussions do, after all, but my point, and there is one, is that recent statements by Rand Paul, along with the Texas Board of Education's attempts to rewrite history through textbook changes, allow me to focus my ire. On the one hand, Rand Paul states that he likes the Civil Rights Act. And yet he then makes a statement that the federal government has overreached. How does somebody argue both and disconnect them as he attempts to do? Without federal involvement the South would not have been forced to desegregate as those at the forefront of maintaining the status quo - of segregated drinking fountains, lunch counters, and Jim Crow laws in general - were elected state and local officials. Of course, if there were no 14th Amendment to the Constitution, there would be no equal protection clause, and no reason to undo a century of "separate but equal." So is it the 14th Amendment or the CRA that featured federal overreaching?

And how about those textbook changes...wasn't it bad enough that the Virginia Governor "forgot" to include a mention of slavery in his Civil War proclamation? Should our textbooks be changed so that the Slave Trade becomes the "Atlantic Triangular Trade?" Should students study Jefferson Davis's inaugural as President of the Confederate States of America because they already study Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural? The board member who fought that argument won, and if the changes go through, you can look for Davis highlights in the future.

Did Phyllis Schlafly impact the U.S. as much or more so than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whom the same board member wanted excised from textbooks altogether? That last one gets my dander up because I once actually heard Schlafly speak in person and my impression was that she only became as famous as she did because of the old "dancing dog" syndrome. In other words, because she was a woman with beliefs vastly different than other famous women, she was trotted out to dance. One could easily argue - and easily win, I think - that without Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Singer, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinham, and Bella Abzug, there would have been no Phyllis Schlafly, that without radical women forcing progress, women like Schlafly would never have been allowed to vote, let alone earned the chance to attend law school and become a darling of the right. Of course, if we took it back to the beginning, there would have been no 19th Amendment, and Barbara Cargill would likely not be sitting on the Texas Board of Education at all.

IIRC, no historians make up the elected Texas Board of Education, which meets today for a final vote on the proposed changes. Will this be yet another embarrassment for those of us who are thinking citizens of the state of Texas? And will Rand Paul's GOP nomination implode because logic demands it?

A Rant of Major Proportions

Stand Up...Or Stand Down (Transferred from short-lived DCP blog)

The rallying cry for the Coffee Party is "Wake Up and Stand Up. Yet there is so much negative hateful rhetoric floating around these days that otherwise intelligent people are afraid. Afraid that by standing up, we will incite the fringe folk into doing dangerous things. So afraid, in fact, that they believe we must instead stand down, and further, pull the covers over our heads.

Obviously this is not a view to which I subscribe. Appeasement is never the answer. It failed when the Europeans tried it in the 1930s, and can you imagine what this country would have looked like had Abraham Lincoln appeased the South...or allowed secession rather than standing up for our Constitution?

We live in a polarizing time, with two entrenched sides who often cede control to the fringes rather than creating a larger, more inclusive tent in the middle. And so at times we have left-wing Democrats who are willing to cut their noses off to spite their own faces, refusing to settle for incremental changes while at the same time right-wing Republicans turn obstructionist, resulting in grid-lock that causes them to move ever-farther to the right.

Judging by his actions, Barack Obama is a moderate president. And yet he provokes even more anti-government rhetoric than Bill Clinton - another moderate president - did. Many of Obama's stances were once also taken by Republican presidents Reagan, Nixon, or Bush (take your pick as to I or II).

Whenever I can't use logic to figure something out, I remember something I learned in graduate school: Follow the money. And that's where I think much of the dissension lies. The billions spent by the health care industry to prevent health care reform, the millions the financial industry is spending to prevent reform, and the money just pledged by AT&T to gain a stronger foothold in the fight against Net Neutrality...what do each of these three things have in common? The bottom line is the bottom line. Lots and lots of people and companies became very, very wealthy during the Clinton and Bush II years, and as time went on, most of the money rose to the top and consolidated among fewer and fewer.

Since Barack Obama won the presidential election of 2008 and the birthers started yammering, I began to well and truly believe that among those who have accumulated the greatest wealth are those who would do just about anything to keep it. It is in their interest to distract us, to make and keep us angry. The middle class may indeed be disappearing, but when considering the cause, ask yourself, who has the most to lose? If you have difficulty answering this question, consider that the top 1% own 42% of wealth in the U.S. The next 19% own an additional 50%, leaving the remaining 80% of us owning less than 10%. Even more astonishingly, of all the new financial wealth created since the Reagan presidency, nearly half of it went to the top 1%...nearly 95% went to the top 20%.

If you come to the same conclusion that I have - that money funds anti-reform movements as well as obsfucating the truth from those ignorant enough to search for it themselves - you will undoubtedly conclude that now is the precisely the time for us not to stand down. Now is the time for us to stand up, to make the voice of reason rise above the voices of anger and ignorance.

