An irrelevant matter regarding a mouse

Since this is the final posting for the year 2011 on my blog, I thought I would reminisce about this past year, and then choose the most exciting thing that has happened in our family and write about that.  I got this idea from all of the TV pundits who have spent this past week talking about all of the important things in the nation and world that have happened this past year, but my subject is a particularly irrelevant matter if one lives in a city.  Remember the title of this blog is also about irrelevant matters

I need to state that I live in a rural area on the California coast along with some rather unpleasant neighbors – black widow spiders and rattlesnakes.  These spider neighbors are not much of a problem because we were taught and we teach those who have come after us that one never puts one’s hands or feet where one cannot see clearly that there are no obnoxious inhabitants there, and we also recognize the rather peculiar random pattern of their webs.

Although the hands and feet rule works for rattlesnakes as well, there is an additional help to keep them away from us, and that is a cat.  Now the cat does not go after the snakes personally, but they do go after the rodents that the snakes feed on, so, ipso facto, no rodents – no snakes.

Our mouser cat had gotten much too old, she is now 20 years old, to go out and hunt, so we acquired a kitten who has turned out to be a prolific hunter, which is what we really wanted, and for which we are really happy.  Sounds great?  Well, Big Mo likes to bring his catches into our bathroom with its shower that has a slightly sunken floor.  He figured out that the mice can’t make it out of the shower if he can manage to get them in there.  They sometimes get away from him before that.

One day the mouse got away from him, and my husband was in the bathroom trying to catch the mouse, which ran behind the toilet.  In the ensuing chase, that appliance that used to be in every bathroom, the toilet plunger, had been left out of the cupboard, and the plunger sort of fell over.  It didn’t go all the way down, but was tilted with the opening at the bottom touching the floor.

Voila!  The mouse ran into that wonderful escape hole!  My husband grabbed the plunger, flipped it up, took it outside and launched the mouse into a marvelous arc away from the house.  And there was born – the mouse-o-matic.  For further details on the shape of a mouse-o-matic, ask for them in the comments section.

I am writing this to benefit any reader who lives in the country and who has a problem with mice in the house, for whatever reason.  When chasing the mouse, tilt the plunger in front of the mouse, it runs in, flip it up, and outside send the mouse on the ride of its life away from the house.  It works about 80% of the time.  We do have a mouse trap for the other 20%, but the mouse-o-matic is much faster and more humane.  If you don’t live in the country and don’t have a mouse problem, we hope you have enjoyed this story.

With that, we in our house wish all of you a peace filled and very Happy New Year.

The Cold Within

The Cold Within

(Reprinted from Dear Abbey, The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, CA)

Six humans trapped in happenstance

In dark and bitter cold,

Each one possessed a stick of wood,

Or so the story’s told.

Their dying fire in need of logs

The first woman held hers back,

For of the faces ‘round the fire,

She noticed one was black.

The next man looking across the way

Saw not one from his church,

And couldn’t bring himself to give

The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes

He gave his coat a hitch,

Why should his log be put to use,

To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought

Of the wealth he had in store,

And how to keep what he had earned,

From the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man’s face bespoke revenge

As the fire passed from sight,

For all he saw in his stick of wood

Was a chance to spite the white.

The last man of this forlorn group

Did naught except for gain,

Giving only to those who gave,

Was how he played the game.

The logs held tight in death’s still hands

Was proof of human sin.

They didn’t die from the cold without,

They died from the cold within.

My prayer for this Holiday Season is that all people who follow a faith tradition that emphasizes love and compassion for our neighbor, regardless of who they may be, will be filled with the warmth of that love and compassion for the next year.  Our poor weary world can certainly use a bonfire of love and compassion right about now. 

The Iraq War

The Iraq War

The night of 9/11 we were watching television, and heard Wolf Blitzer of CNN declare definitively that it was the Arabs who had attacked the World Trade Centers.  And I knew we would eventually go to war.  We changed channels to ABC News, and Peter Jennings kept stating that it was unknown who had perpetrated the attacks.  And I knew we would eventually invade somewhere.

What was lost in most of the rhetoric that came after was the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, that had stated that the Project would not be able to be implemented unless the United States suffered another attack such as Pearl Harbor.  I suggest that one might want to Google this Project, and wade through its vast rhetoric.  One thing I am not saying is that George Bush was involved in planning the attacks of 9/11, but his basic incompetence certainly didn’t help in preventing such an attack.

