Category Archives: Politics

George W. Bush and his administration are proving right about one thing at least: they do create the reality in which we live. It is important for us to recognize this truth and elect representatives who will give us a friendlier and more sustainable reality.
Thudfactor references an article in the Washington Post reporting the comments of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). He is quoted as stating that the recent violence against judges is an effect of outrage against activist judges who are unaccountable for their decisions and who use the court for their political agenda. This is pure nonsense, and no one following the facts (or simple logic) would believe the senator. After all, to whom should judges be accountable? If we take the Republican stance, they should (and will) be accountable to their political party and expected by their party to use the court for their political agenda. The senator’s shot falls far below the mark and far to the right. Nevertheless, it points in the right direction.
I have spent most of my life in schools and colleges, institutions of learning that are microcosms of society, for better or worse. I have witnessed firsthand the difficulty that people in positions of power and influence — teachers and administrators — experience in conveying facts and attitudes that are consciously programmed, the elements of the curriculum. The teacher gets into the transmission mode, and the students go to sleep.
On the other hand, there is a hidden curriculum that communicates without effort, always from top to bottom, and always with precision. When its elements are displayed, students freeze in concentration and watch in wonder. This hidden curriculum in schools is the attitude of the top administrators, their politics if you will. It has to do with whether or not they follow the rules they recite. If teachers and administrators are involved in a system that disregards rules, uses authority to promote personal interests, disregards the rights and feelings of others, and uses bullying tactics to enforce order and compliance, the attitude communicates throughout the school. It has an impact upon student behavior and achievement, in the teachers’ lounge, in the lunchroom, and in the playground.
In Washington now we have an administration that has (and therefore teaches) a disregard for law, for the justice system, and for the rule of law. It has disregarded United Nations rulings and used power to advance its own interests. It has disregarded the Geneva Convention. It has used bullying (“Bring it On”) language in a public forum in which we would expect statesmanship. It has shown intolerance for diversity and stated its intention to revise the Constitution to incorporate discriminatory practices based upon gender and sexual orientation. It has made a mantra of privatizing the public good — education, social services, medicine, Social Security. It has announced its intention to stack the courts with partisan judges to promote an ultra-conservative agenda.
There is of course much more evidence than the two courtroom violence cases cited in the Washington Post that the hidden curriculum of the Bush II Administration is being absorbed and put into effect at all levels. Better bloggers than I cite it daily, and you can find two new examples daily on CNN Headline news, burried among the repeat stories and chatter. And there is the law that Jeb Bush wants to sign in Florida legalizing violence. Wait until these “he hit me first” cases reach the courts!
You cannot have a kind and gentle society that lives by law when the top administrators live by pushing people around and refusing to play by the rules. When we elect a president or a senator, we need to be acutely aware of the type of reality in which we want to live.

I am glad we have the new report entitled The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction Report to the President of the United States March 31, 2005, 618 pages in a downloadable .pdf file. We need all of these reports because there is probably a 6-year-old somewhere who still does not know that George W. Bush received (and heard and shared with us) only the intelligence that he ordered to support his plan for war in Iraq. That which did not support the war in Iraq was discouraged and dismissed.
What the Bush Administration is doing with all of these reports is trying to explain why that which worked before for others in the White House — one agency (CIA) focused on International information and one (FBI) on domestic information with all of the information coming together at the President’s desk — did not work for George W. Bush. Oh, wait. This could still have been an intelligence failure. Do we need yet another report?

In an MSNBC story titled “Hand-picked crowds for Social Security show:
Bush preaches to the converted while pitching his overhaul plan” George W. Bush vows to keep saying it until we believe it:

“There is difference of opinion, and I’ve got mine,” Bush said in Memphis, Tenn. “I’m going to continue traveling our country until it becomes abundantly clear to the American people we have a problem.”

I think he is still talking about a problem with Social Security, but who knows?

