Al's Opinions

Is Conservatism a Religion?

2012-02-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

Some of my Conservative friends have accused us Liberals (Progressives? Social Democrats?) of believing in a religion. I shall try to present their arguments fairly and objectively. They argue that we Liberals ignore human nature. Humans are greedy and selfish. On election day they vote their immediate self-interest. An economic safety net comprising Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, free medical care, and the like discourages saving for retirement, living a healthy life style, and looking for and accepting jobs that aren't the kind we are used to. Instead, our society should encourage or even force self-reliance and discourage dependence on government to bail us out when we are in trouble.

My response to that argument is that Conservatives are ignoring human nature. Humans may indeed be greedy and selfish. However, the history of our species indicates that cooperation with and taking care of other humans are characteristics that have enabled us to dominate the planet and climb to the top of the food chain. We Liberals believe in exploiting these social and mutual help aspects of human behavior. We believe that a successful society is based on mutual support rather than individual greed. Certainly there are greedy individuals. However, the society must contain structures that exploit human tendencies toward mutual support. Hence, we advocate in favor of free medical care for all, for unemployment insurance, for generous pensions, for a generous and effective social security system, and the like.

Are these two opposing sets of beliefs like religions? Are Conservatives ignoring important aspects of human behavior in advocating a society that rewards greed and self-reliance and punishes dependence? Are Liberals ignoring other important aspects of human behavior in advocating a society with adequate social and economic safety nets? I suppose you could say that either set of beliefs resembles a religion. In a religion there are certain things you are supposed to believe even though they seem impossible (Jonah and the whale, Moses and the burning bush, the punishment of the snake for tempting Eve). Both Conservatives and Liberals believe that in a fair election the majority of the people would choose their respective visions of the ideal society. In the case of Conservatism it would be a society without labor unions, without pensions or social security, without Medicare or Medicaid, without unemployment insurance, and an absence of government regulations on business. In the case of Liberalism it would be a society with free or almost free medical care for everyone, with generous pensions, with strong democratic labor unions, an effective economic safety net for the unemployed, and with enough good jobs that no one would have to be unemployed. Conservatives tend to look to Hong Kong as their model. Liberals look to Denmark.

Keystone Pipeline - another Conservative Cause?

2012-01-30T16:59:00.000-08:00

I do not adjust my spam filter very often. As a result I receive many e-mails from various conservative groups. One of them sent me an e-mail today (January 30) that had the subject: "44 cosponsors to APPROVE Keystone pipeline . . ." In the text some of the cosponsors are listed: Senators John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), and David Vitter (R-La.). The other 41 cosponsors are not named. I presume that most of them are also Republicans. The cosponsors intend to introduce legislation to approve the construction of the pipeline.

I am not concerned about the possible success of the proposed legislation. I don't think it will go anywhere. The Democratic majority in the Senate will probably vote it down. If the legislation ever gets to the President, he will veto it. The Senators are simply doing an exercise to please their conservative constituents. And that raises the question: Why is the Keystone Pipeline a Conservative Cause? In my observation, here are some of the Conservative Causes:

Build up our military strength
Cut taxes, especially for the ultra rich
Phase out Social Security
Phase out Medicare
Phase out environmental regulations that annoy business men
Criminalize abortion
Forbid gay marriages
Threaten Iran with bombs, fire, and brimstone
Eliminate the federal Department of Education

The pipeline has the support of those who favor more drilling for oil in U.S. territory, so that we will be less dependant on foreign oil suppliers. However, the proposed pipeline would start in Canada, to make Canada one of the foreign suppliers of our oil. I've noted in a previous blog that we export great quantities of refined petroleum products such as gasoline. I can understand a group of men who make their fortunes dealing with petroleum favoring the pipeline, but I don't understand the logic of dedicated conservatives taking up the cause.

Unless, of course, these "dedicated conservatives" are not really dedicated to an ideology of small government but instead to the prospect of becoming even more rich.

Mitt Romney's tax return

2012-01-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney has made his latest income tax return public. So also has Newt Gingrich. Aside from the details, Romney's return shows that he, like Warren Buffett, paid at a lower rate based on his entire income than did most of the rest of us common herd. Does this information indicate that Romney, Buffett, and numerous other men of great wealth are dishonest, unscrupulous cheats? Of course not. The scandal here is not that Romney and others pay a smaller fraction of their total income to the U.S. Treasury than most of us, but rather that our convoluted tax code allows them to do so. That scandal may actually lead to a serious move to change the tax code and remove the parts of it that allow super millionaires and billionaires to take advantage of the low rates available to them.

Naturally, Mr. Romney was reluctant to reveal his tax return. He wasn't worried about being exposed as an unscrupulous cheat, which he isn't. He was worried about publicizing those parts of the tax code that permitted him to reduce his total tax liability to about seventeen percent of his total income. Airing these features may energize the public to force a change in the tax code. Neither Mr. Romney nor any other multimillionaire wants to see these features go away.

Now, eliminating the tax code features that allow very rich people to pay at a low rate is a cause worth demonstrating for. Is the OCCUPY movement ready to take it on?

Another blunder in our foreign policy

2012-01-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

is becoming apparent in our relations with Iran. We have recently imposed additional sanctions on Iran in the vain hope that "getting tough" would intimidate the Iranian government into agreeing to give up their uranium enrichment program. All the new sanctions have done is to make Iran place ships in the Strait of Hormuz with the threat of preventing oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq from reaching customers in the United States and Europe. Any behavioral psychiatrist would tell you that intimidation does not generally produce the behavior you seek. Rather, the person you try to intimidate reacts by counter threat, not submission.

Our foreign policy blunders are the result of our ignorance or deliberate ignoration of the policies and interests of other countries. About seventy years ago a professor of a college class I was taking told the class that American foreign policy is simply and extension of domestic policy. The same is not true of most European countries. Unlike the United States they are small, weak, and dependant on smooth relations with their neighbors. We are, for the most part, independent of the rest of the world and we don't have to worry about diplomatic niceties like tact and reasonable negotiation.

In its policy toward Iran the administration is catering to the cries of a vocal minority who insist that a strong and powerful country like the United States should simply dictate to other countries how they should behave. This minority happens to control the House of Representatives at present. The administration wants to get something done by the House and it thinks it has to placate the "let's bomb Iran" faction. It practices conciliation and appeasement at home and threats abroad. Some of us who support the administration wish it would do less appeasing and more threatening it its relations with Congress.

Piracy vs. Censorship-2

2012-01-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

Internet users have stifled the progress of strong federal legislation against "piracy," or the unauthorized use for profit of material covered by copyright. The point of copyright protection for a piece of music is to enable the composer to profit from its performance. In the old days it was sufficient to prevent other performers from performing the protected music without paying the composer some money. It was pretty easy to enforce the copyright.

Today, with the Internet and the proliferation of facilities for storing, printing, and replaying music, it is between very difficult and impossible to enforce a copyright once the piece of music is available on the net. Anyone with the right equipment and software can download the piece, make copies, and sell them. The best protection the composer has is to keep the music off the Internet. Even so, an unscrupulous person can buy a copy of the music on a CD at a music store and make a copy of it. The technology of recording has developed to the state that, Internet or not, it is almost impossible to prevent pirating of music once it is available commercially in some form suitable for playing it. Whatever I can hear I can copy, print, and sell. It is impossible for any government to catch and punish or restrain music pirates. Even strong laws won't solve the problem because they're inherently unenforceable.

We need a new model for protecting and rewarding artists who create beautiful music.

Piracy vs. Censorship

2012-01-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

The current row is over a conflict between producers of entertainment and Internet users who fear government censorship. There are two bills now in Congress waiting to be voted on. What I've read about them is that they intend to protect producers of songs, movies, and other entertainment that can be viewed by Internet users for an implicit fee. That is, I can view or listen to the protected stuff if I am willing to look at advertisements, or perhaps join a membership group with dues and the ability to view or listen to the material. The laws are intended to punish Internet sites, particularly sites outside the United States, that make the protected stuff available for no fee. One fear is that the law, if enacted, could lead to censorship of many domestic sites that provide entertainment information. I might produce something for a domestic site that was like something protected by copyright, either intentionally or inadvertently. The owner of the material that I had allegedly copied or plagiarized could sue the offending site or, better still, complain to the federal government and have the site shut down.

This controversy points to a defect in our system of protecting the rights and income of inventors, artists, and other creative persons. Our constitution permits the federal government to issue patents and copyrights. These documents provide that the owner (inventor, artist, etc.) has the exclusive right to make, perform, publish, license, etc., the protected item for a certain number of years. The idea is to reward creativity and innovation. The duration of the right or monopoly is long enough for the creator to receive a profit for his or her creation.

With many products and artistic creations this simple system works well. Successful artists prosper. Artists without talent fail. However, in a few cases the system produces a bad result. Let us suppose that someone had developed a cure for HIV AIDS. It's a magic pill, 100 percent effective. Naturally, this inventor either sets up a factory to manufacture the pill himself or licenses a pharmaceutical firm to do so. He stands to obtain a fortune from his creation. Anyone with AIDS and enough money to buy the pills will do so. The bad effect is that people with AIDS who can't afford the pill will have to do without and take their chances on less expensive medication that won't provide a cure. How do we handle that seeming inequity?

One answer is that the pharmaceutical company or the inventor can simply make available doses of the medication for those who can't pay. That's not a completely satisfactory solution. Suppose not enough pills are set aside. Then, some poor victims of AIDS will still go untreated.

My solution is to create a nonprofit institution, funded mainly by government, charged with the responsibility of selecting new medical treatments, buying the patent rights, and having them manufactured and distributed at either no cost to the patients or at a low enough cost that all patients can afford them. These treatments would be selected on the basis of ultimate value to the community. The selection would be limited to treatments that cure life-threatening ailments and the like. Things that merely improve quality of life a small amount, such as Viagra, would not be selected.

Comments? Suggestions? Figurative cabbages and tomatoes?

The Price of Fuel

2011-12-31T10:46:00.000-08:00

I came across an interesting little article in a back page of the BUSINESS section of the Los Angeles Times for December 31. The headline reads: U.S. exported record amount of fuel. The writer goes on to argue that the reason Americans have been paying such high prices for gasoline this year is that the U.S. has been exporting record amounts of refined fuel. In 2007 the U.S. exported 1.24 to 1.25 million barrels a day. In 2011 the daily quantity had risen to a daily average between 2.77 and 2.89 million barrels a day. That's more than twice the rate in 2007. The writer couples the export of refined fuel to the high prices Americans paid for gasoline in 2011.

Compare this article with the enthusiasm Republican politicians show for the pipeline from Alberta Province in Canada to American refineries close to the Gulf of Mexico. The argument is made that the pipeline will reduce our need for imported petroleum and bring gasoline prices down. I humbly state that such an argument is both wrong and deceptive. Because we, the U.S., export refined gasoline and other fuels, the price of such fuels is determined by the world market, not our internal production of unrefined petroleum.

Air Bag Hearing Loss

2011-12-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

Early in November this year I was injured in a bad automobile accident. My car was hit hard enough to cause the air bags to deploy. I don’t remember that part of the accident but when I came to, the two front seat air bags were full of gas and the car was full of some kind of powder or vapor. My head must have been struck by the air bag. My glasses fell off and a stranger found them for me in the car after I had been helped to the curb.

What is particularly interesting to me is the kind of deafness that I now have. Both my doctor and one of my daughters tell me it is a frequent consequence of being hit in the face by an expanding air bag. I can hear the same high frequencies that I heard before the accident but now I can’t relate them to the sounds of spoken language produced by the high frequencies, such as the ability to distinguish between the “f” sound and the “s” sound.

The really strange part of the hearing impairment came to me when I tried to play a simple musical instrument, a recorder (or fipple flute). I took an alto recorder which has a pitch range from F above middle C to F two octaves above. I had no problem playing the first octave, from F to f. Continuing above f I played g, a, and b. When I tried to play the next note, c’, it sounded way off in pitch. It sounded like g’, a half octave higher! I thought there was something wrong with my fingering. I picked up a soprano recorder. It has a range from c (an octave above middle C) to c’’, two octaves higher. On this instrument I could not get the c’, just an octave above c, to sound correctly. The fingering for the note is different from that of the alto recorder and I began to realize that something strange had happened to my hearing.

I went to the piano. I played the C major scale, starting at middle C. Sure enough, the c’’ two octaves above was badly out of tune. It sounded like the g’’ half an octave higher. The other notes above c’’ were in correct pitch with each other but were all too high by about half an octave.

Since then the missing gap in my pitch assignment of high notes that I hear has decreased from about half an octave to a quarter. My understanding of human speech has improved slightly. However, I am grateful for the printed dialog my new TV set provides for the programs I like to watch, such as the PBS News Hour and some of the British comedies and mysteries.

I have had my hearing tested innumerable times. I have never been tested for pitch (frequency) recognition or pitch interval assignment. I don’t know whether such tests exist. I wonder if any of the other persons who have been deafened by air bags have had a hearing experience similar to mine.

The Antichrist

2011-11-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

By way of disclaimer, I have not read the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book in the Bible, and the source of such beliefs as the Antichrist, the rapture, the final fight between right and wrong, and all that. I have to make up my own definition of the term "Antichrist." Here it is:

I believe an Antichrist (oh, there must be many of them, like antipopes) is a person who masquerades among us pretending to be the true Christ and telling us things that we, or some of us, believe to be extensions of the teachings of the real Christ. All the time this mountebank is influencing us to do things that are very harmful and perhaps even fatal to us and seducing us to believe things that are in fact the exact opposite of the teachings of the true Christ.

I have a candidate for an Antichrist who is living among us this very day. This person is persuading some of us to believe and act in ways that are very harmful to our country and by extension to ourselves and our descendants. We know that our country has an ailing economy. Unemployment is high. Jobs are scarce and becoming scarcer as more and more of them are being moved to China and other low-wage countries. We have a negative trade balance which causes foreign countries to use the dollars they receive from us for our purchases to buy our bonds. We know in our gut that the poor economy is the number one problem we face as a nation.

So, what is this Antichrist up to? He has persuaded a significant fraction of us that the number one problem is the size and the expense of the federal government. To achieve moral purity, we must put aside all these expensive entitlements, like social security, medicare, unemployment insurance and compensation, environmental regulations, and the like, and reduce taxes. Taxes are too high, they must come down. We must go back to the nineteenth century, when there was no income tax and when the only functions of the federal government was maintaining a safe currency, running the postal service, and clearing the western lands of the ignorant and worthless natives who lived there and made problems for the white settlers.

Who is this Antichrist and how has he obtained so much power? He has power, no doubt. He has made it impossible for our elected representatives in Congress to address the problems of unemployment and a weak economy. Instead, they are compelled to quarrel over how to reduce the deficit without raising taxes. He has caused nearly every Republican member of Congress to sign a pledge not to vote for any tax increase regardless of any consequences. He has vowed to reduce the size of the federal government until it is like a baby that could be drowned in the bathtub.

This man has been exposed in television interviews several times. The most recently aired interview was with Mike Croft last Sunday on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. I thought Mike did a good job of exposing the man's intentions for all us to see. The man's name? Grover Norquist.

The argument in favor of small government

2011-11-20T18:01:00.000-08:00

Any number of conservative polemicists have argued in favor of small government, low taxes, and few regulations on business. Some of the arguments are phrased in moral terms: with small government people will have to learn to take care of themselves and not depend on a large, inefficient, unresponsive government to help them. Other arguments are specific to the desires of their rich patrons, who favor low taxes and freedom from any public limits on their behavior. To me the most appealing argument is that large government can become unresponsive to the needs and desires of most of its citizens and, being large, is almost impossible to change. I say that this is the most appealing argument to me. Actually I don't care for any of them.

Historically, governments have tended to be either weak or tyrannical. In neither case the government cared little about and did little of benefit for the "common" people (that is, us 99%). Roman emperors arranged spectacles to entertain the commoners, such as fights between gladiators or feeding Christians to lions, but did little to make sure that the commoners were well-fed, well-clothed, and well cared for in old age. In modern times it was Otto von Bismarck who recognized that a stable government depended on a satisfied population, and set about creating governmental institutions to provide health care and other benefits for the whole population of Germany. By contrast, a century earlier the Kings of France were making sure that wealthy Frenchmen were happy and satisfied. We know where that policy led.

Small, weak government leads necessarily to a society in which the richest individuals have the greatest power. They can create walled and gated enclaves in which to live. They can hire thugs to keep the less privileged away. They can dictate the conditions and the wages of working people. The hired thugs guarantee that the workers accept the wages and conditions. Who wants to be a member of the 99% in such a society?

Not me, certainly. However, Howard Jarvis looked forward eagerly to the creation of such a society. Today Grover Norquist advocates shrinking government to a size that it can then be drowned in a bathtub. Mr. Norquist would almost certainly deny it, but it seems to me that he advocates anarchy; that is, no government at all.

We, the 99 percent, need a strong government committed to making sure that the one percent don't simply squeeze us from the paltry share we have of the nation's wealth and other amenities. The government is strong; unfortunately, it has been taken over by the one percent. Corporations now have as much legal standing as persons. (I wonder if corporations can be put to death if convicted of murder?) We also need strong non-governmental-organizations (NGO) such as unions and associations dedicated to protecting our rights to help us withstand the power of the one percent.

Bound to Fail

2011-11-20T14:11:00.000-08:00

The congressional super committee, charged with agreeing on a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to achieve a balanced budget by Wednesday, November 30 is, according to reports that I have seen, no closer to reaching an agreement than it was two months ago. The failure of the committee to find a compromise is an indicator of the failure of our federal government to operate as a democracy. A history professor once told me that democracy can't work unless there is an agreement among all (or most) factions about fundamentals. Now an important fundamental is the kind of government that we should have. Should our government act to improve the economy by creating jobs, providing relief for the unemployed, acting to correct an endemic unbalance of trade, provide health care for all of us, provide decent retirement pensions, etc.? On the other hand, should the government not get involved with any of those things but instead stick to maintaining a stable currency, provide enough military prowess to intimidate any potential enemy, make sure that crimes against property are punished, etc.?

One faction in congress and on the super committee is pledged to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. The other faction is pledged to use government to improve life for its citizens. These two concepts can't be compromised. There is no agreement on fundamentals. Democracy can't work. The committee is bound to fail.

Senator Russell Pearce is out

2011-11-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

As an unabashed partisan "old" Democrat, I took pleasure in seeing the glum face of Senator Pearce of Arizona on the front page of today's newspaper (Thursday, November 10, 2011). This is the man who authored and pushed the Arizona law regarding illegal aliens that has had so much publicity in the past year or so. I almost feel sympathy for the poor man. He found a hot issue that many Arizonans cared about and created a law that matched their desires. Now, a year or so later, Arizona voters have turned against him and have recalled him from office.

What's a politician to do? If he's ambitious he wants to appeal to a large segment of the population so that he will be in position to seek a higher elective office. Our government is supposed to be a democracy, isn't it? If the people want something, they should be able to get their government to give it to them or at least do something about it. A year or two ago many Arizonans wanted government - State or federal - to crack down on illegal immigrants. Found them up. Carry them to the border and dump them back into Mexico where they belong. The federal government has no consistent policy on undocumented immigration. Senator Pearce authored a law that allowed (or required?) police officials to check the immigration status of anyone they arrested who had some chance of being "illegal," and if so, see to it that they were taken back to the nearest foreign country or turned over to the federal INS. Tough, definite action in response to a strong public sentiment.

What's happened to that sentiment? Are Arizonans becoming soft on illegal immigration, like us softies in California? What's a politician supposed to do in a democracy if not respond to strong public opinion?

Well, there's the rub. Years ago I read a book by a professional pollster who noted that Americans do not have good ways of working their way from "mass opinion" to "public judgment." Mass opinion is a sentiment that can be very strong for a while, and then simply blow away. Public judgment is a sentiment or opinion held by a majority of voters that is pretty fixed. The voters have heard and studied all the arguments for and against a thing and have become settled in their support or opposition. Senator Pearce should have consulted the pollster.

Herman Cain - burning out?

2011-11-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Herman Cain campaign may be coming to an end because of an allegation of sexual harassment several years ago. He fervently denies the allegation. However, the allegation and his heated denial are getting a big play in the main stream media. If his campaign crashes, it will be a result of an allegation that may not be true, or may be true but is irrelevant to the question of whether he should be President.

He should not be President, to be sure. He has some of the goofiest and most dangerous economic ideas I've ever heard. If he were to become President and were to put some of these goofy ideas into practice, it would be very harmful to the country. But goofy ideas don't sell newspapers. Sex scandals sell newspapers. Hence, the space given to a possible sex scandal, compared to the space given to a critique of his 9-9-9 tax plan, illustrates the economics of publishing and selling newspapers.

Keynes

2011-10-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

is my guide to economics. Of course, I've never read any of Keynes' works. All I've read is articles about him and his theory of economics. Lately I've read long articles in The Nation and The New Yorker magazines. These articles present the writers' opinions as to what advice Keynes would be giving us if he were alive today.

Both articles convince me that Keynes would state that the fundamental problem the United States has is an unfavorable balance of trade. We buy more than we export. Hence, foreigners, particularly the Chinese, have an excess of dollars that they can't spend right away. Where do they put those dollars? They buy US Treasury bonds, the safest investment in the world at present. Hence, we accumulate debt to foreigners. Eventually that debt is going to ruin us and probably the rest of the world as well.

What should we do? One reason for our trade unbalance is that American firms have closed domestic production plants and opened plants in foreign countries, particularly Mexico, the rest of Central America, and China. The American firms that do this save money in taxes as well as labor costs. Corporate tax rates are about half of the American corporate tax rate in many countries. In foreign countries the owner or operator of a manufacturing plant does not have to provide subsidized health insurance for the employees. The governments provide that in many cases. In other cases it is not the practice for anyone to pay for the employees' health care, certainly not the employers.

Keynes would recommend that we encourage investors to put money into starting new industries that provide goods that can be sold to foreigners as well as to Americans. These investors further have to be persuaded to keep successful enterprises in this country and not to move production overseas.

Two proposals would provide incentives. First, adjust the corporate tax rate to match that of most other countries. That is, reduce it from the present rate of about 28 percent to about 15 percent. (That's a Republican proposal.) Second, relieve the domestic enterprises from the burden of providing health insurance for the workers. Instead, provide, for example, a single-payer health care plan. (That's a Democratic proposal.) These two plans would go a long way toward encouraging firms to keep the production facilities here in the United States and also keep jobs here.

If we can do this, the additional workers would pay taxes and help reduce the federal deficit. The additional production would reduce the trade deficit. Ideally, we would achieve equality between imports and exports. The multiplying effect of the extra workers would get us out of recession.

I believe this is the advice that Mr. Keynes would give us. I think it is good advice. The present practice of simply trying to reduce federal expenditures will not do anything to correct the balance of trade problem.

Liberal Answers

2011-10-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

For years I've been reading that we liberals are too effete (cowardly? timid?) to answer the conservatives' method of making points by framing issues in ways that suggest the conclusion. Some examples of frames are:

Renaming the estate tax to "death tax," implying that one has to pay a tax if one dies. The polite response is that the tax is not paid by the decedent but by his or her heirs. They pay a tax on the money they receive as their inheritances. The total amount of tax collected depends on how the estate is split up. If one person inherits the whole thing, he or she pays a whopping tax. If the estate is split evenly among several heirs, the total tax paid is less because of the graduated scale on which the tax is calculated. I have not yet seen an earthy response.
Proposals to raise the marginal tax rates on persons with large incomes has been called both "class warfare" and "job killers." One liberal response is to label conservative attempts to do away with Social Security as an entitlement and replace it with some form of individual savings account as class warfare against the elderly and the poor. Attempts at weakening or destroying labor unions by placing severe restrictions on collective bargaining or strikes by public service employees are examples of class warfare against the workers. As far as such an increase could be a "job killer," we should remember that most enterprisers don't start businesses with their own money. Instead, they look for a bank loan and later for investors. We read that today banks are awash with money they they aren't lending out. Instead, they deposit it with interest in federal reserve banks. Besides, some of us are old enough to remember the good times of the Eisenhower Administration, when the marginal income tax rates were as high as 90 percent.

I am pleased to report that I have heard some liberals give responses like the ones above. We are not voiceless. We are not timid. We follow the traditions of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Roosevelt called his opponents "economic royalists." Truman called them "snolly gosters." The proper response to a frame is a more effective frame, not a denial.

Moving Prisoners to County Jails

2011-10-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

The State of California, in order to relieve the crowding in its prisons, is moving many prisoners from State prisons to the counties and cities for incarceration or probation. Naturally, the officials of the counties and cities are complaining that the State isn't providing money to deal with the extra load of caring for and supervising the convicts.

Really? Why do you suppose the State is unloading its non-violent offenders on the local governments? The State doesn't have the money to enlarge the prisons and staff to care properly for them. If the State had the money, there would be no problem.

This is just another consequence of the foolishness of California voters who, a few decades ago, voted to limit the ability of the State Legislature and the voters in local elections to raise taxes by requiring a 2/3 vote to do so. The voters later modified the rule so that a local tax to support public education could be passed by by a 3/5 vote.

It is another example of Benjamin Disraeli's rule that "a people gets the government it deserves, not the kind it wants."

Regarding the prisoner swap, we're getting what we deserve.

Race-based admission to universities

2011-09-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

This morning (Friday, September 30, 2011) I listened to a part of the Larry Mantle AirTalk program on KPCC in Pasadena. The topic was using race as a factor in admitting applicants to public universities. When I turned on the program one caller was arguing that admitting an applicant on the basis of race means denying another applicant who may be (or probably is) better qualified. A few minutes later Larry’s guest, Ward Connerly came on to state his position and personal history. Mr. Connerly has been a vocal critic of any use of race in choosing applicants to public universities.