Further, probably because of both my long years as a mother, and my 16 years in politics, I have a seventh sense in detecting when someone is lying.  My husband probably got pretty tired of me yelling at the TV that I could tell when Bush II was lying about weapons of mass destruction, or yellow cake in Niger, or denying the outing of Valerie Plame (covert CIA agent), among other lies.  He gets a really peculiar look when lying, and in the long term, I was correct.

Also, the absolute lies about Saddam Hussein throwing the nuclear weapons investigators out of the country were obvious.  They were pulled out because El Baradei was not finding any weapons of mass destruction, and since this was to be one of the reasons the Bush administration was creating to justify invading Iraq inspectors could not be left there.  Once the inspectors were out, the rhetoric was ratcheted up about Saddam lying about not having any weapons.  In the long term it was proven that there were never any, so how could Saddam prove that there were none when the plan was to accuse him of having them?  It was truly a Catch 22 for Saddam.  The US would not allow independent inspectors in to prove that there were none, and thus Saddam could not prove verbally that there were none since the US needed to prove that there were.  Saddam Hussein was a truly wicked man.  But try him for what he had actually done, not for what he hadn’t. 

So our war is over.  It should never have begun.  It was so horrible for the Iraqi civilians, to say nothing of our own service people who were sent over there to fight and for some to die.  Our service personnel and their families suffered through what they honestly believed was the right thing to do, and for that they truly need to be honored.

Plan B

Plan B

Both sides of the hoopla over whether to allow girls 17 or younger to purchase what is basically a morning after contraception pill, which must be used within 72 hours to be effective, have some good points.  But first we must concede that this pill is safe to use, and apparently the science indicates that it is.

Let me point out first that we have four daughters.  Although now they are certainly beyond the age of beginning to make such decision for themselves, I have a certain bias toward parents.  After all, parents are responsible for their children through to the age of their 18^th birthday, which certainly indicates a great amount of parental anxiety, and in my mind, rightly so.  If the parents have a really great relationship with their daughters, the girls probably will not need a Plan B, but if for some ugly reason, like rape happens to them, their parents will be right there with them and probably buying Plan B for the girl.

On the other hand I have enough experience in this world to know that not all young girls have parents, or other caregivers, whom they can trust with such intimate knowledge of their behaviors.  In this case, a girl ought to be able to fend for herself, which just might include the purchase of Plan B.  Since Plan B is so expensive, it is doubtful if most girls under the age of 17 can indiscriminately pop on down to the drugstore and purchase a whole lot of boxes of these pills if the pills became available to girls under the age of 18.

And yet these are the girls who will need access to Plan B the most.  We hear constantly about the evils of abortion, and I am certainly not one who believes in indiscriminate abortion, either.  However, if a young girl gets pregnant, the only alternatives are carrying a baby to term and putting the child up for adoption, or having an abortion.  Forcing a young girl to carry a baby to term is, in my mind, not a good proposition.  She is not mature enough to know how to care for a baby, or to recognize that a baby is a 24/7 proposition for 18 years!  And beyond, if need be.  If she opts to carry the baby to term, and if her parents are at all responsible, then they have the potential responsibility of raising another family.  They may or may not be emotionally or physically fit to take this on.

This is one of those times where one tends to decide an issue based on personal experience or religious conviction which may not be the same personal experience or conviction of many other young girls.  We all need to take into account the reality of the life experiences of others, and not judge an issue based on our own biases.  These biases may be perfectly valid for our own experience, but not perhaps for others.  Decisions must be based on what is best for all concerned at the emotionally charged time.

This is such an emotionally charged issue that I, for one, am glad I am not making the policy decisions.

Tomorrow

Generally I post my views on Friday afternoon, in time for the weekend net surfers.  Today, however, we had a retirement party to go to which I thought was in the morning, but turned out to be in the afternoon.  So, will have something by tomorrow. 

Incipient Totalitarianism

On March 22, 2010, James Zogby posted on HuffPost (Huffington Post) Social News, Frightening GOP Behavior.

In this post Mr. Zogby wrote that time after time in the debate leading up to the final vote on the health care reform bill, “A Republican talking point repeated ad nauseam during yesterday’s debate pounded on the theme that they, and they alone, had the right to speak for “the will of the American people”.”  This theme was repeated over and over, using different words and phraseology, but, “All making the same point – that the GOP speaks for the American people.” 

