Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

I had a curious discussion with a friend of mine the other evening, and I'm stunned to think that someone as intelligent as he held such a ludicrous opinion.

I proposed that life is a zero sum game: I win, you lose, that's the end of it.

See, life itself is the ultimate zero sum game. A body dies, and is reabsorbed into the collective resources of the world, to create other life. But that body doesn't reanimate...except in zombie movies and maybe the Republican party's Reagan wing. That creature loses. Full stop. It's done.

The entire system is closed, so ultimately there are no win-win scenarios. That can only happen in open systems, where the totality of resources available can increase. If you and I agree to team up and improve our lot, by definition we improve our lot at the expense of someone (or something) else. Symbiosis only works at a tiny micro level, and then only at the expense of something outside the combination.

Take the shark and the pilot fish. The pilot fish never gets eaten by the shark because it cleans the shark of parasites and scraps from its teeth, which benefits the shark. The pilot fish gets protection from predators, because who'd be dumb enough to get that close to a shark? Pretty symbiotic. They're protecting each other's life. The shark even gets free dental care.

Note, tho, that this supports the shark in his feeding on other fish.

Life is quantitative. Life holds no emotion. Life is chaotic and random.

"No, no," my friend says, and puts forth the following scenario.

A man gets home from work. He has a choice to make: spend time with his family or go bike riding. He can choose to postpone his quality time and go bike riding, since the kids will be there when he returns and there's limited amounts of daylight. Too, the bike ride will make him healthier and give him more time to spend with his kids as the years pass.

I had to admit, this wasn't a bad example of a win-win...until I thought about it.

This is a qualitative decision, not quantitative. I'll get back to that, but first let me analyze this from a quantitative position.

First, the bike: unless it's built of bamboo and the tires are hemp, we're talking about something that was manufactured out of some non-sustainable natural resource, which means that natural resource was now unavailable for other uses.

This friend (he had a specific person in mind) happens to be an avid biker, so I can guess at the bike and what is was made of. It was not bamboo and hemp.

A factory made it, a factory which had to spew an incremental amount of waste into the environment, the same environment that my friend is riding his bike to have less of an impact on.

A factory that had to use an incremental amount of energy, which was probably (altho I can't be certain of this) not renewable.

The tires are petroleum based, so there's the oil extracted from the ground to make that. And what is oil? Dead dinosaurs. One could jokingly make the claim that a dinosaur had to die for my friend to ride his bike (but that would be extremist), and that's before we get to the necessary lubricants to keep the bike moving smoothly.

Now, none of this is to judge bike riding or my friends' value judgements. I applaud and support those. Indeed, I have a pretty hot ride myself and enjoy pedaling around. It's healthy, makes me feel better and gets me off my ass.

The decision to postpone family time for the bike ride is a zero-sum equation too, altho of a far more subtle and benign nature: until someone can clone me, I can't be in two places at once. If I'm not at home with my kids, I'm riding. Full stop. It doesn't matter if I can do one later, this is an either/or choice right now.

Life is quantitative. It is humans who make it qualitative. And there rises a dilemma.

Imposing a new layer on top of life is going to impose conflict as well. By placing value judgements on things we do and things others do is denying life its essential randomness.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I, for one, applaud that someone else is legally prohibited from killing me, so long as they abide to our laws, even if physically they can and that there might indeed be some value to them in doing so.

Here's the oddity, tho. By layering our values on top of this quantitative system, we insist that we are doing it out of some motivation of making things "fair," that we are maintaining order.

Order on chaos. I suppose there's something to that when you deal with sentient beings. After all, I may want to take (not steal) your food and eat it for myself, but if I do that often enough, you die and then I have to find some other food source. And your dead. Neither of us really wins, but if we work together, growing and preparing the food, we can survive. Neither of us really loses in the short term.

But in the background, there's life and as we all know, life is not fair. Both of us will die.

Life is unfair. Bollocks. In fact, life is the ONLY fair game in town. The events that happen in life, earthquakes, fires, floods, weather, disease, and so on, can hit you, they can hit me, they can hit Donald Trump, and there's no logic or order to them. Life levels the playing field that man's "order" works so hard to preserve.

If you look superficially at the positions of the two major political parties in this country, you'd be tempted to think that conservatives recognize this subtlety, while liberals do not. After all, life is hard and the conservatives want to acknowledge that in their positions: those who have, get more, those who don't, lose. The liberals attempt to impose a sort of "fairness" to the world, to shift resources around, ignoring the basic fairness of life.

In truth, it's just the opposite. The more conservative Republican party tries to impose order and discipline on an essentially chaotic system, while the more liberal Democratic party acknowledges that life is fair, and that each of us has to live it, so why make your life more miserable in order to make my life incrementally better?

Liberals live in a world where we recognize that to prevent chaos is not going to work all the time, so the best we can hope to do is to mitigate its effects. Conservatives want to try to keep the wolf from the door, while forgetting there are no walls.

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No Taxation Without Presentation

Let's talk about money for a moment.

A government is reliant on money. This generally comes in the form of taxes of some sort.

So taxes are a necessity, a necessary evil.

There's a fairly comprehensive, if anecdotal, body of evidence that suggests our current income tax system is not only ineffective, but possibly illegal.

As your NotPresident, I have a simple yet elegant solution, one that will lower taxes for most of us, yet re0jigger the tax liability so that it is more equitably distributed amongst the people who most benefit from our nation's freedoms.

After all, they have more freedoms than you or I. Look at how OJ Simpson got off!

