Category Archives: Culture

We Could All Learn From “The Jerk.”

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The Jerk, starring Steve Martin, has long been one of my favorite movies. Not only is it filled with great comedy, it is filled with wisdom and life lessons. One such lesson is represented by the scene in which Martin’s character, Navin, first sees his name listed in the phone book. “I am somebody!” he exclaims.

That should be meaningful to all of us since it represents the human need for acknowledgement and respect. In fact, I believe respect is one of the most basic of human needs right after air, food and water. None of us want to think that we will journey through life without leaving a mark or even being noticed. Indeed, many human conflicts could be avoided by simply showing respect for others.

Street gangs are formed as a result of seeking a sense of belonging. Usually, they band together when the individual members feel disrespected by others in their community. And they are willing to fight and die when they are disrespected by other gangs.

Likewise, consumers experience frustration and anger when corporations and other institutions treat them as mere sources of money instead of actually working to fulfill their needs. Workers feel unappreciated and disrespected when they are paid too little money, or when extra effort goes unnoticed. Civil rights issues, such as gay marriage, are as much about respect and fairness as they are about freedom and personal liberty.

The need for respect even leads nations into war when they feel that others are trying to take advantage of them. For example, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States began as the result of President Truman’s bellicose and belligerent statements that showed contempt for our World War II ally. Truman thought that, since we were the only nation to hold the secret of nuclear weapons, he could use that power to disregard prior agreements and exact new concessions from the Soviets.

In other words, Truman ignored the Soviets’ need for respect.

This is a lesson that should be considered as we enter negotiations with Iran and as we press for new trade concessions from China. It’s what both Democrats and Republicans need to consider if they are to accomplish anything that will benefit our citizens during the next session of Congress. It’s what we all need to keep in mind as we interact with each other. Not just during the holiday season, but year ‘round.

As Aretha Franklin sang, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T…I got to have a little respect.” It’s what everyone needs and deserves.

Prisoners Of Greed.

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Contrary to popular belief, crime does pay. But not in the way you think. It’s not necessarily the criminals who profit. It’s the corporations that imprison them. You see, more and more of our states are replacing state-run prisons with prisons run by private corporations. And since the US has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and only 5 percent of the population, prisons have become a very big business.

Although crime is generally going down and the number of prisoners is shrinking, thanks to intensive lobbying efforts, we are still building more private prisons. To make matters worse, the prison corporations have contracts that dictate that they will not accept any prisoners with chronic illnesses. Their contracts guarantee 85 percent to 100 percent occupancy. Yet it has been shown that private prisons cost significantly more per prisoner than public prisons.

But cost is only one of the problems associated with private prisons. It has been reported that 78 percent of those entering prison have drug problems. Indeed, addiction is one of the contributing factors to most crimes. Yet only 6 percent receive treatment while in prison despite evidence that every dollar spent on drug treatment saves $18.02 in the cost of enforcement, court cases and incarceration.

50 percent of those in prison have committed non-violent crimes, many of them minor. But, because of its Three Strikes and You’re Out law, California has some people serving life sentences for such crimes as stealing a $69 jacket. This is not only inhumane. It’s ineffective. Criminologists know that the peak ages for crime are between 16 and 25. They also know that there is an optimum amount of punishment needed to prevent recidivism. That time varies according to the crime and the individual. If you keep someone in prison for too long, they are more likely to be violent when they get out. And since 93 percent of prisoners will eventually be released, you can see the potential for problems.

If you treat people like animals, they tend to act like animals.

Nevertheless, many politicians continue to push for more severe sentences and harsh conditions for prisoners. The mentality is to house criminals rather than rehabilitate them. Criminologists can prove that such policies don’t work. But their knowledge is often rejected because politicians have found that being “tough on crime” helps their chances for re-election.

Further, such “get tough” policies are good for the profits of private prison corporations. And the private prison corporations often contribute to political campaigns.