This was written prior to the 11/10 elections remember. The final paragraph reads:

“Listening to the rhetorical excesses of last summer’s demonstrators, or those who mobilized to chant slurs at Democrats over the weekend, or to the radio and TV personalities who incite with hate and fear (“that we are losing our country”), or the GOP Congressional leadership who charge much the same and incite in similar ways – I hear echoes of last century’s history.  The behavior fits a frightening pattern and ought to be of concern.”

The shenanigans of the Republicans in Congress have kept the focus on Washington as they continue with the above behavior, but at the state level even worse behavior is taking place and except for Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow and Laurence O’Donnell on MSNBC, there has been little or nothing mentioned in the main stream media.

The Governor of the State of Michigan, through Public Act 4, can remove duly elected officials from office by declaring a financial state of emergency in the targeted jurisdiction.  I have scanned the act, and frankly, it doesn’t mean much in the way of protecting citizens of the four cities and one school district that have already been taken over, and have had an emergency city manager take over all of the administrative and financial functions for those cities and district.  There was a lot of rhetoric about the fact that these are cities, and I presume the school district, that are over 50% minority populations, and that this is basically a racist move.  These cities may have been targeted by the white GOPers in the mistaken belief that the minority citizens wouldn’t know how to fight back (a belief that is being proven wrong as I write), but I rather think that if the GOP can get away with these tactics in Michigan, the nose of totalitarianism is under the tent of our democracy. 

Go back to the beginning of this posting and read again Zogby’s final paragraph.  This is the type of behavior that dictators always use – some trumped up reason to seize control of governments everywhere.  What is being legally questioned, and rightly so, is how can the duly elected representatives of the people be summarily removed from office because one politician, in this case the governor of Michigan, decides the jurisdiction which these officials represent are in financial difficulties.  As a retired elected official, I find this action to be absolutely intolerable, disgusting, un-American, anti-democratic, and treasonable.  Other than that, I don’t have much of a problem with it!

Go out and join the closest Occupy demonstration you can find.  Now.

Addendum to Critical Thinking

Addendum to “Critical Thinking”

In yesterday’s blog I concluded with the following paragraph, inferring that there was a concerted effort by politicians to divert attention from the reasons for the OWS movement onto police brutality by having senior officers in departments, who have no business being involved in the actual policing, indulging in a less than professional manner, such as the “white shirt” in the NYPD and the Lieutenant at UC Davis.  Both of them sort of went bonkers with the pepper spray.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.

Of course today there was an article on Reader Supported News, titled The ‘Crackdown on Occupy’ Controversy, written by Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK, 12/3/11.  I will be mentioning a “Verheyden-Hilliard”.  This is Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the DC Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

This is a 10 page article, but well worth reading in its entirety.  Please do so.  Here I will quote three of four of Wolf’s final paragraphs in the article.

“But as far as my central argument goes, I stand my ground.  I have here presented additional evidence that NYPD and federal authorities coordinate efforts in the surveillance and arrest of OWS supporters.  I have presented what appears to be DHS’s own non-denial, as of this writing, of potential lower level staff involvement.  The oversight role of DHS by specific congressmen, as specified clearly on DHS’s own website is clear.  I argue still the congressmen and women have a confirmed financial interest in the status quo, which individual Occupy members’ first 100 answers to me about their agenda would directly threaten.”

“My analysis about the various forms of collaboration between DHS and local law enforcement is “on firm footing”, confirms Verheyden-Hilliard, “and the record will speak for itself as it comes out.  The whole last decade has been about the integration of law enforcement on a vertical level.”

There is a house on fire, and it is ours.”

During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to only employ those who were in sympathy with the objectives of that administration.  This has been documented too many times for me to attempt to post them all here.  Since Wolf cites the fact that DHS would like to narrow the investigation to only senior staff at DHS, it would appear that lower staff were likely involved in this coordination effort.  All across the country the crackdown on OWS occurred all at once, so to speak, with subsequent incidents of police misbehavior.  This is what I meant by “throwing the police under the bus”.  The low-level officers apparently were acting mostly professionally.  But by upper-level personnel indulging in less than desirable behavior, it has smeared the reputation of all of our first responders.  And taken the emphasis off of the legitimate concerns of OWS, and onto manufactured police brutality.

