Recently, the news is full of stories about Americans and other first world folks who join foreign revolutions. Many are arrested and charged with conspiracy or aiding terrorist organizations. If your memory is long enough or your grasp of history is good you realize that this isn't new. Americans love revolution. We went to Spain to fight fascists, to Cuba to fight for and against Castro and now we are on both sides of the middle easts' ongoing troubles. Americans were there for the Russian Revolution as well. Many believed that Socialism was the political system of the future and when reactionary forces in the US and Soviet Union became embroiled in the Cold War we saw the same arrests and prosecutions on both sides.
The current arrests trouble me. Most of these are of young people hoping to improve the world. Yes they take up arms against our current allies - some believe in religions that differ from those of most Americans, but they are still our children. Perhaps we should arrest their parents and teachers? What about those who preach their religion, should we arrest all who spoke a truth that was not in the mainstream - not our own idea of truth?
In the 1950's the US suffered through, what was called by those it attacked, the Red Scare or if you were the attacker, the war against Soviet Aggression. In those days we had no Patriot Act or Homeland Security, but we did have the paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover and House and Senate Committees that badgered and wrote Contempt of Congress Citations for anyone who might have had Socialist leanings. Many people lost jobs and community standing and some were jailed and fined. In the end in turned out that having unpopular opinions was protected activity under out constitution and most were let off.
Having thoughts and ideas are protected activities under the US Constitution. We should be very careful about how we treat the ideas that diverge. Those who gave us our way of life and the constitution that protects it were after all rebels and dissidents who disagreed with their government.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Memorial Day Musings
War is a pretty messy business I think. Recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don't seem to have much to do with our freedom. For that matter, what has anything happening in the Middle East to do with the American way of life? Moreover, what does a "half off sale" at your local retailer have to do with memorializing dead soldiers? I ask these questions because we really need to start thinking critically about war and it's costs.
Current Defense Department Budgets run close to $700 Billion before we count the dead and maimed. That's more than half our federal budget spent on war. Seven hundred or more dollars for each human being on the planet spent on war. How many of us love war so much that we could afford $700 a year to keep it going?
The real waste in war is human. These little conflicts seem to just nibble at our younger citizens. It's easy to think of the few young dead as being incidental unless they are your or your neighbor's children. Well, I just added up the war dead for these small conflicts of the last sixty years and you wouldn't want the graveyard in your town. The approximate toll for these years is at least 16 Million dead. That's a lot of graves.
Do you want to save some of the next few million soldiers from becoming reasons for memorials? Perhaps you didn't realize that their lives are in our hands? That $700 Billion is, after all, spent by the people that you and I elect. Have we told them we want "NO MORE WAR" forever.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Doomsday Clock is Still Ticking
In spite of the good news from the Iranian Nuclear Talks, The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists has just moved the minute hand of their Doomsday Clock to three minutes till midnight. They theorize that the modernization of US and Russian Nuclear Arms, the belligerence of Russian leader Putin, see his reaction to the Ukraine troubles, ("Ukraine conflict: Putin 'was ready for nuclear alert'" March 15, BBC) and the worlds failure to address Climate Change in a meaningful way is nudging us two minutes closer to Doomsday. We've been this close before to our doom and luckily we've found ways to back away. Seems to me that this might be a good time to do an about face and get some of those lost minutes back on the clock.
What can you and I do to get that clock going backwards? How about we call out those hawks in congress. Most of them think science and scientists are an inconvenience. Forty-seven US Senators disbelieve in Climate Change - let's get them back on track for a start. Can't do much about Putin from here, but we can remind American Politicians that a fried or bombed-to-a-crisp world will surely not be interested in their reelection campaigns. For my Russian readers, do what you can. If you can't talk politics try talking to your neighbors. They probably vote and they darn sure contribute to the greenhouse gas surplus. Remind yourself and others that small changes, when multiplied by billions, can move us all away from midnights' doom.
What can you and I do to get that clock going backwards? How about we call out those hawks in congress. Most of them think science and scientists are an inconvenience. Forty-seven US Senators disbelieve in Climate Change - let's get them back on track for a start. Can't do much about Putin from here, but we can remind American Politicians that a fried or bombed-to-a-crisp world will surely not be interested in their reelection campaigns. For my Russian readers, do what you can. If you can't talk politics try talking to your neighbors. They probably vote and they darn sure contribute to the greenhouse gas surplus. Remind yourself and others that small changes, when multiplied by billions, can move us all away from midnights' doom.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Mutually Assured Destruction!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the whole world decided that nuclear weapons have no place in the world? We have treaties and protocols that we hope will keep the threat of nuclear holocaust at bay. Our peoples have all decided that a weapon - any weapon - of mass destruction works against out common humanity.