Unfortunately, our enormous prison population is damaging our country. It has not only harmed our human rights reputation around the globe. It has destroyed families and entire communities. 1 in 33 school children in the US have at least one parent in prison. 1 in 4 Americans have a felony record.  Moreover, a study by the Pew Research Center found that if you arrest 500 people in a community of 100,000, you disrupt the entire community. Yet there are many communities in which we have arrested as many as 750.

Criminologists know that the best deterrent to crime is certainty of punishment more than the length and severity of punishment. But our politicians pay no attention. We also know that education prevents crime. Yet we now pay 40 percent more for prisons than we do for education.

Our priorities could not be more upside-down.

A Case For Renaming The Department Of Defense.

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Until 1947, the United States military operated under the name Department of War.  At that time, it split into the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and the Department of the Navy. Then, in 1949, the service branches were brought together under a new name – the Department of Defense (DoD). Tired of war, our representative government apparently intended the new name to reflect a change of philosophy; one that would prioritize the defense of our homelands so that we would never again experience a Pearl Harbor.

If that truly was the case, the name has long since become a misnomer;

Since the name change, the US has been involved in dozens of wars on foreign soil (Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and more). Not one of these wars involved military actions in defense of our homeland. Indeed, the Department of Defense is no longer tasked with defending our borders. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, that task has been left to DHS, the Border Patrol, US Customs, the US Coast Guard and the National Guard.

The Department of Defense has, instead, been given the task of projecting our military power to lands far from our shores in support of our corporations and allies. The DoD currently has more than 700 bases of operations in 59 nations around the world. Most are merely anachronistic reminders of World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. So, too, is the name.

Why does the name matter?

It’s not merely a matter of accuracy. Calling the War Department a Defense Department is a form of propaganda. It engenders blind loyalty. After all, which would you more likely support? A military devoted to defense? Or a military devoted to war? Are you more likely to thank a soldier who is serving in defense of our country? Or a mercenary who is waging war in another land on behalf of greedy corporations?

Names matter. Truth matters.

If we are ever going to end our endless participation in wars, we must first be honest with ourselves. We must understand exactly who and what we are fighting for. We must be certain that our military has the right assets for the defense of our nation and its citizens. We must be certain that our military budget is well-spent. We must be certain that we are fighting for the ideals our nation was founded upon. We must be certain that we are fighting for personal freedom and liberty.

Not merely imposing our will on other people.

Public Versus Private. Corporations Versus People.

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Ever since President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” conservatives have attributed virtually all of our problems to the federal government. They believe that the government cannot do anything well. As a result, they have continually cut taxes in order to starve the government of revenue, making it less effective and less efficient so it better lives up to their expectations.

At the same time, conservatives have pushed to privatize many government functions. Private, for-profit contractors now handle many of the functions that our military once did, including food service, transportation, supply and security. Both state and federal governments have awarded contracts to private prison corporations. Public education now competes for funding with private charter schools. Even our most sensitive spying and surveillance programs have been outsourced to private companies as evidenced by the revelations surrounding Edward Snowden.

But are these private entities really better than the government? Is the government really the problem? Much of the evidence says no.

The jury is still out on whether or not privatizing our military is a good idea, but there have been numerous embarrassing incidents in which private contractors were accused of committing war crimes. As for private prisons, studies have shown that they cost far more per inmate than public prisons, even though private prisons refuse to accept high security prisoners and those with chronic illnesses. And a study by Stanford University has shown that private charter schools perform no better than public schools.

Moreover, the 2013 Customer Rage Survey by Customer Care Measurement and Consulting and the Arizona State University W. P. Carey School of Business found that the percentage of people with customer service problems grew from 32 percent in 1976 to 50 percent in 2013. And 56 percent of those who complained in 2013 remain unsatisfied. Most telling is the fact that 98 percent of the most serious customer service problems involved private companies. Only 2 percent were associated with the government!

How can that be? Is it possible Reagan was wrong?

The truth is, our government is ultimately accountable to us. It may seem big and uncaring, but one election can change everything. On the other hand, today’s giant financial institutions and multinational corporations have little accountability to customers. Certainly, you can move your account from a large bank to a smaller one, but the likelihood is that it, too, is controlled by a large holding company. You can switch insurance companies and find that the new company is just as difficult to deal with as the previous one. Likewise, you can get rid of your cable company, but your satellite provider may not be any more responsive. Indeed, it may be worse.

