Lies, and LIES

Last night, the TV Yakkers were apoplectic about the Newsweek misreporting of the Koran in the commode episode. The talking point seems to be that lies were told and lives were lost. Interestingly, this is a news topic only a couple weeks after the Brit memo limning the probability that Our Glorious Leader and Tagalong Tony conspired to cook the intelligence and come up with a pretext for the adventure in Iraq. LIES, now styled as faulty intelligence, were told and LIVES, 1600 of them US Service women and men, were lost. Why all the outrage at Newsweek?

Dissonance and the "Culture " War

You may or may not want to take a test (http://typology.people-press.org/typology/) to find out your own politics, but the survey statistics that the Pew (Phew or Few, if you prefer)have accompanying it (http://typology.people-press.org/data/index.php?GroupID=11) give a dramatic picture of the mismatch between where we're headed the next 3+ years and where we would like to be going. Just flipping through the topics and seeing how my countrymen feel on various issues is both reassuring and infuriating. On the one hand, it is refreshing to know just how Americans feel about universal healthcare, increasing the minimum wage, the relative urgency of budget balancing and tax cutting, measures to curtail access to abortion, outsourcing, teaching creationism, and several other hot button "culture war" topics. If we are not more liberal than the radio yakkers and TV yappers represent, we are at least refreshingly responsible, tolerant, and "mind your own business."

What is infuriating is that we are not moving in a more responsible, tolerant or MYOB direction because the folk who control the White House and Congress think they know better what is good for this country, no matter what the citizens may think! This "father knows best" attitude seems, in their minds, to supercede what real working Americans want. So long as we tolerate a government, Republican or Democrat, driven by the dollars of political contributers, we can count on dirtier skies and water, legislation for special interests, and a foreign policy based on the notion that what is good for Walmart is good for the world. Q: What is hilarious, obscene, and tragic at the same time? A: The notion that it is obscene for the government to help the weak, the poor, and the unwell but divine to subsidize Walmart, United Airlines, Chrysler, Bank of America, and Enron.

Good Work, George

Our fine capitalists like to talk about "cost push" when prices go up and our incisive liberal media have been yapping about the $50 price per barrel of oil on the world market. This has not made headlines or been a topic on YapTV: ExxonMobile profits up 44% the first quarter, Shell profits up 28% the first quarter, and BP profits up 29% this quarter. And our Glorious Leader, oilman George W. Bush of the Bush and Walker oil families, wrings his hands and blames OPEC. Who is OPEC? Isn't it the Prince who was holding hands with Our Glorious Leader a couple weeks ago, along with some other Exxon, Shell, and BP puppet governments? The so-called liberal media parrots whatever spin corporate and political yappers print in their press releases. And the folks who elected him look at gas prices up more than a third in his White House tenure and say, Well done, Georgie!"

General Smedley Butler on War

Seventy years ago, General Smedley Butler, twice a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, had this commentary on war: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html. His observations and views may be even more true today, except the numbers are much larger. In the spirit of his recommendations, I propose the following policy directions to the Democrats; there's no point in suggesting such a course of action to Republicans. This is not neo-isolationalist because none of this envisions withdrawing commercially or diplomatically.
1. Redeploy all American servicemen back to American soil with all due haste. Whether or not this would result in a reduction in forces, there are training needs and some missions available here within our borders. Some might think they could assist with securing our borders. Maybe not a good idea, but certainly they could march in parades.
2. Require the Navy to patrol no more than 300 miles off the coast of American territory.
3. Require that the Air Force patrol no more that 500 miles from American territory.
4. Outlaw all covert actions against other nations. Whether it has had to do with assassinations in Vietnam, the Allende interference, clandestine activity in Nicaragua and Guatemala, or the comical attempts to assassinate Castro, I can think of no clandestine operation of the CIA or any other of our "intelligence" establishments that has redounded to the interests of the United States.
5. Make it illegal to sell or give arms, munitions, and military technology to other nations. Certainly many people have died all over this globe at the hands of people using arms bought from United States arms dealers. Surely our commercial interest in selling weaponry has done more to destabilize than to stabilize, more for tyranny than for freedom, more for murder than for Justice. Can you say Darfor?