This is not only really sad, but disgusting!

Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Years ago I had the pleasure of taking a class at a state college in beginning Greek logic.  I was not terrifically good at it, but it did open my mind toward doing some critical thinking of my own.  This is a really good thing to be able to do with all of the illogicalities one can either read or see every day.  There are three illogicalities that have really struck me lately.  A couple are serious – one is not, but is none the less instructive.

The first one is the Mike Huckabee commercial that airs almost nightly on MSNBC, and regards his petition to the Senate to urge the Senate to overturn what is unofficially known as “Obamacare”.  He urges viewers to sign the petition because to not do so will cause us all to be overrun by some socialist plot, or something on that order.  But the final clip states, and I quote, “Even if you have signed before, call and sign again”.  Really?  This is obviously not an official petition of any kind.  This sort of thing used to be known as stuffing the ballot box, or in this case, stuffing the petition.  Since this is not an official petition, this urging to sign more than once is probably not illegal, but it certainly strikes me as being unethical.  When these signatures reach the Senate it purportedly will infer that all of these people are opposed to Obamacare, when in actuality many of the signatures will be duplicate.  Rather than having a million people sign, it may be a lesser number signing a million times! 

The second illogical incident was actually an article I read for home beauty.  It was indicating that one needs to look one’s best when attending Christmas parties, but that having one’s hair “done” at a sylist could be as much as $45.00 a visit.  It suggested purchasing items that would allow one to style one’s own hair at home.  I totaled up the amount all of the hair products would have cost and they came to some $170.00.  Now since I have short hair and don’t really need more than a good cut every month, this was all sort of academic to me, but unless one had to go to the stylist more than four times, it was about the same as buying all of the various products.  It seemed to me the article was more interested in selling hair products than in saving the harried woman money.

The third illogicality was a discussion I had concerning the pepper-sprayed students at UCDavis.  If any reader has not seen that clip, it was of a group of students, about 12-15, sitting blocking a sidewalk, and they had their arms intertwined.  The students were ordered by the police officer in charge, a Lieutenant, to disperse.  They refused to comply, at which point they could legitimately have been arrested.  There were numerous officers there, sort of standing back, but there were enough that four officers could have separated two of the students each, probably having to drag them off since they undoubtedly would have gone limp, but doing so without harming the students.  Now comes the illogical part.  The students were wearing hooded sweatshirts or had bandanas covering their faces, and there were several standing by with video cameras.  The Lieutenant walked up to the students about 3 feet away, and began shooting streams of pepper spray at their faces.  His body language was that of someone spraying bugs on a hedge.  He went up and down the row of students, spraying away.  The discussion I was involved with indicated he had the right to use pepper spray because the students had not only disobeyed an order, but were wearing hooded sweatshirts and bandanas, which indicated, along with the other students with cameras that they expected to be pepper sprayed.  Well, as far as I know, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a bandana over one’s face is not illegal.  Nor is having someone there to video an incident, so long as one is not interfering with the action, which none of the camera people were.  Nor is expecting something unpleasant to happen illegal.  Therefore, using the sweatshirts, bandanas, cameras and expectations as an excuse to pepper spray non-violent protesters is illogical.  The majority of the officers, I must add, were acting in a totally appropriate and professional manner.  It was just one, apparently rogue, officer.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.

No Simpler Time

Historian and playwright Jan-Ruth Mills teaches Holocaust History at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ.  In October of this year, she served dramaturg for a reading of Sinclair Lewis’ IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE to celebrate the 75^th Anniversary of the Federal Theater Project, which was the occasion for writing the below. 

We hear a lot these days about wanting to return to the “real America”.  Is this the “real America” the speakers have in mind?  Kudos to Jan, our kid, for researching and writing this, and giving me permission to reprint it here.

