Heresy, Heresy!

Heresy, Heresy!!

Today, 9/28/12, on Martin Bashir, Washington Post Columnist Eugene Robinson stated, and I paraphrase, that CEO’s of businesses do not make good political candidates and/or politicians.  In this case Mitt Romney.  If I were the swooning kind, I would have swooned with joy!  This has been my contention for years.

Business types, especially the ones at the top, are simply used to telling people what to do.  If the person doesn’t do it, or makes a mess of it, people like Romney enjoy firing them.  Also, the phrase that government people don’t know how to run government because they have never made a payroll is probably the most idiotic statement I have ever heard.  What does making a payroll have to do with running a government? 

To start with, government is not a business.  A business rightly is in the business of making a profit.  It couldn’t stay in business if it didn’t.  The more profit a business makes, the more people it can employ, and the more it contributes to the general well-being of the community.  So a CEO of a good-sized business is constantly on the lookout for both ways to make more money, and ways not to spend money.  The orientation and mindset of dynamic CEO’s are actually a detriment to running government.   

Government’s primary role, however, is to spend money.  It receives a certain amount of revenue from the people, and must budget that revenue to provide the things that people need.  All people need the infrastructure that government provides:  roads, bridges, school buildings, library buildings, fire and police stations, government buildings for services districts, cities, counties, states and federal offices.  The next tier of expenditures is the employees to occupy the buildings so that these public employees can provide the essential and emergency services that people need:  teachers, librarians, fire and police personnel, transportation departments, department of motor vehicles (licenses), and on and on.  Every time I leave my home in my vehicle, I rely on government to keep my very rural road in enough repair in these tight fiscal times that I can drive on it, for example.  People who live in downtown New York rely on their government for the same essential service.  Public employees are at the mercy of politicians who are elected to office, and oftentimes the quality of our politicians don’t make good personnel managers, thus public sector unions are absolutely necessary under these circumstances to protect the employees.  Not only are the politicians responsible to the community and also their employees, but so should the unions.   

Government is the opposite of business in that government is not in the business of making money.  That is why this push to privatize government services is so terrifyingly dangerous.  We saw what happened when student loans were turned over to Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae.  These institutions had to make a profit since they were businesses.  When government took back the administration of student loans and took the profit motive out, there has been much more funding available for Pell Grants, etc. for students.  Prisons are the most egregious example of privatization.  Since they are a business, they must make a profit.  The businesses do this by decreasing the amenities the prisoners receive, such as decent food and medical care.  Further, the prisoners are often leased out to companies to work for a pittance as low as $1.50 cents a day.  The prisons, of course, are paid much more by the businesses, which love this deal since they don’t need to worry about health benefits, decent working conditions, pension benefits, or raises.  This practice in the United States is a scandal that has long gone unnoticed because it benefits some of the biggest corporations.  Many of the prisoners are undocumented immigrants who have absolutely no recourse.  This used to be known by the ugly word: slavery. 

Of course in a blog of this length it is not possible to go into all of the ways that business and government do not function the same.  It is possible for business and government to cooperate, but only if they realize that each has its place in the universe.

The people who make the best politicians are women who are used to running a household and do a lot of volunteer work.  A household only gets in so much money, and this amount must be budgeted to provide for the essentials the family needs, as well as to save a bit out for what the family wants.  Much like government.  And people who have done a lot of volunteer work, and especially those who have been in charge of volunteers, know that volunteers, like government workers, cannot be fired without cause, that volunteers must be held accountable for the work they volunteer for without making them feel they are being manipulated or coerced.  Even though the mayor, Chair of the Board of Supervisors, Governor, or President would like to wave a magic wand and get what he or she wants done, they are all constrained by the laws and ordinances that prevail.  Which is why I get irritated at business people who whine about regulations.  We all have regulations in our lives.   

So, hail the heresy that CEO’s do not make good politicians or Presidents. 

