Veterans Day

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude for those who were both drafted into service and those who have chosen to serve to fight for the United States of America.  That is not the subject of this post.  I want to talk about two subjects.  

Vietnam is first on my list.  Like most of the people I know, I was vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam.  But I don't intend to talk about that either.  I want to talk about the dismal behavior of those of us who were against that war, including me, toward its veterans.  We saw them as willing pawns who killed at the behest of the government.  The people I know never did anything physical to those vets in terms of insulting them publicly, although some others did act against them physically, but our thoughts and discussions were entirely dismissive of what they went through as them merely getting their just desserts.  I was wrong, we were wrong.  First and foremost, most of those soldiers were drafted and they had no option but to go.  But even those who volunteered did what they had to do to survive.  Yes, there were incidents where soldiers did unspeakable things like the massacres at My Lai, but that wasn't the norm.  Mostly soldiers spent their time in Vietnam alternating periods of intense boredom with periods of abject terror.  We were right that they were mostly used as pawns, but that doesn't fall on them, it falls on those who sent them there and who kept them there.  Our government bears full responsibility for the deaths, injuries and PTSD, which wasn't recognized then, that befell these men.  Our anger should never have been directed at the soldiers at all.  We were wrong.  We should have welcomed those vets home thankfully as survivors of the failed foreign policy of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations.

Finally, I want to talk about the hypocrisy of those who self-righteously declare their undying support for and thanks to veterans of our most recent adventures, but then quietly cut their benefits and leave them and their families to wallow in poverty.  We all remember John McCain's opposition to the GI Bill, which was ultimately passed  anyhow, but the indignities have continued.  A significant percentage of those receiving SNAP benefits (food stamps) are vets.  As a result of cuts to SNAP something in excess of 5000 vets will lose those benefits.  Veteran medical benefits have been reduced.  The unemployment rate among vets is 10%.  One third of homeless men in the U.S. are vets.  Acts of Congress, not fiscal mismanagement, have nearly destroyed the USPS and caused many of its workers to be laid off.  Guess what, the USPS employs more vets than anyone except the Defense Department.  Increasing the minimum wage will help about a million vets.  Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would bring coverage to 40% of the 1.3 million vets who are uninsured and yet some of the most self-righteous empty suit Governors are the very people who have refused to except increased Medicaid coverage in their states.

If we as a nation really want to thank veterans, we should demand that they have access to food, jobs, health care and housing.  It just pisses me off when blowhard politician sing about their devotion to vets and then knife them at every turn.

The Iron Curtain

It seems clear that an Iron Curtain, to use Winston Churchill's phrase, has descended across the American Southland.  As a nation, we have worked for decades to encourage our public to participate in the nation's civic life by voting.  Many have marched, protested, been arrested and beaten to make sure that the right to vote would not be abridged in the United States of America.  Each election has seen a decline in the participation of more and more citizens.  It seemed that we were beginning to turn that around through things like the "motor-voter" laws and online voting.  Renewal of the Voting Rights Act has been approved by huge bipartisan majorities in the Congress right into the 21st century. Then the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted that law.  It's not that it can't be enforced, it's that enforcing it will be much more difficult to do.

The reason the Court gave for its action was that pre-certification is no longer necessary.  Within two hours of the decision, their reason was demonstrated to be fallacious.  Texas, one of the states that had been subjected to pre-certification, passed draconian voter identification laws, rolling the right to vote back to where it was when Martin Luther King marched in the 50's and 60's.  Pre-certification state North Carolina was next and Florida will soon follow.  The Iron Curtain is descending and the promise of our nation is being trashed.

How big a problem is voter fraud in the U.S.?  Since 2000, about 10 cases of in-person voter fraud have been reported in the country.  All but one was dismissed, and the one was caught and never actually voted.  So these states are solving a problem that doesn't exist.  Why?  What's going on here?