I’m not prepared to argue for or against using race in choosing applicants to public universities, such as the University of California. Instead, after thinking about the caller who argued against any race-based criterion for admission because it would entail qualified candidates being excluded, I concluded that the argument is pointless. Whether or not race is a factor in choosing whom to admit and whom not to admit, the mere fact that university facilities are limited implies that some qualified applicants are going to be denied admission. The only way to make sure that no qualified applicant is turned down is to admit all applicants, and do whatever is necessary to create places for them.

I have heard Mr. Connerly express his dislike for race-based criteria for admission to public universities many times. I don’t recall that he has used the argument about the qualified student being excluded to make room for the minority applicant. He has argued that admitting a student simply because of his race tends to reinforce any feeling the student might have about his or her own inadequacy. That is, a minority student can’t be proud of being admitted just because he or she is a minority. A student likes to believe that he or she really has a superior intellect and rightfully deserves a place in the university student body. At least that's one argument Mr. Connerly has used.

Death Penalty

2011-09-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

Many bloggers are writing about the death penalty today. A man was put to death in Georgia yesterday. There were doubts expressed about his actual guilt and several important people urged the State of Georgia not to execute him. The State of Georgia decided that the question of executing this convict was not any one's business except the State of Georgia and the execution proceeded on schedule.

One of the persuasive arguments in favor of continuing our practice of putting convicted murderers to death is that it acts as a deterrent. It is believed that the possibility of being executed for the crime makes many would-be murderers think again and spare the lives of their victims. This thought was once expressed very clearly by a former Chief of Police of Los Angeles. Even if there is an occasional mistake and an innocent person is executed, on balance the existence and enforcement of the death penalty saves lives. Balance the lives of those who are not killed by their criminal attackers against the innocent people killed by the State of California. The net loss of innocent lives is reduced where the death penalty exists and is carried out.

That Police Chief's argument is an example of "the way things ought to be." It is reasonable and ought to be the case that the fear of being executed deters many murderers. Statistics in which murder rates in States with the death penalty, such as California and Texas, are compared with similar data in States that don't have it, such as Michigan, do not show that the murder rate is less in the death penalty States than in those that don't have it. If anything, non-death-penalty States show lower murder rates than death-penalty States.

Is there a reasonable explanation of this seemingly counter-intuitive result? Why isn't the murder rate lower in California than in Michigan? Perhaps California doesn't execute people often enough. Then compare Texas with Michigan. Why isn't the murder rate a lot lower in Texas than in Michigan? A possible explanation is that we should put the argument the other way around. The death penalty is popular in places where murder is fairly common. In countries in which murder rarely occurs, there is no strong sentiment for the death penalty.

In spite of statistical evidence to the contrary, Americans continue to believe that the death penalty deters murder and are in favor of keeping it, by a majority of about sixty percent. This majority declines a bit when a case of mistaken conviction and execution of an innocent person is widely publicized. Such mistakes are usually not publicized, for two reasons. First, the authorities don't want to air the fact that they have made a mistake. Second, the work of proving the innocence of a convict depends mostly on dedicated volunteers, including lawyers and investigators and forensic experts. One the convict, innocent or not, has been put to death, there is no point of continuing the effort. Resources must then be allocated to another convict who is still alive as well as probably innocent.

Palestinian Statehood

2011-09-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

I don't recall that there ever was a State of Palestine during my lifetime. After World War I the part of the old Turkish Empire that now includes Israel and Jordan was assigned to the UK as the British Mandate. The part east of the Jordan River was called Trans-Jordan. The part between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was called - what? I don't remember any special name except British Mandate. The name Palestine may have been used to refer to that part of the mandate.

Eventually, somehow, the mandate was split into two parts, Jordan and Palestine. A member of the Hashemite family (or tribe?) took upon himself the obligation of being the King of Jordan. A cleric, known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became the ruler, in a sense, of the "West Bank" part of the British Mandate.

As we know, after WWI the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the King of Saudi Arabia agreed to create in the British Mandate a "homeland" for the Jews. Saudi Arabia agreeing to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine was a bit like the Canarsie Indians of Brooklyn selling Manhattan Island to the Dutch for $24 in the early 1600's, since they had no more claim to Manhattan than Saudi Arabia had to Palestine. The Manhattan Indian tribes didn't like the deal; neither did the Palestinians. In particular, the Grand Mufti didn't like it. In WWII he sided with Hitler and was ready to get rid of the Jews who had settled in Palestine following the deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia.

After WWII the horrible tragedy of Hitler's "final solution" became known. Americans felt guilty about refusing to admit German Jews before and during the war who had tried unsuccessfully to escape Hitler's gas ovens. We enthusiastically supported the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, where those Jews who wanted to practice their religion and be free from various pogroms and other annoyances could live and create a small religious state. In 1948 the United Nations created the State of Israel.

Immediately the Grand Mufti and other Palestinians attacked and tried to crush the new state. They didn't succeed. With American support, the new state defeated the "invaders" (actually, natives trying to expel immigrants) and established Israel as a potent military presence in the region. Another war, in 1967, allowed Israel to claim additional territory, including a section of Egypt east of the Suez Canal as well as control of all of the territory of Biblical Israel. Part of this new territory was ceded to the control of Jordan. A small piece was offered to Egypt, who refused to take it. The rest was claimed as territory into which Jews from all over the world could come and settle. Of course, in order for Jews to settle in Israel the former inhabitants had to be removed. They were chased out and forced to live in refugee camps in the West Bank territory controlled by Jordan. Many of them moved to the small territory that Egypt had refused, called Gaza.

Enough history. I have summarized my view of it just for background.

At present we have the following situation:

The United States favors the establishment of two separate states in the area. One would be a Jewish state which would be called Israel. The other would be a state for the Palestinians.
The United Nations, the United States, and many other countries in the world recognize the boundary resulting from the 1967 war as the boundary between the two states. The government of Israel has refused to accept this boundary.
The United Nations has ruled that Jewish settlements established on the "Palestinian" side of the boundary are illegal because they amount to encroachments on the territory of the Palestinian state to be created some time in the future. The United States has asked Israel to stop the settlement activity. The Israeli government has refused.
The Israeli government has declared that it supports the concept of eventually achieving a situation in which two separate states occupy the land once known as Biblical Israel. First, there are many details that must be ironed out by negotiations between a responsible government or ruling entity in Palestine and the government of Israel. Meanwhile, the building of new settlements continues in "Palestinian" land.
There are many factions among the Israelis. There is a "peace" faction that wants to proceed with the creation of a separate state of Palestine and make peace with that state. There are several religious factions, some of which want to see Israel in its Biblical borders. Some of them engage in settlement building and seizing strategic land for new settlements as a means of eventually recreating the Kingdom of King David and King Solomon. I don't know how strong these various factions are. The present government of Israel depends on these religious factions to maintain its majority in the Israeli parliament, and therefore will not do anything to stop the creation of new settlements.
The Obama Administration follows the policy of previous administrations in providing absolute and uncritical support of whatever government is in power in Israel. This support strengthens Israel's hand in any negotiations with Palestinians and other Arab neighbors. The Palestinians have no similar patron and are in a poor bargaining position. In spite of this one-sided situation, the Obama Administration insists that no peace settlement can be imposed on the two sides. They must reach an agreement by negotiation.

The United Nations will vote on the question of recognizing Palestine as a member State. The United States will veto the motion in the Security Council. The General Assembly may vote to grant Palestine a non-member observer status. In spite of talk about achieving peace through negotiation between the Palestinian Authority and the Likud government of Israel, negotiations will drag on and on and nothing will be agreed to. More settlements will be constructed. Eventually all Palestinians will be squeezed out, unable to reach their own farm land to grow and harvest their crops. In the course of time, the Palestinian people will either die of starvation or move to other countries and establish new lives for themselves.

I do not know of any country that will take them. They will be in the same position as the German Jews who tried to escape Hitler's gas ovens during WWII. Should we call this Netanyahu's Final Solution?

The Wisdom of Tom Friedman

2011-09-06T17:14:00.000-07:00

A friend records things on the TV for me to watch later. The other day I watched a recording of the program "Face the Nation." One of the guests was Thomas Friedman, who has written many books about important events that are transforming the modern world. The host posed the question of what should Obama do and say next Thursday in his address to Congress about the recession. There were several answers. Maxine Waters, the Congresswoman from Los Angeles, hoped that Mr. Obama would propose a program of jobs to put people to work right away. Paul Gigot, who manages the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, argued against a repetition of the WPA of Franklin Roosevelt that didn't, in his opinion, do much to cure the depression of the 1930's. Other guests had their opinions. A labor leader, James Hoffa, agreed with Ms Waters and said the country needs more jobs now.

Tom Friedman tried to justify the long view. He argued that simply spending money now to provide "temporary work" for the unemployed wouldn't do anything to fix the long-term problem facing the country. He argued in favor of such things as more education so that people could be trained to do the high tech jobs that are available in some of the new industries. He didn't say anything about the number of persons that these new industries would hire.

On a related subject I learned a few days ago that the firm "Facebook" is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has millions of subscribers all over the planet. (Yes, I have a facebook page.) However, providing this service requires only ab out 2,500 employees. A similar situation exists with other new giants, such as Google and Twitter. Companies that manufacture and sell computers and fancy telephones similarly can provide products and services for millions of people with relatively small staffs. It's true that the employees of these firms are well educated, with college degrees in electrical or computer engineering. Unfortunately, it's also true that their total employment is well under a million. Mr. Friedman has not explained how the others are going to find work even with their degrees in various branches of engineering.

We are approaching a situation predicted many years ago in which a relatively small portion of the adult population will be able, through the use of computers and other machines, to provide all the food, other goods, housing, entertainment, and other services for the entire population. This condition is inevitable. Already fewer than five percent of the workers in this country operate farms and provide more food than the rest of us can consume. The United States is a big food exporter.

There are several ways to approach the problem of mass unemployment coupled with a surfeit of goods and services. The Conservative approach is to do nothing. Let things develop naturally and don't try to undertake "social engineering." I believe that the end result of that approach is a society in which a relatively small number of well-educated workers provide nearly all the goods and services we want. Everyone else will be forced to work at low-paying, menial jobs. We now use illegal immigrants to do these jobs. "Real" Americans have not yet realized that low-pay jobs with no hope of advancement is the likely future for most Americans.

I tend to favor a socialist approach. Let each person do what he or she can do well and provide what is necessary for everyone. In this approach wages would have to be coupled to need and not to the character of the work done. If everyone can be guaranteed an adequate living standard during retirement - and we already have all the goods and services available to achieve that goal - then what one is paid relates to his or her needs and not to whether the person is a gardener or a brain surgeon. I don't know whether this approach can work. The Russians tried it, but their system collapsed due to corruption and greed.

Perhaps we need a blend. Pay for work should provide an incentive for work of original nature and high quality. Perhaps the common needs of everyone could be met with a subsidy, like food stamps for all. We might be able to provide an adequate living for everyone, even those persons who are unemployed or unemployable. The brain surgeon would command a higher salary than the gardener, but both would be entitled to food stamps, housing vouchers, and annual vacation trips.

My ideas are not very good. I haven't done any calculations to determine how big the common subsidy should be. There is no political will in this country at present to do anything remotely like what I have just suggested. If any of you readers of this blog (Virge, Steve, Pat, Charley, Roy, etc.) have any ideas, write them down below or send me an e-mail.

The Slowness of Memory

2011-09-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

Perhaps that should be "the sloth of memory," on the ground that "sloth" is an old word that means "slowness", formed by affixing the suffix -th to the word slo(w). Thus, grow > growth; slow > slowth or sloth; etc. I like to think about old words and former versions of the English Language. I have acquired, for example, a copy of "Beowolf" in tenth century English, a language which is virtually incomprehensible to me.

Anyway, ancient or obsolete English is not the subject of this essay. I write this because I just remembered a name. I have a slow memory. The other day I was trying to recall the name of the man who has so intimidated the Republican party that any candidate for any public office who wants to run as a Republican must sign a "no taxes" pledge. This pledge states that the candidate, if elected, will never, never, ever vote to increase any tax or any tax modification that may result in an increase in government revenue. This intimidating man has said publicly that his goal is to shrink government down to a size that it can be drowned in a bathtub.

I couldn't recall his name the other day, although I've thought about him and his tax pledge and his drowning baby government in the bath tub for many years. All I could remember was that the name is Scandinavian, something like Oskar Carlsson or Sven Ostrom, but not either of those. A few minutes ago the name came to me, loud and clear: Grover Norquist. The name Norquist is clearly Scandinavian and probably Swedish. I grew up in a part of Michigan that had been populated in earlier times by Swedish and Dutch immigrants. In addition to members of my own familiy, there were people with names like Ostrom, Lundquist, Carlson, Peterson, Nyblad, and Trofast, whose ancestors had come from Sweden. There were also many Dutch names such as Van Single, Van Dyke, Vandenberg, Dykstra, Hoekstra, Jonkman, Meijer, Van Zant, and others. These immigrants and descendants of immigrants were farmers and brought with them habits of thrift and hard work. They were also mostly Republicans. My Swedish grandfather was the only Democrat in the family. His brothers, sister, and cousins were Republicans. It is not surprising to me, therefore, that Grover Norquist is a Republican.

The surprising thing is that he's got all the Republican politicians in the country terrified and intimidated. I don't know the source of his power but I believe money is a big part of it. He must control a major source of campaign contribution money that he can grant to or withhold from selected candidates. If you are an aspiring Republican and running for office as a State legislator, Mr. Norquist is, I presume, a source of much-needed funding. Funds are available to you in return for the "no tax" pledge.

However, money for campaigns isn't the whole story. Republican candidates are nominated at primary elections. In most States these elections attract only voters with rather extreme political views. In particular, the promise of "no new taxes" is one that these voters cherish.

When I ramble on and on about "skinflint Republicans" who insist that necessary government services can be provided without additional revenue in spite of increased population density and increased longevity, my conservative friends tell me that they just don't understand my thinking. What is there not to like about low taxes? I have no luck trying to explain that some of the consequences of "low taxes" bother me. Low taxes imply the curtailment or end of benevolent and merciful public services, such as:

Social Security
Medicare and Medicaid
Free public and good quality education
Good police and fire protection
An honest, efficient, and prompt justice system
Libraries
Hospital emergency rooms and other emergency medical assistance
Public warnings of impending fires, hurricanes, floods, and tornados
Teachers, police, and other public employees who are fairly paid and competent

I invite you to add to the list.

I don't know why I wanted to remember Grover Norquist. Thinking about him makes me nervous.

The Peter Principle in Technology

2011-08-25T22:18:00.000-07:00

In case you've forgotten the Peter Principle, it relates to the promotion within an organization of employees who impress their bosses with their abilities. If an employee is doing very good work in the position he or she is in, the employee is promoted. Eventually he or she will be in a position where the requirements of the job are just a bit more than the abilities of the employee to perform them. This process continues until everyone in the organization has been promoted to a position in which he or she is not quite able to do the job. All the work is then done by individuals who are not quite competent to do it. This principle is ascribed to a Dr. Peter. That's all I know about him. Perhaps more information is available in Google.

It seems to me that technological progress results in the use of new technology that isn't quite adequate. I can remember a remark a technician made to me years ago about telephones. The rotary dial telephone was invented ages ago - probably not long after I was born. The technician was in the process of changing one of the telephones in my house, replacing a rotary dial instrument with a push-button phone. He remarked that the rotary dial phone had been in use for such a long time that it had been perfected and very rarely malfunctioned. The new, at the time, push button phones were not nearly as dependable, but they were rapidly replacing the older rotary dial instruments.

I've thought of many other examples. The railroad was invented as an improvement on wagons pulled by horses or canal barges towed by horses. It provided more rapid transportation of heavy loads. However, early railroads had some important drawbacks. It took many decades of trying and failing to develop a reliable signal system to keep two trains from colliding. It also took decades to increase the speed from about 20 miles per hour to 100. Finally the system was just about perfected. Then came the bus. Buses could go places trains couldn't. They could offer lower cost transportation. However, they were slower and less comfortable for human passengers. Nonetheless, by about 1940 passenger rail service was declining as more and more people chose either to ride buses or to buy and drive their own cars. Clearly, these newer forms of transportation were in many respects inferior to rail travel. A few decades later, cars were more comfortable and safer, as were buses. But, before these new means of transportation had a chance to become perfected, the airplane appeared. Now we travel long distances by air. For shorter distances we drive our cars, ride buses, or use what's left of the passenger rail system.

I could extend this essay for many feet by showing other examples in which we are using new, developing technology that doesn't work as well as older technology that we've abandoned. It's like the Peter Principle in employment. In many cases we're doing things not as well as we could have with older technology.

My finger tips and the fipple flute

2011-08-23T16:39:00.000-07:00

I am obsessed with my fingers, particularly the tips of them. Last February I cut off a short piece of the right ring finger with a car door. Cars are dangerous things! The finger healed in the course of time, but now it is about five mm shorter than it was. Worse than that, the tip now feels like a callus. A callus is thick, tough skin that your body grows on any part that is continually exposed to hard, rough material. People who don't wear shoes develop calluses on their feet so that they can walk on rough surfaces without feeling any discomfort. My right ring finger now has a callus.

I have a slight talent for music, just a little more than the Emperor in the play "Amadeus." In high school and college I played the clarinet. I wasn't a great player, but I could play well enough to be one of the second clarinets in the college band. The band played at the week-end football games during the football season and gave concerts at other times of the year. For me it was a substitute for the required courses in military training at the Michigan land-grant college (MSU nowadays).

Later I collected three fipple flutes, also known as recorders. I have a soprano, an alto, and a tenor. Until last February I was a fairly accomplished player ot these instruments. Now, because of the callus on my right ring finger, I have difficulty fingering the second note on the scale of any of these instruments. I can manage with the alto by placing the part of my finger that's soft over the holes in the instrument. The tenor is more difficult for me. I think I can play the soprano; it's the smallest of the three.

I keep hoping that my finger will eventually reject the callus and the tip will become as flexible as the tips of the other fingers. I also keep thinking that I may have to acquire a rubber thimble for that particular finger. I have seen rubber thimbles in an office supply store, but they were too small for my finger.

The doctor who treated my wounded finger suggested that I should use hand lotion, like Lubriderm, to soften the finger tip. Apparently it is a common thing for a wounded finger to grow a callus to protect the end of the remaining bone. I haven't been using hand lotion regularly. In order to expose the finger to the lotion continuously I have to wear a throw-away kitchen glove with lotion in the one glove finger that goes around the right ring finger. I haven't been going to that much trouble. I keep hoping that the finger will eventually get tired of being different from the other fingers and reject the callus. That hasn't happened yet.

When is a Corporation a Person

2011-08-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

and when isn't it? It depends on whether the corporation is paying taxes or contributing money to a candidate or political cause. It also depends on who is deciding the question, the Supreme Court or Congress.

The Supreme Court has decided that a corporation is a person with respect to free speech and supporting political causes. A corporation has the same rights as any other person in such matters. The Court has not yet decided that a corporation should be allowed to register as a voter and cast a ballot. In addition, corporations are not (yet) subject to various laws. A corporation can not be indicted and tried for murder it its practices endanger the lives of miners, as an example. In that respect and others, a corporation is not (yet) a person. However, with respect to doling out money to candidates, it is a person, and a very big one at that.

Congress has decided that the money that a corporation pays out in dividends to investors should not be taxed as ordinary income. Some in Congress argue that such money should not be taxed at all, because the corporation has already paid income tax on the income before paying the dividends. Now, this policy makes no sense if the corporation itself is a person. I am a person. I pay a gardener a sum of money each month for taking care of my lawn and plants. The gardener has to pay income tax on the money I provide him. It would do him no good to argue that I have already paid income tax on the money. Yet, this argument works in Congress. The argument is that since I own stock in a particular corporation, I own a share of the company and, through my ownership, I have already paid income tax on the dividend. Therefore, I shouldn't have to pay tax on the dividend. "Double taxation of dividends" is the slogan.

So, what is it? I own shares in an electric power utility in Wisconsin. Is that corporation a person - in which case my dividends should be taxable like any other ordinary income - or isn't it? I am personally opposed to granting the power company the status of personhood. I know that the political issues and candidates that the utility supports are chosen by the Board of Directors. I've never seen a proxy soliciting my choice of which Wisconsin candidate for governor or which candidate for senator I would like the firm to support. Those directors mostly are Republicans, I suspect, and their choices of candidates and issues are not mine.

Warren Buffett's article

2011-08-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

The New York Times recently published an op-ed piece by Warren Buffett in which he decries the Republican (i.e., Tea Party) argument that lowering tax rates will produce prosperity. He's right to skewer the Republican argument, of course. He probably knows also that the argument is merely one of convenience. Historically the Republican Party has always favored reducing taxes, especially on super rich guys like Warren Buffett (read: Koch Brothers). In good times a typical argument is that the tax rates are raising more money than the government needs and the money should be returned to the taxpayers. In bad times the argument is that (a) everyone else has to reduce expenditures, so also should the government, or (b) reducing taxes will stimulate the economy and produce more jobs.

As I say, these arguments are merely arguments of convenience. The Tea Party is funded and led by a group who simply want taxes reduced as much as possible and who want government to become as weak and ineffectual as possible. According to Gloria Steinem, interviewed by Ian Masters on Sunday on radio station KPFK, when conservatives are honest they admit that what they really want is to create a class of workers who will take menial jobs at low wages. In that way they won't have to export work to China and other low-wage countries. They don't want the government to provide free or good education for anyone. They don't want unemployed workers to enjoy the benefit of unemployment insurance. Senator Kyl of Arizona has said that unemployment insurance encourages unemployment; without the insurance, the unemployed worker would take any job available and whatever wage was offered.

We progressive liberals must keep trying to inform the public as to the real intentions of these people who put ending the deficit and paying off the national debt ahead of creating new jobs with decent wages, saving Social Security, improving Medicare, and extending unemployment benefits.

Poll Encounter

2011-08-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

A few days ago the phone rang and when I answered it a pleasant female voice asked if I would answer a few questions in an opinion poll. I asked how long would it take and when she stated it would take only two or three minutes, I agreed to participate.

Instead of the female voice asking questions, the next thing I heard on the telephone was the voice of Dick Morris. He was peddling a book and was talking about what a dreadful President Mr. Obama has been, about his socialistic ideas that are way out of the mainstream, about his complete mishandling of the economy, etc.

After a minute or so of Dick Morris, the female voice was back and said she would now ask me some questions. I said, "go ahead." She asked, "on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being terrible and 10 being very good, how would you rate Obama's handling of the economy?" I thought for a few seconds. Certainly he had tried; he had recommended stimuli to the economy. He'd been hampered by Republican obstruction. I finally decided and replied, "I'd give him a 7."

The voice said, "Thank you. That's all."

I was really irritated at this moment. I said, "You have only one question for me? Is that all you're going to ask after making me spend a minute listening to that ass-hole Dick Morris?"

She said, "Thank you. Good bye." That was the end of our conversation.

I've had people, usually women, telephone me before and ask me to take part in a poll. Usually it's about the effect of advertising on certain products. However, recently I had a poll call from another conservative organization in which the first question was to name the President I considered the best. Then, name the one I considered the worst. I think the "proper" answers for these questions would be "Ronald Reagan" and "Barack Obama. My answers were "Franklin Roosevelt" and "Warren Harding." Polls of this sort are called "push polls." You, the person being polled, are "pushed" toward making the desired response.

Dick Morris didn't push me the slightest bit.

Positive Feedback in our Economic System

2011-08-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

In my last job before retirement I dealt with and learned about process control systems. The company used such systems to impose test conditions on prototype devices. The test conditions were combinations of pressure, temperature, and air flow. The devices under test were development models of equipment for use in aircraft and other transportation vehicles.

I learned that a control system is stable if it has negative feedback. To illustrate the concept of feedback, consider the system for regulating the speed of a steam engine. A flyball governor is driven bu a wheel attached to the main drive shaft. The governor operates a lever that changes position if the speed of the engine changes. In a typical arrangement a speed increase causes the lever to move upward and a decrease causes it to move downward. A fixed lever represents the desired speed of the engine. Another lever is connected between the fixed, or set-point lever and the speed lever. This lever, whose position is proportional to the difference between the set-point and the actual speed of the engine, is connected to a mechanism that changes the position of the valve that admits steam to the engine. If the engine speed exceeds the set-point, the linkage causes the steam valve to move toward the closed position. The result is that the engine speed is reduced. If the engine speed is less than the set-point, the same linkage causes the valve to move toward the wide open position, with the result that the engine speed is increased.

With such a control system, whenever the load changes, the engine maintains or comes back to the desired speed. The time required to return to the desired speed depends on the gain or sensitivity of the entire system. Some control systems can very rapidly bring the engine back to the desired speed. Some control systems take some time to bring the engine back to speed.

Now let us suppose that mechanic has made a mistake and connected the parts of the control system incorrectly, such that an increase in engine speed causes the steam valve to open even wider, or a decrease in speed causes it to move toward the closed position. In one case the engine will eventually operate at such a high speed that it may fly to pieces. In the other case the engine will soon shut down completely. Such a system is said to have positive feedback.

I assert that our economic system based on independent suppliers of goods and services and governed by market forces has positive feedback and is inherently unstable. Consider the present predicament of the country. Unemployment is high – around 9 percent. Even workers with jobs are worried about lay-offs. People who do not have jobs have little money to spend. They are using what unemployment insurance they have to eke out their savings to buy as little as possible. Even employed workers are purchasing as little as possible. As a result, there is little demand for goods and services and suppliers are not hiring more workers. As the recession deepens, more workers are laid off and demand for goods and services declines. The feed-back is positive.

Now consider a situation in which there is almost full employment. Workers have money to spend. Everyone is buying goods and services and suppliers have to hire more workers to meet the demand. More workers provide still more customers, and the demand for goods and services increases. The feedback is positive.