 

 

The 47% Fiasco

This has been truly the week that was!!  Being a news junkie, I listened to and watched more than I really needed to.  After several days of analysis, replayed clips of Romney placing his gold foot squarely in his mouth and then Senator Obama discussing ‘redistribution’, three comments, I think, were absolute gems.

The first is that in just a few short years, my husband and I have gone from some of the youngest of The Greatest Generation, touted by Tom Brokaw as the generation that lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War, then simply got an education, paid for by the government either in the public education system, or the GI Bill, passed by Congress, to pay returning veterans to go to school and get good educations.  My brother earned his Doctor of Education on the GI Bill, and pretty much dedicated his life to teaching.  Although not on the GI Bill, my husband earned his PhD in Soil Physics, and because of his research, thousands of people in the Central Valley have clean water to drink, and he has helped other locations pro bono after he retired from the US Dept. of Agriculture.  But after WWII, we just simply got on with our lives.  No big deal.  It was somewhat of a shock, then to realize we had gone from such an elevated status to being ‘moochers’, feeling like victims, unwilling to take responsibility for our lives, which we thought we had been doing for the past 60 years.  But we have pensions and health insurance from the government, paid into by us for those 60 years, along with my Social Security and Medicare.  What slackers we have been without even knowing it.  At the ages of 82 and 83, I guess we had best go out and get jobs to satisfy the $50,000 a plate lunch (or was it dinner?) bunch.

The next comments that I have found hilarious except for their utter stupidity is the taking President Obama to task for calling for the ‘redistribution’ of resources.  Ever since Ronald Reagan, the sainted Teflon President, wealth has been being redistributed – up.  Every chart shows that the average income of wage earners has remained stagnant since he was President, an almost straight line across the bottom of the chart, while the incomes of the wealthy keep going up, and up, and up.  It seems to me that just like leeches, the top 2% are sucking the basic quality of life out of the bulk of the population to appease their own avarice.  Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, made the comment that the 47% video was a call that, “We have to stop coddling the servants”.  Right on, Mr. Robinson!  And another pundit remarked that the word ‘redistribution’ is code for, “Those black people are after your stuff!”

The third observation, made by Krystal Ball, on The Cycle, was actually a question.  She asked who the most powerful person in the world is at this moment.  Not the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, or any of the other fat cats.  The most powerful person in the world is the worker, for minimum wage, no doubt, who took the 47% video!  Now this worker maybe set the cell phone hoping to record something he could sell.  The reason why is irrelevant.  He took it, then had the good sense to take it to Mother Jones who checked both the person setting up the phone, and the video itself to verify its accuracy.  Perhaps he or she was a student making a few extra bucks working the party.  Only Mother Jones knows and they aren’t talking.  But this action only goes to show that the most prosaic, mundane action in the world can have powerful effects.  It reinforces the fact that anyone of us, all of us, are important.  No one is any more important than anyone else.  We are all God’s children, and any one of us can make a terrific difference in this world by our actions.  Together we can change this world for the better.

Perhaps the saddest part of Romney’s blurt was that he believes a person’s worth is measured by whether they pay income taxes or not.  Don’t pay any attention to what a person does with his or her life.  Don’t pay any attention to whether they make a positive difference in anyone else’s life, however small.  Don’t pay any attention to anything else but making lots and lots of money.  Is this what the once Grand Old Party has fallen to?  Total inconsistency in the message, to wit., you are only successful if you make a lot of money and can avoid paying income taxes by parking your money elsewhere, and you are a total failure if you don’t make enough money to pay income taxes. 

This whole thing has gotten so ridiculous that it is impossible to make sense of any of it.

Political Capitalism 101

First, the other day I received a bumper sticker, plus the usual letter asking for money, from some very conservative right-wing Catholic organization explaining how my religious liberty was at stake because the Affordable Health Care Act allows for insurance companies to provide contraception coverage for women who are not Catholic.  The religious liberty of these women, assuming they have a religion, did not seem to be an issue.  But the bumper sticker read, “I’m Catholic, and I vote”.  I looked at it for a long time, and then put it on my vehicle.  But underneath, and it fit quite nicely, I placed an Obama/Biden sticker, so it now reads, “I’m Catholic and I vote Obama/Biden”.  So, if anyone who reads this gets the above mentioned bumper sticker, please use it in the manner I have described.  Mustn’t let any free bumper sticker go to waste!