No Simpler Time

Jan-Ruth Mills

Imagine a United States of America where

Children are forcibly taken from their parents to schools “as far as possible from [their] home environment” in order to strip them of their culture and make them as “American” as possible (within the limitations of their “racial” characteristics).[1]

Corporate donors establish a Eugenics Record Office (ERO) to promote the breeding of “good” American families. A majority of states practice forced sterilization. When a case challenging the sterilization of a young woman is heard by the Supreme Court, an ERO officer testifies that she, like her mother, is a promiscuous imbecile (although she earned Bs in grammar school and her pregnancy was the result of rape). Her baby is found to be defective as well. The Chief Justice writes in the majority opinion, “Three generations of imbecility is enough.” Impressed, Nazi Germany models sterilization laws after ours.[2]

Tens of thousands of African American men (370,701 in one year in one state alone) are arrested on minor charges and then “leased” to US Steel and other corporations. With no hope of appeal and no oversight of working conditions, thousands die of starvation or beatings or illness. Chained together 24/7 for years, they eat, sleep, and defecate without hope of privacy. Some are transported to worksites in open cages. A white farmer writes the US Justice Department that thousands of black families are held on farms without proper nutrition, clothing, medical assistance, or education. The Justice Department seldom investigates reports.[3]

Private militias employing more than 100,000 men,[4] with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department, and local law enforcement suppress the labor movement, often violently. “State officials seemed genuinely confused as to the difference between public and private power, and treated corporate interests as if they were the public interest.”[5]

Would that these were fictions rather than the historical context for Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. For millions of working class Americans, people of color and women, if we understand the “it” to be the loss of habeas corpus and the rights of privacy, assembly, speech, and press, and the threat of arrest or even murder by corporate militias deputized by the state to bust unions, “it” did not require a fascist dictatorship. It was here.

Those who sought to end the progressive labor movement’s efforts to end child labor and to establish a minimum wage and a forty-hour workweek were not limited to using the resources of capital and the state and federal government. At the 1911 annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) the president declared, “The American Federation of Labor is engaged in open warfare against Jesus Christ and his cause."[6]  In the interwar period, NAM promoted the “America Plan,” an insistence on open shops and a refusal to negotiate with unions, declaring them to be un-American.

Unions would be further characterized as un-Christian by evangelists like Abraham Vereide, Frank Buchanan, and Bruce Barton. Abandoning the fire-and-brimstone preaching style of Billy Sunday (whom many believed was the model for Lewis’ Elmer Gantry) for a consumer capitalist Christianity that could appeal to the “best people,”[7]  these men developed an elite fundamentalism that ministered to the likes of Henry Ford and James Farrell (Chairman, US Steel) as well as many political leaders. They preached that submission to God would provide a solution to the conflicts between business and labor. After returning from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Buchanan declared his admiration for Hitler and his belief that “in a God controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.”[8] Later he would explain that the best America would be a “God-controlled fascist dictatorship.”[9]

All this talk of submission might be dismissed as a simple matter of faith (or preference), except that in practice Ford and US Steel and other members of NAM viewed submission to the will of the corporations as their employee’s Christian duty, and they went to great lengths to avoid collective bargaining. Their Jesus cared more about a closed shop than about poverty and unemployment. Private militias continued to grow and acquired millions of dollars worth of machine- and handguns as well as tear gas and even chloropicrin, a lethal gas used in WWI. “While most hostile tactics of employers were legal—there was no federal legislation prohibiting espionage or violent strike breaking and private police agencies went largely unregulated by state and federal law—the activities of labour groups were frustrated by court injunctions and antitrust prosecution. It was only labour’s use of force which was illegitimate.”[10] Except for sticks and stones and their raised voices, strikers had little with which to defend themselves.

Despite these dangers, millions of Americans took to the streets to secure the rights of assembly, association, and speech. It Can’t Happen Here takes place in 1936, two years after the New Deal’s recognition of labor unions’ collective bargaining rights inspired the West Coast waterfront strike. In San Francisco, striking longshoreman faced the San Francisco police, deputized “special police” (the militia of the San Francisco Industrial Association), and finally the National Guard.[11] On Bloody Thursday, July 6, 1934, three strikers were killed. In typically anti-union rhetoric, common in the main stream newspapers of the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Police revolvers cracked into mobs of howling, cursing strikers.”[12] (Howling and cursing are not, of course, illegal.) The next day, the silent funeral procession down Market Street of thousands of longshoreman and their families led to a city-wide general strike.[13] In all, there were 1,856 in 1936,[14] the same year the La Follette Senate Committee began hearings into the abuses of corporate militias to bust unions.[15]