We know what happens in each situation. The recession in one case deepens and results in a severe depression. It may take many years for the economy gradually to improve. The exuberance in the other case may lead to a speculative bubble. Certainly the increase in economic activity is limited by the total number of potential workers available. After everyone has a job, the only way to achieve greater production is by using more efficient tools and methods.

In the long run, the economy goes from a “normal” state to either extreme, stays there for a while, and then may change rapidly or slowly to the other extreme. After a peak is reached, the economy can decline rapidly into a recession. Once in recession, the economy climbs slowly back to “normal.” The resulting oscillation in the system is called the “business cycle.”

Economists and politicians have been grappling with this instability problem for centuries. One attempt at a solution that would provide negative feedback is called “Keynesian Economics.” In this approach a strong central government provides the negative feedback by providing temporary employment and unemployment benefits to laid-off workers during a recession and increases taxes on a prosperous population during a boom. The government may also impose regulations to inhibit gambling speculation that occurs during a boom or a bubble. The goal is to smooth out the extremes of the business cycle. Recessions are less severe or deep and booms are less exuberant.

There are some difficulties in implementing the Keynesian solution. The government needs extra money to provide the unemployment benefits and the temporary jobs during a recession. This money can be borrowed, preferably from wealthy individuals within the country. However, the government is required to go into debt and operate at a deficit. During a boom, the government should use extra tax revenue to pay back the debt incurred during the previous recession.

Both of these actions are politically unpopular. Members of the public resent having the government borrow money to provide benefits to unemployed workers during a recession. Such action is contrary to what they are doing. They are tightening their belts and spending less money and giving less to charity, and they think the government should be doing likewise. Also, they resent any increase in taxes, even during good times. They want to keep all their money and spend it on the good things that are available or to speculate on things that seem to be going up and up in price.

Economists and politicians each have important responsibilities. Economists have to develop models of control, like Keynesian Economics, to stabilize the world-wide economic system. Politicians have to implement those models that seem to be the best and explain to the public how the chosen model is supposed to work and why the various actions of government are necessary, even though counter-intuitive. In recent times we have not been well-served by either economists or politicians.

Memory of Herbert Clark Hoover

2011-07-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

I was five years old when Mr. Hoover was elected. I was not paying attention to politics then and I have no memory of the 1928 election. All I know about it comes from reading and watching television. I once read that Mr. Hoover had some plans for easing the misery of the Great Depression. The Democrats controlled the Senate - or at least they could use the 2/3 vote to end a filibuster rule then in effect - and refused to enact any of Mr. Hoover's plans. It was left for the next President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to use some of Mr. Hoover's ideas and enjoy the credit for trying to ease the pain of the depression.

Poor Hoover! For two generations the public blamed him for the depression and for not doing anything about it. We now accept as fact that Hoover did not cause the depression. The blame has to be assigned mostly to his immediate Republican predecessors, Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Of course they weren't totally at fault, either. Mostly the depression just happened because of the bursting of a bubble of speculation about eleven months after Hoover was elected. People didn't know then how to prevent such speculative bubbles. We don't know how to today, although there are valuable lessons from the history of the 1929 crash and the following world-wide recession that we should study today.

Are the Republicans in Congress hoping to do to President Obama what the Democrats did to President Hoover eighty years ago? There are some similarities. Both men inherited situations that were largely the fault of their predecessors. Both men had proposals for shortening ans easing the recession/depression that were stymied by one of the Houses of Congress. The opposing party was more eager in winning the next Presidential election than in doing anything effective about the economy.

I think this is a good analogy. What do you think?

An Article of Religion

2011-07-12T07:31:00.000-07:00

In my previous musing I compared the beliefs of "Tea Party Republicans" with those of a religious zealot. Here's another belief - or superstition, if you prefer - about how to cure the recession. Of course, the goal we all have is to put people back to work. The Republican superstition is that people are unemployed because rich people don't have enough money to hire them! I've heard several United States Senators express this idea. A former Senator from Texas, himself a rich man, said that he didn't know any poor people who would hire him. He implied that since only rich people could afford to give him work, we should all hope that rich people become even richer so that they can hire more of the rest of us.

Rich people are richer today than ever. Yet, unemployment persists. Why? The Republican explanation is that (a) they're still not rich enough, or (b) they're uncertain about taxes (since the Democrats and President Obama talk about tax increases). Any economist can tell you that the reason factory managers aren't hiring is that there isn't enough demand for their goods and services. They can satisfy present demand with the present work force. In other news we learn that banks and other lending institutions are awash with money. In spite of the existence of this money, no sensible entrepreneur wants to take on the risk of starting a new business unless he is sure of customers.

This obvious explanation of a persistent depression was well-known in the 1930's. Even before that, Henry Ford recognized that there would be a big market for his automobiles if working people earned enough money to afford them. He raised the wages of the workers in his factory. Other factory owners and managers had to follow. The result was the automobile revolution of the 1920's and 1930's. Henry Ford was barely literate and not highly educated. Yet he grasped a fundamental fact about economy. Factories get busy and hire workers when the public has the means and the desire to purchase the products. Why to the TP Republicans cling to the myth of the rich man who hires all the workers he can afford, regardless of demand?

Missionary Zeal in American Politics

2011-07-11T21:01:00.000-07:00

As a college student I took a course in medieval history. The Christian Church was an important institution then and the teacher spent a lot of time discussing the history and the nature of the Church. His name was Professor Harry Hubert Kimber, and I may have mentioned him before in these opinionated musings. He stated that Christianity was and is a missionary religion. Its adherents are bound to convert all people to Christianity, and more particularly to their particular sect. Catholics try to convert others to Catholicism; Baptists to the Baptist belief; and so on.

The same is true of Islam. Muslims are similarly bound by their belief to convert the infidel to Islam, the one true faith.

The same is not true of Judaism or Buddhism. It's next to impossible for a non-Jew to convert to Judaism. Buddha taught that each person should make up his or her own mind about whether to accept his teachings.

All of these reminiscences introduce the idea of this post. Many Americans have deep ideological beliefs about what kind of government and what kind of society we should have. These beliefs are not based on public opinion or public judgment or democracy. They transcend all that. I refer to the beliefs of some members of the Republican Party. These beliefs seem to be as follows, in part:

Government that imposes regulations and high taxes is bad.
People should take care of themselves and not depend on government for anything.
Government should make life simple and easy for people who run businesses.
It is the mission of True Republicans to try as hard as they can to reduce the size of government. That means lowering government revenue, abolishing regulations, and ending all forms of welfare, including social security and medicare.
The ideal life is one like that of the early nineteenth century (without slavery, of course).
The federal government should stop borrowing money to pay expenses. It should cut expenses to match the available revenue.
Government should not redistribute wealth. If poor people want to become less poor they should work harder.

Just as the missionary religious used force and fear of death to convert the infidel and heathens to the true faiths, so these missionary Republicans are prepared to do whatever it takes to bring about the society they believe in. It's too bad that they have to drag the rest of us along with them.

A Selfish View of Taxes

2011-07-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

How often have you heard the phrase: "California gets back only 70 cents from the federal government for every dollar in federal tax collected in the State?" This is a generally held opinion. People are willing to pay taxes for things that benefit them. Here are some examples of tax expenditures that benefit me personally:

Building and repairing roads and highways that I use.
Maintaining and improving airports that I use: BUR (Burbank) and LAX (Los Angeles).
Repairing the sidewalks in my neighborhood.
Catching and incarcerating criminals that operate in my neighborhood.
Keeping records of land ownership so that there will never be any question about my ownership of the house where I live.
Maintaining a stable money supply so that my savings accounts will not vanish in inflation.
Maintaining the public library that I use.
Maintaining a good quality of public education in my neighborhood so that I will not be bothered by uneducated and unschooled teen-agers begging and stealing money.

There is one thing common to all of these tax-supported activities: they are supported by State or local taxes except item #6. Maintaining a stable money supply is a responsibility of the federal government.

Here are some activities, mostly federal, that do not benefit me directly:

Repairing homes destroyed by tornados in Missouri and Alabama.
Fighting a war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.
Building high speed rail lines in New York, Florida, etc., or anywhere except a line between Los Angeles and Seattle (so I can ride a bullet train to visit my children who live near Berkeley and Seattle).
Giving money to banks. Banks have enough money already.
Spending billions of dollars a year to put and keep people in prison for growing and using pot. People who use booze are not touched.
Providing social security pensions for lay-abouts other than myself, especially if it requires some of my tax money.

These and other ideas are extensions of the principle that the government does not have the right to tax me and give the money to someone else. The government does not have the right to redistribute income or wealth. This right is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution but it is advocated by certain writers, notably the late Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand left the Soviet Union with a fundamental hatred of any form of socialism. If altruism is a consequence of socialism, altruism is also unacceptable.

How many of you agree, at least in part, with Ayn Rand?

Three Pillars of American Society

2011-07-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

The number three is important in Engineering, Religion, Music, and the social structure of our country. In Engineering, one has to anchor any physical object to three fixed points not in a straight line for stability. In Religion we see the holy trinity among Christians and the Three Pillars of Islam. Many musical compositions have three rhythmic beats in a unit, such as the waltz or the minuet. So too our social structure rests on three pillars. These pillars must be of approximately the same strength or influence. Otherwise, the society will not be stable and will be biased in favor of the strongest pillar.

The three pillars are government, organized labor, and organized business. They compete with each other. As long as each of them is strong enough to defend the interests of the group it represents, the society is stable. If one becomes too weak or another too strong, the society is skewed in such a way that the interests of the strong pillar dominate the others.

Today we see that the business pillar is very strong and has been strengthened recently by decisions of the Supreme Court. The labor pillar has been weak for many years and appears to be growing weaker. Government is not strong enough to limit the excesses of business. As an example, a recent news item revealed that the average salaries paid to executive officers of large companies have been increased again. Going back to the 1950’s or 1960’s, in those days the pay of the chief executive of a company was about twenty times that of the average worker in the company. Today it’s about four hundred times the salary of the average worker. During this same period, the labor pillar has weakened. In the 1950’s as many as fifty percent of workers belonged to labor unions. Today the ratio is around ten percent. During the same period the wealth of the nation increased greatly. However, that increase in wealth has accrued to a small segment of the population. The average worker has not benefited from the creation of the wealth. Our society is in a state of poor health.

When our society is healthy the three pillars operate to maintain a balance. Government sets the rules for the behavior of unions and of businesses in the interest of protecting the public. Labor and business compete in the dividing up of the newly created wealth. Labor and government act to limit many of the harmful practices of business. Business and government collaborate to limit many of the bad practices of labor unions. Business and labor both try to influence government and so produce government policies that are neutral between the interests of labor and of business. That’s the way it should work.

The pillar of labor is weak. Business has been able to influence many government decisions and, in particular, the selections of justices of the Supreme Court. These days the Court is putting out decision after decision that favor businesses, particularly large corporations. I think these decisions are abominable and will be overturned in the course of time, although I will not be around to celebrate when they are overturned.

Many of my liberal and progressive friends believe that the way back to fairness and sanity is through electoral politics. Elect liberals and progressives to Congress. Elect a liberal and progressive President. These are good ideas and worthy goals, but we also must work toward strengthening labor unions. Strengthening labor unions can not be done by having fund-raising parties for liberal and progressive candidates. We can help by boycotting hotels and restaurants that rely on underpaid, non-union workers. We can help by joining strikers on a picket line and being willing to be arrested by the police. We must advocate for strong labor unions.

At the same time, we must accept the fact that some unions, like some businesses, do unsavory and possibly illegal things. We must criticize these things but we must not stop supporting organized labor because of its imperfections.

Gay Marriage

2011-07-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Recently pundits and others have noted that President Obama is reluctant to commit himself on this issue. He says his opinion is evolving. Of course, he's in a political tight spot. The issue divides the public into three parts: those who strongly favor gay marriage, those who strongly oppose it, and those who don't care.

For a long time I was in the third category. I married a wonderful woman in 1950 and we lived together until the end in 2007. During that whole period the thought that the marriage of same-sex couples might be a threat to our marriage never crossed my mind. In recent years, when the concept has become a hot item politically, I have moved toward the "favor" camp. Actally, I care a lot more about what the Republicans would like to do about social security and medicare than I do about gay marriage. My attitude is that since it has great importance to gay people and poses no threat to anyone else, I favor allowing it to exist.

I once asked an Episcopal priest whether he would "marry" a gay couple. He said that the Book of Common Prayer has no ceremony for marrying two people of the same sex, and therefore he couldn't do it. He would be pleased, however, to bless the union of a gay couple. The Book of Common Prayer has blessings for everything. There is a lesbian couple who attend the church that I do and they are raising two adopted children. The children also attend the church. When I first started attending the church, one of them approached me and introduced herself and made sure that I understood that she and her partner were lesbians. Naturally I was pleased and flattered that she would make a point of introducing herself to me and welcoming me to the congregation.

Rep. Paul Ryan - true believer or con artist?

2011-06-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has proposed a national budget to reduce the need to borrow money to pay our bills. His plan does not include revenue enhancement (e.g., letting the Bush tax cuts expire) but achieves the result in part by abolishing Medicare as we know it. Present retirees enrolled in Medicare, like me, would not be affected. Workers ten years or more away from retirement would find Medicare replaced by a system of vouchers to help them afford private health insurance plans. These new retirees would pay more toward the cost of their health care than present retirees. One result of the Ryan plan would be to impose more suffering, more poverty on elderly retirees who have no chance to earn additional money by going back to work (who would hire them?) but no additional burden on wealthy individuals who have gained financially from the Bush tax reductions that were enacted in 2001 and intended to expire by 2010.

I have seen Mr. Ryan defend his proposals in a television interview on the NBC program "Meet the Press." He sounded sincere and convincing. My recent experience with a con man who tried to sell me some unnecessary (and non-existent) repairs to my car leads me to thing that perhaps Mr. Ryan is trying to perpetrate a swindle. He is more convincing than the con man I encountered, to be sure. The purpose of his swindle is to extract a large share of the reduction in the federal deficit from elderly, relatively un-rich individuals and not impose any inconvenience on an important constituency of the Republican Party.

I have another thought about Mr. Ryan. He may be a great fan of the writer Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a Russian immigrant from Communist Russia who had seen at first hand all of what was wrong with communism and socialism and none of its potential benefits. She was extremely opposed to any government policy that took wealth from one class of society (i.e., the rich) and distributed it among the poor and middle class members of society. If he is a follower of Ayn Rand, Mr. Ryan probably argues that the government has no right to take my money and give it to someone else. If so, his proposal to abolish Medicare by degrees makes good sense to him.

Republicans who recognize the political problem that Mr. Ryan's plan poses for them in the 2012 election try to change the subject by stating that, well, at least Republicans have a proposal to deal seriously with the budget deficit. It is a proposal for negotiating, a starting point in a debate about the deficit, etc., etc., etc. They deny that they want to abolish Medicare. They say that all options are on the negotiating table - except an increase in taxes. Mr. Bush's tax cuts, recognized in 2001 as a political gift to wealthy constituents, have become fixed in stone if one is to believe these Republicans.

What can we do? Democrats must point out the unfairness of the Ryan budget as loudly and as wide-spread as they can. If the Democrats simply "make nice" with the Republicans, the public will not be aware of the basic unfairness of the Ryan proposal. Many Republicans do not recognize this unfairness. They believe that individuals should take care of themselves, just as they did 100 and 200 years ago. They argue that it is "class warfare" to place the loss of Medicare on the same footing as taxing wealthy taxpayers. It's wrong and immoral to be jealous of the rich.

The Three Hikers

2011-06-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

The other day on the radio I listened to Patt Morrison interviewing a woman who was one of the three hikers who, about two years ago, were captured while they were hiking close to the border between Iran and northern Iraq. This woman had been released on bail recently because she was a woman. The two male hikers are still in prison in Iran with no prospect for a trial. They have been accused but not formally charged with spying.

The woman that Patt interviewed said that the three of them did not believe they were anywhere near the border with Iran at the time they were picked up by some Iranians in uniform, presumably members of the Army. They had been assured by their Kurdish friends that the area in which they planned to hike was safe and was not near the border. The border itself in unmarked.

The thought came to me that they were still miles from the border and within Iraqi Kurdistan when the Iranian soldiers picked them up. It came to me that perhaps it was the Iranians who were "spying" and didn't want their present to be reported. Therefore, they had to take the hikers with them. They are now an embarrassment to some factions within the Iranian government. Appeals for their release or at least for their trial have been sent to the President of Iran. The woman being interviewed stated that the President had told her that her friends would be released soon, but nothing has happened.

My theory: A platoon of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were spying in Iraq Kurdistan and came upon the hikers. They took the hikers captive to prevent them from revealing to the world the presence of the Iranians in Kurdistan. The President of Iran doesn't have the authority to go against the Revolutionary Guards. The only person who can release the prisoners is Ali Khomenei, the ultimate authority in the country and the one person who can keep the Revolutionary Guards in line. (Perhaps even he does not have that authority.)

Exxon for President?

2011-06-01T21:50:00.000-07:00

I have a silly idea that someone with the talent of Mark Twain, Theodore Seuss Geisel, or Sholem Aleichem could make into a great story. In a previous blog I mused about Supreme Court decisions regarding the rights of corporations. In each important decision the Court asserted that the 14th Amendment grants corporations certain rights at law that are generally reserved for persons. In effect, a corporation is a person.

My silly idea was to extrapolate these decisions. If a court is a person, it is entitled to all the rights granted to persons in our constitutions, including the right to participate in elections. (The Court already has allowed a corporation to make unlimited contributions to political candidates under the First Amendment.) Corporations should also have the right to vote as persons and as registered voters and even run for office.

In my story line some corporations test this theory. At first it is an obscure small corporation, such as a law firm, that decides to run for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. The law firm is elected and chooses a representative to sit on the council. Other corporations quickly notice this development. Soon the Gallo Corporation and Union Oil are competing for the office of Governor of California. A mining corporation becomes Governor of Montana. General Motors barely loses in Michigan to a Farmers' Cooperative. Morgan Chase becomes the Mayor of New York. And so it goes.

It's a silly and juicy idea. I wish I had the talent to make it into a hilariously funny and sarcastic novel.

The Supreme Court

2011-05-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

The United States Supreme Court has been a model for other nations in their construction and adoption of national constitutions. It is clear today that if a nation has a written constitution there must be a body named in that document to enforce the constitution itself. That is, a constitution requires a constitutional court. In most of the world, constittional courts are highly respected and care is taken in chosing the justices to retain public confidence in the court.

In our country the creation of a constitutional court came about almost by accident. The members of the convention of 1787 who drew up the federal constitution did not see enforcing the constitution as a role of the Supreme Court. Instead, they believed, the enforcer would be the President who would have the power to veto laws passed by Congress if they were unconstitutional. The requirement that enforcing the constitution should be done by a body not subject to political pressures was demonstrated by the first Chief Justice, John Marshal. The case which asserted and established the Court's power to enforce the constitution is known as "Marbury vs. Madison."

As Shakespeare wrote, the evil that men do lives after them. The good is often buried with their bones. One can say the same about our Supreme Court. Most of the decisions have been good ones and no one talks about them. What we remember and talk about have been some of the bad ones. Here are a few bad ones:

Dred Scott: In 1857 the court ruled that a negro slave did not have the right to sue his master in court to obtain his freedon. You may recall that Dred Scott's master had traveled from a slave state through one or more states in which slavery was illegal, then back to the slave state. Dred Scott brought suit, claiming that he had been freed by the process of traveling into a "free" state. The Supreme Court ruled that the owner of a slave had the right to retain ownership regardless of where he might take the slave. The northern "free" states were outraged by the decision, and civil war was the result.
In 1886, in the case "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad," the Court asserted that a corporation was a "person" at law. It was entitled under the 14th Amendment to the same legal protections as those afforded to human persons. Officers of the corporation were immune from lawsuits resulting from acts of the corporation. The corporation itself could be sued for damages but not the officers. That affirmed an important difference between a corporation and a partnership. At the time one judge mused that a corporation was a strange kind of "person." It didn't have an ass to be kicked or a soul to be damned. More than a century later the Court asserted that since a corporation was a "person" it had a first amendment right to contribute money without limit to a political candidate. Many of us are outraged by that decision. There is a plan to amend the constitution to make it clear that the "personhood" of corporations is limited to civil suits and does not grant a right to make campaign contributions or, heaven forbid, be elected to public office. What would you think of President General Electric?
About 1941 or 1942 the Court decided that the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry was constitutional. It has recently been reported that a report by the US Navy stated that these citizens were no danger to the country and there was no evidence that they would not be loyal to the United States in the war with Japan. That report was suppressed by an official in Roosevelt's State Department.
In 1896 or thereabouts the Court decided that "separate but equal" accommodations for the descendants of former negro slaves were constitutional. Segregated schools, segregated eating facilities, segregated transportation facilities, etc., were allowable. This decision was reversed nearly 60 years later in the famous school desegregation case by the Warren Court.

There are other examples of bad decisions, but you see my point. The Court is not perfect. However, it has a very important function in our government, that of policing the other two branches, legislative and executive. In order to carry out its function the Court has to retain the respect of the public. It must be both politically neutral and legally knowledgeable. It is unfortunate that recent Presidents have deliberately proposed candidate justices who were biased in favor of economic and political ideologies that agreed with those of the President and his supporters. It is equally unfortunate that the Senate did not, in most cases, determine and debate the biases of the candidates before voting to confirm them.

Reid's Response

2011-05-24T16:53:00.000-07:00

According to the blog newsmax.com Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, had this to say about President Obama's recent speech about the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians:

President Barack Obama has lost at least one ally for his views on the Mideast. In a speech Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rejected Obama’s own talk last week in which he called for Israel to negotiate peace with the Palestinians using pre-1967 borders as a baseline, Politico reports.

“The place where negotiating will happen must be at the negotiating table — and nowhere else,” Reid told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Those negotiations . . . will not happen — and their terms will not be set — through speeches, or in the streets, or in the media.”

As for the borders issue, “No one should set premature parameters about borders, about building, or about anything else,” he said.

With friends and allies like Harry Reid, Mr. Obama has no need for enemies.

As you know, I applauded Mr. Obama's speech in my previous post. I don't agree with Harry Reid's analysis. If I thought that the Likud Government in Israel really wanted a peace settlement with an independent Palestine, I might give some thought to Mr. Reid's prescription. After many years of making excuses, the Likud Party has convinced me that it really doesn't want peace. It wants all of Biblical Israel. It wants the Palestinians to go away, to disappear, to move to other Arab-speaking countries, or to die off. I sense that Mr. Obama thinks as I do and for that reason he is trying to lay down the law to Mr. Netanyahu. The United States will support an Israel that agrees to live within the 1967 borders and will support any modification of that boundary that both Israel and the Palestinians agree to. The United States will not support Israel's continuing policy of delay and obfuscation while continuing to build more and more settlements in land that ought to belong to Palestine. This is what I think American policy should be.

As to Mr. Reid's echoing Mr. Netanyahu's "conditions" for peace negotiations, in which everything is on the table and there are no preconditions - except that the Palestinians agree and state publicly that Israel has a right to exist - I think that the first thing to agree on must be the boundaries between the two states. If Israel and Palestine can't or won't agree on boundaries, there is no point to proceeding further.

A final comment: does the government of Israel believe that Palestine has a right to exist?

The President's Speech

2011-05-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

The speech was about American interests and policy toward the Middle East, the area at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea and adjoining regions. He stated conditions that he believes are an essential starting point to any serious and sincere negotiations regarding the status of Palestine and Israel. His starting point is:

There shall be two independent but friendly nations, Israel and Palestine.
The borders between these nations shall be either the boundary that existed in 1969 or an agreed to modification of that boundary.
Other outstanding differences, such as the right of Palestinians to return to their lost homes, are left open with no preconditions.

To me this seems like a fair place from which to start. However, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyau, immediately dismissed it, claiming that the border that existed in 1969 is indefensible. The pro-Likud claque in the United States has chimed in and claims that Mr. Obama has set back the peace process and caused irreparable harm to it.

To me, it's like Alice in Wonderland. Does the government of Israel really want a peaceful settlement based on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on part of the territory of pre-war Palestine or pre-Roman Israel? Mr. Netanyahu talks of wanting peace. When it is suggested that Israel ought to be able to make some useful concessions in a serious negotiation, he changes the subject to the question of security and his doubt that the Palestinians really want peace. His first requirement is that the Palestinian negotiators formally recognize "Israel's right to exist." But that requirement involves circular reasoning. A right to exist is properly contained in or implied by a peace treaty or a formal exchange of ambassadors. It's the end of a process, not a beginning.

I am honestly suspicious of Mr. Netanyahu. I don't think he is sincere in wanting peace with a rump Palestine. I think he wants the Palestinians to go away, to disappear, to migrate to other Arab countries, and leave all of Biblical Israel to the present state of Israel for occupation and colonization by Jewish immigrants. He regards the Palestinians as interlopers who are occupying land that properly belongs to the Jewish People, as the gift of God to the followers of Moses. These interlopers must be moved out or killed off, just as other interlopers were dealt with in ancient times.

I applaud President Obama's speech. I believe that most Americans will applaud it. I hope that it receives a favorable audience in Israel among people there who do not blindly approve of everything the present Likud government is doing.

Los Angeles may close some Fire Stations

2011-05-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

The City of Los Angeles has a structural deficit. That is, there isn't enough money to pay for all the services that Angelenos expect and desire. The elected officials have been struggling with the current deficit for months and have finally come to some unpopular decisions. Some services will have to be curtailed. Big surprise!