General Butler makes very cogent points about the "military-industrial complex," Ike's term actually. Shifting from a death-focused capitalism to one focused on our sustainable husbandry of this small planet cannot be easy or simple, but is becoming more and more necessary.

Privatization and Flying United

It is strange that the Democrats have not made any noise about United Airlines defaulting on $10 Billion in unfunded pension liabilities, resulting in as much as 50% reduction in benefits to their retirees. Is this what Social Security retirees could look forward to under private/personal/personal property accounts? As uncool, stodgy, regressive, as Social Security is, it may be more likely to be there than the retirement programs of United, MCI Worldcom, Enron, General Motors, Ford, et. al. and, of course, Walmart doesn't have a retirement plan for two-thirds of its associates. Social Security might be all right of the Glorious Leader would stop financing his war on the unfortunate occupants of oily Mesopotamia from the Trust Fund.

Dude, What have you done with my church?

I grew up in a Missionary Baptist Church. We read the King James version of the Bible and did not have a creed hanging on the wall of the building. We believed that each Baptist and each Baptist minister interpreted the Scripture and was guided by the Words of Jesus. My grandfather was a deacon and was a Democrat and was fierce about separation of Church and State. He was against prayer in school because he did not trust schoolteachers of other religions, Methodist for instance, to refrain from proselytizing his children and grandchildren. He saw the spiritual domain as the exclusiuve purview of the church and family and expected school and government to keep hands off.

He believed he was capable of reading his Bible and determining the will of God and the meaning of Christianity, and accepted leadership from his pastor. The government had absolutely no valid information for him on religion. Billy Graham was a pretty good preacher in his view, but rightfully had no authority in our church. My grandfather was disappointed in what he saw as a tacit endorsement of Richard Nixon and allowed that what Reverend Graham was "rendering to Caesar" was an abuse of his spiritual influence.

Our church was a member of the Muhlenberg County Baptist Association, which meant exactly that. Individual churches yielded no authority to the Assocoation, but used it as an instrument of communication and for the channeling of funds to missions and more remote levels of the Southern Baptist Convention. Each church was governed by the board of deacons and all business was conducted at a Wednesday "business meeting" after prayer meeting. The pastor had no role beyond that of a member in conducting church business; he was an employee.

The church I see today has the pastor, Chan Chandler, of East Waynesboro, North Carolina, Baptist Church inviting members to "repent or resign," it has the leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary leading "Justice Sunday," and Calvary Baptist Church invites the judge in the Schiavo case to "reconsider his membership." This is not your daddy's church, Alice!

Walmart Health Insurance: Dream or Nightmare

What if Walmart decided to provide health insurance for all of its 1,200,000 employees instead of only 500,000 of them? Wouldn't that be a nightmare for health insurance providers, negotiating rates with Walmart? Damn, I want them to negotiate my health insurance rates! Since most of their competition already provides health insurance for most of their employees and since Walmart does as much busines as all of them combined, I would submit that Walmart can provide health insurance for all its employees and still make $256 billion a year. Want to cut taxes? Make Walmart pay for its employees health insurance instead of Medicaid.

Synergy

Maybe some "problems" only seem random or disconnected. Most of us would agree that the United States has the following "problems:" low wages, health insurance, not enough workers for certain jobs, recruiting difficulties for the military, huge budget deficits and national debt, future Social Security insolvency,and illegal immigration.

What if a political party proposed a package that included the following elements: increasing the minimum wage; a legal immigration program for those who learned English and volunteered for the Army; immigration quotas to provide workers for companies who agreed to pay minimum wage and provide health insurance and a retirement plan.

Which is the greater evil between requiring MacDonalds and Walmart to provide a living wage with benefits or having the taxpayers provide for their employees?

Why blame immigrants for the conditions and opportunities to which they respond? If their employers were required to provide a living wage instead of the taxpayers, wouldn't that be more reasonable?

If the package included some of these balancing components, surely controlling the borders would become more palatable for all of us.