After we decide to end these weapons what next? How do we guarantee they will never be used again? I have an idea that we cannot ask others to give up these weapons until we are willing to give them up ourselves. What do we think the odds are that Iran, for example, will drop a bomb on us in the foreseeable future? Much more likely that our friends the Israelis will since they actually have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Here's the list of those who actually have weapons:
United States... 4804 nukes Pakistan... 120
Russia... 4480 " N. Korea... less than 10
United Kingdom... 225 " Israel... 80
China... 250 " France... less than 300
India... 110 " NATO Nations... Belgium,Germany,Italy,
Netherlands, Turkey... 150-200 (Part of US Total)
The total is more than 10,000, none of which belong to Iran. I wonder what the Israelis are really upset about. I wish we could uncouple the problems of Iran vs Israel from the real problem of the 10,000 plus nukes scattered around the world. Many of the holders of these weapons are proven bad actors like the current Russian State or North Korea. It makes much more sense to go after these proven bad guys than to use all our energy slowing the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
You and I need to bring all of our attention and resources to bear on the real problem of nuclear war. There are fourteen possible bad actors who all have nuclear weapons, including The United States. Let's put pressure on these fourteen countries to prove they love peace and are willing to forego the possibility of nuclear holocaust.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Who Defines the Struggle?
I've been thinking about the world of work. There has been, for example, much discussion of how to rate teachers. Many pundits proclaim that we need to test kids as a way of deciding pay and employment for teachers as if kids were a product instead of people with free will. On a broader front, the owner class says that wages should track efficiency and yet with all the recent gains in efficiency wages are still flat.
At the same time we have all seen what efficiency has done for corporate profits. Twenty years of labor efficiency has resulted in massive profits for corporations and huge wage increases for corporate bosses. What do we think is going on when there is such a disparity between what we are told to expect and what actually happens? I don't think it's hard to figure out; I'd say we have been propagandized and flat out lied to.
We were told that Labor Unions were corrupt, inefficient and outdated. Who told us? Corporate Media, Corporate Owners and CEOs, Politicians who owe Corporate America for their election and we even told this same story to ourselves. Let's face it, if you hear a lie often enough, it starts to sound like it might be the truth. Even worse, we bought the philosophy of bootstrapping and individual attainment.
Yes! Some people do pull themselves up an have great success; think about Bill Gates of Microsoft for example. Bill became a Multi billionaire after dropping out of college and starting a company in his garage, as the story goes? Not exactly true - he is the son of a well-to-do lawyer who sent him to the best private school in Seattle and to Harvard University until he quit to design the Disk Operating System which made him rich and famous. As we see, even Bill Gates needed a community to help tug up his bootstraps.
What's important here is how all of us define the way we prosper and what we call the things that get in the way of that prosperity. The things we struggle with and who defines them has been obfuscated by the Great American Story, the Horacio Alger - up by your bootstraps propaganda that ignores the infrastructure of community and culture, the work of government and family that props up every endeavor. Shouldn't we be just a little skeptical of Corporate Media and Corporate Leaders who take the money and then accuse labor of not working hard enough to get their share.
Let's you and I write our own definitions for struggle and what is considered the fruits of those struggles. People work because it's how we provide food and shelter for ourselves and our families and how we measure our worth to ourselves and others. In times of plenty (like the USA currently) excess work is used to insure a plentiful future. That's the simplest was I know to define work and it's rewards.
If you go along with that definition then when you and I work hard and don't quite make the food and shelter budget, much less our measure of worth, there might just be something systemic wrong. If you then look around and see that some have a thousand year supply of food and shelter and others are starving for food and shelter while working as much as you, what then? What I think is that you and I must redefine the struggle as being one between us and those who have somehow gotten away with that thousand year supply.
At the same time we have all seen what efficiency has done for corporate profits. Twenty years of labor efficiency has resulted in massive profits for corporations and huge wage increases for corporate bosses. What do we think is going on when there is such a disparity between what we are told to expect and what actually happens? I don't think it's hard to figure out; I'd say we have been propagandized and flat out lied to.
We were told that Labor Unions were corrupt, inefficient and outdated. Who told us? Corporate Media, Corporate Owners and CEOs, Politicians who owe Corporate America for their election and we even told this same story to ourselves. Let's face it, if you hear a lie often enough, it starts to sound like it might be the truth. Even worse, we bought the philosophy of bootstrapping and individual attainment.