The problem is not a matter of public versus private. Most customer service problems stem from bureaucracy – both public and private.

But our most serious problem involves both public and private institutions. It centers on the alliance between government and large corporations based on disproportionate access and influence. Consider, for example, the alliance between the George W. Bush White House and Richard “The Dick” Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, which was awarded billions in no-compete military contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan; or the alliance between Ohio congressional representatives (both Republican and Democrat) and the Ohio contractor for Abrams tanks which was awarded a contract for additional tanks that the Army neither wants or needs; or the alliance between Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s staff and a private prison company which led to the company receiving multi-million dollar contracts for private prisons. There are many, many more examples.

Not surprisingly, many of the government’s most outspoken critics are conservatives who will gladly spend money to enrich their districts, their states, their corporate friends and themselves.

The Tao Of Politics.

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I am not a Taoist. Nevertheless, I have learned that the philosophy of Taoism has much to offer. The Taoist concept of Yin and Yang holds that nothing is ever entirely black or white; hard or soft; good or bad. Taoism teaches that good people can do bad things. It also teaches that those we consider bad can, on occasion, do good things.

This is particularly true as it pertains to politics.

For example, I know many who are otherwise caring, loving people who would deny food, shelter, health care and other human necessities to the unfortunate simply because their Republican Party preaches personal responsibility. They have become convinced that the poor are merely taking advantage of those of us who have been successful. They want to believe that the majority of the poor are lazy. Such thinking allows them to look the other way when they see someone who is in desperate need of help.

They cannot conceive that someone can work hard and still struggle to feed their families because they are underpaid by large, greedy corporations. They falsely believe that minimum wage jobs are entry level jobs that are the first step up the economic ladder. In past times, that may have been true. But in today’s economy, with many of our high-paying jobs now shipped offshore, for many people, the economic ladder has been pushed aside by greedy corporate executives.

Many Republicans refuse to accept that the American Dream no longer exists for many people; that the US is not the land of opportunity it once was; that no amount of hard work can pull many of the unfortunate out of poverty; that the US now has less upward mobility than most of the rest of the industrialized world.

As a result, many good Republicans cheered when the federal government cut $5 billion from the annual budget of SNAP (food stamps) – an amount equal to all of the charitable organizations in the nation (501c4 “charities” such as American Crossroads and FreedomWorks, not included). The same people who would gladly give food and money to a family member or neighbor are still clamoring to cut another $4-40 billion from SNAP at a time when 1 in 6 Americans and 1 in 4 American children are dealing with hunger.

These grinches are not bad people. They are simply uninformed or misinformed.

These champions of personal responsibility and faith are convinced that social safety nets are not only unnecessary. They believe that social programs are creating a culture of dependence. They believe that the minimum wage, labor unions and government regulation are threats to our economy.

They believe that subsidies and giveaways to large corporations are good. But that subsidies and giveaways to people are bad. Why? If it’s true that corporations are people, shouldn’t they both be treated equally? If a half dozen banks are considered too big to fail, shouldn’t group consisting of millions of poor Americans also be considered too big to fail?

Taoism teaches that all things are part of a greater whole – the great Tao – and that if you harm another, in reality you harm yourself. Caring Republicans would be wise to keep that in mind.

Impeach Obama?

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In the fantasy world of right wing crazies, the impeachment of President Obama is becoming a greater possibility. For example, Michele “Batsh*t Crazy” Bachmann recently told viewers of Fox News Channel that President Obama has “rewritten the Constitution to serve his own purposes.” First, I doubt that Bachmann has ever actually read the Constitution. Second, the “evidence” she used to support her claim is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)…a bill passed by Congress, signed by the president and upheld as constitutional by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

Some evidence.

