Demise of Democracy

     It will not surprise me at all if a future historian will set the date of January 21, 2010, as the beginning of the demise of Democracy, as we know it, in the United States. Because on that day five appointed officials usurped the power of the Presidency and the Congress, and decided to diminish our right to elect people that will represent our interests. 

     John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona, called it “The worst decision by the Supreme Court in the 21st century. Uninformed, arrogant, naïve.” And that was before the five Republican-appointed judges confirmed today (6/25) the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amount of money on election campaigns. 

     The Supreme Court’s five-to-four decision in the “Citizens United” case opened the doors to a power grab by Corporations and the super-rich, enabling them to pour vast amounts of money to influence elections by allowing them to buy limitless air-time and use it to deceive the public about candidates and issues. 

     Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, operated on the premise that if you repeat a lie often enough, many gullible people will believe that it is the truth. If you want to know if it works in this country, observe the great number of people who receive their “news” from the propaganda channel that calls itself, oxymoronically, Fox News. 

     The five men that enabled the intrusion of the super PACs, and the one- hundred million dollars donations into our electoral system, were nominated by Republican Presidents, as were the four men and one woman that imposed on us George W. Bush as President.

     Was it just an accident of historic proportions, or is it a preview of things to come in a future Republican administration?

 Sun-Sentinel (July 1, 2012)

Unzipping Mitt

 

     The rich really are different than the rest of us. Ann Romney, the one with the two Cadillacs and the car elevator, declared that "We better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out." She was trying to explain why her husband is so stiff and why most Republicans who voted in the primaries voted against him. I don’t know what will happen if we unzip Mitt, but I would like to think that when I unzip myself I do not let out Mitt Romney’s alter ego.

4/10/12

Tea and Anarchy

      When map makers for television screens decided to color states red for Republicans and Blue for Democrats, their choice of colors seemed peculiar to me because red is usually associated with fringe groups like communist or Anarchist organizations.

     But now it seems to me that the red color fits Republican-leaning states, because it matches the neck color of the base of the amalgam of Republican/Tea Party voters, and some of their elected officials.  I read that redneck originally was a descriptive and semi-laudatory term used for those who farm or labor with their heads bent forward, so that the back of their neck get sunburned.  Today, comedians like Jeff Foxworthy (“You may be a redneck if . . .”), turned it into a name for ill-educated, know-nothing loudmouths.

     However, the Republican Party may have earned that designation in 2008 when they introduced their candidates for the Presidency of the United States.  That list included a governor (Mike Huckabee), a senator (Sam Brownback), and a member of the House of Representatives (Tom Tancredo).  In a televised debate this odd trio raised their hands when the moderator asked who does not believe in evolution.   The GOP also had the Governor of Alaska as a candidate for the Vice Presidency, and she was very shrewd but not exactly a fountain of knowledge.

     It looks like that the GOP+TP’s main interest is shrinking the size of government, abolishing universal health care and women’s rights to control their own bodies.  In order to achieve those goals they would like to make our government so small that it will fit into the reproductive organs of women.  This being the only place they believe that they have a right, and obligation, to poke their noses in.

     There always was a conservative wing in the Republican Party, but it was over shadowed by the more mainstream Eisenhower-Rockefeller majority.  However recently thing changed and the lunatics took over the asylum.  Since Reagan, the GOP was on the march to be the Conservative Party of this country, and by now it is mainly an egocentric neo-Neanderthal collection of mean-spirited people.  They not only insist on conserving the riches of the one percent of the wealthiest elite, but they also want to eliminate the social safety net that prevents the less fortunate among us from sinking into permanent abject poverty.

     It was said that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in England legitimized selfishness.  The same thing cannot be said of our ultra-conservative voters, because they are supporting people who belong to a party that works against our existential interests such as education, social security, Medicare and, yes, universal health insurance.  

     The lack of government-provided health care makes it difficult for our few remaining industries to compete in the global marketplace.  General Motors, for instance, figured that buying health insurance  for its employees and retirees adds more than 1500 dollars to the cost of each car.   One year GM bought over five billion dollars’ worth of insurance, more than it spent on buying steel.  Foreign car workers in Japan, Germany or England have coverage provided by their government. 

