Category: politics

politics

Hello Again on a Sad Day for Workers

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I cannot believe that over three months have passed since I last posted but the CMS does not lie – my last post was on March 19th. I believe this is the longest gap between posts ever for this blog. Historically April has been the cruelest month for my posts – in the nine Aprils that have occurred since WGTCTIP2 has been live I haven’t posted during three of them. May however is a month that I’ve never forgotten about – previously whatever funk I was in during the month of April would dissipate like April showers and posts would then bloom like the May flowers of the rhyme I’m referencing. So, while my “no post” April was not an anomaly the “no post” May definitely was and I’m hopeful that this long of a gap never occurs again. With all of that being said, hello again!
What has been happening since I last wrote? A lot – some good though most of it bad. What has been bad? How about the direction that this country is headed in for starters…
If you aren’t one of the lucky people in this country who own their own business, you are a worker, just like me. Yesterday, the SCOTUS (the acronym stands for “Supreme Court of the United States” but it always looks like scrotum to me) decided to restrict class action law suits in general raised by workers when they dismissed a pending discrimination case against Wal-Mart. Not good.
I’m not a socialist. I believe in capitalism and a free market. That being said, Wal-Mart abuses our system and not just by using its size to defeat smaller mom & pop stores. Wal-Mart actually hurts you and me even if we do not shop there. They pay so low we subsidize their employees’ health insurance – they do not let people work full time for that reason and they even show people how to apply for welfare. For a company that in the last 12 months had $16.5 billion in net income.
Stay tuned for many more posts in the short term – all is not right in the state of our Union and I will be pulling back the curtain to shed some light on what I believe needs to be voiced. I won’t go gentle into that good night.

politics

Why Pay Attention to WI?

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Why should you pay attention to the hubbub that is happening in Wisconsin right now? Are you frustrated that so many public sector employees currently receive much better benefits than you do Mr. or Ms. Private Sector? Does it strike you as unfair that their future well being is taken care of as they are set to receive relatively generous pensions while you not only will not get a pension when you retire but you aren’t sure if you are even going to have a job next week?
These are valid but misguided feelings. Paul Krugman makes a very compelling argument that we need to pay attention to what our government did in Bagdad in 2003 to truly understand what Gov. Walker is doing in WI right now and why Unions are being unfair demonized. From the article:

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, “right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.”

Klein’s statement rings very true because in all of the oxygen that has been given to the “unions are evil” rants that you’ve heard so much of these days, no one has ever said that if the ultra-rich just paid their fair share in taxes, then we would have more than enough money to pay for our pension commitments. The George W. Bush tax cuts to the rich which were supposed to expire somehow haven’t yet and the great redistribution of wealth from the lower, middle and even upper classes to the upper-upper class, a.k.a the wealthiest of the wealthy, continues unabated since Reagan started this trend back in 1980.
Here is more from the article:

[It is] an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting….For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

Wow. How is the MSM not reporting these facts? It is because somehow the powers that be, the ultra-rich, have been able to turn the masses against each other, distracting them from their real targets, namely the Koch Brothers, the Chamber of Commerce and other all of the other organizations that basically want us to return to an almost jungle-like primal state.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes postulates what life would be like without government, a condition which he calls the state of nature. In that state, each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. This, Hobbes argues, would lead to a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) Hobbes’ description contains what has been called one of the most best known passages in English philosophy; which describes the natural state mankind would be in, were it not for political community:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I feel that many if not most Republicans, and every single Tea Party person, wants our country to get back to a place where most would have solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives, while the privileged few would be chowing down on cucumber sandwiches all day long.
Post idea via Brian, data via Wikipedia

politics

Loose Lips

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…sink ships. That and a few other mottos about keeping your mouth shut when it comes to things related to our country were not only en vogue but were actively advertised during the World Wars:

Loose lips sink ships!
Loose lips sink ships!

To put it another way, as Michael said to Fredo in “The Godfather”:

Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.