I am wryly amused to see the reactions of many of my liberal Democratic friends. They are outraged that some fire stations are going to be closed. They are outraged that some teachers are going to be let go, although it isn't the city but rather the Board of Education that is the target of their wrath. Their plan is to have big demonstrations in favor of keeping fire houses open, keeping the police staffed, keeping libraries open, keeping hospitals and emergency rooms operating, etc., etc., etc.

It's much too late for demonstrations. The city doesn't take in enough revenue to pay for all the firehouses, policemen, libraries, hospitals, and tree-trimmers that city dwellers demand. We Californians voted ourselves into this mess during Jerry Brown's first two terms as Governor. We deliberately created a revenue deficit for local governments, otherwise known as Proposition 13. In addition to limiting future increases in property taxes this proposition made it nearly impossible for either the State or the City or the County to raise general revenue taxes. State taxes could thenceforth be increased only by a 2/3 vote in both Houses of the State Legislature. Local taxes could be raised only by a 2/3 vote of the public. An exception was made for "special purpose" taxes, such as an increase in the sales tax to pay for improved public transit.

Fire houses are going to be closed and we Californians are getting what we deserve. Instead of demonstrating for fire houses we should dress up in "sackcloth and ashes" to express our collective guilt and shame.

The scam that nearly worked

2011-05-10T21:45:00.000-07:00

This scam was perpetrated on me on Monday, May 9. I was driving west along Sherman Way in Canoga Park. A man in a black Ford drove alongside me and motioned to me. I lowered the window so that I could hear him. He said my right rear tire was leaking. I thought he meant that it was going flat. I turned in to a parking area near a Ralphs supermarket. He got out of his car and pointed to my right rear wheel and exclaimed that it was leaking hydraulic fluid. I got out of my car to look. There was indeed some water on the asphalt next to the wheel. It didn't look like brake fluid. He pointed to the brake disk and pointed to some red fluid on it. He had me convinced and I didn't know what to do at the moment.

Looking back I realize that I should have thanked him and told him I would look after it, got back in my car, rolled up the windows, and locked the doors. I should have told him I would phone for a tow truck to take the car to a mechanic I knew and trusted. I didn't do any of that.

I'm not at all proud of what I did next. I listened to him. He pointed to the woman and babies in the back of his car. He was a mechanic who was trying to do an occasional job for himself, not for the boss. He told me to beware of most mechanics because they will install shoddy equipment in your car and thereby void the warranty. He wondered whether I had received a recall letter recently from the Toyota Company about my 2000 Avalon. He assured me he wasn't trying to steal my car. He would have a tow truck take my car to his boss's shop at no expense. I wanted the car towed to my own mechanic. He said that if I didn't like his estimate of the repair cost he would have the tow truck take the car to my own mechanic.

Eventually (and this is the part of the story that I'm most ashamed to admit) I let him take my car keys and drive me to my house. He gave me his phone number and said he would perform some diagnostic tests on the car to find out what was wrong and the tests would take an hour or two.

At home I had time to cool off, relax, become calm, and think clearly. I talked to my daughter by telephone. She told me to find where the car is and to report the whole matter to the police.

I eventually, after phoning 911 and waiting to be switched to several police stations, was able to talk to a duty officer at the Topanga Station in my area. The officer said that I should talk to the man again before calling in the police. He might be legitimate. If so, he would sue me for bringing the police down on him.

Eventually the man answered his phone. He would come and get me in about half an hour. My other daughter phoned me and warned me against getting into a car with the man. I got a friend to drive me to the location. I phoned him again and told him I didn't need his transportation and was bringing a friend. I also asked him where the car was.

He said the car was at an address on Ventura Boulevard. He implied it was in a shop and begged me not to come into the shop lest the boss find out what he was doing and fire him.

My friend arrived and we proceeded to the address. The "shop" was a large building that had nothing to do with auto repairs. We parked just beyond the building. The man came from the parking area behind the building and led us to the car. He said that he had already made the needed repairs. I told him I had not authorized him to work on the car, but just provide an estimate. He didn't tell me how much the "repairs" cost. Instead he opened the trunk of my car and showed me several dirty pieces of hardware that might have come from some auto or truck. There were two long tubular structures that might have been shock absorbers. I knew that none of them had come from my car. None of them had the remotest connection to a hydraulic fluid leak. He wouldn't have had time to replace such parts during the two hours that he'd had the car, especially without a lift so that he could get under it to do the work. I told him I had no interest in the parts and told him to remove them from the car.

The woman was with him. She said she was his sister. She said I ought to pay something because her brother had saved my life by warm\ning me of the brake problem. I said that since I hadn't authorized any repairs I wasn't obligated to pay them. By now I had the car keys. He kept talking about his children, that he was just trying to make a living, etc. I finally told him about a woman who had accosted me a week or two earlier in another parking lot with a story about losing her credit card and having no money and would I give her something to buy groceries, or perhaps buy groceries for her? I had given her twenty dollars and I offered the same to him.

He refused my twenty dollars and showed me a big wad of bills to prove that he had some money. He became angry and threatened to have a lien placed on the car. I told him I would take my chances and my friend and I drove off in our two cars. We drove to my regular auto mechanic with no problem. The brakes worked as good as ever. I left the car with my mechanic for its scheduled servicing and told him the whole story. I told him to inspect the care\to make sure that there was nothing new that had been installed.

It's a long story that I'm not proud of. I tell it to warn others not to be taken in by an auto repair scam.

Refusing to Learn

2011-05-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

There are different ways of refusing to learn from experience or from experiment. In general, the phrase "refusing to learn" applies to a serious problem that requires some unusual action to solve. Typical problems that we Americans face are depressions. As long as there was "vacant" land to the west, whenever you had lost everything in a depression you could go west, claim a tract of land and become a farmer. After1910 (or so) when the frontier was declared closed, that option was no longer available. The great depression of 1929 was especially hard because there was no longer any vacant land to to to.

Several things were tried in 1929 to 1939. At first the federal government did nothing. President Hoover took the advice of his Treasury Secretary to let all the poison in the stock market burn itself out. That is, let the last buyers of inflated stock shares eat their losses. Doing nothing didn't work. The big losers simply shared their losses with everyone else and millions of workers were without jobs and without income. The next President took the advice of an economist and spent government money to create jobs. Enough of the unemployed workers found temporary work and were able to buy things so that the economy began to recover. The government had to go into debt to raise the money to provide the jobs. After a while the economy recovered and there was enough revenue to begin paying down the debt.

We are again in a recession or depression caused by the ability of the Wall Street gamblers to make us all share their losses. You would think that, having gone through the Great Depression of 1929-1939 our leaders and our more responsible politicians would draw on the experience of those years to frame policies for the present. For some reason nearly all of them choose to ignore or to forget the failures and successes of that time seventy-five years ago. Instead of using borrowed money to create temporary jobs, our leaders talk about reducing the deficit. We seem doomed to follow the path of Herbert Hoover rather than that of Franklin Roosevelt.

Out of sight, out of mind

2011-04-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Pity the poor fellow (or girl) who has served time in prison and now wants to rebuild his life. He (she) has repented the crime, has served the sentence, and now wants to join society and become simply another honest worker. As soon as he's out of prison he has difficulty finding a job - no one wants to hire a felon - and a place to live - no one wants to have a felon as a neighbor.
To illustrate the problem I present a portion of a newsletter I recently came across:

More Assaults Against Our RA Property Rights

Group Homes

Councilman Greig Smith has written an ordinance to regulate the many group homes that are appearing in residential neighborhoods across the city. Although any ordinance must address all types of these businesses, it is the unregulated sober living homes and private “group homes” whose tenants are often convicts and/or transients that are causing problems for us. The operators of these homes use our tax dollars (alcoholics are considered disabled by the feds) to charge rent and cram up to 30 people into a 3 or 4 bedroom home. Do the math to see how much money they are making at our expense. Complaints range from increased crime to the residents doing drug deals or having sex in cars or in the yards of these properties. Obviously, the operators’ prime concern is more about making a lot of money than it is about being good neighbors.

This article illustrates part of a general problem we have in America. The problem is that we have never achieved a public consensus on the treatment, education, and rehabilitation of criminals. Our public attitude is to send the convicted criminal to a prison and forget about him. We don't think about what this person is going to do after his sentence is finished. Our prisons should be as much about education and rehabilitation as about punishment. Unfortunately all we think about is punishment and public safety. We seem to believe that there is a type of individual who is prone to commit crimes and that criminals are such individuals. We don't accept the idea that any one of us may or will under the right circumstances commit crimes. Would I steal food from a grocery store to feed myself and my family if I had no money? Yes, I would. If I were an addict and had no money and needed a fix, would I steal or rob to get the money? Probably. I doubt that I have the will power to overcome a serious addiction. Do I belong in prison? I don't think so.

If we had in place practices and policies for rehabilitating and educating convicts while in prison and if we had good judgment about which convicts to release and which ones to keep a while longer, persons like the writer of the newsletter article would be less worried about temporary homes for released convicts. If also we had a better system of providing these homes and determining who stays in them there would not be the problem of addicts taking up residence in such places.

How do we get there from here? We can't depend on a democratic and representative government to do it for us. What we need is a group of dedicated individuals to do the hard work of creating and operating such temporary residences, including raising the money to get the first residence started. There would eventually have to be an organization to operate all the residences in the State. I don't know whether it should be operated by the State or by a non-profit non-governmental operation (NGO).

I invite your comments.

Revolutions

2011-04-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

The current attempt of the Republicans to enact the Paul Ryan budget reminds me of the French and Russian revolutions and what led up to each. The French and Russian revolutions involved transfers of power and wealth from the wealthy classes to the poor and powerless. Representative Ryan's budget amounts to a transfer of power and wealth from the poor and middle-class Americans to the wealthy. If it succeeds, it will be just a prelude to a French or Russian style revolution here in America.

The writer Ayn Rand and others have offered a homily for the rich as justification for their good fortune and their natural right to hold on to it and increase it. It's a saying, something like this: "No one has the right to take from me what is mine and give it to others, especially those who are poor." Followers of this belief argue that governments have no business trying to redistribute wealth. As an example, Medicare is a program that provides needed medical services and care to many elderly persons who otherwise could not afford them. Thus, it is a government activity that redistributes wealth and ought not exist. Mr. Ryan's budget takes away medical services from those most in need and thereby serves to correct an activity that redistributes wealth.

Mr. Ryan's budget also reduces the tax rate on the wealthy. This reduction reduces the redistribution of wealth. Many other features of the budget aim to accomplish the reduction, at least, if not the end to any redistribution of wealth by the government.

My own opinion is exactly the opposite of Ayn Rand's. It is obvious to me that one of the most important functions of government is to redistribute wealth - to discourage the accumulation of great fortunes by a few individuals while the rest of the population gets no share in the total increase in wealth of the nation. This accumulation of additional wealth by the few and the stagnation of the fortunes of everyone else has been occurring for the past thirty or more years in our country. It is time for government to take strong measures to stop this concentration of wealth at the top and redistribute at least some of it so that the rest of us can enjoy improves and enhanced services from our government. Rather than converting Medicare to a voucher program where senior citizens buy health insurance from private insurers government should plan to improve the existing medicare system to achieve more efficiency and an adequate mechanism for funding. More taxes, of course for the funding, and incentives to encourage medical care providers and drug companies to provide their services in more effective and economical ways are needed reforms. Certainly not vouchers!

How to negotiate

2011-04-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

I've spent some pleasant time visiting Mexico and Thailand. My wife, who was born in and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand had no difficulty understanding the method of negotiating a price for a souvenir or valuable art object in either country. The basic principle is that the seller first asks a high price and the buyer offers a low price. Eventually they reach an agreement and the sale is consummated. In Mexico, at least, if the buyer has paid more than the seller expected, the seller will offer another item, not very expensive, at no charge. If that happens to you, you know you've paid too much. At any rate, the Mexicans and the Thai delight in such negotiation. A friend once told me about the bargaining for time on a fishing boat in a town somewhere in Baja California. The bargaining was very tense and determined. After the price had been agreed to, the Mexican crew of the boat invited my friend to join them in a meal.

Compare those pleasant memories with the current negotiations in Congress over the budget for the year 2012. The Republicans have made an offer that is ridiculously low. No new taxes; make the Bush tax cuts permanent, then reduce them some more. Make drastic reductions in government expenditures for Medicare, Medical, education, etc. Maintain or increase the bloated defense budget.

What is the Democratic counter-offer? So far there is none. The President has revealed what he would accept as the final compromise between two extreme positions. That's a serious blunder in negotiation. Before the President makes his reasonable compromise offer - some cuts in Medicare, etc., and some increases in taxes - either he or some Democrat in Congress should make an extreme Democratic offer - say, no cuts in Medicare, etc., drastic cuts in unnecessary defense spending, and a big tax increase for the very rich. Then the two sides can haggle and gradually make concessions and arrive finally at what the President has just proposed.

The President has given the game away. Now the "reasonable" compromise will be something between the extremely conservative budget proposal of Representative Ryan and the moderate budget proposal just laid out by President Obama. Too bad! What should have happened is that a prominent Democrat should have presented an extremely liberal budget proposal. After a week or two of much yelling and screaming about how far apart the two proposals are, the President would then present the moderate proposal.

Is History Repeating?

2011-04-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

I have read that in the 1930's, when Germany was suffering the depression (along with the burden of paying reparations for World War I) and when the Nazis were gaining political power, the upper classes in Germany chose to use Hitler and his fascistic movement rather than oppose it on the ground that they believed they could control him. Let him scapegoat the Jews for Germany's problems and he would distract the workers, many of them unemployed, from being angry at the system that had failed them and would instead vent their anger at the Jews.

Historical analogies are never perfect. However, I see an analogy between the decision of the wealthy class in Germany in the 1930's and the decision of the wealthy class in our country to embrace the Tea Party Movement. The Tea Partiers have the enthusiasm and the energy of the Nazis. They also have a fixed idea of who or what the culprit is, the group responsible for the present depression. Just as the Nazis blamed the Jews for being "un-German," so do the Tea Partiers blame liberals who want to raise taxes and provide free health care for everyone, free old age pensions for everyone, etc., etc., etc. The wealthy ones, e.g., the Koch Brothers, are perfectly happy to let the Tea Partiers take over the government and impose their program of disabling all forms of welfare for the poor and undeserving loafers and enhancing the privileges and wealth of the rich.

The German elite classes found out too late that the Nazis would not be controlled. How soon will our own elite classes realize that the Tea Party movement is going to take them down with the poorer classes?

Tea Party lore teaches that high taxes cause unemployment; social welfare causes laziness; free medical care causes unhealthy behavior; etc., etc., etc. Let our Congress be made up of a majority with such beliefs and see what they will do with our country.

If I write any more I will simply be preaching to the choir.

The wisdom of Prof. Kimber

2011-04-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

I spent the years 1940 - 1944 as an undergraduate student at Michigan State College in East Lansing, Michigan. Years after I left the name was changed to Michigan State University. I guess a university is classier than a college. At least now I can brag that my undergraduate BS degree came from a university, not a mere college.

But I wander from the subject. What concerns me is the deep and continuing split between Republicans and Democrats, both in Washington and in Sacramento. In both cases there is an impasse over the budget. The budget is important, not because it provides money to pay for vital services, such as medicare and highway repair, but because the budget is the way public policy is set. It was so in the days of King Henry VIII as much as today. The king or the president is constrained from carrying out certain policies because there is no money allocated in the budget for them.

At Michgan State I had courses in history from Professor H. H. Kimber. One of the things he taught me is that representative government won't work unless there is a general agreement on fundamentals, such as what kind of government do we want. This lack of agreement between the two major parties is leading to paralysis in Washington and in Sacramento. Let me cite a few examples:

Last year Democratic majorities in Congress were able to enact a reform in our way of delivering medical services. The objective was to provide universal medical care. The law didn't go that far but it did provide medical care for several million Americans who can't now afford it. The Republicans opposed the reform and none of them voted for it. Unlike the Democrats, Republicans don't believe the government should do anything to provide universal medical care. Their leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, often points out that our present system is the best in the world and shouldn't be messed with. Of course Senator McConnell enjoys the best medical care in the world. This excellent care is provided to all members of Congress. In addition Senator McConnell is a millionaire and is quite able to pay for any medical services he needs. Republicans now want to repeal the health care law. If they can't repeal it, they can delay its implementation by simply not appropriating any money in the budget to fund it.
Another sticking point in Washington is the funding of Planned Parenthood. Democrats view this program as a useful service for poor and middle class women in helping them plan for how many children to have and how to take care of them. Republicans hate the program because it includes providing information about abortion as well as birth control, even though planned parenthood clinics do not actually perform the medical services.
A basic difference in the future of American government services exists in both Sacramento and Washington. Republicans believe that government does too many things. They would like to see an end to costly environmental restrictions on business as well as an end to all taxes on businesses. They argue that business taxes are simply passed on to customers anyway. In addition they make California businesses less competitive than businesses elsewhere who pay less tax. Democrats are not concerned about the size of government. Like everyone else they simply want government to provide the services that the public expects in an effective and economical manner. They believe that government should protect the public from harmful pollutants emitted by factories into the surrounding air and water. They believe that the State should provide a first class education to the children of today so that they will be good citizens and trained workers in the future. Like Ronald Reagan, Democrats believe that taxes should hurt and that the hurt should be felt by the very rich as well as the rest of us. They believe that the revenue from taxes should be sufficient to pay for all the services that the public needs.

There is no basic agreement on these issues. In Washington each side will let the government shut down its operations rather than yield to the position of its opponents. In Sacramento also neither side is willing to agree to the demands of the other. Republicans seem to be extremely stubborn. They are unwilling to compromise on partial funding for Planned Parenting unless the term "abortion" is completely expunged from its vocabulary. Republicans refuse to agree even to put the question of a tax increase to a vote of the public here in California.

I had the advantage of learning an important lesson about representative government from Professor Kimber. The public has the same lesson presented to it in the day's news. Is the public paying attention?

Two bad decisions: Dred Scott and Citizens United

2011-03-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

Writing a blog that’s worth your time to read is not easy for me. I’m not a reporter and I don’t have access to any interesting news. At least news that I think might be interesting for you. I’m left with writing about my opinions about the news and the opinions of others. This is a blog of opinion. I try not to echo or repeat the opinions of others. They have to be my opinions and they have to be original enough to make it worth your time to read them. That’s the difficulty.

Anyway, that’s just an introduction to the subject of this blog. I try to compare the situation in the United States today with the situation following the famous Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857. The corresponding decision today is the one made about a year ago in which the Court decided that Corporations had equal rights with citizens regarding monetary contributions to political campaigns.

What was involved in each situation was (is) a conflict between two very different visions pf how our society and economy ought to be organized. In 1857 there were two visions. One was the ideal expressed in our Declaration of Independence in which we declared that all men are created equal and have an unalienable right to be free. The other was that society should be organized around the need to grow cheap food and cheap raw materials for manufacture, such as cotton, and the implied need for large farms or plantations operated with cheap and relatively unskilled labor. Cheap labor was supplied by African slaves. Those of us holding this view were convinced that Africans and their descendants were intellectually inferior to descendants of European immigrants. Hence, they were not capable of absorbing much education and should be used to perform low-skilled unpaid labor. This conflict could not be resolved peacefully. Three years after the decision the nation was split in a civil war.

Today one of the two visions is still the idealism expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the federal constitution. The other vision is that corporations should be treated as though they are persons and should have influence on public policy in proportion to their wealth. A justification for this belief is that public policy has a lot to do with the profit of many corporations and even with the very existence of some of them. Another justification is that a corporation is made up of many investors or “owners” and should be able effectively to advocate (with money) for their interests.

In thinking about how to organize this essay I considered the question of whether the present conflict of visions will lead to civil war. I decided against predicting a second civil war and I confess that the analogy between 2011 and 1857 is imperfect.

What will Jerry do?

2011-03-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

Jerry Brown, recently elected governor of California, has some bit problems. He has to present a balanced budget to the legislature for the next year. At present the revenue collected in the form of taxes is less than the annual expenses of the state by about twenty or more billion dollars. Governor Brown would like to distribute the pain somewhat fairly between rich taxpayers and relatively poor people who depend on state services. A minority in the legislature does not share Mr. Brown's belief in spreading the woe and oppose that part of his budget that calls for some increases in taxes. Not only does this minority reject having the legislature enact the increases in taxes, but even refuses to agree to submit the proposed increases to the voters in the form of a legislative initiative.

If the minority has its way (in case you've forgotten, the California legislature can enact a tax increase or propose a ballot proposition only if 2/3 of the members agree) certain services will have to be drastically reduced. State universities, public schools, and community colleges all depend on the state for most of their revenue. They will have to accept big cuts. Medical, assistance for handicapped persons, and other medical services will be cut. I won't try to describe the hardship and misery that these cuts will make.

What can Jerry do? At least, if the additional revenue is not forthcoming he must make sure that the minority in the legislature are shown to be largely to blame. Even though the Democrats have majorities in the Senate and Assembly, and even though Jerry is a Democrat, independent voters (i.e., voters who don't pay enough attention to politics to belong to a political party) will naturally blame the party in power for the misery and the protection of the rich from experiencing any of the misery. Some will conclude that the Democrats are incompetent and will try to put the Republicans in charge of running the state.

If I thought the Republican intransigence were merely a political trick to discredit the Democrats and that, if Republicans were given power to propose and pass budgets, they would act responsibly and let everyone share the misery, I wouldn't bother writing this post. Evidence indicates that the Republicans are not interested in acting responsibly. The previous governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had just as much trouble with the Republicans as Jerry Brown is having. Instead, Republicans are hewing to the line laid down by such leaders as Grover Norquist and the late Howard Jarvis. The line is that people depend too much on government and that government should stop trying to relieve the misery of being both poor and disabled, of being poor and poorly educated, of being unable to pay for needed medical care, and the like. The way to make government stop doing such things is to cut off the supply of money.

Jerry Brown, as governor, must make sure that every California voter understands what the Republicans in the legislature are up to and that they, making use of the 2/3 vote requirement, are bent on putting California at the bottom of the list which ranks states on how much they spend per pupil on education, how much they spend per person on health care, etc.

Right of Privacy, Democracy, and Idealism

2011-03-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

These are lofty and noble concepts. At least they are to me. There are people in this world whose ideals rule out a right of privacy or an acceptance of democracy. The Taliban are an example. Their ideal is expressed in a holy book, the Koran. The Taliban will accept you if you are an observant muslim. Rather than allowing you a vote or voice in establishing the laws of the country and the policies of the government, the Taliban argue that these matters have been settled already for all time. Laws and policies are set forth in the Koran and it is blasphemy to propose any other means of enacting laws.

Another example is the Republican members of the California Legislature. They oppose any increase in any tax, and they have the power to block any tax increase by the Legislature. The State constitution requires a 2/3 vote in each house to enact any tax increase. These same Republicans also oppose any democratic means of increasing taxes and refuse to vote to submit any such proposal to the voters of the State. The State constitution also requires a 2/3 vote in each house to submit such legislation to the voters. I don't know the name of the holy book of the California Republican legislators, but they believe and follow it just as fervently as the Taliban believe and follow the Koran.

Irreconcilable Differences

2011-03-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

A symptom of the decline which I wrote about in my previous post is the irreconcilable differences between our two main political parties. The parties have completely different visions of what our country should be li0ke in the future. This is a situation quite different from the differences between Republicans and Democrats when I was a high school student. There were differences in those days also, but it was possible to find workable compromises that neither party liked very much but which both would accept.

Social Security was one such compromise. Southern Democrats didn't want Negro farm laborers to be included. Since the constitution is color-blind, the law excluded all farm workers and farmers. Government workers who already had pension plans were also excluded. The important thing is that both parties accepted the system with compromises although neither was completely satisfied with the result.

Today there are two very different competing views about what the United States should be like. In one view there should be "free" (i.e., tax-supported) services to provide education and good health care for everyone. In the other view individual citizens would be self-sufficient and self-reliant and would not depend on such "free" services as health care and education. In the first view our country should try to become more and more like the countries of western Europe in which high taxes provide free college education, free health care, free retirement benefits, and the like. In the second view our country should look to its own past in which hard-working pioneers tamed the land, built farms and grew their own food, made their own clothing, and used effective folk medicine to cure diseases. Education was provided by reading books next to the fire in the fireplace (like Lincoln).

There seems to be no acceptable middle ground between these views. We seem doomed to experience a century of decline, followed by a change of dynasty (i.e., governance).

Are we now in the declining century?

2011-03-05T19:04:00.000-08:00

Chinese historians have observed that a typical dynasty lasts three centuries. In the first century the people are hard at work building up the country and, presumably, repairing the damage from the collapse of the previous dynasty. During the second century the country is prosperous and the people flourish. At the beginning of the third century the country begins a long decline. At the end of the century the dynasty is overthrown. A new dynasty takes over and the process repeats.

It appears to me that we may repeat Chinese history. We are now near the beginning of our third century. I figure that the first century started at the conclusion of the revolution, in 1783. By the 1880's we had legally abolished slavery and we had become prosperous. During the next century we became a world power. We struggled to achieve equal rights for all Americans: black, female, children, and finally gay and lesbian. Workers acquired the legal right to form and join unions and to bargain collectively for pay and working conditions.

The third century began chronologically in 1983. An important event was the mass firing of members of the union of air traffic controllers. President Reagan chose to fire them rather than bargain collectively with them. I am not going to argue whether he was right or wrong. However, according to the historical model, something like that was due to happen. That particular union did not have much popular support; its members were exceedingly well paid.

Popularity of labor unions reached a peak in the 1940's after the passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Act in the 1930's. By 1983 (or whenever the air traffic controller union was destroyed) union popularity was low enough that elected officials could attack them in public statements and pressure them to give up some hard-earned benefits. This decreasing public support for organized labor has emboldened such opportunists as the newly elected governor of Wisconsin to propose legislation to end the effectiveness of public employee unions in the State. A new majority in the State legislature is prepared to enact the governor's proposals as soon as a quorum can be achieved.