Long before writing It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis dreamed of writing a novel about labor, but despite attendance at union meetings, interviewing Tom Mooney and Eugene Debs, and even hiring a journalist to help him gather details, the subject failed to inspire.[16] Despite his diligence, he remained unable to create working class characters that rise above caricatures of lazy hired help or curmudgeonly type setters. One reason may be found in the words of John Pollikop in the novel, who tells the middle-aged and middle-class newspaper editor Jessups,

You never thought about them, because they was just routine news, to stick in your paper. Things like the sharecroppers and the Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies in Kentucky shot striking miners.[17]

If Lewis was never able to rise above the limitations of the wire service reports, his novel and play challenged artists and intellectuals to imagine living under the same conditions so many of their compatriots endured. He challenged the middle class to rise to the heroism they read about in the morning papers. The existence of a private militia attached to Windrip’s political party is presented as something foreign, something that smacks of the Nazi’s Sturbmabteilung or Mussolini’s Squadristri, but its name, the Corpos, connects them, if thinly, to the realities of the union activists who kept big corporations from making “it” happen here.

---

[1] “The Problem of Indian Administration,” Alaskool Central. 2004. Web. 10/1/2011

[2] The case is Buck v. Bell, the young woman’s name was Vivienne Buck. See http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl

[3] Alabama, 1927. Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 375

[4] Free, Rhona C. 21^st Century Economics. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010

[5] Weiss, Robert P. “Private Detective Agencies and Labour Discipline in the United States, 1855-1946, The Historical Journal. Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar. 1986, 97 Jstor. Web.  10/11/2011

[6] Auerbach, Jerold S. Labor and Liberty: The La Follete  Committee and the New Deal, New York: Bobbs-Merril, 1966, 146

[7] Sharlet, Jeff, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, New York: Harper, 2008, 125

[8] Ibid, 130

[9] Ibid.

[10] Weiss, 97

[11] Bloody Thursday, Cotton, Jared. PBS. Television.

[12] “3 Killed, Thirty One shot in widespread rioting”The Daily News. 5 July 1934. San Francisco Virtual Museum . 10/5/2011

[13] Bloody Thursday. Cotton, Jared. PBS. Television.

[14] Free, 201

[15] Weiss, 88

[16] Hersey, John. “Chronology,” Sinclair Lewis, New York: Library Classics, 1992

[17] Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet, 1970, 249

Finally Optimism

Finally, Optimism

There is probably more to feel optimistic about the future of our country now than there has been ever since W was elected.  I really wanted him to succeed, but, alas, my desires were cruelly thwarted not only by his own ineptitude, but by the lust for power and greed of those advising him.

During these present seemingly turbulent times, however, I see the people of this country rising up, finally, and fighting back.  It disturbed me over the past few years when I would hear about the monumental apathy of the young people of this country.  I didn’t see that, but neither did I see a banner under which they could coalesce and march.

“We are the 99%” makes a marvelous banner, and it is one which does not exclude anyone who wishes to march under that banner.  Over time, I’m sure there will be more definitive objectives formulated, as well as leaders of the movement emerging.  As one pundit said this morning, “Give them a break.  They are only two months old!” 

In the meantime, the rest of us who support them but cannot for whatever reason join in must continue to raise issues that need addressing.  Last week I mentioned that JPMorgan had accrued $547B from food stamp/debit card holders.  It is easy for the banks to garner these funds by the means of “swipe” fees.  Whenever the card is swiped, a fee is automatically deducted.  To charge food stamp/debit card recipients a “swipe” fee is, in my opinion, about as crass and corrupt as one can get.  This service should be provided by the Federal government, and for a lot less money.

But, one of the good things that has happened is the formation of an organization, United Republic.  This organization came about from Dylan Ratigan’s movement, Get Money Out, and other like-minded organizations, such as the Democracy Fund.  They have united under the name United Republic: Democracy Is Not For Sale.  Their goal is to get money out of politics.  Pure and simple.  The means for doing this is not so simple.  One method is a constitutional amendment, which although it will take time, work and much politicking, would be probably the most permanent!  Google United Republic and check this out yourself.

For these, and many other reasons, I am much more optimistic about the future for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  If we can keep up the pressure, they will have a much better future than I feared they would have. 

And are these kids cute! 

Privatizing Government Services?

Of course it is not possible for any one person to say “I speak for #OWS”, nor do I presume to speak for anyone else who supports #OWS.  There are as many reasons for supporting the movement as there are people who do.