But the main point of this post is the extraordinarily blunder Mitt Romney made concerning the incident in the Middle East.  Let’s review the time line.

1.       A rather noisy crowd gathers in front of the American Embassy in Cairo regarding a ginned up 10 minute crass video insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

2.      The members of the Embassy are rightly concerned and issue a statement decrying the video and making a statement to the effect that it is not the policy of the United States to insult anyone’s religious faith, and that our country is based on freedom of religion. 

3.      Concurrently, the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is really under attack, and four Americans are killed, including the American Ambassador to Libya. 

4.      Prior to the news of the tragedy in Benghazi, however, Romney issued a statement that the Obama Administration had apologized to the protesters in Cairo, and that this is but more of Obama’s bad foreign policy of apologizing for America, blah, blah, blah.  (That neither Obama nor his Administration has ever apologized for America is apparently totally irrelevant to Romney.)

As we know, these protests against this disgusting video have traveled clear across the Moslem world from Morocco to Indonesia by today, 9/14/12.  As many thoughtful pundits have said, it is very difficult for people who have lived their entire lives under a dictatorship that controlled their very lives to understand that in the United States we have freedom of speech, religion, the right of free association, etc.  Thus, when something like this video is made, it is virtually impossible to make those offended understand the government was not behind it.

What does this tell us about Mitt Romney?  Michelle Obama made a comment during her speech at the Democratic Convention that was spot on when she said that being in office doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.  I can attest to that from my own experience, miniscule though it was compared to the Presidency.  I found I had talents I had no idea even existed.  So, what do we know now about Mitt Romney.

From a previous blog, Romney and Bullying, I discussed Romney’s lack of empathy for either dogs or people:  from harassing the perhaps gay boy in high school, to strapping the dog’s kennel on the roof of the car for a 12 hour trip, to gutting businesses for profit and thereby stripping the workers of health care, jobs and pensions.

Der Mitt jumped on this event in Cairo before he had all of the facts, though that has usually never bothered him before, in an effort to expand his political capital.  He saw an opportunity to undercut President Obama, he thought, and it apparently never occurred to him that he was damaging the image of the United States at the same time.  Nor, I doubt, did he care.

The kindest thing to believe is that he blundered, though he has not only not backed down, he has tripled-down on his statements that Obama is weak because he hasn’t invaded another country yet.

Or, the unkindest thing to believe is that the video was deliberately brought to the attention of the Moslem world on the anniversary of 9/11 to incite riots and give Romney an opportunity to indulge in what the radical right wing of the Republican Party would perceive to be “strong manly and American” rhetoric, rather than the nuanced and striving for peace of the Obama foreign policy.  (I doubt that even the radical right wing anticipated the tragedy in Libya because apparently it was a separate operation by a rather small radical right wing group in Libya.) 

Romney had his speech deriding the Obama administration readily at hand.  He stumbled in his presentation to make it fit the statement from the Embassy.  The surfacing of the video, the incitement to protests, this statement from Romney have an unpleasant “Turd Blossom” odor.  

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins

 

Usually when people refer to the Middle Ages they only have really negative things to say about the major religion of the time – Catholic Christianity.  But with almost everything, not all of it was bad by a long shot.  Some was, so don’t think I am naïve! 

One of the best things about it was that it defined pretty well what behavior was to be sought after, and what behavior was to be shunned and ripped out of one’s life patterns.  These last were the Seven Deadly Sins.  The good behavior was called the Fruits of the Spirit.  The Spirit in this case is the Holy Spirit, or third person of the Trinity.  These Fruits of the Spirit can be the theme of another blog, but today I’ll stick to the Deadly ones.  I actually hadn’t thought much about these Seven Deadly Sins since Vatican II when the emphasis in the Church turned more on the positive actions that Christians should take to help transform the individual and society into something more akin to what God has taught in almost every religion that society ought to be.  