Well, the bad people at WikiLeaks took advantage of one soldier’s hatred towards America/mischievousness/yearning to make a big difference in the world in whatever – whether positive or destructive – way possible, or maybe he took advantage of the WikiLeaks organization to get his name out there (now that it is I hope he has fun with the fan mail he’ll get in prison as he serves a mega long court martial sentence), but regardless of the order in which who approached who, a treasure trove of classified information was obtained and shared publicly with the world. This act is taking sides against the family to the nth degree. For shame!
While I get the macro level argument for having a state of full transparency in the world, I do strongly believe in the need for secrecy when it comes to statecraft, and believe in the opaqueness of communication and mission, and I honestly think that releasing all of this information was a bad move. I’m all for transparency, but sometimes things are best left in private and sometimes the best things ever said aren’t said. That being said, I’m not going to pass up on this story just because I find it distasteful. I do think that America’s interests were harmed, though I’m not specifically sure how. I’ll leave that up to the experts to quantify. Even if he/they truly wanted to make a statement, they could have release much less than the 250,000 documents that they published.
Considering that the info is out there though, I’m not going to just avoid it. Here in no particular order is the “top 10” things we learned (he following content was taken from Zach Roth over at Yahoo News):
But what did we actually learn? Here are 10 key revelations from the cables:
1. Many Middle Eastern nations are far more concerned about Iran’s nuclear program than they’ve publicly admitted. According to one cable, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly asked the U.S. to “cut off the head of the snake” — meaning, it appears, to bomb Iran’s nuclear program. Leaders of Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern nations expressed similar views.
2. The U.S. ambassador to Seoul told Washington in February that the right business deals might get China to acquiesce to a reunified Korea, if the newly unified power were allied with the United States. American and South Korean officials have discussed such a reunification in the event that North Korea collapses under the weight of its economic and political problems.
3. The Obama administration offered sweeteners to try to get other countries to take Guantanamo detainees, as part of its (as yet unsuccessful) effort to close the prison. Slovenia, for instance, was offered a meeting with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions.
4. Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud took $52 million in cash when he visited the United Arab Emirates last year, according to one cable. The Afghan government has been plagued by allegations of corruption. Massoud has denied taking the money out of the country.
5. The United States has been working to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani nuclear reactor, out of concern that it could be used to build an illicit nuclear device. The effort, which began in 2007, continues.
6. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered diplomats to assemble information on their foreign counterparts. Documents in the WikiLeaks cache also indicate that Clinton may have asked diplomats to gather intelligence on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s plans for Iran, and information on Sudan (including Darfur), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iran and North Korea.
7. The State Department labeled Qatar the worst country in the region for counterterrorism efforts. The country’s security services were “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals,” according to one cable.
8. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are tighter than was previously known. Putin has given the high-living Berlusconi “lavish gifts” and lucrative energy contracts, and Berlusconi “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe, according to one cable.
9. Hezbollah continues to enjoy the weapons patronage of Syria. A week after Syrian president Bashar Assad promised the United States he wouldn’t send “new” arms to the Lebanese militant group, the United States said it had information that Syria was continuing to provide the group with increasingly sophisticated weapons.
10. Some cables reveal decidedly less than diplomatic opinions of foreign leaders. Putin is said to be an “alpha-dog” and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to be “driven by paranoia.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel “avoids risk and is rarely creative.” Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi travels with a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse.
The cables were obtained, via WikiLeaks, by the New York Times, the Guardian of Britain, Der Spiegel of Germany, Le Monde of France and El Pais of Spain.

humor

European Maps Accoring to Stereotype

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I love maps. I have a map of NYC that was made for runners (it lists all of the bathroom available in Manhattan based on availability and cleanliness). I have maps of the NYC and London underground systems. And so on, and so forth…
Today I was sent a link to some maps that Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian living in Great Britain, created. the first was done in 2009 in the midst of the energy dispute between Russia and the Ukraine. Russia was labeled “Paranoid Oil Empire”, the Ukraine “Gas Stealers”, and the E.U. as “Union of Subsidized Farmers”. Switzerland was simply “Bank”.
Click on the thumbnails below to check them out and if you like, check out Yanko’s site. Enjoy!

Via Ann

politics

Existentialist Firefighter Delays 3 Deaths

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There is plenty of bad news to go around these days and even when there is good news, like say when a firefighter saves someone’s life from a burning building, you can easily put a negative spin on it. Okay, the firefighter article is just an incredibly funny Onion article that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now but if you’ve been paying attention to current events, its overall negative and despairing tone just fits.
If you have not heard by now, the busted Gulf well has been capped but it took BP over three months to do so and who knows if / when my kids will be eating fresh Bayou seafood in the future. The Gray Lady features an article today titled A Spill Into the Psyche, and a Respite which talks about how

more than [it being] an environmental catastrophe, the disaster playing out in the gulf has become a festering reminder of the disarray afflicting so many areas of national life, from the cancerous political culture to the crisis of unemployment to an intractable war in Afghanistan, seemingly impervious to whatever plans are dreamed up in Washington.