In previous blogs, however, I did emphasize that I don’t like the word “fairness” in relation to what the occupiers want.  That is a rather weak word, in my opinion, reminding me of all the times my own children would say, “That isn’t fair!”  The word “justice” is a much stronger word, and that one always reminds me of the Book of Amos in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, “Let justice roll like a river, washing oppression away”.

People have also questioned what I mean about justice.  Precisely what is unjust that requires mending.  I have a really good example.  At the last meeting of our local Democratic club we had a representative from our local County Department of Social Services (DSS) discussing various programs that DSS administers, including the food stamp program, which for some dumb reason was renamed here in California as CalFresh.  There was a discussion about the replacement of stamps with debit cards and how convenient these were for the both the clients and the grocery stores.  The amount the client is awarded could be entered on the card which looks just likes a credit card, and thus takes away the embarrassment of having to have food stamps in the first place.  I thought this was a really great idea.  I could see how this would cut down on printing cost for the government and handling of food stamps for the grocery store.

Then, much to my consternation, I read an article on the blog, Faith In Public Life, 11/7/11, titled The Danger of Privatizing Government Support Programs.  The article quoted an article on New Deal 2.0, a project of the Roosevelt Institute which highlighted the fact that since benefits from government programs like unemployment aid and food stamps can now be administered through prepaid debit cards, rather than cash, users are running up fees for using these cards at banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America, and big banks are reaping the rewards.  As the New Deal 2.0 reporter explains:

“Big banks are making a tidy profit by acting as middlemen for what should be publicly provided services.  In just three months, from July and September, Ross reports that U.S.Bancorp, which provides unemployment benefit debit cards, made $357 million in revenue in the division that handles the cards.  That amount is more than one-fourth of its total revenue.  I previously reported that JP Morgan made $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of last year in the division that handles food stamp cards, and it was up two percent in the last three months of the year.  The head of the division himself has said, ‘Volumes have gone through the roof in the last couple of years… This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.’

“In addition to banks profiting off of prepaid debit card fees, some of them are also getting paid directly by state governments to administer these social safety net programs.  Overall, this system results in big banks profiting from hard economic times that strain American families—as more Americans enroll in food stamp programs, banks collect more money from fees and more money from the state.”

These programs could easily be administered by both state and federal government at a much, much  lower cost.  Banks are in the business of making money regardless of the source.  Governments are in the business of providing the assistance to people in need.

Occupy Oakland Revisited.1

Several years ago our small city became the target for partiers from all over.  We contributed enough of our own locals to create a problem, but adding people coming in from all over to “Mardi Party” the weekend before Mardi Gras created a major problem.  We have a state college here, which was the locus.

My daughter, the police officer, was on duty that night, but fortunately was not at the center of the considerable riot that ensued.  A day or two later I was in my Supervisorial office waiting for my car pool ride to return from a doctor’s visit when our very competent clerk came in with a phone call.  She said, with her hand over the receiver, that she didn’t think I wanted to take the call, but I was the only Supervisor there at the moment.  She told me that the woman on the line wanted me to call our local Sheriff to “tell” him that he should let her son out of jail because all he had done was throw a brick at a police officer.  My comment to our clerk was to ask her what right her son had to throw a brick at my daughter! 

In the Occupy Oakland reporting only Keith Olbermann, that I know of, has commented that there have been some seven officers injured requiring medical treatment because of bottle, rock, paint and other objects being thrown at the police.  We forget that these police are also human beings, with all of the weaknesses as well as strengths of other human beings.  Of course, at least in our city, they have considerable ongoing training on how to restrain themselves, and how to continue in their professionalism to follow up on their motto: To Protect and to Serve. 

This is not to say there aren’t a few rogue police officers and departments, and politicians willing to exploit them for their own agendas.  Everyone knows that there are, and when they are indicted and proven guilty in a court of law, they should have the book thrown at them, regardless of what their orders from the higher ups were.  That is not the point.  The point here is do not blame all of the police for what some do. 

And in conclusion, it is of course really very bad that two Iraq war veterans were injured in the Oakland melees.  I’m not sure if these veterans wore distinctive clothing identifying them as veterans, but it really makes no difference.  It is of course really very bad that two American citizens were injured to the extent these veterans were.  We truly need to have peace here.

If we would have peace, we must work for justice.