     But the amount that private sector companies pay to insurance companies for services that should be provided –- free -- by our government, is minuscule when compared to the costs incurred by state  and local employers of civil servants.  Costs that could be substantially cut, (and so would be our taxes), if universal health insurance -- like Medicare for all –- would be available.

     However, when the neo-Neanderthals are elected they would rather try to eliminate unions, impose their ill-will on women’s bodies, and give tax breaks to the richest Americans.

     So, if I am asked to help elect the likes of Governor Rick Scott, or Senator  Marco  Rubio, or Congressman Allen West, I prefer to act like the Republican Congress that  follows Nancy Reagan’s mantra and “just say no.”


5/18/2012

Run, Newton, run

 Run, Newton, Run
        Newton Leroy Gingrich said that his donors "asked me to stay in the race." While I am definitely not one of his donors (he certainly does not need me as long as he has the Las Vegas mogul), I would like him to stay, too.

      Because of all the presidential candidates that the GOP offered for public approval, Newton Leroy Gingrich is certainly the most colorful. He also is the master of slimy duplicity, to wit:

      During the Vietnam war he sought and received a student deferment from the draft, but when elected later to Congress from Georgia, he established, in 1981, the Military Reform Caucus, based, I guess, on his vast military experience.

      In May 1988 he brought ethics violation charges against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright for allegedly using a book deal to circumvent campaign-finance laws and House ethics rules. At that same time Newt did the same exact thing by raising over a hundred thousand dollars from Republican political supporters, to promote sales of hid own book.

      As Speaker of the House, he led the move to impeach President Clinton for the President's affair with an intern, while Newt did the same exact thing, at the same exact time (but with another intern), while being married to his second wife.

      While pledging to promote methods to reduce government spending, Newton Leroy Ging-rich became rich, or richer, collecting more than one and a half million dollars between 2001 and 2010 from Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored secondary mortgage company.

      The number three plays a significant role in the life and adventures of Newt Gingrich. As Speaker of the House of Representatives he was third in line for the Presidency. When the House judged him guilty of violating its ethics rules, he was fined three hundred thousand dollars. Presently he practices his third religion, having been born a Lutheran, changing to Baptist and converting to Catholicism. He practices his "family values" on his third wife, and while running in the primaries he felt at home being in third place in a four candidate race.

      The Republican primaries are very boring, so come on Newt, RUN. 

Sun Sentinel 4/25/2012

The Elephant and the Eagle

     It seems to me that when the Republican party adopted the elephant -- and not the bald eagle -- as its symbol, they were prescient. After all the elephants in the wild are destroying their environment at a rate that is only second to what we do to our own environment. When in captivity and performing in circuses an elephant is trained to hold on to the tail of the elephant that precedes it, thus limiting severely its vision and awareness of what is happening in the world.

     The eagle, on the other hand, soars in the sky on two powerful wings. But the left wing of the Republican party does not exist anymore. And a bird with only one wing may hop and jump but will find it impossible to elevate itself off the ground.

3/8/12 (Sun-Sentinel)

The One Percent

    Suppose you go shopping to a giant department store and the greeter -- lets call him Grover -- tells you to sign a pledge in order to get in.  The pledge states that if you are a working person and your income is less than $50,000 a year, you have to pay full price on any merchandise that you need.  But if your income is over one million and you achieved it not by working, or producing goods, but by manipulating money, than you do not have to pay for any goods or goodies that you acquire.

     It just doesn't make any sense to me.

     And yet 270 Republican members of Congress signed a pledge to never raise taxes on the richest Americans, thus providing them with a free ride at the expense of the rest of us.

    It seems that for some, politics like religion, requires the suspension of logic.  If one believes that the universe was created in six days some five thousands seven hundred and seventy two years ago, that person might believe that Rick Perry, or Michelle Bachman, or Newt Gingrich (to name a few), could become a good and caring President.

     But, applying logic, Henry Louis Mencken observed that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."   Some seventy years later, the amalgam of Republicans/Tea Baggers does base their electioneering strategy on trying to convince the American public to vote against its own interests.  

     Ronald Reagan, the  beloved patron saint of the Republican right, had one good quality that is totally lacking in the present Presidential candidates of his party: a great sense of humor.  So its not totally impossible that when he said "Government is not the solution, but the problem" he was joshing.  