A few nights after forcing myself to watch the Republican National Convention I couldn’t get back to sleep in the middle of the night, and my mind began to wander over and around the speeches I had heard, and the budget plan the Paul Ryan, Vice Presidential candidate, but current Congressman from Wisconsin had presented.  And, there they were – the Seven Deadly Sins.  Pride, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth.  What was said that brought these to mind? 

Pride

Pride is knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you and only you know what is right.  It is not ever being able to admitting a fault.  So, the Republicans started out President Obama’s Presidency determined to see to it that he was a one-term President, and as we know now, they made this determination on the day he was inaugurated!  And in February of 2009 they were already calling President Obama a failure!!  That’s because they are right and everyone else is wrong. 

Greed

Greed can easily be explained by the quip I had put together when I was in office and people would come into my office demanding that I approve of whatever they wanted to do, regardless of whether it would be damaging to their neighbors, or in compliance with the laws.  “What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is mine.  I want mine, I want it now, and I want you to pay for it”.  This is the attitude of the the 1% who have started the mantra, “No new taxes”.  

Lust

Lust doesn’t have to be just sex.  One can lust for power as well.  Lust is the Deadly Sin that allows what one lusts after to take over every other thought.  Thus, the lust for power will infiltrate any and all decisions that one, or one’s group, will make. 

Anger

The radical right is really angry that from their perspective they are losing power to that rabble out there called the diversity of America.  They see women and people of color beginning to also gain some power and they are exceedingly angry about that.  So, the best way to keep women out of power is to control their reproductive choices so the women are back under the control of men.  I find it ironic that women in seats of power make decisions that impact the daily lives of people all of the time.  But when it comes to their own bodies, only men can make those decisions.  There is something wrong with that picture, for sure!  People of color are to be feared as well as ‘the other’.  Barack Obama is not quite an American; he probably has not even been born here; and those other people of color will vote to keep him in office, and we will lose even more power, and that makes us really angry.  As well as very afraid. 

Gluttony

Gluttony can be defined as referring only to food.  That is, you have enough food on your plate, but you want even more.  You eat much more than your body needs, you crave more than your body needs, and you become gluttonous.  This can apply to ‘things’, as well.  Who has the need for so many vehicles that he will need an elevator in his garage to bring the vehicle of choice up to be driven away?  Probably Mitt Romney!  There is a difference between what we need and what we want.  We need clean water, adequate food, clothing, shelter, and a safe place to sleep.  Everything else we want.  If we keep those wants in perspective, that is fine.  A really comfortable mattress may not be an actual need, but it sure is a nice want.  It is when our desire for these ‘wants’ gets out of hand that we are in trouble of becoming gluttonous. 

Envy

The radical right accuses those who long for economic justice of being envious of success, when actually the opposite is true.  Those who define success by how much money one has are envious of the ‘widow’s mite’, and they want that as well as their millions or billions of dollars.  For example, I have never figured out why women who can afford to stay home and care for the children are extolled for being really great Moms.  But poor women who are on welfare are cheats and must be sent out to work because they are taking our hard-earned tax dollars!  What is wrong with this picture as well?  To envy the little that the poor have, and a desire to take even that away, probably violates several Deadly Sins. 

Sloth

Another word for sloth is apathy.  In the radical right, sloth is not being able to be bothered by the fact that the economic policies they espouse are causing children, in our own country, to go hungry to bed every night.  Calling this ‘food insecurity’ really bothers me.  It is hunger, and it is totally unacceptable.  Sloth is not caring that people are out of work.  Sloth is not caring that climate change is real, and future generations will have a major problem with this.  I could fill this whole page with examples of sloth in the radical right. 

So, there you have it – the Seven Deadly Sins and the Republican National Convention.  Not a pretty sight for this former Republican.  Whatever happened to the party that supported civil rights; the party that supported clean water, clean air, and the environment in general.  We need that party back, and we need it now.