Why Social Security should not be tied to the stock market may not be readily apparent to those for whom the stock market produces income. These people understand the stock market, but they generally do not understand working for wages.
By the same token, hourly wage workers do not understand the stock market. They know people make money from the stock market, but they don’t understand how that money is made.
So why not let workers make money for their retirement in the stock market? Other than the fact that the stock market doesn’t always make money, and people do in fact always get old and need money, here is a point to consider:
The stock market makes its money on the income of corporations. Corporations make their money by hiring people to work, mostly for low salaries and hourly wages. If a corporation can work people overtime without pay, assign double duties, shorten lunch hours, take away break time, avoid worker health and safety issues, work a large force of part-time people with no benefits or health insurance, etc., then the corporation can raise its profit margin. It can pay its CEO more money, and make more money for its stock holders, at least in the short run, as long as the work force doesn’t actually die. It is in the interest of corporations to keep wages and benefits low and profit margins high.
It is in the interest of the worker, of course, to receive an adequate wage and have health coverage, a safe workplace, and a retirement plan. Corporations do not provide these benefits out of their own good hearts. Corporations have no good hearts. To the extent that workers have these benefits, they are due to government regulation of corporate behavior and the few remaining areas of labor in which collective bargaining is still effective.
When George W. Bush says “ownership society,” he means that when Social Security is privatized workers will “own” a part of corporations. They will share the corporate goal — grow corporate profits. Workers (and their elected representatives) would then willingly give up lunch hours and breaks, vote for laws that permit unpaid overtime, cease clamoring for little things like medical insurance, etc., in the interest of making sure their Social Security will be there for them when they retire. It is sort of a Donner Pass thing — workers would eat themselves to keep from starving.
It is not a sustainable model, you say, but sustainable models are not the Bush long suit.

Giving the management of the safety net for our seniors over to the private (for profit) sector is of course wrong. I am disappointed also to hear Democrats suggesting raising the retirement age. We should fight raising the Social Security age. Here are some points we should be using:

• Professional people and business owners do see retirement the same as wage earners. Professional and business owners continue into retirement as well-paid consultants or simply continue to work because they set their own hours and agendas. Wage earners, who have worked their whole lives to enrich other people, cannot keep the pace of the work-day world past 55 or 60. Their ability, by any means — education, hard work, overtime — to lift their socioeconomic status or achieve any level of self-paced autonomy in their work should be looked at separately. The driving, clock-punching, answer-to-the boss, hands-on production level of work is killing to older people. When we raise the age at which we permit these people to draw Social Security, we are agreeing to keep them hard at work until death and disability relieve us of the problem.
• Improving your socio-economic status by working hard and managing well (upward mobility) in the United States, once the phenomenon of the world for it’s level of opportunity, is non-existent. We have eliminated it by several means, one of which is creating corporate dynasties that preserve the hold of a few wealthy families and another of which is installing these families as the governing class. Under the leadership of these corporate and conservative influences, we have shifted the tax burden to the poor and middle class, further protecting wealth and privilege of the few. Perhaps these are unpopular things to say, but Democrats should be looking at the real statistics on the value of work to the individual worker. It is much less than it was 50 years ago. Work builds wealth, but not the wealth of the worker. Take a look at the “L-Curve.” Google will find it for you. We can use the statistics on “how much work is worth to the worker” to mobilize our more humanitarian and populist causes. We need worker’s rights and fair wages. We can’t get people to believe this if we don’t assemble and show the evidence. The Neo-Con agenda is to promote a dream that has vanished, but every poor clock-punching worker still wants — needs — to believe the dream. That is why the Neo-Cons can make poor people vote for their wealth-building schemes even while they cut entitlements and necessary safety-net features like Medicare and Social Security.
• Working parents have working children (see 1 and 2 above). Raising the Social Security (and Medicare) age takes the support system from young families, keeping Grandma and Grandpa “gainfully employed” until they are dead or disabled, and denying them the retirement years they had hoped for to baby-sit, nurture, and enjoy grandchildren. This more than anything else has disintegrated the American family and put day care on the map of big business. All of us work till we die, and nobody has any time for family unless they are members of the wealthy class (ownership society?) and can manage their own time.
• Older workers (60+) have aging parents, but they cannot draw Social Security at a reasonable age and care for them. Instead, we send our ailing 70-80 year olds for long stays in institutions, keeping elder care firmly in the big business and for-profit sector of the economy and further eroding the family.
• Keeping older workers (60+) on the job because they have to work until they can get Social Security at 66 or 67 means that job and promotion opportunities do not open up for younger people. Entry level jobs and promotion opportunities are blocked by people who have to extend their planned work years.
• During the years from 60 onward, women in particular and a large number of men also do not have any advantage in increased earnings. Many are shuffled to lower-paid jobs, even when they stay in the organizations they have been in for years. Older workers feel the pressure of their sense of value to organizations diminishing, and many feel that they are “hanging on” when their organization really would like to see them gone.
• Perhaps, because of the rapid changes in technology, organizations would work better if workers over 60 retired. Raising the Social Security age runs counter to this idea.
• Most people save a little for retirement. They save it so they can travel, take the vacation they never had or see Europe or South America or Mexico. Raising the Social Security age keeps them until their health and ability to travel is gone, and this money goes to medical costs and nursing homes.
• Churches and charitable causes used to operate on the work of energetic senior volunteers. These people now (and more so in the future if we raise the retirement age again) are still punching a clock. By the offer of government money to faith-based initiatives for community service, and by taking retired seniors out of the available volunteer pool, the Neo-Cons are beginning the push to move this area of community, home, and family into a big-business line item where it will be theirs to manage.
• Medical advances in the past three decades have indeed increased life expectancy. However, the quality of life for seniors has diminished. More live in poverty. More live in pain. More live in nursing homes. Fewer live with their retired children as care-givers. Fewer baby-sit their grandchildren. Fewer can afford travel. Fewer are able to volunteer. Many choose between heating fuel and food. More of their resources are consumed in paying for medicines, and more of them are dying from side effects of medications. We have lost sight of the life cycle, the need for family, the meaning of what it is to age, and the function of health care. We prolong dying and call it increasing life expectancy. Then we use it as an excuse to take that precious 55 to 65 golden age of life and mine it for more production and more billing opportunities. Not only is this immoral, it is also what my mother would call “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
  

With all the cuts in humanitarian and social programs (education, medical care, environment, etc). in the Bush 2006 budget, any senator or congressman who votes for it will certainly not be enjoying the Christmas specials for the next few years.

no_crisis

Originally uploaded by Sarah Williams.

About the Crisis in Social Security:

No “WMD,” or “shortage in flu vaccine,” or “terrorist attack on election day” either.

Social Security has financed itself and several other projects. If Social Security funds had not been used for other projects, the Baby Boomers would have paid for themselves — or in my case, ourselves.

Crisis talk is another attempt to frighten Americans into accepting autocratic rule by big business interests represented well by George W. Bush. The proposed reform will take the money of small investors out of their pockets directly to the accounts of people wealthy enough to diversify, protect investments, capture markets, and manipulate stock prices.

Is it at all possible that President Bush has not noticed that anyone who has enough money can have a private investment retirement account already?
Social Security, on the other hand, is a fail-safe for retirement, a system whereby the nation (that’s us) guarantees that we do not suffer from producing large numbers of impoverished seniors. It is security for our social system. It is not individual. That is the point. Social Security is how our social system saves for seniors. The size of the pool is its security. Think about it as something we all do that benefits all of us. Isn’t that the concept?
Also, perhaps he has forgotten that the stock market is not a guaranteed investment. In fact, investment in the stock market is much more risky for the small investor than for the wealthy investor. If you are a small investor, which most of us would be, you can lose everything.
The proposed social security reform is a white-washed method of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, the latest of many George W. Bush “reverse Robin Hood” economic initiatives. It works with his philosophy that the poor are already poor, so a little more poverty won’t make that much difference.