Bachmann isn’t the only mental hospital escapee making such claims. At Tea Party rallies throughout the US, it’s common to see people holding “Impeach Obama” signs or verbally calling for the president’s impeachment. Even worse, numerous Teapublican congressmen have suggested that impeachment may soon be “necessary.” To justify their calls for impeachment, they point to manufactured “scandals” such as Benghazi.  But, unlike his predecessor who ignored numerous warnings prior to 9/11 and led our nation into war under false pretenses, President Obama has done absolutely nothing to warrant impeachment. And, just one year ago, voters had the ultimate opportunity to remove him from office.

It’s called an election.

Unfortunately for Teapublicans, they lost…badly. Nevertheless, Teapublicans continue to blame the president for their own failings. They ran up the debt with their wars and tax cuts and blamed it on Obama. They collapsed the economy and blamed Obama for unemployment. They created the debt crisis in 2011 and blamed Obama for the damage done. They have used the filibuster to nullify many of the president’s initiatives and to block many of his appointments and nominations.

They cry that Obama “refuses to defend our border” despite the fact that the Obama administration has doubled the size of the Border Patrol and invested billions in a border fence. They forced our government into sequestration then howled when the cuts resulted in long lines at airport screening. Most recently, they shut down our government then blamed Obama for parks and monuments being closed.

They continue to complain that Obama was foreign born (he was not) though their most vociferous whiner and presidential wannabe, Ted Cruz, was born in Canada. They attacked Obama for attending a “radical” black Christian church yet claim he’s a Muslim (as if that’s something bad). They howl about the start-up issues with the ACA website despite the fact that they have done everything in their power to sabotage it. They not only withheld much of the funding needed for its creation, Teapublican-controlled states refused to implement their own health insurance exchanges, forcing millions more Americans to log onto www.HealthCare.gov to find health care coverage.

Now Teapublicans are back home holding town halls and giving speeches about the evils of Obamacare. They are also inviting people to bring their “horror stories” about Obamacare. One can only imagine that they will spend their last 8 working days of 2013 reading these anecdotal, and likely false, stories into the congressional record and voting to repeal the law for the 48th time. And don’t be surprised if, next year, Rep. Darrell Issa, Rep. Paul Gosar and others use these stories as the basis for impeachment.

Knowing that impeachment is doomed to fail unless they gain control of the Senate, Teapublican congressmen are also continuing their attempts to destroy the Obama presidency by refusing to negotiate a budget and refusing to raise the debt ceiling which would force the US treasury into default. Never mind that such a move would have severe and long-lasting consequences for the world economy and our nation’s ability to borrow. It might even cause the world to replace the dollar as the world’s prime currency. But in the minds of many Teapublicans, such realities are dwarfed by their dislike for President Obama.

Teapublican hatred has no bounds.

Holiday Spirit According To Walmart And McDonald’s.

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Last week, several large retailers made headlines by announcing that they would be open on Thanksgiving Day. Not content with the usual mad rush to sell holiday gifts on Black Friday, the retailers are hoping to increase sales by dragging their employees away from their families and the dinner table.

Chief among the holiday scrooges is Walmart.

When Walmart first made its announcement, its public relations team assured the press that its “associates” (Walmarts euphemism for underpaid employees) would be treated to increased pay and a special dinner. They said the associates would have “fun.” What they didn’t say is that they would cut the hours for these associates before and after the holiday in order to prevent the associates from making extra money!

Such double talk is nothing new for anyone who follows Walmart. Last year, the corporation made $15.7 billion for its owners, the Walton family. Unfortunately, that money hasn’t trickled down to the employees. Indeed, in recognition of the low wages paid to associates, some Walmart stores have been holding Thanksgiving charity food drives for their own employees!

But Walmart is far from the only corporate scrooge.

McDonald’s also refuses to pay employees a living wage. It seems the company even recognizes that fact. But, instead of raising wages, the company has created a website to help its employees better budget their incomes. The site not only recommends that its employees get a second job in order to make ends meet, it shows a recommended budget that fails to include FOOD! (One can only assume that the company expects employees to rely on food stamps to feed their families.) And recognizing the financial stress of the holidays, the company suggests that its employees might save a little extra money by SELLING THEIR HOLIDAY GIFTS!

Yet these very same companies are fighting any potential increase to the minimum wage. That is an incredible show of hubris given that the executives of both companies pay themselves millions.

