Rural Values

2009-04-01   The Whole Truth !

2009-04-20   Who Was Ayn Rand?

2009-09-09   Why the Double Standard?

April 1, 2009 ~ Letter to the Editor  ~ Lake County Record Bee

The WHOLE truth!

I read a letter in this column a week or so ago in which the writer stated that it cost the government over $500,000 to create a job under the new stimulus package and that we should instead turn that money over to private enterprise, since they are so much more efficient at job creation.

The oath we take in the courtroom is The truth, the WHOLE truth and nothing but the truth  and this is the perfect example of how a half truth can be misleading.

In this case, the WHOLE truth is that the writer simply divided the amount of money the stimulus package will cost by the number of jobs created and came up with that number. He completely ignored the fact that we, the people, were getting far more than mere jobs for this money.

We will have bridges that are long past their designed life span replaced with new, safer bridges. Ask the people in Minnesota how important that is; since they had a major bridge collapse costing many lives last year. We will have decomposing roads rebuilt. We will have high speed mass transit connecting major cities. We will have thousands of new classrooms built. 50,000 teachers will have their jobs saved from budget cuts that will benefit 1,500,000 students. Communities will get new sewer and water systems. I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

To simply ignore any of the tangible benefits that we will derive from the stimulus package is cynical at best, dishonest at worst and completely misleading.

Turn the money over to private enterprise? No kidding! Enron, Worldcom, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, Countrywide Mortgage, AIG and Goldman Sachs are all private enterprises. They, and many others like them, are directly responsible for the pain we are now suffering worldwide. Millions of good, hard working people have had their life savings decimated, while the CEOs and highest echelon of the corporations employees have become wealthy beyond all imagination, at our expense. They have rewarded each other richly for perpetrating the greatest fraud in history.

CEOs compensation is set by their Boards of Directors, who have mostly remained anonymous to this point. It is very common that a CEO from one company sits on the Board of another company and vice versa. So its like I will vote for astronomical pay for you, then you do the same for me!  The common shareholders rarely have a say and so the profits, instead of being distributed fairly, are more often divided mainly by the elite employees of the company while the shareholders get a few cents per share.

All this is facilitated by having the government regulatory agencies being stifled by management, appointed by the administration, whose job it is to shield the industry from the regulations meant to control it. Instead of watchdogs protecting the people, we have lapdogs, protecting the industries.

Both parties share blame. The current system is debauched. It is now a full time job for each Congressman and Senator to raise funds for re-election. Lobbyists ply the halls of Congress nonstop in search of votes that can be bought. While the Republicans get the lions share of this corporate funding, the Democrats get just enough to keep them on the hook as well. For instance, big oil companies donate about 75% of their money to Republicans, but give the other 25% to the Democrats, who apparently can be bought for less.  Exxon-Mobil, the worlds most profitable corporation in history, gets billions in tax breaks every year and pays little to nothing for the oil and gas pumped from our Federal lands. 20 years after causing the greatest environmental disaster in history, Exxon has not yet paid a dime of the billions it owes in judgments against it. Their political money has been well spent.

So, apologies if I laugh out loud whenever I hear the argument that we should turn everything over to private industry because they are so great. Its also true our government has not done its job well to date but the solution is not to abandon it. The world is far too complex for us to disembowel our government. Our citizens must be aware of the WHOLE truth and they must insist on our representatives actually representing OUR interests, not the corporations. Teddy Roosevelt was a great Republican who devoted his presidency to not only protecting the environment but also to Trust busting so that the people would not be savaged by unregulated greed and avarice of the big corporations. Half truths are misleading and do not help us move towards a solution.

April 20, 2009 ~ Letter to the Editor ~ Lake County Record Bee

Who was Ayn Rand?

Recently we were asked who a fictional character was from a book that has had a dramatic effect on all of our lives, although you may not yet realize this.  The non-existent John Galt was the hero of Atlas Shrugged which was written by Ayn Rand and became a widely read and influential manifesto for a society that enshrines Darwinian survival of the fittest thinking.  I read this book and Ayn Rands earlier book, The Fountainhead, as well as many other economic books from different viewpoints. Where I went to school students were exposed to the full range of economic philosophy, not just one side or the other.

The theme we are constantly bombarded with these days is that the eastern elite schools only teach communism, yet Ayn Rand lectured at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and MIT. I guess if a university teaches anything OTHER than extremist right wing philosophy they must be evil by that faulty logic!

I have had several of my conservative friends send me e-mails during the past year with the exact same Who was John Galt heading, all calling him the hero and wailing that all who would stand in his way of unfettered freedom to realize his goals without any government interference or regulation are depicted as evil. At one point in the book Galts character (its important to remember he is not, nor ever was a real person) stabbed to death a bureaucrat who had the audacity to stand in his way, declaring after that no one else stood in my way! How inspirational!