This lack of public support for labor unions, coupled with the increasing influence of large corporations with money to spend to help elect candidates who share the interests of the corporate managers seems likely to undo most of the progressive legislation of the past century. We seem to be headed for a period of low, starvation wages, undoing regulations relating to workplace safety and environmental cleanliness, and deliberate policies to achieve a level of unemployment desired by the managers. Our declining century is at hand.

Can we prevent this predictable decline and prove that Chinese history doesn't prevail here in America? I hope so.

Praise for Emergency Rooms

2011-03-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

I had occasion to depend on both the Los Angeles Fire Department Paramedics and the Emergency Room of the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Center in Woodland Hills last Friday (February 25). About 9:30 in the morning I got out of my car and carelessly closed the door on a piece of the tip of my right ring finger. The piece of flesh remained on the car door and the rest of my finger bled dark blood. I was able to go into my house and wrap some Kleenex tissue on the wound. I dialed 911 and asked for help. In a few minutes the ambulance arrived and the paramedics took me to the emergency room of my choice, the one at the Kaiser facility about three miles away. By 10:30 an ER doctor had seen the wound, had anesthetized my finger and cleaned the wound, and was installing a gauze bandage. I won't bother you with the precise structure of the bandage.

Monday (yesterday) I had an appointment with a plastic surgeon at Kaiser. He looked at the wound and pointed out that it was already starting to heal. His recommendation, which I accepted gladly, was to continue to let the healing proceed by itself. He predicted that it would take about four weeks to heal.

My finger will continue to have a gauze bandage for a while. That's fine with me. I know it's healing.

This episode in my life illustrates how valuable to me a good hospital emergency room can be. If I had been unable to obtain medical help for several hours, the wound might have become badly infected and I would have lost most, if not all of the finger. This ties in with my own belief about government. I follow the advice of our greatest President, Abe Lincoln, who said that government should do for the people those things that the people can not do for themselves. Prompt medical attention is one of those things.

Why are we so surprised?

2011-02-28T17:40:00.000-08:00

Years ago in the campaign for proposition 13 the sainted Howard Jarvis told us that his goal was to reduce the revenue available to politicians. Having less money, they would do less. There'd be less annoying and costly regulation of business. Besides, people should pay directly for the services they receive and not depend on government to provide them. People should pay to use libraries, just like they pay to visit museums. Parents should pay for their children's educations. All of these services should be provided by private enterprrise. Private businesses are more efficient than government. Etc., etc., etc.

This philosophy of government did not originate with Mr. Jarvis. It's an old idea, one cherished by Republicans for ages. One of President Gerald Ford's favorite sayings was "government spends too much money." An early advocate of "small" government was a business man who, about 1929, wrote an article complaining about how government regulations was costing his business too much money. He didn't care about the size of government. He simply wanted it to leave him alone.

The behavior of recently elected Republican governors and legislators indicates that their primary concern is not the size or strength of government but rather a government that will support the aspirations of their wealthy backers. Governor Walker did not reduce the revenue of the government of Wisconsin to bring about "small" government. His intent all along was to make Wisconsin a State hospitable to manufacturers by reducing the wages of workers. To do that requires destroying labor unions. He is starting with the public employee unions.

We liberal progressives seem to have been caught off guard. We are astonished and unbelieving that a governor could be so calculating as to produce a budget problem, then use that problem to attack the civil servants of the State. But think back a few years. When Bill Clinton left office, the federal revenue exceeded federal expenditures. The national debt was being paid down. One of George Bush's first accomplishments was to engineer a sustantial tax reduction. Most of the benefits went to the wealthiest taxpayers. The government has been running a deficit ever since. Republicans are now using this deficit to justify their attacks on Social Security, Medicare, support for National Public Radio, and expansion of health care. They're not talking about reining in the Defense budget or about letting Bush's tax cuts expire and going back to Clinton's tax rates.

We thought that the elections of 2006 and 2008 had put away these aspirations of some Republicans. We shifted our attention to other matters, such as ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extending the rights of marriage to gays and lesbians, providing true universal health care in California, and providing public funding for election campaigns. Now we face the task of fighting for workers' rights. It's as though we were living in the year 1911, not 2011.

We haven't been paying enough attention to our political enemies. We've ignored the evidence of a wise man who believed in keeping his friends close and his enemies closer.

Idealism gone Mad

2011-02-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

I am unhappy about the attempt in Wisconsin to crush public employee unions. I'm unhappy because it looks like the start of an attack on all labor unions. In effect, the governor of Wisconsin and his allies intend to restore the relations between labor and management that prevailed in 1880. I know that Governor Walker is popular among Republicans. However, I can't believe that nearly all Republicans support his draconian views of labor unions and the rights of workers. I believe and will continue to believe until someone proves me wrong that a majority of Wisconsin residents and Americans generally believe that workers should have the right to collective bargaining.

I know that many sincere and kind-hearted people believe that public employees shouldn't have the right to strike. If the firemen go on strike, who will put out the fires? The argument is advanced that the same restriction shouldn't apply to workers in non-governmental organizations like auto plants and steel mills. If Ford is shut down by a strike we can buy our cars from Toyota or GM. We have only one fire department, one police department, etc., and we can't allow those services to be shut down by a labor dispute.

There is a reasonable argument on the contrary, which I won't discuss here. My point is that Governor Walker's stand is supported by some idealistic people in addition to his cronies who simply want a labor force with no union and a high enough rate of unemployment that workers will accept starvation wages and abysmal working conditions just to have a job. I am concerned about the idealists. Like idealists everywhere they have their heroes and they occasionally support really bad policies and proponents of these policies that seem to fit with their ideals. My hope is that these idealists will realize the negative implications of Governor Walker's proposed legislation and will join those of us who oppose his plan to destroy the public employees' unions.

Misplaced Anger

2011-02-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

Some of my friends ask me why I dislike Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska. I've been giving that question some serious thought. I've decided I don't really dislike her. In order to dislike someone I have to know that person. I don' know Sarah Palin. I've never met her or even seen her in person at a distance. If I did know her I might like her as a person. I can't say.

What I dislike about her is her politics. Now, truthfully, I agree with some of what she says and implies. She is angry that the federal government spent so much money bailing out the Wall Street financial institutions, especially at learning that the managers of these institutions are back in business as usual, paying themselves huge salaries and bonuses, while at the same time the poor people who signed up for the sub prime mortgages that these rascals were peddling are now losing their homes to foreclosure. In addition the federal government has spent diddly squat to help these soon to be homeless persons. They get no bail-outs, no bonuses, no fat increases in salary.

Where Sarah and I disagree is that we are angry at different institutions. She's angry at the government and especially at the Democrats. I'm angry at the plutocrats who, with the vast power that money gives them, have taken control of our government and set its policies to favor their interests and screw the rest of us, Sarah and me alike.

Sarah Palin is the poster woman for the Tea Party Movement. Tea Partiers have been convinced that it's the government's fault that we are in this mess. The government should back off and not interfere so that the people can sort things out by themselves. They ignore the great influence that the extreme plutocrats have on government. They ignore the good that government has done during past recessions. They ignore the great 20th Century President and his New Deal which, although it didn't bring an end to the depression of the 1930's, did provide help for those most affected by it. Franklin Roosevelt did not waste money bailing out Wall Street. He used money to provide jobs for the unemployed. It's true that a good many of those jobs were simply "make-work" jobs and many commentators complained that the money to provide them was wasted. Other jobs created during the New Deal era produced lasting public works, art, mathematical tables, and other useful and valuable things.

I would admire Sarah Palin if she would advocate in favor of using government to help the poor and unemployed rather than doing nothing and letting the Wall Street plutocrats get off scot free. Some of those rascals deserve to spend hard time in prison.

Spiritualism vs. Multitasking

2011-02-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

Friday morning after my walk with my friends Chuck and Wally I drove home. In getting out of my car I used my right hand to shut the door. In the process the tip of my right hand ring finger was caught between the top of the door and the door frame. A piece of flesh and a piece of bone was separated from my finger. I wrapped the bleeding finger with Kleenex and phoned 911 for an ambulance. I retrieved the piece of the finger and took it with me to the emergency room. The ER doctor, Dr. Yang, looked at it and decided it couldn't be reattached. My finger was x-rayed, cleaned, dressed, and bandaged. I was instructed not to take showers (to keep the bandage cry) and was given material to replace the bandage in two days. I was given prescriptions for an antibiotic and for easing pain. Monday or Tuesday I will visit a hand specialist who will look at the finger and decide on how to help it heal.

I've thought about this mishap for some time, trying to make sense of it. I've been driving cars for about 70 years and never before have I caught my finger in a car door. I thought that the spiritualists are correct. A spirit was trying to get my attention. Perhaps God himself (or herself) has an important message for me. What was I thinking at the time? Perhaps it was a thought that God disapproved of. I couldn't remember what it was. Was there some plan I had to do something that God didn't like? Again, I came up with nothing. Perhaps the message will be revealed to me when God is ready. But, why then the unusual calamity with my finger?

Then I realized that there was a simple interpretation. I am a man and a study recently revealed that men can't multitask. Women can, but they're not good at it. I was trying to multitask. I was thinking about something else while I closed the door. As a result I didn't pay attention to my fingers and one of them was caught in the door. I realized that I occasionally tip over glasses of liquid at the table when I reach for something. I must stop trying to multitask. When I reach for something or close a door I must concentrate on what I'm reaching for or the door, not something else. Perhaps that was God's message.

Governor Walker shows the way

2011-02-23T17:38:00.000-08:00

Governor Walker is the Republican Governor of Wisconsin. Like many other Republicans, he has a visceral hatred of unions and in particular the notion that disputes between employers and workers should be settled by collective bargaining, a form of finding a compromise between two desires, such as the desire of an employer to hire workers for the smallest possible pay to increase his profit and the desire of workers for a standard of living better than what they have. He has shown all of us how to screw the public employee unions.

Get elected with a majority in the State legislature.
Grant a generous tax reduction to wealthy taxpayers, with small reductions to those with less income.
Show that there now is a deficit in the State's budget. There isn't enough income to pay for all the services.
Go after the public employee unions. Tell them they'll have to give up their recent salary increases and accept reduced pensions to reduce the State deficit. Tell them they'll also have to give up collective bargaining, the right to strike, and the deduction for union dues from their paychecks.

It's a diabolical scheme. Even President Nixon wouldn't have dared trying to get away with something like that. Today it may work. Public employee unions have been demonized in the news media and in particular in the speeches of many public officials. No more than 12 percent of the working population belongs to a union these days. The biggest unions are the public employee unions.

Some Republicans (e.g., Karl Rove) like this approach to electoral politics. The unions are mostly strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Weaken or destroy the unions and the Democrats will lack an important resource.

Non-partisan supporters of Governor Walker's ploy may argue that public employees shouldn't be allowed to strike anyway. Government has a monopoly on the services it provides. If the services are stopped because of a strike, the public can't choose another provider. Public employees have [or should have] benefits not enjoyed by workers in private industry, such as better pay, better working conditions, and job security. This non-partisan argument ignores the point that one reason public employees have these benefits is the effectiveness of their union in negotiating with government agencies.

Governor Walker has shown the way. Republican Governors in other States are prepared to follow his lead. I hope that the public recognizes this abominable scheme for what it is and rise up in support of the rights of public employees.

False Economy

2011-02-14T21:57:00.000-08:00

On the editorial pages of today's (February 14) Los Angeles Times a pundit weighs in with a criticism of Governor Brown. The criticism concerns Brown's proposal to place a tax increase referendum on the ballot so that voters can choose whether to increase the State's revenue. The pundit points out that Candidate Brown did not campaign on a plan to increase taxes. In addition, the public voted two years ago against a proposed tax increase.

Candidate Brown did not campaign on a plan to increase taxes! Well, duh! In the entire history of this republic, there was not one candidate who ever got elected by promising to increase taxes. Brown knows that and I know that and I suspect the pundit knows that, also. It is also widely recognized, even by Republicans, that the State of California can not provide services at the present levels with the income available. Either taxes will have to be raised or services will have to be curtailed. The voting public wants neither alternative. We are faced with a failure of representative government. One way or another, the public will have to take its medicine.

One solution to the problem of representative government being unable to make a necessary but unpopular decision is to replace the government with a dictatorship. The dictator then makes the decision and suppresses all criticism of it. We have seen this method of solving the problem put into effect in many countries during our lifetimes. Governor Brown has pointed out another way out of the dilemma: let the public decide in a fair and open election what medicine to take. The legislature should agree to placing the proposal on the ballot. There should then be a lively, open, and extensive discussion of the measure and the consequences of adopting it or rejecting it. We've had enough talk about how to provide services that the public wants by getting rid of waste and corruption, of creative bookkeeping, etc., etc., etc.

Nothing Puzzling About It

2011-02-10T10:28:00.000-08:00

Regarding the behavior of the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, many of my liberal friends and allies have been puzzled at the behavior of the Republicans. Nearly everyone agrees that the economy is in the tank and that the first priority of responsible legislators is to do something to get it out of the tank. However, the Republican majority has made a priority of repealing the health care legislation just enacted last year, imposing new and draconian restrictions on a woman's right and ability to obtain an abortion, and ringing declarations about the definition of marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. The puzzle is, why would grown men and women engage in such things and do nothing about the sad shape of our economy?

The answer is simple. These Republicans are supporters of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. He asserted that the troubles that we experience are God's punishment for our transgressions. To placate God and call off the punishment we must reassert our absolute dedication to Christian values. Homosexuality is evil; the Bible calls for homosexuals to be stoned to death. Abortion is a form of murder and violates one of the Ten Comandments. Divorce is forbidden. If only we Americans would again embrace these values God would again look upon us with favor and such troubles as a bad economy, losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the low opinions that many foreigners have of our government leaders would all go away.

So, according to their beliefs, the Republicans are doing something to solve the problems of abad economy.

Three Cheers for Jerry!

2011-02-01T10:51:00.000-08:00

Governor Brown has laid it on the line for the Legislature and for the people of California. Without more revenue there will have to be big cuts in important services, such as education. According to this morning's paper, twelve billion dollars in cuts are needed unless the public votes to increase certain taxes. To the people, if you want to keep the system of public education in a good state, it will take more money than we now have. To those concerned that increased taxes will drive business out of the State, a bad education system will drive away more businesses than higher taxes.

A 2/3 vote is necessary to put the tax increase initiative on the ballot. Brown has put it to the Republicans: If none of you vote to allow the public to vote on the increased taxes, then you propose a budget that fits the available income. You propose which services are to be cut or eliminated so that the people of the State can see where you stand.

If the 2/3 vote is not available, we will have to collect signatures to place a public initiative on the ballot. We have work to do.

In the footsteps of Saul Alinsky

2011-01-30T22:46:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I advised my liberal-progressive-Democratic friends to let Obama go about the constitutional job of being President and not depend on him to start or promote new initiatives toward reforming our undemocratic, corporate-ridden political and economic system. Starting something new is something we have to do ourselves. Our opponents on the Right have been working for years to develop a coherent movement that, even though it is a minority, is so disciplined and organized that it has become more influential than the majority of our citizens. As Democrats, we have a tradition of obstinate independence that precludes the discipline shown by the Tea Party movement. We need to have at least agreed goals that conform with our views about what's wrong.

Unlike the Tea Party Movement, we can't vent our frustration with the system and at the same time advocate fundamental changes that will, if enacted, simply reinforce the things about the system that we hate. Fortunately, we are not that disciplined and not that inclined to listen to demagogues who use our frustration and energy to promote their own selfish interests.

Let's start with agreeing on what needs to be changed.

A great deal of wealth has been created in the past thirty or more years. Most of it has gone to a tiny segment of society. Most of us have not participated in becoming more wealthy. CEO's of large companies typically receive salaries and other forms of remuneration 400 times that of the average worker. In the rest of the industrialized world, excepting perhaps China, the ratio is only about 20. Some of this wealth needs to be redistributed, starting with the tax code.
We no longer have a system of representative government. Our elected Representatives and Senators do not accurately represent us. They represent the interests of those individuals and organizations who have money to spend on election campaigns. This situation needs to be changed. The supreme court decision a year ago simply verified what was already in effect; namely, that organizations with money have political influence.
Our country has blundered into several needless wars: Viet Nam, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. None of these wars was started in the constitutional way by a simple declaration of war by Congress. None of them would have been started if the American Public had been consulted. We can debate the question of whether we obtained any of our objectives in these wars, but in general the situation in each case has settled our of probably will settle out to be just what it would have been if there had been no war.
We need to do a great deal more than we are doing about global warming. It is too late to discuss the question of whether human activity is a cause. We have to plan for a warmer environment, a rising sea level, more frequent and stronger hurricanes, and other undesirable changes in the weather. Our government is doing practically nothing. No reputable institution is advising us on how we must change our ways of living to cope with the coming climate changes.
We put too many people in prison. We require long prison terms for minor offenses. Prosecutors use the threat of long prison terms to try to induce drug retailers to rat out their suppliers. The retailers don't talk - they don't dare - and accept the long terms to protect their lives and their families' lives. We should rely much more on a system of probation for minor offenders. Probation is cheaper than prison.

Feel free to add to the list above.

We can not depend on favorite candidates for office to make these changes. We need to use techniques recognized in the constitution itself: public protest and petition. History teaches us that peaceful protest is more effective than violent protest. Look at Russia! The people rose up and violently ended the rule of the tsar. What replaced it? The rule of Stalin. In these days, the rule of Putin. It is not sufficient to overthrow a government that is oppressive. There must be a profound change, not only in the government, but in the people. Peaceful, if rowdy, demonstrations eventually wear down the prejudices of the people and bring about changes in the government. I am talking here about an effort that will take two or three generations. It isn't going to happen in the election of 2012.

Vinegar and Honey

2011-01-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

Many of my Democratic friends are disillusioned with President Obama because he doesn't confront his Republican opponents. Instead, he tends to placate them. He won't tell them that he knows they are telling lies when they assert that Social Security and other entitlements have to be scaled back to reduce the deficit. He won't tell them that, because of the way Social Security is funded it delivers a net surplus to the general fund in the Treasury. He won't tell them that the TARP program was (a) started by their President, George Bush and (b) has been a success and will probably turn out to be a net gain for the Treasury. And so on.

Mr. Obama has already demonstrated his style of governing. He's not confrontational. He recognizes that while confrontation would be very satisfying to those of us who are perpetually angered by Republican lies and misrepresentations it would not produce useful results, especially with a divided Congress. Even when we Democrats had a majority in both houses there were enough Democrats in Name Only (DINO's?) from districts that normally elect Republicans to make progress on a progressive Democratic agenda very difficult. We forget, especially here in California, that the United States is a deeply conservative nation. Americans are more religious than the people of almost any other country. Around 90 percent of our fellows attend church services at least occasionally. No other nation has as large a percentage of nominal believers in some religion. Religious belief naturally goes with conservatism. Religious people of all faiths believe things written in their holy books, things that were written down thousands of years ago. The same believers in the wisdom of ancient writings follow ancient writings and ideas about economics, about the responsibilities of government, and about self reliance rather than dependence on systematic help from society.

Our successful presidents have been those who choose honey rather than vinegar. My mother told me that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. A similar principle applies to dealing with other humans. Mr. Obama understands that bit of ancient wisdom and applies it to his job as President.

Intransigence and Bias

2011-01-25T20:55:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I heard on the radio (NPR in Pasadena, California) about a wikileak. The documents leaked revealed details of negotiations between the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Authority a few years ago. According to the documents, the Palestinian leader had agreed to give up nearly all of Jerusalem, had agreed to letting the (illegal) settlements in the West Bank stand, and so on. As far as I could tell, this leader was willing to give the Israelis just about everything they asked for. The Israeli government refused to accept this offer, or even to continue negotiations. Instead, Israel cut off the negotiation and asserted that the Palestinians were not being partners in the search for peace.

Israeli intransigence I understand and accept as the way things are. What amazed me was the spin that the radio announcer was giving to this damaging leak. He (or she?) asserted that the leak would be very damaging to the Palestinian leader! This leader would find himself in trouble with his own people for being willing to concede so much!

That was the way the story was reported in NPR. Until then I had considered NPR to be relatively free of bias in the way it presented news. But here was a story, presumably true because no one denied it, that to me was very damaging to the government of Israel. Israel has been claiming for many years that the Palestinians do not want peace and are not willing to make any concessions, etc., etc., etc. The story reveals that it is Israel that has been unwilling to make any concessions or even to accept important concessions from the Palestinians. The way NPR reported the story reveals a strong pro-Israel bias among its news reporters.

Later on, either the same day or the next day, it was reported, again by NPR, that many governments had reacted to the story by changing their attitudes toward Israel. That is, they were becoming more inclined to blame Israel for the continuing conflict than before. In fact, the leak has been damaging to Israel.

More about Values

2011-01-21T22:24:00.000-08:00

There are inconsistencies in my set of values. I classify values as individual values and societal values. An example of an individual value is thrift and frugality. I try to be thrifty in my purchases and frugal in the use of things I've purchased. I'm frugal about food. I live alone and sometimes food that I buy starts to get moldy before I eat it. My practice is simply to scrape off the mold and eat what's left. Most mold has a bad taste - it tastes, well, moldy. Of course bleu cheese, English Stilton cheese, French Roquefort, and others are moldy. The delicious flavor of those cheeses is due to a special mold. As you can see from the cheese, the mold is blue-green in color. Hence, the name bleu cheese (bleu being the French word for blue).

Getting back to thrift and frugality, it is good for an individual to be thrifty and frugal. It is also good for society for individuals to be thrifty and frugal. We live on a crowded planet with limited resources. If I am thrifty and frugal I am leaving resources for others to use. I am convinced that thrift, frugality, and avoiding waste is a value that every individual should cherish.

There are some people who believe that society should not only encourage thrift and frugality but actually enforce it by strictly rationing the resources that members of society can use. This rationing is done by pricing or using "market forces" to allocate scarce resources. This enforcement of limits on the use of resources becomes to some people a value. Just as my own habits of thrift and frugality leave resources for others to use, so this enforced limit leaves resources available to those who can afford them.

I do not view the enforced limit of the use of resources by market forces as a value. That is, I do not think it is a good thing. Rationing may well be necessary but it should not be left to market forces to make the allocation. Resources should be allocated according to need. Every American is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If a person is a diabetic and needs insulin to remain alive, then that person should have insulin. He or she shouldn't be deprived of insulin because the price is too high.

Allocating scarce resources on the basis of need rather than price and ability to pay isn't easy. It isn't automatic. Human intervention is necessary. Human being have to make decision about allocation. These decisions must be made openly so that everyone can see whether they are made fairly and not according to some special relationship between the person who decides the allocation and the person who receives the scarce resource. For example, giving a person the power to determine the allocation of insulin gives that person the power to decide who lives and who dies.

I am trying to show that there is a conflict between individual and societal values in some cases. In my insulin case, one can argue that it is impossible to make sure that an insulin czar will always be fair and will not play favorites. Hence, the only alternative is to let market forces make the decision. To me, decisions made by market forces are obviously biased in favor of the rich. The rich diabetic gets all the insulin he or she needs while the poor diabetic doesn't get any.

I will continue this essay later, with other examples of values in conflict.

What's next in the health care saga?

2011-01-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

I believe that at least a few Republicans are sane, intelligent, and compassionate. Providing affordable health care to all Americans is a noble and compassionate goal and I believe that at least a few Republicans share it. I believe that these compassionate Republicans who voted to repeal the existing health care law would replace it with something that would achieve the goal of universal health care. Let me try to argue their point.

First, these compassionate Republicans believe that health care should continue to be paid for by private insurance. They oppose a universal single-payer plan such as the one in Canada or the national health insurance such as the one in Britain. They favor making it possible for everyone to buy private insurance. That implies that the insurance premiums have to be affordable. How does one achieve that goal?

You can not achieve it by simply legislating the size of the premiums. Private insurance companies have to earn a profit. They must set premiums high enough to cover the cost of the money they pay to medical providers. The whole idea is shared risk. The average person is healthy and does not need any expensive medical treatment. A few individuals do need expensive treatments. The cost has to be shared among both groups. That is, it is necessary that every person has insurance and pays premiums. The same principle applies to home insurance and auto insurance. Everyone pays premiums but few collect benefits.

OK. Compassionate Republican principle number one is that everyone must buy health insurance.

Perversely, one of the big Republican arguments against the existing health care plan is the universal mandate.

A corollary of the principal of requiring everyone to buy health insurance is that insurance companies must not be allowed to cherry-pick their clients. A health insurance company must sell a policy to anyone who applies, regardless of the risk that person poses. The company must ignore any preexisting conditions in setting the premium. Otherwise those persons who need insurance the most will be faced with impossibly high premiums to obtain it.

A second belief of compassionate Republicans is that any move toward universal health care should use, as much as possible, existing systems of providing and paying for medical care. The existing system relies on insurance companies that are regulated by State Insurance Commissioners. Different States have different rules and limits regarding premiums, determining what medical costs are covered, and the like. The result is that a person buying health insurance is limited to those insurance companies subject to the regulation by the State in which they live. A resident of California shouldn't buy insurance from a company that is regulated only by the State of Nevada, for example.

It has been proposed, in the name of competition, to allow insurance companies to sell policies in any State, particularly in States in which they are not regulated. If that change were to be adopted it would require that the federal government set up a national insurance commissioner to replace the 50 State insurance commissioners who now regulate the insurance industry. Alternatively, the insurance industry would operate without any regulation at all. Neither alternative seems to be one that truly conservative Republicans would embrace.

Perversely, some Republicans have advocated just such a change.