     However the Republican Presidents, Governors and Congressmen who followed him worked at making  governing a problem.  They advocate the elimination of the social net that protects the most needy while increasing the wealth of the most greedy.  If they could have their way, they would shrink the size of the government so that its only remaining function would be controlling women bodies and their reproductive organs.

     So, is it in the best interest of women to vote for the repressive Republicans?

    Working men who contemplate voting Republican should remember that one of the primary aims of that party is to destroy their unions.  It started in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley legislation and then Ronald Reagan firing of the air-traffic controllers in 1981, and continues today with the Republican governors assault on state employees.

     So, if it is not in the interest of most women and most men to support the Republican party, than who should be the people that vote for them?  

    How about the one percent of the richest Americans whose interests are served and protected by the GOP.

2/10/2012 (Sun Sentinel, Los Angeles Times)

Need to be crazy to want to be president

 

Representative Barney Frank expressed his opinion on the Democratic and Republican parties thus: "We are not perfect, but they are nuts."  I could not agree more.  My very clever wife has a different outlook on the political scene -- she thinks that you have to be crazy to want to be the President of this country, and it does not make any sense to vote for someone who is crazy (but we did, anyway).  If I have to choose between someone who is less than perfect, or someone who is a nuts, it will not be a difficult decision.

January 03, 2012 (Sun Sentinel)

"religious right" is wrong

      It is my opinion that the term "religious right" is wrong. There is nothing right with the fundamentalist cults, be they Christian, Moslim or Jewish, that are trying to force their beliefs and prejudices on the rest of us by legislation, terror or judicial decrees.

      The fundamentalist cults, and particularly the most conservative Jewish rabbis, are very busy falsely trying to convince their followers that President Obama is an enemy of Israel. His greatest "transgression" is that he advocates a Palestinian state and peace between Jews and Arabs.

      As an Israeli-American I am highly offended. As an Israeli I am a veteran of the 1948 war that secured the establishment of the State of Israel. As an American I voted, enthusiastically, for Barack Obama, and I will vote for him again next year, albeit with less enthusiasm, because I still believe that while he means well, he is less than competent in implementing his proposals.

      I refer to myself as an Israeli-American because the term Jew seems to denote a religious affiliation. But some that shun religious services, and I am one of them, believe that being a Jew is not necessarily being a practitioner of an ancient religion, but rather being a descendant of one of the oldest nations in world history.

      It seems to me that when Moses led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, his mission was not to create a new religious group -- after all the descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs had been practicing a unique monotheistic religion for hundreds of years by then -- but to build a nation; and the laws of Moses, in addition to codifying the existing religious practices, established the social and political canons necessary to govern a nation. 

      I do believe that the biblical Moses was not a religious leader, but a political one. Having been raised, and presumably educated, in the court of the Pharaoh, he may have been acquainted with Egyptian law and might even have been familiar with the codes of the Babylonian King Hammurabi. The uniqueness of the laws of Moses is their inclusion of monotheistic religious aspects.

      In view of the changing historic nature of nationalism and nations, would it be wrong to consider the laws of Moses as the forerunners of a modern-day constitution and Bill of Rights? After all, those laws transformed a group of people whose only bonds were their blood ties, and their faith, into a nation. Although religion was an important part of the Jewish national heritage, it was by no means all of it. Every nation and many tribes of that era had in addition to their rulers, their own Deity to worship. The Jewish religion was used as a unifying code of conduct for tribes of semi-nomads to weld them into a nation and to protect -- and separate -- them from the many different cultural influences outside their fluid borders, as well as from the alien population within.

      When the Jewish tribes formed a kingdom -- disregarding the religious leaders disapproval -- the first king, Saul, tried hard to separate the state from the church, or at least to establish the primacy of the monarchy -- but like so many later rulers in world history he found out that he was battling a formidable institution. His successors, David and Solomon also had their disputes with the religious establishment, as did all the following Israeli Kings, and many other royal heads of state throughout history.