Fun stuff that definitely touches a nerve, and it doesn’t even include immigration, the environment, the nascent green sector, etc. Great.
Now let’s talk about the crisis of unemployment that was mentioned in that quote above. The Gray Lady featured about two weeks ago an article about the life and times of Scott Nicholson, a semi-recent grad who is having a tough go at landing a “decent” full-time job. This hyper qualified and brow beaten yet still hopeful millennial (which means he is somewhere between the ages of 18 and 29) faces a 14% unemployment rate which approaches the levels for his age group that was present during the Great Depression. Even more fun than the oil spill is a generation imperiled.
So, what is fun that we can talk about? How about that “Inception” took in over $60 million this weekend which once again proves that Nolan just nails it, time and time again. The one thing this sad world needs right now is a nice distraction and this piece of work should do the trick. The last time I had a new born around, I was able to find time to fit in a midnight IMAX “The Dark Knight” showing and somehow I have a feeling that I’ll be finding time to see another late night Nolan flick this time around as well.

humor

World Cup at the White House

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Our government’s reaction to English keeper Robert Green’s error during this past Saturday’s Group C opening match, which allowed the American squad to tie the England in their match this past Saturday, is below:
WorldCup_WhiteHouse_Viewing
‘ Nuff said.
Via Anthony

politics

Great Escapes

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If you have paid any attention to the news lately, you would have to agree that “escape” would be the theme of the month.

Just about two weeks ago, a disaster occurred in the Gulf of Mexico which has caused millions of gallons of sweet crude oil to escape into the water. All plans thus far on stopping the flow have been for naught and the Gulf Region, five years after Katrina’s disaster, is facing another disaster, this time in many respects much more dire. A hurricane destroys structures but not an ecosystem. While shrimpers were able to recover from Katrina, shrimpers may not be able to recover from Deepwater Horizon. This story continues to unfold because oil continues to escape. BP, the company in charge, is trying today to drop a giant 100 ton concrete-and-steel box over the leak to cap it though no one knows if this will work because the leak is over 5,000 feat underwater and this has never been tried for a leak this deep. I guess we’ll see if it works (we now know it failed). I’ll be having some good old Creole food this weekend though because a fried oyster po’ boy just might be extinct pretty soon (I did – went to Acme for lunch and had a half shrimp / half oyster po’ boy with Uncle Bob’s red beans as my side).
Just about two days ago, a near disaster in Times Square almost occurred and the cause of said disaster, an American citizen that developed and placed the car bomb, tried to escape and was literally caught in his seat just as he was leaving the country on an Air Emirates “Islamabad via Dubai” flight. Only 53 hours passed by from the time of the attempt to the time the authorities captured Faisal Shahzad and that was almost too much. While many will trumpet how the bomber was an Islamic fundamentalist, most will never mention that the street vendor who alerted the police was not just a Vietnam Vet, he was among other things a Muslim. The fact that this almost happened in such a low tech way, and the speed in which the authorities responded, is both terrifying and gratifying. I’ve often said that while NYC is a tremendous target, the NYPD is a defacto small army and I feel safer here than anywhere else. Two weeks have passed and nothing has happened on either of the issues above, unluckily and luckily. You can check out the Big Picture’s dramatic photos of the continuing disaster in the Gulf. You can also walk through Times Square because nothing but a scare or two has happened since the attempted car bomb. We’ll see what the future brings. All I know is that terrorism wins when people adjust their lives. In the big scheme of things, the good will triumph over the evil. Society responds and unites because there is more that unites us than separates us.

politics

The Only Way to Combat the Inevitable is to Make it Irrelevant

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I was out to dinner with two political friends of mine this past Saturday night and I wound up codifying a belief that I’ve had since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate money flowing relatively unchecked into political campaigns: money will always be a part of politics. So, the only way to combat it is to make money itself irrelevant.
The way this can be accomplished is by creating the conditions where it does not matter if one spends one to possibly five billion dollars during a campaign, note that this figure is before the special interests get involved. Through either scheduling, or media restrictions, or other means unknown or unstated at this time, the conditions need to be set so that any ungodly sum of money is taken off the table when it comes to any election.
I manage digital projects for a living and there quickly gets to be a point where throwing more bodies at a problem does not generate positive results. Twelve coders working in parallel cannot complete a relatively short term goal most often. To complete the task, you want two coders to sync and be left alone for a week or so to bang it out. The same must be true for campaigns and their cash – they need to have negative results for throwing more money at the problem. If this happens, then maybe we’ll start to see our political discourse and system reformed in a way that sticks for a good bit of time.