My conclusion is that the thoughtful and compassionate Republicans are not the ones that set Party policy. The policy of the Republican Party seems to be simply to oppose anything that Democratic President Obama advocates. I join in calling it "the party of NO."

Those silly Republicans!

2011-01-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

Republicans would like to present themselves as a Party of reasonable people who do not waste valuable time doing silly, pointless things. This week in the House they are doing just that: something silly and pointless. They are debating and voting on a measure to repeal the recent health care law that has just been enacted. They in the House know that there isn't a chance that the repeal will go anywhere. The Senate won't even consider it. Even if the Senate were to take it up and pass it, President Obama would veto it. There's not a 2/3 majority in either house to support the repeal. So, why waste the time to debate it and vote on it?

Speaker Boehner says that the repeal is being considered because it was a campaign pledge. However, there is no majority among the public, according to recent opinion polls, in support of the repeal. The debate and the vote in the House are not going to win Republicans any additional votes in the next election. Republicans and those few Democrats who may vote for the repeal know that it isn't going anywhere. Perhaps that knowledge gives them cover. They can say they are voting to satisfy some of their constituents, while at the same time they know that, since neither the Senate nor the President will agree to the repeal, they are not doing any harm to national policy. I wonder how the House Republicans would vote if there was a Republican majority in the Senate and they knew the President would not veto the repeal?

The Republicans are off to a great start!

Fear and Mistrust of Strong Government

2011-01-13T16:38:00.000-08:00

Conservatives and Liberals both have this fear and distrust. Conservatives fear that a strong government will take away their property or limit what they can do to conduct a profitable business. Liberals fear that a strong government will take away their civil rights in an effort to enforce public order and safety.

The murder of six people last Saturday in Tucson has brought out a discussion of actions that a strong government can and ought to take to prevent such things from happening again. Here are some of the suggestions:

Impose strong restrictions on the availability of various types of firearm. In particular, ban the sale of weapons with magazines that hold many bullets.
Tighten laws regarding the sequestering of persons with types of mental illness that may lead them to conduct shooting rampages.
Provide personal protection and a degree of isolation for all elected public officials, not just the President. Screening would have removed the assassin's weapon before he was anywhere near Representative Giffords.
Tone down the poisonous rhetoric from both sides of the political spectrum. Such rhetoric may inspire an otherwise peaceful but mentally unbalanced person to undertake an assassination.

And so on. Add your own suggestions. There are practical limits in how far we can follow any of them.

It's politically impossible to impose a sufficiently strict ban on firearm sales and ownership to prevent another lunatic from obtaining a gun and setting out to kill an elected official. Conservatives would object loudly to such severe restrictions.

It is politically impossible to put every person with mental illness in an institution. There is the danger that unscrupulous judges may put innocent and sane individuals away because of political opposition. Liberals would object loudly to laws that enable judges to put people away because of fear that they might do something, whether sane or not.

Screening and metal detectors for every member of Congress doesn't sound practical. It is important that a member of Congress be approachable by any constituent, even one who disagrees with the member.

Toning down the rhetoric is a nice idea and I'm all in favor of it. How do we square limitations on what can be said about a political opponent with the first amendment?

It's a quandary.

What will Brown do?

2011-01-08T22:30:00.000-08:00

A good friend asked me today about the future. Specifically, what predictions can I make for how Governor Brown is going to deal with the California budget deficit. At the time I said I don't know. Thinking over the question, I think I have some clues.

Jerry Brown is a Democrat. As a Democrat, he has no use for the Republican mantra that the only way to balance the budget is to cut government spending - cut it back, way back, waaaaaay back.
Candidate Brown pledged not to raise taxes except by a vote of the people. Well, that was a pretty easy promise to make. The legislature isn't going to raise taxes because of the 2/3 vote requirement. The only way to get a substantial tax increase is through the initiative process.
Jerry Brown has been in State government as one official or another longer than almost anyone else - certainly longer than any other person now in State government. By now he knows how the system works, where the levers of power are, and how much he can realistically expect to accomplish.
Brown is noted for being frugal. He won't hesitate to cut the spending levels of may State functions.
Brown as a candidate promised to turn over the funding of many local services to the counties and cities. If he does this, he will be able to make a substantial reduction in the cost of State government. Of course, local cities and counties may have to struggle and squirm to raise the additional revenue needed for the services - hospitals, fire departments, police, street repair, libraries, schools, etc.

I expect to see some initiatives to increase certain taxes. I expect counties and cities to have to find additional ways of raising money. I expect to see some willingness by the public to accept some changes in the property tax system; i.e., some modifications of Proposition 13. Perhaps business property will be taxed at a rate more in keeping with the ad valorem value than it is now. There will be much yelling and screaming and kicking by those business property owners who have enjoyed for thirty years the advantage of not having their taxes increased to keep pace with inflation. It will be an exciting time. I look forward to enjoying the fighting. I hope my health remains good for at least four more years.

Con vs. Lib - What's the Difference?

2011-01-05T17:41:00.000-08:00

To save space, I have abbrreviated the title of this post from "Conservative vs. Liberal - What's the difference?" The question came up this morning in the monthly first Wednesday meeting of the Men's Group at a church in Woodland Hills. We geezers were talking about the new Congress, in which the Republicans have a majority in the House and an increase in the Senate. We wondered why politicians don't talk to each other and try to find compromises instead of taking absolute stands and trying to suppress any ideas advanced by the minority.

My thought is that the difference between conservatives and liberals is that the two groups do not recognize the same problems as matters that ought to be addressed in legislation. Consider the health care bill enacted by the previous Congress. The House, with a Republican majority, is going to spend several days debating the proposition that the bill should be repealed and replaced with something more to the liking of Republicans. This debate and the final vote will be taken in spite of the fact that we still have Mr. Obama as President and a Democratic majority in the Senate. It would be a true miracle if the repeal were to be achieved. (I write "miracle" instead of "calamity" because miracles do not happen in my world, certainly not in the last two thousand years.) The vote is purely symbolic, a waste of time to please a few constituents.

We geezers still wondered why there are such strong feelings on the two sides. One reason, I believe, is that conservatives and liberals are concerned about different problems. Consider American health care. It is very good. If you need the latest advances in medical practice, you can get them here - if you have the money to pay or if medical providers will provide them pro bono. However, a significant part of our population can not afford medical care at all. This part comprises people without medical insurance to cover expensive medical treatments. In Canada and in many European countries such care is provided under a system in which the cost is paid by the government. In other words, the cost of medical care for all is borne by taxes which everyone pays. In addition, medical practice in these "socialist" countries is less expensive than medical practice in most American communities.

I have written extensively by e-mail to my conservative friends about universal health care. Neither one of them supports the idea. One argues that we already have universal health care because hospital emergency rooms are legally obliged to treat everyone regardless of ability to pay. The other argues that we simply can't afford to provide free medical care for everyone; the government is running big deficits as it is and there isn't the money to provide free care. My point is that conservatives do not recognize uneven health care as a problem that government should do anything about.

On the other hand, my conservative friends are very much concerned about what I call the "Andy Cap" fraction of society. Andy Cap is a cartoon character who lives in north-central England. He lives on the dole and sedulously avoids doing work for money. Conservatives see any public benefit, such as free health care for the poor (or for all) as a chance for "Andy Cap" or lazy freeloaders to get something of value without working or paying for it. A related concern is the malpractice situation. Conservatives see that malpractice lawyers encourage dissatisfied patients to sue their doctors and hospitals. These lawyers earn enormous fees from successful lawsuits. In addition, most trial lawyers are Democrats and contribute heavily to the Democratic Party.

We talked also about the influence of money, especially corporate money on elections. In our country a successful candidate for office has to raise a lot of money. Two candidates competing with each other vie for money. The one who can raise the most money usually wins the election. It is no surprise that the successful one will, in office, support legislation that benefits his wealthy supporters. As a result, we have a plutocracy, not a democracy, even though the new Republican majority in the House intends to have the federal constitution read to the members.

Naturally, we talked about the "Tea Party" faction in the Republican Party. Most of us think the Tea Party people have some quaint ideas. They are sincere and angry. In my view, they are angry about many things that make me angry but their anger is directed at other things than mine. I think they are being misled and I hope that in time they will realize that their leaders are using them for some ends that are not good for the country.

What is Zionism?

2010-12-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (Tuesday, December 28) I read the letters section in the Op-Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times. One of the writers commented on the current stand-off between Palestinians and Israelis regarding the negotiations leading to a peace settlement. This writer alleged that the problem would be solved very quickly if only the Palestinians would agree to the existence of a Zionist state (i.e., Israel) in the region. Since the Palestinians refuse to agree that Israel has a right to exist, there can be no progress on negotiations.

I've pondered this proposition. What is meant by a Zionist state? What are the implications in a right of Israel to exist? Above all, why is it that the Palestinians, who have lived in the area for two thousand years, are the ones who have to make all the concessions?

Let's consider a few definitions of Zionism.

Zionism means that Jews living anywhere in the world have a right to move to the Biblical land of Israel and live there. The land was given to them thousands of years ago by God and they have a right to it. Any non-Jews who happen to be living in the territory will have to make room for any Jews that decide to settle there.
Zionism means that, because of the persistent persecution of Jews in many European countries, a national homeland should be established in areas near Jerusalem where Jews can live and practice their religion in peace.
Zionism means that, in order that Jews may safely practice their religion, a religious state must be established in which Jews can be citizens and elect governments that will protect them.
Zionism is strictly a religious movement and has nothing to do with government.

Israeli leaders seem to operate on the assumption that Zionism is defined by items 1 and 3 above. Jews have a sacred right to the territory of Biblical Israel and must establish a government of the territory that will protect them from all enemies.

I can't blame the Palestinians from rejecting the Israeli leaders' definition of Zionism. I can't accept it myself and I am not a Palestinian. Of the four partial definitions, I can accept only number 2. The Jews deserve a national homeland. They do not deserve a religious state. They certainly do not have a moral right to seize property owned by the Palestinians and expropriate it for their own use. However, as an American, my moral criticism sounds hypocritical. My forebearers took land from the indigenous people who lived here and established their own farms, factories, cities, and other features of our civilization. The indigenous people were killed off by diseases like measles and small pox as well as by frequent wars. The survivors have been herded into reservations, where they live in poverty for the most part. The Israelis are simply following our example.

The Folly of Conceding too much

2010-12-13T19:07:00.000-08:00

There is a serious move afoot to challenge the constitutionality of an essential component of the new health care low. The law requires everyone to purchase health insurance. A federal judge has ruled that this requirement exceeds the power Congress has under the Interstate Commerce clause. Congress does not have the power to require every person to engage in a particular contractual obligation. The matter will be sent on to the Supreme Court for a final ruling.

The basic premise of the law was that health care was to be provided by insurance. To achieve affordable rates, everyone must participate in the insurance pool. If not, only the sick and those with probable sickness in the future will buy insurance. No one will be able to afford the premiums. The whole structure will fall.

One news commentator noted that if the "public option" had been included in the law, there would be no legal requirement for everyone to buy insurance. Those who decline to buy insurance would instead join the "publilc option" group and pay into that. The pool would be filled with a natural mix of healthy and not so healthy individuals.

Mr. Obama may now be wishing that he hadn't caved to the desires of the insurance lobby in discarding the public option.

Morals vs. Logic in Politics

2010-12-08T17:25:00.000-08:00

The other day the local PACIFICA radio station aired an interview with George Lakoff. Professor Lakoff asserted that Conservatives have developed ways of framing and talking about issues that appeal to the average non-political listener. Conservatives appeal to morality. Liberals make the mistake of appealing to logic. The human brain doesn't work that way. Morality trumps logic.

There is a pair of moral precepts that both Conservatives and Liberals have. These are "self-reliance" and "helping neighbors." Extensions of these precepts lead to many of the disagreements between Conservatives and Liberals.

Self reliance leads to the notion that everyone in America should take care of himself or herself. No one should willingly accept help from the government. Government payments to the less well-off encourage the abandonment of the spirit of self reliance. Lazy people let the government take care of them. Energetic, self-reliant people take care of themselves. Hence, it is bad public policy to establish programs that automatically take care of the poor and unfortunate. Such assistance should be given only in the case of natural disasters, like storms, earthquakes, fires, and floods. Therefore, the government should turn Social Security into a private savings plan where individuals can invest their savings to provide an income for them in retirement. We should stop talking about universal health care and instead set up medical savings accounts so that individuals can put some of their savings in a fund to pay the bills in medical emergencies.

Helping neighbors leads to an almost opposite set of notions. Abraham Lincoln said that "government should do for people that which the people can not do for themselves." It is the government's job to provide retirement pensions (Social Security) and free or low-cost medical care for the sick and injured. Universal Health Care is a public good and deserves public support. Individuals should not be forced to depend on the unpredictable swings of the stock market or interest rates to provide them an adequate retirement income. In our economic system, workers are underpaid. The value of their work is greater than the value of the pay they receive for it. It must be that way, otherwise no business would ever make a profit. Pensions are deferred payments for work done.

No one is ever one hundred percent "Conservative" or "Liberal." Most Liberals favor Social Security and Universal Health Care but would not willingly spend years of their lives living on welfare. Even Liberals respect self-reliance. Most Conservatives favor emergency relief for victims of natural disasters. They respect the notion of neighbor helping neighbor and many give generously to non-governmental organizations, such as churches, that provide assistance to persons down on their luck. Many Conservatives argue that public welfare should be replaced by assistance provided by these organizations.

The definitions of "conservative" and "liberal" that apply to our present politics are not the definitions I learned in school nor the definitions provided in dictionaries. The "conservative" definition of a Conservative is that he or she is a person who resists change. Things should be left the way they are. Changes produce unexpected results that may be worse than what we have now. It's better to stay with the devil you know than the devil you don't know. The "conservative" definition of a Liberal is that he or she is a person who welcomes social experimentation. The Liberal wants to take a chance on "the devil you don't know." The Liberal believes that the present system is intolerable and is becoming worse and something has to be done. The definitions that relate to our present politics involve the moral issues that Conservatives or Liberals hold dear. I have given an example: Conservative belief in self-reliance and Liberal belief in helping neighbors. There are many others. You are welcome to make up and submit your lists.

Those Poor Republicans

2010-12-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

Republicans in the Senate - all 42 of them - have announced they will filibuster any legislation or other matter that comes to the Senate unless and until there is a vote to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years. For instance, they won't vote on any proposed strategic arms treaty with Russia until the tax question is settled to their satisfaction. In the recent election we were led to believe that the voters were dissatisfied with

Escessive partisanship and bickering in Washington
Unemployment and the lousy economy
The out-of-control deficit
The stimulus program, viewed by many as a big failure
Inability of the Democrats to pass a simple, effective health care law that did not continue special favors for big pharma and big insurers

Now we see that the partisanship and bickering are still with us in force. The economy hasn't improved. Republicans want to continue the deficit by continuing the Bush tax rates. The stimulus is now recognized by economists as a successful program that prevented the loss of another million jobs.

Individual Republican Senators are not stupid. At least, most of them are not stupid. They know that the economy is the big problem and must be dealt with now, not after the election of 2012 when, they hope, the President will be a Republican. Why are they putting so much importance on the Bush tax rates?

It must be a Republican article of faith, like the belief in the resurrection of Jesus among Christians, that lowering taxes is always the solution. If the economy is down, lower taxes. If there is a smallpox epidemic, lower taxes. Lowering taxes, especially on the richest taxpayers, will enable these fortunate people to have extra money that they will spend on employing more workers in their factories, donating money to provide free smallpox medication to the populace, and other good works. In the case of the Christian belief, there is no one alive today who witnessed the resurrection and we don't really know exactly what happened, or if indeed anything happened. So to the case that lowering taxes, especially on wealthy people, stimulates the economy: it may have happened once but there is no one around who actually saw in happen and can explain in detail how it happened and whether it would happen this time. There have certainly been times when a lowering of taxes coincided with recovery from a recession. There have also been times that taxes were lowered when there was no recession, and there have been times when a recession leveled out and became a recovery and there was no simultaneous change in tax rates. Yet, the theory remains an article of faith among Republicans.

When is the Grand Old Party going to come to its senses and become the hard-nosed and realistic party it once was? When is the Party going to exchange Sarah Palin for a Dwight Eisenhower or an Earl Warren?

Some Changes of Interest

2010-12-02T10:48:00.000-08:00

Until the begining of 2010 I was interested mainly in politics. I had been a member of one Democratic political club or another since about 1958. At the end of the year 2009 the club of which I was a member came to an end when no one wanted to be the President. I've had invitations to join Democratic clubs since then but so far I've not joined one. Instead I have gotten involved in two other organizations: the Woodland Hills Neighborhood Council and the Warner Ceneter Kiwanis Club. These two have taken up more than the time I would normally have spent on Democratic club activities except for the extra work done during an election campaign.

I'm still interested in politics, of course. I was pleased that the Democrats made a clean sweep this year of the State offices. Steve Cooley, the respected and able District Attorney of Los Angeles County ran for State Attorney General as a Republican. Previously he had been elected and reelected in Los Angeles County by big margins. The DA of Los Angeles is a non-partisan office. When running for office as a Republican, he did not carry Los Angeles County. He lost the election by a slim margin and would have been elected if Los Angeles County had supported him as it had previously. It's agreed that the Republican label was an anchor or anvil that sank him. I don't know how long this distaste for Republicans will stay with the voters but for now we Democrats in California can bask in the pleasant knowledge that our opponents are very unpopular.

Now that I am seeing what a Kiwanis Club or a neighborhood council can do, I have come to believe that I didn't accomplish much in all the years that I was an active Democratic club member. At best I may have contributed to Democratic victories in close elections in local districts. We club members helped Brad Sherman win election in a district that had been designed for a Republican in 1996, after Tony Beilenson retired. We helped Fran Pavley and later Julia Brownley in their election campaigns to represent the 41st Assembly District. However there were other candidates that we worked for and who didn't prevail. They were running in districts that had traditioally voted for Republicans.

I've noticed that even though the Democrats made a clean sweep of State offices in the election last month, the make-up of the legislature was almost unchanged. The Democrats still have a substantial majority in each chamber but the majorities are not great enough to overcome the 2/3 vote requirement that gives the Republicans an absolute veto on all legislation if they hang together. The only way to get anything done is to offer a few Republicans bribes in the form of projects that benefit their districts.

At any rate, the two organizations that now take up much of my time work on projects or on proposed projects that have an immediate effect. The Kiwanians work on special projects for children. Neighborhood councils review and object to bulding plans proposed by the Los Angeles City Council. Some of these activities may not have an immediate effect, but in general the two organizations to have at least small effects on the actual quality of life of individiuals living in this area. It's more satisfying to prevent a zoning change for a pawn shop than to see an Assemblyman in a safe district reelected even though I was one of a group that did phoning for him. He probably would have been elected anyway. The zoning change would have occurred if the neighborhood council had not intervened and held public meetings at which concerned residents could voice their opposition.

I still think about joining another Democratic club. So far I haven't found one that appeals to me and also holds meetings reasonably close to where I live.

Missplelling, Mispronunciation, etc.

2010-11-19T16:28:00.000-08:00

I grew up in an area bounded by the Great Lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario. In school I was taught the correct pronunciations of the name of the State in which I lived as well as the names of several cities. I was taught that the first Europeans to explore this part of North America came from France. They spoke French and when they encountered a native American name they spelled it according to the rules of French spelling. Aside from the vowel sounds, there is a consonant combination in French - CH - that indicates a different pronunciation than the same combination in English. At a very young age, I was taught that I lived in MISHIGAN, not MITCHIGAN, and that it would be an indication of gross ignorance to make such a mistake in the pronunciation of the name of my native State. Cities such as Chicago, Cheboygan, Michilimackinac, and others with the CH spelling were to be sounded as though the CH were SH.

To this day I cringe when I hear radio announcers, who have a special obligation to pronounce the English language correctly, mispronounce the name of the largest city in Illinois as "chick-AH-go" rather than "shick-AH-go." It seems to me that they nearly all do it. It's as gross an indication of ignorance as inserting an "L" sound in the pronunciation of the city of Palm Springs. Anybody who has been taught correct English pronunciation knows that the first word of that name rhymes with "bomb" and "balm." The existence of the L in words like palm, balm, calm, and psalm is evidence that English spelling is not phonetic. It is indended instead to show the origin or the provenance of the word. These words evolved from words in Latin which contained the L in spelling because in Latin the L was pronounced. In Old French these L sounds changed to "ul" and finally to "-u": pau(l)me, psau(l)me, etc. By the time these words were introduced in Middle English, the language of Chaucer, the l sound was long gone. Subsequent scholars have reintroduced the L in the spelling simply to show that the words have been adopted from Latin. In Chaucer's day, Latin was the language of really well educated people.

When I was still a child, there was a story that involved the pronunciation of the largest city in the State: Detroit. The accent was on the second syllable: "de-TROIT." Only a foreigner, like someone from New York or Omaha would make the mistake of saying "DE-troit." The story involved a girl who crossed the Detroit River into the United States and tried to convince the immigration inspector that she lived in "DE-troit." She was delayed for several hours.

Signs of Hope

2010-11-19T12:30:00.000-08:00

Our news media are increasingly becoming part of the great conservative echo chamber. In this echo chamber various conservative commentators, such as Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh spout half-truths and outright lies about conditions in the country, about how the recession got started, who's to blame, and so on. Sources other than Fox News treat this propaganda as one side of an argument or debate and feel obliged to repeat it to show that they are being fair and balanced. As a result, a large fraction of the American public believes that Obama is a socialist and was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and is a Moslem, not a Christian.

I've heard some news lately that gives me hope that all is not forever lost and covered in lies. Two authors were interviewed about a book they had recently completed and had published. The book explains the cause of the real estate bubble and how it came to burst and create a world-wide recession. One interesting fact came out. It turns out that 75 percent of the sub-prime mortgage loans were made to persons who already owned the houses they were living in. These people were refinancing to extract some equity from their houses for purchasing new cars, vacation trips, more clothing, etc. Wages were stagnant and spending equity was keeping the economy going.

As long as house prices kept rising, no one saw any problem with these refinanced mortgages. It wasn't important that the borrowers had good incomes. They had been living in the houses and had, on paper, good credit ratings. Banks lent the money and sold the mortgages to other banks who bundled them and sold them all over the world as A-rated bonds. The rating companies, such as Moody's and Standard & Poor, cooperated in assigning the ratings. Since house prices were going to continue going up and up and up the process could be repeated forever and there was no problem.

Except, house prices started to turn down. That was a disaster that no one had expected. Suddenly consumers on stagnant incomes could no longer continue to spend the equity in their houses - they suddenly didn't have any equity - and they cut back on their buying. Suddenly we were in the midst of a recession. We're still in it.

Meanwhile, employers have learned to make do with fewer employees. If you lost your job because of the recession, you are probably not going to get it back when the recession is over. Your job has been permanently replaced by a foreign worker in Asia or by a machine. You're going to have to learn a brand new trade. Because of the recession combined with conservative ideology, the government isn't going to offer any training or education for you to make yourself fit for a new line of work. You are supposed to be self-reliant and retrain yourself by yourself.

Good day and good luck!

Small Government

2010-11-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

I admit I'm rather slow-witted. There has been evidence before me for years that would explain a puzzle I've had regarding the leaders of the Republican Party. I'm thinking specifically of leaders in Congress, particularly Senator McConnell of Kentucky, whose professed goal is to create a situation that will lead to the defeat of President Obama in his reelection campaign in 2012. The puzzle is that Senator McConnell surely must recognize the dire straits we are in as a nation, due mostly to the incompetence and arrogance of the previous administration. Why wouldn't Mr. McConnell as a patriotic citizen in a powerful position do what he could to get us out of the situation we're in?

The answer finally hit me. It's an old one. Republicans don't believe in government that provides useful or helpful services for the people. Government should be small and weak. Government shouldn't get in the way of a business making big profits by imposing regulations limiting air pollution, employee safety, working hours, and the like. Government shouldn't do things for the people like providing them a guaranteed retirement pension, guaranteed health care in retirement, protection for their savings accounts in banks, and rescuing people trapped by hurricanes and floods. In fact, it is necessary to show the people that government is really no good at such activities and they shouldn't rely on it. To make sure the public understands this inherent lack of capability previous Republican administrations have deliberately put incompetent people in charge of such departments as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The result was the housing scandal of the Reagan Administration and the incompetence of FEMA in dealing with the results of the hurricane in New Orleans.

Anyway, when you vote for Republicans these days you are voting for government that doesn't do anything for you.

More about Nuclear Reactors

2010-11-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I argued in favor of using nuclear reactors as reliable, back-up power sources to fill the power gaps occurring when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing in an electrical power system based mainly on solar power and windmills. A friend has pointed out another important use for nuclear reactors: producing radioisotopes for use in medicine. Even if we do manage some day to develop geothermal energy as the reliable back-up for nights and windless days, we would still need reactors for medical uses. There would be some radioactive waste from these reactors also even if not in the volume produced by power reactors.

One of the goals in the petition I was writing about was to avoid reprocessing spent fuel elements. I think that expressing such a goal in a petition is pointless. In the United States we do not reprocess spent fuel elements. It is cheaper to mine fresh uranium, enrich it to the desired U-235 content, and make new fuel elements. We have rich deposits of uranium ore. We have no commercial incentive to reprocess spent fuel and so we don't do it.

In France the situation is different. The country derives a large fraction of its electrical power from reactors but has no domestic sources of uranium. All uranium has to be imported. It makes economic sense, therefore, for France to reprocess spent fuel elements and recover the uranium for subsequent use. An added benefit is that the waste or the fission products removed from the uranium in the reprocessing operation is very concentrated and does not create a great storage problem.