      Later, when the Kingdoms of Israel were overrun and defeated by the Romans, Rabbinical Judaism took over the vacuum created by the lack of political authority. The task that the Rabbis faced -- keeping the Jewish nation alive -- necessitated shifting the focal point of the unifying codes of the nation. Thus holidays that once had a national meaning were modified to emphasize a religious aspect. The exodus from Egypt, which marked the beginning of Jewish nationhood was transformed into a celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites from bondage by the Lord, with services that omitted any mention of Moses but included the longing for reestablishing a national home ("Next year in Jerusalem"). The liberation of the country from Hellenic rule by the Hashmonaim and the restoration of the Jewish kingdom was turned into the miracle of the pure oil for the lighting of the Menorah. The harvest festival became a commemoration of the giving and receiving of the Torah.

      The Star of David that many of us wear to denote our Jewishness has no religious significance. Unlike the crucifix, it does not play a part in religious services, and if we call it by its Hebrew name -- Magen David -- which means the shield of King David or his coat of arms, we refer to a national symbol. It is, of course, no accident that the Star of David is displayed on the national flag of the State of Israel.

      As a nonobservant Jew I am a direct descendant of an old and honorable nation. A nation that contributed greatly to the advancement of humanity for thousands of years. It is hard to imagine the state of Western Civilization today if it were not guided by the teachings of the writers of the Bible, the preaching of Jesus, the interpretations of Maimonades and Spinoza, the insights of Freud, or the inquiring mind of Einstein -- to name but a few great fellow Israelites in the last two thousand years.

      We should not stain a long and honorable history by spreading uninformed and hateful gossip about the President of our country. Let us remember that while the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Natanyahu, and our President do not always see eye to eye, the Israeli defense minister and former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, declared publicly that President Obama is as good a friend of Israel as there ever was in the White House. 

 November 28, 2011 (Sun-Sentinel)

National Zoo

The bad news is that Congress is taking a summer vacation while postponing legislation on Universal Health Insurance. It is bad for the millions of uninsured people and, to a lesser degree, for the visitors to our nation's capital.


Because two of the most visited tourist attractions in Washington, DC, are the National Zoo in Rock Creek National Park, and its branch on Capitol Hill.


The main zoo is home to more than four hundred and sixty species of animals from all over the world, while its Capitol Hill branch contains four hundred and thirty five specimens, collected from every state in the United States.


The Capitol Hill species are certainly not as exotic as the ones in the main zoo. They do not, for example, include Cheetahs (though they certainly have their share of cheaters), and while they have many parrots and some decent humans, the place is known for its dogs (blue and Democrats), and its ostriches (red and Republicans).


The blue dog democrats are a recent reincarnation of the "Reagan Democrats" and like their political idols have a strong and selfish belief that they are better than the rest of us. They have the best health care system that our money can buy, and are sure that they deserve it, but we do not.


The Republican ostriches, unlike the original African species, bury their heads in the ground, thus keeping themselves always immune to new ideas, and at times oblivious to the truth, and the only sound that they emit is: "no".


Is it possible that the Republican party adopted as its working motto the observation by Henry Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Undecided Voters

     Benjamin Disraeli said that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". The Republican Party and its candidates have been flooding us with the first two degrees of lying for a long time, and I do not blame them. When you do not have any positive ideas to offer to the electorate, you bring out the old smear tactics that worked in the past.


     However, I do have a problem understanding the statistics that are presented to us daily, and in particular the large number of "undecided' voters that supposedly haven't made up their minds after almost two years of non-stop campaigning.


     Could they be recent visitors from another planet, or simply uncaring or uninformed citizens that shut themselves off from the world around them. There is, of course, another explanation: their minds are made up but they are ashamed to reveal their choice.


     If there are still some voters with an open mind that have daughters or granddaughters that they care about, please consider their future.


     Our next President will, most likely, have to fill at least two vacancies on the Supreme Court, and that may put Roe v Wade in jeopardy. The Republican candidate for President, John McCain, voted consistently against women rights during his quarter century in Washington, and his choice of the person to succeed him in office does not inspire confidence in his future choices of Supreme Court justices, if it comes to that.


     And there is a possible worse scenario if McCain is elected President and then succeeded by his VP. While McCain voted to prohibit abortions, his running mate would like to expand to ban to include women that are victims of rape or incest.

     So when you cast your ballot remember that he future of your children is in your hands.