Abortion Foes Obscure Complexity Of The Issue.

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For 40 years, religious conservatives have fought against a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy. They have pushed laws that would deny government funding for medical clinics performing abortions. They have demanded waiting periods. They have demanded that women be forced to view pictures of fetuses.

They have subjected abortion providers to increased scrutiny. They have demonstrated outside clinics. They have bombed clinics. They have hurled abuse at patients, nurses and doctors. They have published hit lists with the names of providers, along with their addresses, phone numbers and auto license numbers. They have even murdered doctors.

More recently, conservative politicians have placed limits on the time period with which women could seek abortions. They have required abortion providers to be accepted by local hospitals (many of which deny providers access on religious grounds). And they have voted to subject women to invasive and unnecessary medical procedures before they can have an abortion.

In their narrow minds, God willed the pregnancy, so the woman just needs to deal with it.

They refuse to accept a woman’s desire to abort the offspring of rape or incest. They refuse to accept a family’s desire to save a woman’s life when a pregnancy endangers her, even when other family members depend on her. They refuse to accept the financial and emotional difficulties of bearing a child so disabled that it will never be able to survive on its own. They refuse to accept the financial and emotional burden of giving birth to a child that will need constant attention…not only from the family, but from medical specialists.

Ironically, the very same people try to limit sex education and contraception. And they fight Obamacare because they fear that the government will come between them and their own medical decisions. Yet they’re willing to force the government between a woman and her doctor.

It’s long past time to acknowledge the complexity of the issue and work to minimize the issues that lead women to seek abortions…issues such as rape, incest, poverty, prenatal diseases, lack of education and the woman’s physical ability to carry the fetus to full term. It’s time to recognize that each pregnancy is different; that each woman has a right to her own religious and moral beliefs; that each woman should be free to make medical decisions in consultation with her partner, her family and her doctor.

Simple-minded religious and ideological-driven laws will not stop abortion. They will merely drive it underground, and into the back alleys. Such laws will only ruin lives…the lives of already living, breathing, thinking  people.

Extremists And Cowards.

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Bullies and weaklings; a**holes and chickensh*ts; Teapublicans and Democrats.  Whatever you want to call them, many of the people who now take up seats in Congress generally fall into one of these two categories. Never has the distinction been more obvious than following the latest vote on “Obamacare.” 39 cowards chose to join the right wing extremists by voting for a bill to “fix” the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by requiring insurance companies to continue to sell junk insurance policies.

The cowards are Democrats who have revealed themselves to be far more concerned about being re-elected and doing what’s best for themselves than doing what’s right for their constituents and their country. Indeed, they are Democrats who have sold out their constituents, their campaign contributors, their congressional caucus and the president. Instead of standing up for health care reform, they stood up for the status quo. They stood up for insurance company profits. They stood up for lobbyists. They stood up with their hands out looking for large campaign contributions from the insurance industry and Big Pharma.

Certainly, many of these weaklings have been targeted by the Republican National Committee and its billionaire sponsors. I have a certain amount of sympathy for these people since right wing Super PACs have already spent millions to attack them more than a year before the mid-term elections. But, if you’re a progressive voter, what’s the point of supporting a representative who refuses to support you on something as important as the ACA? These cowards are forcing their supporters to hold their noses and choose the lesser of the two evils.

For the record, I don’t believe in so-called litmus tests for politicians. I believe in compromise and bipartisanship, but not at the expense of betraying those they are elected to represent. Voting to undermine the ACA by eliminating insurance standards is just such a betrayal.

From the beginning, the ACA has been a difficult undertaking. Everyone knew that its implementation would not be smooth, even in the best of circumstances. (We all know that the roll-out of Social Security, Medicare and Part D did not go smoothly.) In order to get the bill passed, the administration was forced to drop the public option that was intended to keep insurance companies honest by providing more competition. Congressmen and senators spent months and months adding amendments that would weaken the bill. Then many of those same people voted against it anyway.