Some Americans point out that reprocessing spent nuclear fuel creates quantities of highly concentrated radioactive material. Such material would be a target for thieves who could sell it at a good price to terrorist groups who would use the material in "dirty" bombs. I accept the argument, but I must point out that banks are targets for thieves and robbers who use the money for nefarious purposes. We have learned how to deal with bank robbers. We can learn how to foil radiation thieves and similar criminals. My point is that we don't give up using money because of bank robbers.

Clean Energy

2010-11-12T17:05:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been invited to sign a petition or write a letter to my Congressman advocating certain measures regarding the handling of radioactive waste from nuclear power reactors. Some of the measures are (1) no processing of spent nuclear fuel rods; (2) develop safe means of storing spent nuclear fuel; (3) stop generating nuclear waste. The third measure would entail shutting down all nuclear power reactors in the country. The anti-nuclear activists constitute a single-issue constituency. In their minds the importance of their issue outweighs everything else.

For one thing, it outweighs the need for a dependable and adequate source of electric power 24 hours a day. It also outweighs the need to get a handle on global warming and air pollution caused by human activity. We have an urgent need to decrease and, if possible, eliminate the use of fossil fuels for producing electric power. I agree with those who urge the development of solar power farms and wind power farms as sources of electric power to replace power plants that use coal, petroleum, or natural gas as fuel. Unfortunately, there are few places where the wind blows all the time and no place where the sun shines all the time. We need other sources of power to fill the gap when wind and sun can't supply our needs.

There are three sources of supplemental power that I know of: geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear. Geothermal power is available in places of present or past volcanic activity, such as Iceland, Hawaii, Yellowstone National Park, and California. The technology of converting heat from the earth to electrical energy is not fully developed. In theory one can bury a heat exchanger in a hot place and convert water to steam and run turbines. The development of materials for heat exchangers and means of placing such large objects deep underground have not advanced very far. More work needs to be done before we can hope to obtain a significant fraction of our power needs from the earth's heat.

Hydroelectric power has been used for a long time. The technology is mature. In addition, most of the available water power is already in use. We can not hope to make a significant addition to our power capability by building more dams with turbines. In fact, there is pressure to destroy some of the dams that we have constructed as a means of restoring runs of migratory fish, especially salmon.

The remaining source is nuclear power. I admit to a bias in favor of nuclear power, having studied nuclear physics in graduate school and having worked for companies involved in designing nuclear power reactors or economical means of concentrating the isotope U-235 in raw uranium. I recognize that a nuclear explosion is a dangerous thing. However, the experience with nuclear power has shown that there are fewer deaths and cases of illnesses per megawatt-year of energy produced by nuclear reactors than by fossil-fuel fired power plants, especially coal plants. In addition to adding to the burden of CO-2 in the atmosphere, coal-fired plants also spew compounds of sulfur, resulting in acid rain in regions down-wind from the plants, and also radioactive elements such as uranium that are present in trace amounts of coal. Before 1950 it was known that a coal plant would emit more radioactive material than a nuclear plant of the same power. Even then nuclear power was touted as "clean" power.

The argument that nuclear power is potentially dangerous has to be taken in context. Hydroelectric power is potentially dangerous. Dams break and drown people. Coal miners die in mine accidents. Geothermal power is obtained from dormant volcanoes which will, some day, become active. Windmills for power generation kill migrating birds. Solar farms have to be located in places where there is strong sunlight every day; most of those places are far from the centers of population where the power is needed. High-voltage transmission lines have to be built to deliver the power. High voltage wires can break and start fires and cause other damage. Nothing is inherently safe. Even abstention from the use of electrical power can cause death due to freezing.

I had an opportunity to sign a petition, but I passed it up.

Thoughts about John Boehner as Speaker

2010-11-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

The presumed accession of Representative John Boehner to the position of Speaker of the House of Representatives has stimulated me to think several things. First, about Boehner himself, he comes across as a blowhard, spouting Republican orthodoxy. There will be no tax increases on his watch. Republicans will become paragons of virtue and thrift and save the Republic by trimming waste and unnecessary programs from the federal budget.

If you think only about what he says and about the dangerous situation this country is falling into, you may conclude that he is a complete jackass. There is no way that any party, any administration, is going to save us from ultimate ruin simply by trimming waste and unnecessary programs. The gap between services that the public demands and the revenue available to pay for these services is too great. However, many Republicans, especially those who are political activists and vote in primary elections and raise money for election campaigns actually believe such nonsense. It was the great and revered Saint Ronald Reagan that told them that. In spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary they still believe it.

I think that Mr. Boehner is a reasonable and intelligent man. He must know that he is uttering nonsense. Why? He has a coalition, a political movement to lead. If he is to continue as leader, he mustn't get too far away from the doctrine of his followers. In his present position, or the position to which he aspires, he can not solve the nation's deficit problem. He will need help.

David Stockman, St. Reagan's advisor on the budget, has laid out a program for the solution. First, let the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of December. Let them expire for everyone, including Mr. Obama's beloved middle class. There still won't be enough money to pay all the bills. Make some cuts in entitlements for everyone, even the rich. Defense spending must be cut. It is unrealistic to think that we can be perfectly and completely secure against foreign aggression if only we spend enough on fancy weapons and a great Defense department. We live in a dangerous world and we have to accept some risk. We must reform the practice of medicine so that our health care costs are reduced to a level closer to those of Canada and other developed countries. We must stop coddling the rich by keeping the Reagan tax rates. We should go back to the rates in effect during the Kennedy and Nixon administrations. We should raise the age of retirement from 65 to, say, 68. We should reduce subsidies to farmers. I can go on and on with this list. If there is pain, it must be shared by all, not just the retirees living on their meager Social Security benefit. The rich, the wealthy corporation farmers, the bankers, the security speculators, the military-industrial comples, and all the rest must share in the pain.

Boehner can not accomplish this difficult task. We need to help by insisting on getting wealthy contributors out of the business of financing elections. It will probably take a constitutional amendment to limit the spending by candidates and their supporters to a level that allows their opposing candidates the same access to the public as that provided by their money. Money equals talk and excess money drowns out the opposing opinion.

More about the High Cost of American Medical Care

2010-11-09T17:44:00.000-08:00

I may have written before about this subject. My source is Dr. Atul Gawande, who has written several articles on the subject in the New Yorker magazine. I have conservative friends who insist that the reason medical care in the United States costs more (at least twice that of the next most expensive country) than in any other country is (a) Americans live dangerous lives, with automobile accidents and gun fights injuring and killing people, or (b) The care provided in those countries is inferior and often too late to avert death. I have liberal friens who insist that the reason is (c) The greedy insurance companies make exhorbitant profits and cancel policies on patients who develop a new and expensive condition.

They're all wrong, of course. According to Dr. Gawande, the cost of good medical care varies greatly within the United States and depends on the model of medical care practiced by the doctors in each community. The cheapest and best is provided by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Doctors work on salary. Specialists and laboratory services are available for the asking. The patient doesn't pay the doctor but rather the Clinic. An expensive model is one in which doctors operate as intependent businesses and refer their patients to specialists and to laboratories as needed. The patient pays the doctor, or primary care physician. If the doctor refers him or her to a specialist, the patient pays the specialist - usually a big fee. The patient pays for any laboratory work done. The doctor, or primary care physicion, receives a kick-back from the specialist and perhaps from the laboratory. In this model, specialists do not see any patients except those that have been sent or referred by a primary care physician.

When a doctor, whether primary care physician or specialist, operates as an independent business, usually a corporation, he or she has a strong incentive to maximize the income received from the practice. A primary care physician may prescribe unnecessary laboratory tests or specialist referrals and enjoy the extra revenue from these referrals.

Dr. Gawande has discovered, by comparing Medicare per-patient payments, that the clinical model exemplified by the Mayo Clinic provides good care at substantially less cost than the private physician model. It is clear to me that his results show that all three of the excuses listed above are incorrect. It remains to be seen whether the new health care bill has incentives to persuade medical doctors to adopt the clinical care approach instead of the individual practice approach.

In Canada and England, where there are systems to provide universal health care, one can of course choose to be treated by a private physician, one who is not in the British National Health Service or who receives payment from the Canadian single-payer system. This person can receive the same level of care as his neighbors and have the privilege of paying American prices for the care.

Sound-bite Masquerade

2010-11-04T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've noticed that many people use favorite quotations, or "sound-bites," to express principles that they believe to be very important or compelling. These people will use such a quote to make a point in a political argument. I've undertaken a hobby of collecting them and I'm starting my collection with this post.

Governments should learn to live within their means, just as we do as family members. This expression is used in a discussion of the deficits run year after year by the federal government and many States, particularly California. The speaker means that the solution to the deficit is simple: cut expenses. The speaker never gives a thoughtful list of programs to cut or abolish. He or she may give a list of a few well-publicized examples of waste or fat in government, such as providing free car washes for government employees. It doesn't matter that eliminating the free car washes will reduce the deficit by less than 0.001 percent. That is the only solution offered. A more thoughtful response to the deficit problem is to discuss both ways in which major expenses can be eliminated, such as closing the prisons or the schools, as well as ways in which revenue can be increased. A government is not like a family. A family can lose its home and declare bankruptcy. A government can not go bankrupt. A family can not make modest increases in its income. A government can increase taxes.

Only private businesses can create jobs. To me this is a surprising assertion. The speaker will often in the same conversation comlain about all the public employees and how much government has to pay them. To me these employees have jobs. They perform activities that are generally useful to me as a citizen and resident. Public employees carry the mail. Public employees repair potholes. Public employees teach our children. In California public employees maintain and repair the State's highways and freeways. Governments contract with private firms to build bridges, canals, highways, new educational buildings, new prisons, and the like. To me that activity seems an awful lot like creating and maintaining jobs.

Liberals have no interest in creating wealth. They just want to divide it up. This speaker typically is arguing that we "liberals" want to rely on government too much and have disdain for private business. I can think of many things that governments have done that either created wealth or provided facilities that enabled private businesses to create wealth. After the Civil War the American government provided railroad companies a subsidy just for building railroads. The American government created the Panama Canal. Governments have built highways, bridges, the internet, postal systems, dams, and many other facilities that have enabled others to create wealth. Many of these projects were supported by liberals who were willing to have governments spend money on projects that no private business could undertake. A private business can not fund the building of a bridge unless it is a toll bridge, so that stockholders would have a return on their investment. If a private firm built a toll bridge, it would locate the bridge in a place where there was bound to be heavy traffic. Bridges in remote locations would never be constructed and many rich areas of the country would remain inaccessible. Bridges in such locations have to be built with government funds.

This is the beginning of my list. Dear Readers, you are welcome to add your own favorite sound bites to the list.

More about Democracy, etc.

2010-11-03T17:46:00.000-07:00

Today is Wednesday, November 3, 2010. When I started to write this post several days ago the election had not yet happened and I was going to write about some of the seeming contradictions in the American system of government. Now that the election is past and the results are known, I can add some comments about the election and what I think it means.

Except in California, the Republicans won big yesterday. They achieved the largest turn-over in the House since - perhaps during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. I don't have the statistics handy, but it was larger I believe than the turn-over in 1994. What meaning is there for the present big change in representation in the House?

My first thought is that the result affirms a statement ascribed to Alexander Hamilton. He is quoted to have said something like "the public (people?) is a great beast." The most common element among voters to explain their choices is that they were reacting in anger and by instinct, not by reasoning. I may have a blind spot regarding Conservative thought but it seems to me that in many cases the voters voted against their own best interests. They were angry that the government hasn't done enough to create jobs and end the recession. So, they voted for candidates who promised that they would have the government cut taxes and do less. To me, that is the reaction of an angry wild beast, not a logical thinking human.

A more subtle explanation is that the voting public is frustrated at the failure or refusal of elected officials to make changes in "Washington" and do something effective about unemployment. The frustration is misdirected. Our system of government was designed by the likes of Alexander Hamilton to prevent government from doing anything unusual or out of the ordinary. Certainly Hamilton never imagined that the federal government would ever be involved in trying to create new jobs for unemployed workers. The classic solution for unemployment in his day, and right up to the beginning of the last century, was to encourage an unemployed worker to "go west" and find his fortune. The government facilitated the "go west" solution by dealing with the rather annoying fact that there were already people living on the land that the unemployed worker wanted to claim for his family's farm. These annoying people, even more annoying than some of the wild animals, like wolves and bison, were dealt with sternly by the Army. They were killed off or relocated in areas not desired for agriculture. That's where their descendants are today, on Indian Reservations.

Clearing out the indigenous population was a "Conservative" program to deal with unemployment. It had been used in various places for thousands of years. Our government was designed to favor "Conservative" acts and policies: acts and policies that had been in place since the beginning of history.

The Great Depression of the 1930's was the first big economic downturn since the closing of the frontier some time between 1910 and 1915. My father witnessed that event while homesteading in the State of Washington. After that, the nation could not solve economic hardship by telling the unemployed to "go west." The "west" was the Pacific Ocean, completely unsuitable for farming.

If we were a logical people, we would recognize that "going west" was no longer a useful means of dealing with recessions. We would have developed other alternatives and embraced them. In fact, during the Great Depression of the 1930's we were fortunate to have had a President who recognized the need for other means and who tried a method of having government fund work projects to put unemployed workers to work doing things that were supposed to be useful. Some of the projects were very useful; others were boondoggles. Somehow we recovered from the depression without having a violent revolution. The French in 1789 and the Russians in 1919 were not so fortunate.

Our archaic system of government did not fit well with President Roosevelt's make-work programs. Later political leaders eschewed the idea of government spending money just to put unemployed people back to work. Recently we have tried giving money (bail-outs) to banks and insurance companies so that they won't go bankrupt and can continue lending money to entrepreneurs who want to start businesses. This approach hasn't worked even as well as Roosevelt's WPA and PWA and other alphabetic programs.

Roosevelt had the advantage that the United States had an excellent credit rating. He was able to fund the various programs by borrowing money. However, the ease of borrowing money led many of his successors to use borrowing in preference to increased taxation to pay for projects that were not aimed at putting unemployed workers in jobs but rather in projects that didn't have a lot of public support. Many of these projects involved wars aimed at establishing and protecting an American commercial empire. As a consequence we are now at a state in which we have a huge national debt and have justifiable doubts that we can raise the money for programs like the WPA and PWA by selling T-bills to China.

By the way, how many of you watched the interview with David Stockman on the "60 Minutes" program on CBS last Sunday? He pointed out that our political leaders of both Parties are unwilling to propose an increase in taxes as part of the solution of the chronic deficit problem. He advocated simply letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire as scheduled on December 31 as a start. All of them, not just those for the people with incomes greater than $250,000 a year.

Our Undemocratic System of Government

2010-10-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

A few hours ago I heard a discussion on the local Pacifica station between the host of the program and a writer. The writer opined that Obama had lost or turned away the support of his most loyal followers. Instead of trying to govern in a new mode, he chose to run a traditional administration. Rather than choose new advisors, he depended heavily on advisors from the Clinton administration. His followers, or at least some of them, have been disappointed in the way that the health care reform bill was passed. Many of them, and I include myself one, wanted to see a reform that would take the insurance companies out of the medical care system. Instead, Obama turned his back on the "public option" and gave the insurance companies another 3 years before the most important reatures of the law take effect.

I think that Obama's followers have a different view of "change" in Washington from that of Obama. I believe that Obama wanted to try to make the constitutional system work by trying to work out compromises with his opponents. He knows that our system is not designed to reach decisions by mere majority rule. Important decisions require consensus, or an overwhelming majority. The Senate is, in fact, deliberately structured to thwart majority rule, not merely by the filibuster but by the system of representation. Each State, regardless of population or economic power is entitled to just two Senators. Populous and rich California has two. Little Rhode Island has two. Alaska has two. It is possible to achieve a fifty percent margin in the Senate in favor of a proposition in which the fifty percent of Senators represent only about ten percent of the total population.

As a consequence, it has always been necessary, since the first days of the American republic, to put together voting majorities by special deals. Senators and Representatives from certain States or districts have to achieve some benefit for their constituents in exchange for a favorable vote. This is a consequence of our constitutional system and Obama wisely decided not to try to buck it. He was looking for a change back to the days of President Lyndon Johnson, when President Johnson and Senator Dirksen, the minority leader (and also a Senator from Illinois) would make deals to get some Republican votes for Johnson's favored program in exchange for some judicial appointments for the Senators to make. There was comity in Congress in those days. Democrats and Republicans could talk to each other, make deals, collaborate on things they agreed on, and so on. That was the kind of change Obama was hoping to achieve.

The spirit of comity and compromise has been poisoned in Congress. I won't try to assess blame or even to estimate when the poison started. It was certainly in evidence after the election of 1994 when Gingrich became the Speaker and the Republicans were enthusiastically trying to implement their "contract with America." It's in evidence today with Pelosi as Speaker, Boehner as the minority leader in the House, and McConnell as the minority leader in the Senate.

Lament of an Old Democrat

2010-10-27T16:52:00.000-07:00

That's what I am: an old Democrat. Not and "Old" Democrat, which implies a difference from "New" Democrats, but an old Democrat. The fact is, I am old. I was born more than 87 years ago. I have had some ideals that recently I've concluded are unachievable. They were always unachievable but I never believed that until recently.

Let's consider Universal Health Care. That's an ideal that I cherish. Many countries have achieved systems of providing and paying for health care that provide needed health care, including preventive care, to every resident. Our country hasn't managed to do that. The President has tried. The Democrats in Congress have enacted a piece of legislation that can achieve that goal if it is allowed to operate. There are political and legal challenges to the legislation. Some States are refusing to cooperate with the federal government in implementing some of the provisions of the law. Some individuals are mounting court cases against an unpopular provision, the requirement that everyone have health insurance. Some Republican politicians have vowed to repeal the law if they are elected to Congress and if the Republicans gain majorities in the two chambers.

If the case against requiring uinversal insurance coverage gets to the Supreme Court and is ruled unconstitutional or if a Republican Congress repeals the entire law I will accept the real situation in this country, namely, that Universal Health Care can not be achieved in the United States. This thought makes me depressed.

Closer to home, another discouraging thought is that the State of California is doomed to have insufficient tax revenue to provide all the services that the people of the State want. Because of the screwed-up tax system, most counties and cities depend on the State for part of their funding. Because of the deficit in the State budget, these local government entities will also not be able to provide all the services that the people want. The only consolation to me is that the people of California are getting just what they deserve. They have voted for this screwed-up tax scheme and for requiring the legislature to pass taxes and budgets with 2/3 votes rather than simple majorities. This supermajority vote requirement gives undeserved power to the minority of legislators who believe that there should be no government at all. They routinely refuse to allow the State to increase its revenue, yet refuse to specify which services they would like to se reduced. Their ideal is no government, including getting rid of all the services that government provides, but they know that if they actually started eliminating services, such a public education, local police and fire protection, and street and highway maintenance, the voters would vote them out of office.

My ideal was that the public would be willing to pay the taxes needed to provide good services. It appears that I was fooling myself. The public demands the services and yet refuses to provide the funds to pay for them. That's another depressing thought.

Some Dangerous but non-religious Beliefs

2010-10-17T21:08:00.000-07:00

Continuing my tirade about things that people believe that aren't so - actually I am expanding on a farorite saying of my father. He would say, "It isn't what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that isn't so."

I am thinking particularly about the Anarchist movement in Russia during the nineteenth century. The Anarchists were appalled at the conditions of the poor and the not so poor people. They wanted western style reforms for Russia, such as freedom of speech, free and fair elections, government of, by, and for the people rather than for the aristocracy, and all that. They believed ("knew") that the key to bringing these liberal ideas to Russia was to abolish the Tsar. They also believe that the way to abolish the Tsar was to kill him. Accordingly, they plotted to kill the Tsar. Eventually they succeeded. The Tsar that they killed was the most liberal and progressive man to occupy that office ever. All that happened was that a new Tsar was installed. He was ultra-conservative. The Anarchists learned nothing and continued their efforts to kill whatever person happened to be the Tsar. Eventually another group, much better organized and more realistic in their thinking managed to overthrow the entire government and replaced it with their own.

This bit of recollection - actually, remembering things that I have read, as I am not old enough to have witnessed the assassination of the Tsar in the 1870's - led me to wondering about other movements of poorly informed idealists in history. Today we have, of course, the Tea Party Movement. Their goal is similar to that of the Russian Anarchists. They want to destroy "big government." If only government can be made small so it doesn't spend much money, collect much in taxes, issue regulations that annoy businessment, etc., things will fall into place and we will be back in the good old days when everything was wonderful.

I think another example of misinformed idealists is the crusade movement in Europe. The aim was to recover the holy land (Israel, Jerusalem, etc.) that had been conquered and occupied by Arabs and Turks who installed Islam as the dominant religion of the area. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that there were some influential clerics who told the people that God was punishing them for allowing the infidels to take over the holy places, and that things would improve for everyone if only an army of brave and armed men went to the holy land and chased the infidels out. I know that conditions of life for most people were pretty miserable then, at least by modern standards. People died early in life from diseases which they believed were caused by God as punishment. Most people were poor. Soap was extremely expensive, so everyone stank. Acolytes used strong incense in churches to conceal the collective body odor of the congregation.

The crusades were a complete failure. They didn't liberate the holy land and they didn't persuade God to lift the curses of disease and poverty from the people. They also caused the Muslims to have bad feelings toward Europeans, which have lasted to the present day.

There are many other examples of idealists who foolishly had simple solutions to complex problems. I will write about them later.

Dangerous Religious Beliefs

2010-10-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

I am often tempted to think that some religions are good and others bad. At least, I often think that some are better than others. The three great religions of this planet in terms of adherents are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.

In the past two or three millennia zealots of these faiths have carried out acts in which the object was to kill members of a different faith. In spite of history, each of these three faiths teaches that it is wrong and immoral to kill another human being, except as a punishment for a heinous crime. All three faiths tolerate a death penalty for convicted murderers.

We Christians have a long history of killing our enemies (and our annoyances) in the name of religion. A thousand years ago we organized crusades to recover the holy land (Jerusalem and environs) from the control of the Muslims. Our guys won many battles and killed many Muslims, but in the end, the Muslims prevailed. More recently we American Christians wiped out more than ninety percent of the population of North America. The occupants (only recently have we conceded that they were and are the true natives) were using farm land that we coveted. We discovered early in our history here that the natives were susceptible to measles and small pox. We now know that they simply had never been exposed to such diseases and had therefore no immunity to them. At the time we knew nothing about viruses, bacteria, and other biological causes of disease. Our religious leaders assured us that the deaths of the occupiers were signs that God wanted us to have the land. We believed and we accepted this presumed gift from God. The slaughter by disease of the native population was the greatest act of genocide in history.

Islam spread rapidly from the faithful surrounding the Prophet Muhammad and his family to a vast area from Central Asia and India to the northern parts of Africa. The spread was rapid and was helped along by some battles and killings of those who didn’t want to convert. Islam penetrated parts of Europe (Southern Spain and Portugal. Later, when the Turks finally overthrew the Eastern Roman Empire, they introduced Islam into Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia. The church and government of Spain got rid of the Muslims after 1492 by various unpleasant practices of the Spanish Inquisition. Deaths were used to induce conversions from Islam to Catholicism. At the same time, Jews were allowed to leave.

I have not read much about the spread of Buddhism across much of Asia. There is one important difference between the teachings of the Buddha and those of the Christ and the Prophet. The Buddha taught that each person should decide for himself whether to adopt the teachings of Buddhism. There was no promise of heaven or any other reward for a convert and no threat of death or other punishment for the non-convert. I do not advance this difference as an argument that Buddhists have been less lethal in their competition with strangers than Christians and Muslims. I argue only that the Buddhist religion has no justification for forced conversions, no promise of heaven for those who die fighting for defense of the faith, and no story about Armageddon and the Return of Christ. I do not cite any examples of mass murder, forced conversion, or genocide by Buddhists simply because I am not aware of any such examples.

One can not say with any certainty that one religion is better or truer than another. We’re each free to choose our belief and live according to it. We’re also free not to choose any system of belief. Our federal constitution guarantees us this freedom of belief. Another aspect of this uncertainty is that no religion is inherently evil. However, clerics and holy men and women of any religion can and sometimes do incite their followers to do evil things in the name of their beliefs. Some Muslim clerics have for centuries used Islam to justify the murder of perceived enemies. Recent history has shown us the power of the fatwa issued against a specific person. Salman Rushdie was for years the target of a fatwa for a book he had written. A cartoonist in Denmark, a movie producer in the Netherlands, and others, have been the targets of fatwas for insulting the Prophet.

Christian and Buddhist clerics have no weapon like the fatwa with which to intimidate enemies. The worst thing a Christian cleric (e.g., a bishop) can do is to excommunicate a follower. Several American politicians have been punished in this way. They are all still in good health.

The issuance of fatwas and the promise of going straight to heaven to meet and enjoy seventy voluptuous virgins are Islamic religious beliefs that I regard as dangerous. They’re not evil in themselves, but they put dangerous power in the hands of the clergy. Our constitutional guarantees of various individual rights have evolved over centuries as tools to restrict the absolute power of public officials.

Finally, I’m getting to my point. Certain current Christian beliefs are dangerous. A very dangerous belief is the immanence of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming. Many Christians today, especially in the more radical sects, believe that these events will occur very soon, perhaps within the next ten years. If they are to be that soon, then we should do one of two things:

1. Immediately get our religious lives in order. Pray. Confess our sins. Do everything possible to be on the good side of Christ when He returns so that we may live and enjoy his 1000 years of rule.

2. Immediately start enjoying whatever life we still have. Forget about protecting the environment; Christ will tend to that. Make money. Spend money. Cheat. Rob. Steal. Rape. Kill. We will die and nothing will count when the time comes. In the mean time, live well and make merry.