Yes! Some people do pull themselves up an have great success; think about Bill Gates of Microsoft for example. Bill became a Multi billionaire after dropping out of college and starting a company in his garage, as the story goes? Not exactly true - he is the son of a well-to-do lawyer who sent him to the best private school in Seattle and to Harvard University until he quit to design the Disk Operating System which made him rich and famous. As we see, even Bill Gates needed a community to help tug up his bootstraps.
What's important here is how all of us define the way we prosper and what we call the things that get in the way of that prosperity. The things we struggle with and who defines them has been obfuscated by the Great American Story, the Horacio Alger - up by your bootstraps propaganda that ignores the infrastructure of community and culture, the work of government and family that props up every endeavor. Shouldn't we be just a little skeptical of Corporate Media and Corporate Leaders who take the money and then accuse labor of not working hard enough to get their share.
Let's you and I write our own definitions for struggle and what is considered the fruits of those struggles. People work because it's how we provide food and shelter for ourselves and our families and how we measure our worth to ourselves and others. In times of plenty (like the USA currently) excess work is used to insure a plentiful future. That's the simplest was I know to define work and it's rewards.
If you go along with that definition then when you and I work hard and don't quite make the food and shelter budget, much less our measure of worth, there might just be something systemic wrong. If you then look around and see that some have a thousand year supply of food and shelter and others are starving for food and shelter while working as much as you, what then? What I think is that you and I must redefine the struggle as being one between us and those who have somehow gotten away with that thousand year supply.
Monday, January 19, 2015
A Day For Heros
Today we celebrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Most of us know of his bravery in the face of Jim Crow southern cops and dogs. The march on Selma proves his heroism beyond all quibbling and his ultimate sacrifice shames us all. The things he and the black freedom movement did for Black Americans was monumental. That alone would earn him a place as a great American hero.
In the long term, his insistence on taking a stand against poverty and the inequality it brings may be more important and more heroic. A mass movement directed against corporate greed might have ended Dr. Kings life even more quickly than bigotry did. We can only guess what gains the movement might have given us if Dr. King had survived, but we applaud his heroism in any case.
We know that the immediate past reason for white antipathy is fear and shame based: a result of the slavery economy of eighteenth and nineteenth century America. Now that slavery is outlawed, we might wish that white bigotry had been outlawed along with it. The reasons for our ongoing pink against brown problems is bedded in the ongoing economic wants of capitalism. The wish for high profits drives capitalists to keep wages down any way they can. One of the easy ways to do that is to ghettoize some, (the blacks and browns) for the profit of the few, (whites and especially capitalists).
Many of us have been led to believe than capitalism is better than socialism or any other collectivist economic model. Let's face it, the propaganda machinery, (Newspapers, TV, Cable and Internet, Textbooks), is all in capitalist hands. We probably won't find them pushing alternative economic systems with any vigor. You know where I stand just from the title of this Blog. I suggest that Dr. King was a hero brave enough to have his own doubts about American Capital. I'm also pretty sure that his Christian God speaking as Jesus of Nazareth would have those same doubts.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring". That's my Hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..
In the long term, his insistence on taking a stand against poverty and the inequality it brings may be more important and more heroic. A mass movement directed against corporate greed might have ended Dr. Kings life even more quickly than bigotry did. We can only guess what gains the movement might have given us if Dr. King had survived, but we applaud his heroism in any case.
We know that the immediate past reason for white antipathy is fear and shame based: a result of the slavery economy of eighteenth and nineteenth century America. Now that slavery is outlawed, we might wish that white bigotry had been outlawed along with it. The reasons for our ongoing pink against brown problems is bedded in the ongoing economic wants of capitalism. The wish for high profits drives capitalists to keep wages down any way they can. One of the easy ways to do that is to ghettoize some, (the blacks and browns) for the profit of the few, (whites and especially capitalists).
Many of us have been led to believe than capitalism is better than socialism or any other collectivist economic model. Let's face it, the propaganda machinery, (Newspapers, TV, Cable and Internet, Textbooks), is all in capitalist hands. We probably won't find them pushing alternative economic systems with any vigor. You know where I stand just from the title of this Blog. I suggest that Dr. King was a hero brave enough to have his own doubts about American Capital. I'm also pretty sure that his Christian God speaking as Jesus of Nazareth would have those same doubts.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring". That's my Hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..
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