The Republican Party, now under the control of its extreme right wing, has realized that minorities, the young, the old and the poor tend to vote Democratic.  Rather than coming up with policies that will help these constituencies, they have decided to fight this rear guard battle.  These laws are designed to prevent them from voting. The processes required to get acceptable ID's for people without driver's licenses or access to birth certificates or who are students in the state is arduous and trying.  When it was the Southern Democrats suppressing the vote back before the Voting Rights Act there were poll taxes and "literacy" tests that were used to prevent "undesirables" from voting.  The mechanisms are different but the goal is the same. The harsh reality for the Republicans is that their constituency of white males is becoming a minority of aging curmudgeons.  These moves will only delay their descent into irrelevance.

They must be stopped and defeated in every election everywhere it is possible.  They have a core of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers who operate quietly behind the scenes to fund seizing and holding state government's and therefore control the redistricting and voting process.  What can be done?  We need a new civil rights movement.  Not founded on racial equality, but rather upon citizenship equality.  We need massive marches on the state capitols of those states behind the Iron Curtain and those in danger of disappearing behind it, like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  We need to mobilize to help people negotiate the multiple obstacles to voting and then vote out those state legislators and governors whose agenda is to withhold the right to vote so that they may keep their dying grip on power for a few more years.  

I marched for equality in the 1960's and I am prepared to march again decades later.  Are you in?  Will you stand with me and those like me who are determined to defend the United States of America against these domestic threats?

Everybody Loves the Sequester

Republicans and Democrats alike fell in line behind the sequester when it was proposed not because they wanted to slash their favorite appropriations but because they figured the other side would never let slashing its favorite appropriations happen so the draconian cuts would never happen.  Surprise, surprise, no one blinked so now everyone is paying for Congressional obstinance.

Well, not quite everyone.  While 70,000 kids are being thrown out of Head Start, millions of seniors are deprived of nutritious meals, hundreds of Federal food inspectors have been furloughed endangering the nation's food supply, and thousands of teachers, police officers and firefighters have been laid off, not one member of the House of Representatives or the Senate has seen any effect at all.  In fact, the executive, legislative and judicial branches were specifically exempted from the effects of the sequester.  In all fairness, it should be noted that President Obama has voluntarily reduced his salary by 10% in response to sequester cuts.  No one else has rushed forward to share the pain.

In fact, while seniors go hungry, Congress and the President were so deeply moved by the impact of their own gutlessness on hapless air travelers that they loosened the rules of sequestration to allow the FAA to restore air traffic controllers and reduce air traffic delays.  Oh the horror of having to wait and extra hour in order to be treated like garbage by airlines and pay for a bag of 20 stale peanuts!  Let salmonella into our food chain, but don't make members of Congress and other air passengers wait another hour!  What hypocrites.

A couple of days ago, in an interview with Ryan Lizza, of CNN and The New Yorker, House Majority Whip Eric Cantor acknowledged that Paul Ryan and he created the sequester by pressuring Speaker John Boehner not to accept the grand bargain upon which he and the President had agreed.  Why do Cantor and Ryan like the sequester?  Simple, the sequester achieves the GOP right wing's long time desire to cut Federal spending on programs that they and the Libertarian/Ayn Rand wing of the party believe to be outside of the scope of Federal authority.  

Democrats naïvely believed that the threat of cuts to GOP favorites like defense and corporate subsidies would compel Republicans to avoid invoking the sequester.  But the Republicans understand that there is a lot more than 10% waste in the Pentagon budget, so defense wouldn't really feel the pain despite cries to the contrary from military leadership and Obama appointed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.  Libertarians are not fond of outright subsidies to the private sector either, and corporate earnings are at an all time high, so the large corporate entities that are beneficiaries of governmental largesse would weather the storm.  Those private sector companies that are very much dependent on the Federal government, like those working in cutting edge technologies, e.g. alternative fuel sources, are not likely to show profitability in the short run, and depriving them of their funding source will help kill them clearing the playing field for the traditional businesses that are major sources of contributions to the Republican Party.  