You can see in an instant how destructive this belief can be. The only way to control the crazies among us is to convince them that the Apocalypse isn’t going to occur during our lifetimes. At the earliest, it will happen to our great-great grandchildren in their old age. We haven’t done a very good job of convincing. Many of the crazies see the triumph of Israel over the unfortunate Palestinians as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming and the Armageddon and the Rapture and all that.

Another point is that we have to live in a world with many belief systems. Some of them conflict with others. One belief system is the scientific one. In this system we neglect and ignore the possibility that a great divine power is present and is active in the events that we see and experience. Everything is explained or understood to happen without the interference or action of a creator. This is the world view the physicists, the chemists, the geneticists, the archeologist, the astronomers, and other scientists have put together and described. Another belief system is one of the religions I’ve mentioned or some religion I haven’t mentioned; e.g., Judaism, Hinduism, the Bahai’i Faith. If we are sincere in our religious beliefs, we then must accommodate two or more mutually contradictory ideas before breakfast. One test of civilization is how well we do at such accommodation.

Fish in a Barrel

2010-10-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

What I say below is not new and I've said it all before several times. It is one of my most common criticisms of the Republican Party. I call this post "Fish in a Barrel" because the criticism is so obvious expressing it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

The Republican Party is the party of the rich and affluent, and also of those who intend to become rich and affluent. It is the party of people who hate to pay taxes and who welcome any attempt to reduce their taxes. Never mind that important services are unfunded or that others have to pay in some form to make up for the taxes that the affluent greedy do not pay. They like a party and politicians who, when in office, allow them to keep more of their mone.

As a result, the Republican Party always has a reason or an excuse to vote for tax reduction and against any tax increase. If times are good, the government doesn't need the money. The requirements for services, the needs of the unemployed, and all the other reasons for government to spend money are reduced and therefore taxes can and should be reduced as well. If times are bad and even though the need for more services and more relief for the unemployed are increased, the argument goes that "a recession is not a time for increasing taxes." In other words, whatever the problem is, a tax reduction is the answer.

Bursting of the Housing Bubble

2010-10-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

A Filipina friend and I were talking about the loan business, home mortgages, first and second mortgages, and all that. I wandered into a story about a man I worked with at my last job. His name was Andy. He and his wife and their children had recently moved from Chicago. He bought a house in Torrance, near the plant. I don't know what he paid for it; at the time average tract houses were selling for about $30,000. Like most young people he and his wife didn't have any savings to speak of. He obtained a mortgage for part of the cost of the house and a second mortgage for the rest.

In those days (around 1970) what Andy did to acquire a house was very typical. Andy had a second mortgage with a balloon payment. That is, after five years the entire mortgage was due. Andy solved that problem as did his cohort. Before the five years was up, he was able to sell the house for substantially more than he paid for it. I don't know any particulars, so I will make up some typical numbers. After five years the house was sold for about $40,000. Andy paid off both mortgages and had $10,000 cash left over.

He used part of the cash as a partial payment for another house. Let's say he bought a house for $50,000 (a bit better than the house he'd just sold) with $10,000 cash and a loan of $40,000. No second mortgage this time. In a few years he sold this house for, say, $70,000 and put part of the cash into a third house. In this way he was able to take advantage of the housing boom to acquire equity and comfortable living accommodations.

At no point in Andy's rise from living from paycheck to paycheck to relative affluence did anyone question his credit worthiness. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that housing prices were rising. This situation prevailed until about 2005 or so, give or take a year. At that point housing prices peaked and started declining. Now all the young people like Andy were in a bind. They owed more than their houses were worth. There was no chance of selling the house and moving to another one with an increase in net worth. Their only choice was to abandon their houses.

Much has been said to disparage both the borrowers and lenders. Borrowers have been blamed for taking on debt that they couldn't manage. Lenders have been reviled for lending money to people who obviously couldn't handle that much debt. Do I think that my friend Andy should be held up to shame for what he did? No. Everyone did it. There was almost no risk as long as housing prices kept going up and up. If people are to be regarded with shame for gambling on increasing house prices in 2005 but equivalent people are to be regarded as clever for doing the same things in 1985, are we not then a bunch of hypocrites? Enough of blaming the people involved - that is the people who made and who took out the loans. Blame the system; blame the bankers who packaged the mortgages and created the "toxic assets." In the end, why blame anyone? It happened. It was a natural consequence of our world-wide economic system. We should pick up the pieces and go on.

My choice for candidates and why

2010-10-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I presented my choices among the various propositions on the California ballot next month. Among the candidates, I know little about them except incumbents Brown and Boxer. I'm not wildly enthusiastic about either one, but I will vote for both of them. I think it's important to explain my reasons.

With respect to Brown, there is a good chance that as Governor he will sign an act passed by the Legislature to create a single-payer universal health care plan for California. The Legislature has passed such an act twice and our present Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has vetoed it both times. If Republican Meg Whitman is elected Governor, she will also veto such a bill. I have hope that Jerry Brown would sign it if he is elected. Therefore, since I believe strongly in such a plan I will vote for Brown. It may be that Whitman would be a better Governor (I doubt it); even so, I believe Brown would sign the bill and I am certain that Whitman would veto it.

With respect to Boxer, she comes a lot closer than Ms Fiorina to expressing and representing my concerns regarding national policy. Carly Fiorina suffers from being a Republican and having to cater to the ultra-conservative wing of her party in order to win the primary election. In addition, she has to keep the conservative wing in line in order to have a chance of winning the general election in November. Finally, she has no experience in politics and would be easily influenced by her staff and the staff of leading Republicans in the Senate. Boxer, after all, came to the Senate after serving for years in the House. Most importantly, in the present political scene there are no prominent Republican office holders or candidates that I have the least enthusiasm for. This has not always been the case, as I have voted for a few Republicans in past years.

I expect to vote strictly for Democratic candidates this fall.

Debates, Jobs, Lies

2010-10-03T09:14:00.000-07:00

I rarely listen to or pay attention to debates between opposing candidates for office. There was a time when I eagerly watched the television set to see and hear debates among such pairs as Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, and, most famously, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. I don't know whether those debates influenced the outcome of any elections but they were fun to watch and listen to. I'll never forget Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that "you're no Jack Kennedy" or Michael Dukakis wavering before George Bush the Elder accusing him of membership in the ACLU.

These days are memory. I have learned that one can't learn what a candidate will or won't do in office from what he or she says in a debate. The aim of the debater is to persuade voters who haven't made up their minds and who have not concerned themselves with some of the more intricate problems in the success or failure of government to provide needed services. Quite often debaters spend a lot of time on an issue that they will have no control over if they are elected. A good example is the claim to create jobs for Californians. Neither Jerry Brown nor Meg Whitman want to be tarred with the accusation that his or her election would cause Californians to lose jobs, particularly because businesses decide to move out of California because of high taxes or excessive regulations. They both favor more jobs. That's commendible of them, but neither one will have the power as Governor to create a single private sector job. The best either can do is to start work on some infrastructure project that will require lots of workers and lots of money. And, where is the money to come from?

Many people in politics who favor the interests of businesses claim that California loses jobs to neighboring States because of (a) high business taxes and (b) excessive regulation, especially regulations relating to creating a clean environment. Environmental laws are said to be bad for business.

I assert that the claim that taxes and regulations drive businesses out of the State is a lie. Regulations and taxes are a problem for a person running a business, especially a small business. However, they are a minor irritant compared with the major cost to any business: the high cost of labor. One can cite many cases of businesses that have left the State because of labor costs. They have gone mostly not to other States but to foreign countries that have really low labor costs. Jolly Green Giant used to can peas in California. A number of years ago it moved its operation to Mexico to take advantage of lower costs for labor and for raw peas. Although it made a profit in California, it made MORE profit by moving to Mexico.

There is nothing that Governor Whitman or Governor Brown could do about high labor costs. I suppose she or he might propose lowering the minimum wage to 25 cents an hour. Her or his term of office would end soon after that suggestion. Remember how the voters got rid of Gray Davis after he raised the auto license fee?

About Voting

2010-10-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

My general election pamphlet from the Secretary of State arrived a few days ago and I have made a preliminary decision as to how I will vote on the various propositions. I plan, at present, to vote YES on two of them and NO on the others. The two that I favor are these:

19, Legalizes marijuana and permits taxing of it
25, Reduces from 2/3 to 1/2 the majority for the legislature to pass a budget; leaves 2/3 majority the requirement for raising taxes

As I say, these are my favorites today. I oppose all the others. Here are my reasons:

20, Redistricting of Congressional Districts -- This would remove from the Legislature the power to determine the boundaries of Congressional districts and give that power to the new redistricting commission, which already has the power to set boundaries of State Senate, State Assembly, and Board of Equalization. My argument is, the new redistricting commission has not been tried yet. Why add to its responsibilities now? Let's wait and see how it works in practice.

21, Vehicle License surcharge to help fund State parks, etc. -- The goal is laudable but impossible to achieve in this manner. Money is fungible. Years ago we found out that devoting revenue from the State lottery to fund schools simply allowed the Legislature to decrease funding by the amount of the lottery revenue. The same thing will happen with the money for parks.

22, Prohibits the State from taking funds used for transportation, redevelopment, or local government projects -- Here also part of my argument is that money if fungible. Because of our cock-a-mamie tax laws local governments are forced to depend on the State for a subsidy. If the State can't take money from the transportation fund, for example, it will simply reduce the subsidy to the local governments. The solution is to repair the broken tax system.

23, Suspends Implementation of Air Pollution Control Law (AB32) until unemployment rate falls below 5.5 percent -- This is simply a gift to two big Texas oil companies and has nothing to do with unemployment.

24, Repeals recent legislation that would allow businesses to lower their tax liabiity -- The legislation in question allows a business with a loss in the current tax year to apply part of that loss to income in later years and in previous years. In addition the legislation allows tax credits for certain types of business that the State wants to encourage. I am not a pro-business activist, but neither am I anti business. The laws in question are new and are about to take effect. Many other States have similar laws that allow business losses in one year to be applied to profits in other years. I see no reason not to allow the California laws to take effect. If there are abuses, legislation can be enacted when the abuses are discovered.

25, Changes legislative vote requirement for enacting the State's budget from 2/3 to a simple majority in each chamber. The 2/3 vote required to enact a new or increased tax would remain. -- I heartily endorse letting the Legislature decide matters with a simple majority vote rather than a difficult super-majority. The reason that California has had so much trouble in recent years enacting a budget is because the 2/3 vote requirement gives a rather small group of ideologues a veto. The public has put the Legislature in a straitjacket by enacting the 2/3 vote requirement, then blames the Legislature for not being able to agree on a budget before the constitutional deadline. I would like to see the power to raise taxes also decided by a majority rather than 2/3, but I accept this change eagerly. Half a loaf is better than none.

26, Requires that certain State and local fees be approved by 2/3 votes rather than simple majorities -- This is simply a move in the wrong direction. It would make governing a city or county or other local voting district more difficult than it is. We should give our elected representatives the power to do what we want them to do and then hold them accountable if they don't do it. At present they have the excuse that 2/3 vote requirements make it impossible to secure sufficient revenue to provide all the services demanded.

27, Eliminates the Commission on Redistricting -- This goes in the opposite direction of Proposition 20. 20 would require all redistricting to be done by the commission; 27 would give the entire job back to the Legislature. This proposal may be a good idea. States that use commissions let the commissions redistrict both the State and the federal election districts. Before we make any changes in the Redistricting Commission, we should let it operate so that we can see the results. If the results are bad, then the commission can be eliminated and the redistricting returned to the Legislature. The public should exercise patience.

These are my voting choices today, October 1. If I change my mind on any of them, I will write about the changes here.

Boundaries

2010-09-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, written a few hours ago, I expressed pessimism about the possibility of resuming peace talks between the Israeli Likud administration and the Palestinian Authority. Let us suppose that, contrary to my expectation, the Palestinians are persuaded to return to direct negotiations with the Likud Administration. I urge that the first item to be discussed and possibly negotiated is the boundary between Israel and Palestine. There is a boundary that the international community, including the UN, has agreed to. Israel has not agreed to that boundary. The big question is, will Israel agree to any boundary? If Israel is serious about agreeing to a two-state solution, it seems reasonable to believe that Israel is ready to talk about where the boundary should be.

It would be interesting to see whether Israel will agree to discuss a boundary and, if so, where it should be.

I predict that Israel will refuse to discuss the location of the boundary. In the past, Israel has always insisted that choosing a boundary should be the last item to be negotiated.

Settlement Building Resumes in Israel

2010-09-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

The "partial freeze" on settlement building by Israeli fundamentalists has ended and the settlers are gleefully (but quietly) resuming the construction of new living structures. The goal of the settlers / fundamentalists has never been in doubt. They aim to recapture all of Biblical Israel to round out the area occupied by the Jewish state. I have read that although they do not constitute a majority of Jews living in Israel they are an essential part of the coalition government now in power. Prime Minister Netanyahu fears the loss of his majority in the parliament if he acts to anger the settlers.

As long as settlement activity continues and as long as the settlers themselves are guaranteed residence in and protection by the state of Israel, there is nothing to negotiate with the Palestinians who are slowly being displaced by the settlements except the ultimate date of their departure from Palestine / Israel. The United States is pretending to try to get negotiations going for a two-state solution. Mr. Netanyahu may personally believe that a two state solution would be a good one for Israel, but he can not advocate such a solution with serious or meaningful compromises as long as his coalition must depend on the cooperation of the settlers / fundamentalists.

On the other side, the Palestinian leader Abbas can not convincingly engage in any "negotiations" with the Israeli government as long as that government continues to allow the settlers to continue their slow occupation of all of what is left of Palestinian territory.

Both sides would welcome peace. Neither side can negotiate in a realistic manner. What is to be done?

The United States has the power of money to cause the settlement activity to cease. Our contry provides foreign aid to Israel in the amount of several billions of dollars every year. Some of the money is used to replace money used to build settlements. Money is fungible. If we stopped our foreign aid to Israel, Israel would be in desperate straits. We could force an end to settlement activity as the price for resuming the foreign aid.

Our own government lacks the political will to use the power of money on Israel. Cutting off the subsidy would anger an important lobby in Washington - the American Israeli Political Action Committee or AIPAC. No President dares to face down this lobby. It would cost his party important support in the next election.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians languish in refugee camps or watch helplessly as their farms are isolated by the growth of new Jewish settlements. Any suggestions?

More about Values

2010-09-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I set forth a few of my beliefs that I asserted should qualify as values. Conservatives keep talking about people voting their values in an election. I agree. I vote my values. It occurred to me that I should write a few lines about what I perceive to be conservative values. It will clarify the distinction between my voting preferences and those of a conservative.

Like most liberals I believe in health care as a right, not a privilege. Good health care must be available for all. That means to me that one doesn't have to pay for it as an individual, any more than I have to pay for police protection as an individual. I pay for police protection through taxes. I would pay for health care the same way.

Conservatives simply do not believe that health care should be a right. Everyone should take care of his or her own health. If, in spite of a healthy regime you become seriously ill and can't pay for the medical treatment you need, that's too bad. As President Carter once said, "life is not fair." Conservatives do, however, believe that police protection is a right and they have no problem paying the taxes that support our police departments.

I believe that elderly residents, like myself, who have spent their younger years doing work that was useful to society, should have the right of a moderately comfortable life in retirement. Their standard of living should not depend on the vagaries of the economic system or the fluctuations of the stock market. Hence, I believe in social security with adjustments for a gradual rise in the cost of living.

Conservatives do not believe that old people have the right of a decent living guaranteed by the public. One should save money for old age. If you make a poor investment and lose most of your life savings, too bad. "Life is not fair." No matter that the investment looked very good and sound when you made it and that your loss was not predictable or even foreseeable. Bad luck is your problem and not something that others should care about. In addition, providing a guaranteed retirement income tends to subsidize laziness and poor judgment and tendency to make risky investments.

I can make similar arguments about individuals who are unemployed because of the recession. I think that they are entitled to some minimum standard of living as long as they are unable to find work. Conservatives believe that providing such is subsidizing laziness. If the unemployment income is cut off, many of the unemployed will manage to find some kind of employment. Too bad for the others.

These are a few of my values and the contrasting values of conservatives. I welcome your comments.

Using Sound Bites instead of Thought

2010-09-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

The other day a friend asked me, “What is the attraction Sarah Palin has for some voters?” My immediate answer was, “She’s hot and she’s dumb.” By hot I meant “sexy” and by dumb I meant “no intellectual challenge to the average male human.” I compared her with Hillary Clinton who is bright and is perceived by many men to be a serious challenge. I added that another attraction Sarah has for the average man is that she likes to have many children.

I’ve been thinking about the “dumb” adjective. I didn’t mean “dumb” in the sense of being unaware or being stupid or being poorly educated. Ms Palin is aware of her surroundings, she’s not stupid, and she’s at least fairly well educated. I used the term in the sense of “unthinking.” A “dumb” person in that sense doesn’t think about why things are as they are. He or she recognizes that there are things in the environment that are annoying or even stressful. However, the “dumb” person doesn’t devote any original thought to these problems. Instead, the person uses a stock phrase that sums up a simple and usually incorrect assessment of the problem.

Many political junkies use these stock phrases or sound bites as substitutes for original thought. A popular example is that increasing the taxes on the very rich will increase unemployment because the very rich will have less money with which to hire the rest of us to work in factories or offices or farms or whatever. If you give that phrase any thought at all you realize that it’s a bit of nonsense concocted to justify favorite tax treatment for the rich. Rich people don’t invest money in new businesses or new equipment just because they have the money. In fact, a successful enterpriser doesn’t invest his or her own money at all. He or she borrows money from a bank and sells shares to raise the money to start a new business. The bank and the potential stockholders won’t part with their money unless the enterpriser can convince them that there is a market of people with money eager to buy the product. That is, the phrase “make it and they will buy” doesn’t apply. What applies is “if they want it and can afford it, make it and sell it to them.”

Another popular example, propounded by President Reagan, is that increasing the tax rates on the rich discourages them from working hard because they get to keep less of the money that they earn. Again, if you think about this sound bite for a moment you realize how absurd it is. No matter the tax rate, as long as it is less than 100 percent, extra work provides extra income. It may not be as much as you’d like, but it is extra. This is simply another rationale for favored tax treatment of the rich.

I can go on all day with these simple sounding explanations in favor of or against specific policies. Some original and careful thought will convince you that the explanations make no sense as explanations. They make sense only as rationales for certain policies.

I invite you to find your own examples of these sound bites that masquerade as thoughtfulness about politics and economics.

Values

2010-09-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

Conservatives say that elections should reflect the values of the voters. To some conservatives, values are more important than economic well-being. At least it seems that way to me. I am not a conservative and I have great difficulty in understanding the conservative viewpoint on many issues. Some of the values that conservatives espouse are "marriage between a man and a woman," "right of the unborn child to life," and "small government that does not interfere in the lives of ordinary people." There are other values which I'm not going to try to list here.

Anyway, thinking about conservative values and the inference that many conservatives make that liberals have no values led me to thinking about values. Sure, elections are about values. I have values. I'm going to list a few of them here:

All Americans should receive good quality health care. Health care is just as important as police protection and it should apply to all Americans in the same way.
A person should be judged on the basis of his behavior and his moral code of conduct, not on his religious beliefs. I value a sincere, honest atheist as much as I do a sincere, honest Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.
Men and women are both human beings and should be treated equally.
There are no "races" among the species homo sapiens. We are all descended from a small group of our species who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Some of us are descended from people who left Africa sometime between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago and who, in the process of living in areas with little sunlight lost much of the pigmentation of their skin. Based on our ancient ancestry, we are all "niggers."
As Americans we have, or should have, a right of privacy. Neither government nor private institutions should try to control our thoughts or actions as long as our actions do not harm or threaten other Americans. Thus, a pregnant woman has, or should have, the right to choose whether to carry the baby to full term. Two homosexual persons, men or women, should have the right to "marry" or live together and be recognized as partners and enjoy all the legal benefits that apply to heterosexual married couples.

The preceding list is not a complete list of my values. They are important ones. In my case, not all values have the same importance.

Let the next election be about values. I will vote my values with pride.

The Tea Party Ideal

2010-09-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

When I was very young I had a grandmother. She lived on a farm. Her son, her oldest child, lived with her on the farm and ran it. The farm had a creek, fields, horses, cows, chickens, and maybe even some pigs. I don't recall most details of that farm. I get it confused with the farm of my Aunt Ruth. She and her husband had a farm. She was a grandmother. Her son lived nearby on another farm and he had a wife and several children. Her daughter lived on another nearby farm and she had a daughter. Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ray were grandparents.

They had a nice farm. It was near Boone, Michigan. They had an electric generator powered by a one-cylinder gasoline engine. The generator charged a battery bank. The battery bank supplied electricity to the house to operate lights and an electric refrigerator. There was also a windmill that operated a pump. Some of the water from the pump was stored in a tank in the upper storey of the house. That tank provided water for the kitchen sink. There was a flush toilet also. When my second cousin Eleanor was about five, she went into the toilet, locked the door, did her business, and remembered how to unlock the door to get out. Aunt Ruth marveled at her granddaughter's perspicacity.

I stayed with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ray one summer. It was 1935, the summer that Will Rogers and Wiley Post died in a plane crash in Alaska. I loved the farm. At the time I didn't, but now I know that I did love pulling the weeds and feeding them to the pigs. The farm was like heaven. I thought that Aunt Ruth and Uncle Ray were very rich, much richer than my own parents who lived in a rented house in a little village near Grand Rapids. In our house we had electricity but no running water and no flush toilet. We had two hand pumps in the kitchen, one for well water to drink and use for cooking and one for cistern water for washing clothes. I knew that when my parents were young they lived on farms. It must have been wonderful for them. Somehow they had lost something and had been forced to move into the village.

If I had done nothing of an intellectual nature since those days, I would now still have the dream that motivates members of the "Tea Party" movement. According to the dream, things were once nearly perfect. People lived on farms and were rich. The took care of themselves and helped their neighbors at harvest time. Government was far, far away and did very little except maintain roads and collect taxes. Nobody thought anything about universal health care. We had universal health care. When you were sick, you went to the doctor and he treated you. He would give you a bill for services and you would pay it whenever you could. If you didn't have money you would give him food - eggs, milk, vegetables, whatever you had that he and his wife could use. When you were old, you would continue to live on your farm and one of your children would take over the farm and work it. When your time came, you would die at home surrounded by your children and some of your grandchildren.

Life was good in those days. Tea Party dreamers would like to have it back, even though those now living probably never experienced life as it was to our grandparents when they were young. My generation, the village children, never lived as our grandparents had lived. We never experienced the hard work of farming. We never experienced the dangers of living and working on a farm. We were never gored by an angry bull or kicked by a frightened horse. We never fell out of the hay loft in the barn and broke our collar bone. We were not taken from a life of very hard work at the youthful age of 64 as my mother's father was. We never experienced typhoid fever epidemics due to burying our sewage in pits and then drinking the water from nearby wells. In our dreams these difficulties didn't exist. Life was full of sunshine, weeds for the pigs, gathering eggs from the chickens, up at daybreak for a hearty breakfast, and so on.

I envy the Tea Party fans their dreams. I wish life could be like the dream. Of course, it can't. In fact, it never was.

"Small Government" pros and cons

2010-09-13T15:55:00.000-07:00

Let me make a distinction at the beginning of this little essay. There are two different ideas about what "small government" means. One idea, that of the businessman, is that small government doesn't publish and try to enforce regulations that annoy him or cause him extra expense. The other idea is that any government is liable to be taken over by a tyrant. A tyrannical small government is preferable to a tyrannical big one. Better a Huey Long in one State than a Hitler in an whole country. Personally, I have no patience with the businessman's idea of "small" government. I take seriously the idea of avoiding a large government that becomes tyrannical.

Let us consider an ideal case of "small" government. It is a democracy (or a republic). It interferes as little as possible in the lives of its citizens. It doesn't spend a lot; therefore it doesn't tax a lot. It provides few services. Fire protection is left to individual volunteer fire brigades whose members drop what they're doing and rush to the fire to put it out or, at least, to prevent it from spreading to neighboring buildings. Police protection is provided by private firms that provide guard services for a price. The government does provide an army, mostly of volunteers, who gather to fight off a foreign invader. The government issues money, keeps records of real estate transactions, provides courts to deal with civil suits, and provides some regulation of large enterprises, such as dams for navigation, irrigation, and power.

Would you be happy living with such a government? You might be if you lived two hundred years ago when you were clearing land you had just occupied. All you needed from the government then was an army or a militia to protect you from the indigenous people who formerly occupied the land you now claim.

I think that today you would want government to provide more than the minimum of services it provided two centuries ago. You would certainly want effective police protection and effective response to a fire. You would want government to provide, or cause to be provided, clean drinking water. Other desirable services are adequate electric power, gas for heating and cooking, sewers for draining away waste, and maintained roads and highways. You would want the air you breathe to be as clean as the air you would have breathed 200 years ago. I think that if you thought carefully about the issue of "small" vs. "large," you would incline toward "large" government.

This "large" government that provides all the services you need for living in a large city may or may not be tyrannical. It will certainly be expensive, more expensive than the ideal "small" government. One way or another, this "large" government will collect taxes of various kinds. You will pay a tax on your real estate, your income, the things you buy, your car, etc., etc., etc. If you see the government as tyrannical or even as unrepresentative, you will complain about taxes. City governments tend to be isolated from the citizens of the city simply because of the size of the city and its population. The city may have a representative government, but each elected representative three hundred thousand individuals. It's pretty hard for each of these constituents to have a one-on-one discussion with their representative. Two hundred years ago cities were smaller and representatives had fewer constituents and they were not as isolated from each other as today.

The coming election pits conservative "small government" people against liberal "large government" people. That's an oversimplification to be sure but it does represent at least one category of ideas involved in the election. It might be a good idea if we could agree, once and for all, just what kind of government we want. The next election may decide the matter for a couple of years but not permanently.