Quoted from The other tsunami, Cover story in The New Statesman by John Pilger, Monday 10th January 2005.

The west’s crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week’s bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush’s coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of “aid” only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government’s current “generous” contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.
On 24 November, one month before the tsunami struck, the Blair government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta, “designed to meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to review its defence capabilities”, reported the Jakarta Post. The Indonesian military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has killed more than 20,000 civilians and “insurgents” in Aceh. Among the exhibitors at the arms fair was Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which, along with British-supplied Scorpion armoured vehicles, machine-guns and ammunition, were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day the tsunami devastated the province.
The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its modest response to the historic disaster befallen its Asian neighbours, has secretly trained Indonesia’s Kopassus special forces, whose atrocities in Aceh are well documented. This is in keeping with Australia’s 40-year support for oppression in Indonesia, notably its devotion to the dictator Suharto while his troops slaughtered a third of the population of East Timor. The government of John Howard – notorious for its imprisonment of child asylum-seekers – is at present defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some $8bn. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world’s poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its young people, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed.

From the New York Times:

Evangelical Leader Threatens to Use His Political Muscle Against Some Democrats, January 1, 2005, By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
COLORADO SPRINGS – James C. Dobson, the nation’s most influential evangelical leader, is threatening to put six potentially vulnerable Democratic senators “in the ‘bull’s-eye’ ” if they block conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.
In a letter his aides say is being sent to more than one million of his supporters, Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist and founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, promises “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if President Bush fails to appoint “strict constructionist” jurists or if Democrats filibuster to block conservative nominees.
Dr. Dobson recalled the conservative efforts that helped in the November defeat of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader who led Democrats in using the filibuster to block 10 of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees.

Christianity developed from an oppressed people. The early Christians were hounded by Rome, which ruled that everyone had to accept that Caesar was divine. They were also oppressed by the Jews, who ruled that everyone had to subscribe to the ancient law and contribute to the ruling religious government. Both of these oppressors were empowered by divine right — the Word of God to Moses and the word of the gods to Caesar.
America was founded upon an idea of representative government, not divine right or divine law. It was not even founded upon majority rule. Inherent in the system of representative government is tolerance for people of diverse faith, creed, color, and national origin. Democratic (representative) government protects the rights of the few against the oppression of the many. It assumes that all people have the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” American Constitutional law protects the individual and the minority group — whether minority due to race, creed, or national origin. We have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to vote. Two of the reasons for which the Constitution was established are to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Christianity was not an oppressive creed at its origin, but it became so when married to the authority of Rome and the royal families of Europe. The American Constitution broke this bond with separation of church and state, a constitutional rule against establishing a church as the state church. Most people today believe that this separation idea was incorporated as a protection for religion, so that people could worship freely. In fact, it was a protection for democracy, which cannot co-exist with divine right.
Neither Christianity nor its founder believed in civil government by the law of God or in the attachment of gods to nations:

• In Matthew 22:15-22 the oppressive Jewish leaders of the day, the Pharisees, knowing that Jesus taught there was only one God, challenged him regarding giving tribute to Caesar. After all, if you support Caesar, are you not acting against your own God? Jesus explained that the money was Caesar’s money, and he answered “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (KJV) The modern translation gives his response as “Give the Emperor what belongs to him and give God what belongs to God.” (CEV)
• In John 4:5-29 we have a story in which Jesus spoke with a woman of another nation and creed and explained to her that the true worship of God was not tied to a particular mountain or a particular city. He said: “…neither in this mountain nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father….God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (KJV) In modern translation: “…you won’t worship the Father in this mountain or in Jerusalem…. God is Spirit, and those who worship God must be led by the Spirit to worship him according to the truth.” (CEV)

Spirit and truth have no geography. God has no geography. The attachment of God to nations is a false claim and a power grab by human beings. Whether it is a claim of an Islamic fundamentalist or a claim of a Christian evangelical, it is false.