And so the sequester continues to devastate those who are most vulnerable and those who are working in developing the technologies we will need in the decades to come, while merely annoying the rich and powerful a little bit.  My conclusion?  This is an example of the Republicans being evil and the Democrats being stupid.  This is a hell of a government we've got here.

Sequester

Until recently, you just didn't hear the word "sequester" used in conversation very much.  I like the word.  It's not my favorite little used word.  That would be "bifurcate."  When did you last hear the word bifurcate used in normal conversation?  Right?  Like never!  Why is that?  It's a great word.  Think about how many times you've wanted to convey the concept of splitting something into two pieces, not equal pieces necessarily, just two pieces.  That's bifurcate.  Let's all try to use bifurcate in conversation from now on, until you or someone to whom you're speaking decides that the word just pisses you or them off.

"Sequester" is less satisfying to say, and probably used less frequently.  That is until recently.  My guess is that a large percentage of the people who are using the word don't really know what it means.  As kids we never played "sequester and seek," right, so it's not a familiar word.  Unfamiliar that is until it became linked to a) an artificially created financial deadline and b)...well I can't remember what b was going to be, so forget it.  I did.  

This sequester is about gutting every part of the Federal government regardless of merit or consequence.  If that doesn't sound like a good way to run a country, it isn't, but the political climate in the United States is mostly about how not to govern.  With all the politicos and pundits running around telling us that the sky is falling, you'd think someone would try to do something about it.  If you think that, you're wrong.  The Congress took is usual Presidents' Week break to go home, wrangle contributors, bloviate (another one of those words), do photo ops, smile at Presidents' Day parades and try to remember where their residences of record are actually located.  President Obama returned from golf with Tiger Woods last Tuesday to begin working on this, but there was no one to talk to until this weekend when members of Congress straggled back into town.  And even then no one wanted to talk, they just wanted to strut upon the stage.  The Republicans have opted to spend their time trying to blame the President for the sequester even though a majority of them voted for the sequester and it was proposed because Speaker Boehner could not get his caucus to agree to the grand bargain to which he and President Obama had agreed.  They have accused the President of failing to present an alternative to the draconian and, yes, I'll say it, stupid sequester.  I guess they're ignoring the White House web site.

Anyhow, you have to wonder why no one is doing anything.  I believe the answer is that they don't want to.  Polls show that 71% of voters believe that the solution should include revenue increases from closing loopholes and cutting subsidies to industries and companies that don't need them as well as cuts to Federal programs.  Thus the Democrats are ready to let the Republicans twist slowly in the the wind.  The Republicans have been trying to slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, meals on wheels for the elderly, the National Endowment for the Arts, et al forever, and the sequester gets them there without having actually to do something that might anger constituents, so they are happy to let the Democrats get pummeled by their constituents, who overwhelmingly support those programs, because they didn't protect them.  There is another component to this thing and that is that the government won't actually run out of money until March 27, so the sh*t won't hit the fan until then.  Now every Federal agency, company and state government that will be effected has already started to plan to wind down.  But Congress figures it has until March 27th, so what the heck.  

Personally, if the government is going to choose between children, seniors, cops and teachers and subsidies for BP, ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Cargill and their ilk (another of those words), I'm going to have to side with the kids, seniors (of which I am now one), cops and teachers.  The reality is that our fiscal health can't be protected with cuts only, revenues are needed too.  I guess I should point out here that Medicare, a favorite target, can be fixed easily, but it will take political will and our politicians don't have that.

It's Been a Long Road and There is Further to Travel

Today would have been Martin Luther King's 84th birthday.  On NPR this afternoon, Talk of the Nation played Dr, King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which they do every year.  As I rode in the car listening I found that the power of his words brought me to tears, literally.  The guy in the pick-up truck next to me gave me a strange look, but I don't care.  While Dr. King was speaking of African Americans, his thoughts apply to all who seek justice in our country and around the world.  So instead of writing about those things, I decided to share the speech with you in this video.