~Laurie G

Stand Up...Or Stand Down (Transferred from short-lived DCP blog)

What Lies Beneath? (Posted on Toe in the Water & short-lived DCP blog)

Today I read on the Huffington Post that according to USA TODAY, "Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency." Further, the newspaper reports that while personal income fell 2%, paid taxes dropped 23%, excluding Social Security. While it's true that spending has increased in order to help the country climb out of the recession, it's also true that among those polled by Gallup last month, those who believe taxes are too high are the same taxpayers whose taxes remain "near a 50-year low."

What lies beneath that sort of disconnect? Yesterday a YouTube video posted last September enjoyed a resurgence. The video, which features two candidates for Texas governor who belong to the secessionist movement, seem to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Indeed, what stuck in my mind as I watched it [again] was hearing Debra Medina announce, in response to shouts of "We hate the United States," that, "We are aware that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." Hearing Thomas Jefferson's words come out of this woman's mouth sickened me.

It was my daughter who actually alerted me to the video. She very much objected to the video's title at YouTube - Texas Filled With Insane Christian Republican Terrorists - particularly because the link was provided by one of the the other Dallas Coffee Party Movement admins on our Facebook page, and a core value of the Coffee Party Movement is to eliminate the name-calling that passes for political discourse these days.

I agree that the video's title was unnecessarily incendiary; its contents make the case without resorting to name-calling. That said, those heard on the video are actively shouting their hatred of the United States, bastardized the words of the man who wrote our Declaration of Independence, and by doing so advocated the violent overthrow of our government.

When George Bush took office, the projected 10-year budget surplus he inherited became a deficit that ballooned as a result of tax cuts combined with increased spending, as well as two unfunded wars, one of which was supposed to pay for itself. Interestingly, the same individuals now calling for the blood of tyrants and patriots to water the tree of freedom, were not doing so until Barack Obama was elected president.

It seems to me that the vehemence directed against Obama's "socialist" government grew out of proposed health care reform. In March on my personal blog, I wrote that in the rest of the developed world, citizens share health care while in the U.S. it's something we horde. They see it as a basic human right while we see it as a privilege, even though nearly 2/3 of personal bankruptcies, historically, are a result of medical bills. Could it be that all the money the health care industry spent lobbying Congress and with advertising aimed at the public against reform were successful in convincing the same people who believe their taxes are too high that, as reported in Salon, "healthcare reform helped 'other people' and not themselves"?

I can't help but wonder whether "other" is coded language that feeds into the worst impulses of a certain segment of Americans, perhaps those who preach that "others" don't have "small-town values." Is what lies beneath...black?

If you feel so inclined as to comment, please do so on the Coffee Party Blog...I'm hoping somebody will actually visit. It's very, very lonely!

What Lies Beneath? (Posted on Toe in the Water & short-lived DCP blog)

No Time Like the Present

What better time to talk about health care reform than when I'm home sick?

I just re-read Frank Rich's terrific op-ed piece from Sunday's NYT, and it drove home my own views on all the angry "pitchfork people," as I like to call the angry mobs of sheeple populists.

What concerns me about how the health care upheaval played out is this: People have bought into the belief that the less fortunate are morally inferior and don't deserve health care. How else to explain the reaction gone viral of a mob harassing a man with Parkinson's who was engaged in an act of non-violence? Even though they likely know somebody - an extended member of the family, colleague at work, or neighbor - in debt after a life-threatening illness, they don't realize that they themselves are, as one Harvard MD says, "One illness away from financial ruin." Indeed, more than 60% of bankruptcies filed in the U.S. are the result of medical bills.

Elsewhere in the developed world, health care is something its citizens share. Here in the U.S. it is something we horde. They see it as a basic human right...we see it as privilege. An article in Salon said it well: "[The sheeple] tend to believe healthcare reform helped 'other people,' not themselves."

A Canadian friend of mine recently told me that when Canada adopted universal health care, people assumed the sky was falling. Now the father of Canadian health care is considered the nation's greatest citizen. I can only hope that the polls trending upward since the passage last week of health care reform continues and that the hostility will die down. Actual signs, though, indicate the initial blip was just that...initial. And even more recent polling indicates that people believe Democrats are to blame for the violence perpetrated against its members in Congress post passage.

But I worry a low-level of hatred will remain, because for many, it all comes down to black. There's this "other," see, in the White House; an uppity, scarily-named, "intellectual" with a preternatural calm. And he signals a rising up of all the other "others" - is it any surprise that Newt Gingrich compared health care reform to passage of the Civil Rights Act as regards possible fall-out? Maybe he's just speaking a hard political truth, but his harsh, cynical view negates the actual purpose and result of civil rights laws. And that's the difference Bill Maher pointed to [again] on Friday night when he defined patriotism as doing what's right for the country as opposed to doing what's right for any particular political party.

Nobody's thrilled with the final health care reform bill; that million dollars a day spent by healthcare interests (insurance, medical, hospital, and pharmaceutical companies) to effect the outcome in their favor made sure that of that. But I sleep a little better at night knowing that as a nation we are trying to live up to a moral responsibility.

No Time Like the Present