The ACA faced unparalleled opposition from both inside and outside the beltway; from lobbyists; from the insurance industry; from the pharmaceutical industry; from the medical supply industry and more. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in very public attempts to block it. Teapublicans have spent years bad-mouthing it and predicting that it would be a “train wreck.” They mischaracterized it as a “government takeover” of medicine. They said it would result in “government death panels.” The right wing media has called it “an end to liberty,” “socialism,” “fascism” and worse. The mainstream media has thrived on the controversy, reporting it as though it was some sporting event, trumpeting every setback and glitch. Now they are scoring the ACA by the numbers of people who have registered and purchased insurance policies.

Teapublicans made their opposition to the ACA the centerpiece of two election cycles. They have attempted to repeal the ACA or defund it more than 40 times. They even shut down the government in an attempt to defund the ACA.

Many Teapublican-controlled states refused to expand Medicaid leaving millions of their citizens without health insurance. Many of those same states refused to create insurance exchanges, forcing the federal government to pick up the slack and directing millions more Americans to the healthcare.gov website. At the same time, they cut funding for the website. They funded cyber attacks to disrupt the website. Then they held congressional “investigations” in order to call attention to the glitches.

And now, NOW, 39 so-called Democrats add to the headwinds by voting for a bill that would undermine the ACA? I can think of only two words to describe such a vote…cowardice and treachery! I spent the last election cycle supporting some of these people. I donated to their campaign funds. I can hardly wait until I receive another email from them asking for my support.

They won’t like the answer any more than I like their vote.

Let’s Try To Become The Nation Our Founders Imagined.

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In reading The Untold History Of The United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick (a gut-wrenching, powerful and well-documented book), it’s clear that, contrary to what we were taught in history classes, the US has long been a cruel and greedy empire.

For more than 200 years, we have engaged in wars of choice with no other purpose than to capture territory and extract resources. We have brutally murdered, tortured and subjugated indigenous peoples, all the while patting ourselves on the back for bringing them “Christianity” and “civilization.” We perfected mass murder and water boarding in the Philippines. We forced China, Japan and Korea to bow to our wishes for trade. We exerted our will in the Caribbean and South America in order to claim their resources and protect the interests of our corporations.

We occupied Cuba, Dominica, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama and the Philippines. After World War II, we occupied Germany, Italy and Japan. We have sent our troops to every corner of the Earth and have long ruled the air and the seas. According to Stone and Kuznick, “by 2002, we had some form of military presence in 132 of the UN’s then 190 member nations.” And, by my best estimates, we have been at war for all but 33 years of our history.

Why? It mostly has to do with business.

We forced our will upon nations in order to control their gold, silver, copper, aluminum, rubber, sugar, fruit, land, even drugs. More recently, on behalf of our industries, we have pursued oil in the Middle East. We helped to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Chile, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere. We supported and trained death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua. And we have bullied almost everyone else.

All the while, we celebrated our victories along with our good intentions.

Is it any wonder, then, that our people have long admired the Romans? In reality, we are them; a power-hungry nation of avarice and cruelty. Like the Romans, we believed that the gods or, in our case, God was on our side. We called it Manifest Destiny; the God-given right and responsibility to govern all those people we considered incapable of governing themselves. Of course, “those people” just happened to be people of color.

We have become the kind of empire our forefathers fought to escape. The Founding Fathers had high ideals; that all people are equal and have a right to life, liberty and happiness. Yes, many held slaves, but many wrestled with that fact and sought a way to end slavery while holding the states together. For example, although he was a slave holder, Thomas Jefferson wanted to bring slavery to an end. In recognition of the complex politics of the issue, he likened slavery “to having a wolf by the ears. You can neither hang on nor let go.”

We can’t change the past, but we can change the future. We must strive to be better; to lift people the world over out of poverty; to support and restore freedom; to end hunger; to rein in greed; to help educate children; to create jobs; to increase the sustainability of our all-too-fragile planet.

We may never be able to end wars, but we should make them increasingly rare. We should have a strong defense, but we cannot and should not be the self-appointed police of the planet. That was never the intention of the Framers. Rather, they believed that we should be an example to others; a model of liberty and justice for all.

We haven’t been, but we still can be.