Category: Politics

What has happened to this country…

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Mr. President: You promised change. Where is it?

Mr. President, 

I will admit to being a Liberal.  I wear the label with great pride.   I used to consider myself an independent and always registered to vote as such.  During the Clinton years I became so appalled at the behavior of the Republicans I began to identify myself as a Democrat.  I have since become so appalled at the lack of any clear direction or backbone in the Democratic Party that I am back to considering myself an independent.

It strikes me that our government was effectively been co-opted by the corporations and a small percentage of obscenely wealthy individuals.  This stealthy coup d’état was in a large engineered through the Republican Party.   Continue reading “Mr. President: You promised change. Where is it?”

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Show Down at the Shariah Corral

Oklahoma is generally thought of as a backwater by the rest of the country and I suspect big parts of the industrialized world.   Oklahoma State Question 755 passed with 71% of Okies voting for it.  It bans state judges from considering Shariah or International law when deciding cases.  I’m not sure what problem they were trying to solve…even preemptively.  It is currently in suspension awaiting legal action.

In this Bible Belt state you have got to wonder where acceptance and tolerance  have gone.  My reading of the Bible leads me to think that they should be the backbone of Christianity.

Shariah at the Kumback Café Frank Rich Editorial at The New York Times

From the article:

‘To understand U.S. politics today, try “It’s the fear element, stupid.”’

This seems to be part of a bigger movement to breed fear and paint our President as “un-American”.  I’m not sure what an “American” is except one of a group of immigrants living in a common land, hopefully with some shared goals.

Apparently tolerance for differences is not one of those goals.

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B-A-N-A-N-A… R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C

I’m not much on conspiracy theories, but I am beginning to concoct one.  Our government is adrift.  We have not had any real leadership in the President’s office for 10 years.  What little “leadership” there has been has been counter to benefiting the vast majority of us.

The question then is who benefits from lack of leadership in this country.  My short answer would be cowboys on Wall Street and the wealthy 1 or 2 percent of Americans who seem to be setting the government’s agenda. Continue reading “B-A-N-A-N-A… R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C”

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Do I have this right?

Do I have this right?

  • We are not going to extend unemployment payments…
  • We are going to raise the retirement age…
  • We are going to get rid of the mortgage interest deduction…
  • We are going to freeze Federal salaries…
  • We have made it tougher for individuals to file bankruptcy…
  • We are not funding schools to the point where we are no longer providing quality education.  Our children are falling behind the rest of the industrialized word…
  • We are thinking about cutting Social Security benefits…
  • The Republicans are trying to repeal the new health care law, weak though it was…

Yet the Republicans are going to hold our legislative process hostage until their rich benefactors get the tax break none of them need…

Do I have this right?

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Size Does Matter

How Germany got it right on the economy by Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post

The above link is an article on a different form capitalism, one that values social democratic ideals.  This is not the capitalism found in the good ole USA, but it is found in Germany.  Despite the bad economic times, and the raising economic power of Asia, their economy is still doing very well.

I have had some of the same thoughts as the author of this article, only mine were about farming.  I have occasionally had the same thoughts about small retail shops as Wal-Mart and other big box stores kill downtowns and mom and pop operations. I have just never made the logical progression to our manufacturing base. Continue reading “Size Does Matter”

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Just Imagine — No Taxes

There is personal wealth and then there is community wealth.  I read this a while back in a discussion of the growing wealth gap in this country.  One measure of wealth that has a lot to with the general happiness of a population is community wealth. This includes such things as parks, good roads, support of the arts, community buildings, education, etc.

I started thinking about this again as I have just come back from the Shelby County Clerks Office where I was registering my vehicle.   It is not an awful government building, I’ve been in a lot worse, but neither is it grand.  I still remember where they housed the County Sanitarians in Pulaski County, Arkansas.  It was an old hospital that had long been past its prime when the medicos abandoned it.  Now the County was trying to use it for office space.   It does seem to me that many government buildings get short shrift. Continue reading “Just Imagine — No Taxes”

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Huge concentrations of wealth corrodes the soul of any nation

A couple quotes from the Nicholas Kristof editoral linked to below:

A Hedge Fund Republic? Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times

“But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?’

“I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.”

I’ve been watching and crying over this growing problem for years.  Part of me just cannot understand how in a democratic society where the vast majority of folks are in the middle and lower economic classes this happened.  After all 9 to 1 should win ever time, right?

In large part it has happened because both political parties are unabashedly junkies when it comes to financing political campaigns.  Continue reading “Huge concentrations of wealth corrodes the soul of any nation”

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For Whom the Law Tolls

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew- or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you – until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

-Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1960

The local Jewish community newspaper in  St. Louis ran the following editorial.  It was triggered by Oklahoma passing a constitutional amendment banning judges from considering Sharia (and international laws) in their judicial opinions.  The editoralist does not see a lot of legal danger from this amendment, but finds the attitude behind the passing of the amendment very dangerous.

The link: For Whom the Law Tolls

I’m just so proud to be an Okie…not.