health

By A Healthy Margin of 7 Votes Reform Passes

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Much has been written and said about the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which now provides and/or mandates health care for 95% of all Americans. I’ve waited to listen to as many viewpoints as possible throughout the entire process before weighing in which is different from the way I’ve operated in the past. When looking back at previous years and causes, I would sometimes post many times in a single week about a given political topic, especially when it involved something idiotic Bush the Second or the Republican party (more on them in a bit) did or said. So, considering that health care reform is something that I care deeply about, my absence of comments on this issue up until now has been nothing less than the the model of restraint.
Part of my hesitancy to voice my opinion was due to my overall disgust of the public sausage making that passes for our government these days. Its an embarrassment and I feel like I’m being led by a nation of children.
The other part of it was that my relationship with the health care sector of this country has been so ridiculously involved in relation to the amount of medical issues I ave either known about or had to tangentially deal with that I am quite emotional about the issue. If I started to post on it, there would be no going back, this blog might have simply turned into a “health care reform all the time” blog. Over my lifetime, I’ve had constant access to and interaction with our country’s medical establishment: doctors and nurses, waiting rooms and offices, procedures and exams, infirmaries and hospitals, operations both out-patient and in-patient – you name it, I’ve experienced it, and most from an early age. At most points I was a care giver and observer. At others I was the patient. At most times I managed the bills and fought to ensure that I maximized my coverage options and benefits. Its a tricky business and you need to be quick on your feet – not easy to do any day and especially not when injured – but I’ve developed a specialty for it. I’ve known my entire life that our system needed to be improved. After Clinton tried and failed, and as our country descended into nonsense land (see both terms that Bush was in office and mostly everything that our nation’s government did during that time), I just put on the back burner of my hopeful mind that anything good would ever happen. But unbelievably and almost improbably, especially after Ted Kennedy’s seat was won by a Republican, it happened.
In the end, the final vote was 219 – 212; 7 votes separated the biggest piece of social net legislation in a generation from success or defeat. 7. That’s it. Razor thin but still wide enough.
For over a year now this legislation has been proposed, debated, revised, debated, rinse and repeat ad naseum. In the end, an unorthodox randomly used but legal procedural move was needed in order to get this legislation passed, again by the slimmest of margins. What did we pass? Something that will cost about a trillion dollars over 10 years – supposedly that is a good thing. I have yet to talk to my doctor cousin and friends about what it means to them and what they think. Its helpful to understand what a leader of a university hospital and two Harvard MDs think of this whole shebang because I haven’t been able to read the 2,000 pages of the act. Right now, I just feel that the high level provisions that the bill enforces, such as banning a company’s ability to drop coverage based on pre-existing conditions and keeping minors covered longer to name just two, are simply morally correct.
There are plenty of drawbacks and loopholes that still need to be closed and many of the provisions do not kick in for four long years, during which plenty of healthy people will get sick and sick people will getter sicker and/or die, so it is flawed and no by no means perfect. That being said, what the act does provide is far and away better than anything that is currently in place. It provides a foundation to build upon for further and future reforms.
Those that oppose this bill – mostly rapid Republicans and Tea Party folk – have been raucous in their dismissal and hatred towards it. “It reeks of Big Government, its socialist, its too costly, its dangerous” they cry. They support tacitly those that debase decorum and attempt to spit (literally) on the civil rights of black war veterans. Not a single Republican voted for the bill and thirty or so Democrats voted against it which boggles my mind, because again I feel that it is morally right and if they [the right wing nutters that so strongly opposed the bill] are so Christian, isn’t healing the sick something Jesus would do? As Bob Herbert has written in his piece “An Absence of Class”, he correctly points out that “For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness” and that it “is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.” I think this health care reform vote will go down in history as the day that America went both crazy and sane and then sadly crazy, crazy because not a single Republican went on record to support this obviously overall decently good bill and sane because it got passed but sadly crazy because the side of good needed the loopiest of ways to pass the darn bill.
Kudos POTUS, Pelosi and the others that strong armed this bill to the finish line.

politics

The True Nature of Our Economy

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The art imitating life imitating art quality of the Onion sometimes just leaves me breathless with the way they nail the absurdity of our lives head on. Their recent post U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion shines a bright spotlight on the man behind the curtain of our ATM. There is nothing backing up our money except our shared belief / delusion that its worth value. Period.

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

By the time you get to the end of the article, you’ll be laughing too hard to want to get a gun and gold and run off into the woods.