To understand who Galts character was, we need to know who Ayn Rand was. Her real name was Alice Rosenbaum, born and educated in Russia. Her father, Fronz Rosenbaum was a chemist who lost everything to the brutal Communist revolution led by Lenin. Knowing that she was traumatized by witnessing her parents having everything they had worked for being confiscated by an extremist dictatorship, its easy to understand why she saw the world in simplistic black and white without any middle ground.

One of her most ardent admirers was Alan Greenspan, who presided over our economy during the recent orgy of unregulated excess that has dumped us at depressions doorstep. In recent testimony before Congress he testified that I was shocked, SHOCKED, that the bankers could not be trusted to self regulate!  No kidding, he actually said those words. I didnt know whether to feel sorry or angry at his naivete.

As James Madison said, If all men were angels we would have no need of laws, much less of government. Well, here in the real world, all men are not angels. If anyone would like to see a current working example of a country where there is no government interference with entrepreneurs realizing their dreams, no taxation and no gun control, look no farther than to see what life is like in Somalia. Its obvious to me that we must have a government to ensure fairness and to protect those who cant protect themselves from greed and avarice.

The flip side of this lawlessness is Communism, which destroys all hope of genius reaching its potential and smothers any spark of excellence. Everything is owned and operated by the government and the citizen is reduced to nothing more than a tooth on a gear going around in circles. One day, or one year, is just like another.   

As is true in most things, the correct place to be is somewhere in the middle. In our society we have come to understand that some things are too big or too vital to be left to private entrepreneurs without oversight, but that the individual must at the same time be allowed to realize their dreams. We enjoy social programs that build highways, bridges, educate all children equally, help care for the elderly, etc. While we have many social programs, we also have created more millionaires and now billionaires than any other country in the world. Many studies have proven that the happiest people on earth live in countries that call themselves socialist, which is only confused with communist by the ignorant. Socialism is not a dirty word even though it is used as a smear by those who dont know better.

September 9, 2009 ~ Letter to the Editor ~Lake County Record Bee

Why the double standard?

            Football is a graphic war game and one of America's most popular sports. The ultimate goal of every man on the field is to simply destroy his opponent. From the second the ball is snapped each player has his assignment and regardless of his position, it is to lay his counterpart flat on his back, or to "pancake" him. The ultimate is of course to knock your opponent out of the game. I must admit to still relishing the memory of Ronnie Lott, not only because he was fast and played smart, nearly always being in the right spot, but mostly because when he got to that spot he delivered a blow that rattled his man down deep in his bones.  

            Decades ago the decision was made that when a deranged fan jumped out onto the field, either dressed or undressed, the cameras would not reward this bad behavior by televising it. Instead another shot would be shown, maybe of the players or coaches looking on with disgust as security corralled and escorted the usually drunken fan off the field to the cheers of all else. Bear in mind that this level of decorum is exhibited during one of the most violent sports we watch.

            You might ask where I'm going with this. Well, for the past couple of months we have had the spectacle of hatriots showing up at town halls and at every other opportunity, carrying graphic photos of our president in disgraceful depictions, most of which are completely disconnected from reality. Others have now taken to showing up wearing pistols and carrying automatic weapons, calling for nothing less than the assassination of our president proudly and openly.

            How has the media responded? By rewarding their bad behavior with massive airtime of course, disproportionate to their numbers and ignoring any semblance of fairness or facts that might bear their hatred out. Do the media outlets bother to mine down to the facts, asking these people for specific instances that might back up their demonstrations of seething hatred? They don't even attempt to focus on the issues, instead they simply provide a worldwide bullhorn for the hatriots. The next time you hear the tired old saw about the "liberal media bias" please bear this in mind. Every major news outlet, from cable to broadcast TV, most newspapers and radio stations are owned and operated by huge corporations. Many of these are owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is anything but fair and balanced in his political viewpoints.

            No longer is there a debate about the issues taking place but instead we get the spectacle of nearly rabid outpouring of hatred. Maybe its simply human nature. Combat between humans has gone on from the earliest times. First between family groups or tribes with sticks and rocks, then between city states or nations, on to the Roman Coliseum where spectators enjoyed watching lions devour Christians as the closing act, graduating to using ever more destructive weapons. Today, the single biggest industry, especially here in the United States, is producing weapons designed solely for the purpose of killing other humans. We not only produce more military hardware than any other nation, we produce more than the next 10 countries combined! We are the only animal that hunts itself. We often go to war with countries that have never attacked us first.

            Will we ever be able to grow beyond our most base instincts to adopt the kindness and caring for even the most unfortunate that Christ is said to have lived and died for? Will my granddaughter grow up in a world at peace? I hope so, but with each baseless snarling hatriot episode being given unlimited airtime and celebrity, it becomes more doubtful.