Income is easy to tax and even easier to account for: you get a check, it gets deducted ahead of time, if you earn a salary. But that's not the problem. The problem comes from all those non-wage earnings: dividends, sales proceeds, and so on.

The disincentive of an income tax is to avoid spending money until after you've settled your debt to society. Withholdings make this bit easy, but the first time you get a lump sum from, say, the sale of a stock, you are clueless as to what to do regarding your taxes.

My tax system would avoid all this. Rather than focus on income, I would focus on wealth.

You are free to earn as much money as you can, legally, illegally, I don't care. What I DO care about is how much you keep out of the economy. And there's the difference.

Simply put, I would tax any investment that, in turn, did not create more income. No more tax shelters. No more idle rich sitting on their arses, collecting dividend checks. No more squirreling away money that you earned on the backs of the working and middle classes so that your kids can go to Choate and Harvard.

It's really very simple: the incentive in this tax system is to spend money, actual cash money, and the more you can afford, the more you should spend.

Naturally, there will be some baseline "minimum wealth" figure under which no one would be taxed. It's not fair, for example, to tax someone who owns a $100,000 home for four people, struggling by on an income of $30,000. I'd have to run the numbers a bit, but my suspicion is I would exempt anyone who owns less than $500,000 in assets.

Net of a home mortgage, to boot.

Eveerything else above that is fair game, and yes, I would tax your retirement savings. But notice something: every dollar you draw down after retirement is 100% tax free.

The tax rates would be graduated. It's not fair to ask someone who owns, say, $500,001 to pay the same rate of tax as someone who owns 500,000,001. If your hogging your wealth, you're going to get hit with a penalty, a big penalty.

Admittedly, this plan would need a lot of fleshing out (actually, it's already been fleshed out, but after Senator McCain stole my idea for a cash prize for alternative energy, I'm laying just enough cards on the table to show my hand without putting my chips in completely.

You want it, Barack? John? Come buy it off me!

I even promise to spend the check!

Our Chief Weapon Is Fear

Alike were they free from Fear that reigns with the tyrant, and envy the vice of republics. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline. Part i. 1.

What calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth. -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit, introduction

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt Speech, July 2, 1932.

It concerns me that this nation is a nation afraid.

Nevermind the terrorists. That's a legitimate concern, but not a fear, when you come right down to it. More people died on September 11 of heart attacks than in the terror attacks, but no one is raising the heart attack warning color to orange during barbecue season.

Nevermind the economy. That's a clear problem and that has its legitimate basis for fear; fear of losing your job, your house, your life savings.

No, I mean, when did Americans become afraid of each other and of our government? A clear motivation of a quasi-dictatorial government to divide people is to conquer them. It's clear the government has intended, at least since the seventies, to divide the American people up into parcels that can be easily labelled: red state, blue state, liberal, conservative.

In so doing, it becomes easy to paint "the other guy" as what's wrong with this country. We've swallowed this whole, to be fair, on both sides, altho it seems more prevalent among conservatives. FOX News and Rush Limbaugh lead a charge of fire-breathing blowhards whose only purpose in life appears to be stoking the flames of hatred towards their fellow man.

In Rush's case, it's pretty easy to see why: poor pathetic lonely little creature who's only hope for redemption is to tear the other people around him down, and stand on the rubble of his destruction.

In FOX's case, too, the motives are easy to see: for every "BHO" reference on their network, another FCC rule falls by the wayside.

In this respect, assuming he's sincere about it, Barack Obama and I see eye to eye, but for different reasons. Obama wants to unite us to fix what he perceives is wrong with the country.

I want to unite us to fix the entire fucking system, from top to bottom.

It's no longer enough that we tinker and Twitter each other about this program or that program. It's clear that the system itself, like a leaky, moldy house, is creaking and in danger of collapse.

And like a leaky, moldy house, it's foundation is, however, strong. Mold can be cleaned up, creaks patched, or perhaps even the entire structure cna be torn down, but if we can keep the foundation from cracking open, we can rebuild as good as new.

The problem is, fear. I am not afraid, but I am only one man. I can take fears away from others, but even that's only a handful of people.

To enact and effect the changes necessary, as the lessons of the French and American Revolutions show, will take more. Much more.

We are a complacent people. It is said the reason the French government has to capitulate to its people is that it fears those people.

That's not a bad thing, in my eyes. A government SHOULD fear its people and not the other way around! Right now, the only thing this government fears is losing the next election, and right now, those elections are so tight that there's no point in fearing the people: the other half is easily mined for votes.

Which is why John McCain is able to shift and meld so easily between moderate-left and moderate-right voters, while clinging to a conservative base that has no other choice.

But let the government learn fear of its people, as it started to during the 1960s, and watch the power of the people rise from the ground and swell up indignantly against those crimes that politicians of both parties commit regularly.

People will have a voice once more in the governance of their day to day lives. People will suddenly care about what is going on around them, rather than trust the whims of men who are unduly influenced by powers your average man in the street cannot even begin to comprehend.

"We, the People," will suddenly mean something...

Vive La Révolution

On this date back in 1789, a nation of people, yearning to be free, stormed the symbol of their oppression, the Bastille.

These people were tired of being dictated to, not by a monarchy, but by an plutocracy that was headed by a monarch: told what to think, told what to eat, told what to do, told what to accept.

The people paid heavily taxes while the aristocracy and cronies thereof paid next to nothing towards the upkeep of the nation.

The nation had spent its way into bankruptcy on the backs of wars declared unilaterally by the ruling class, supporting "revolution" by people in countries that had nothing to do with their daily lives.

The people were ganged up on by the two largest economic forces of their day: the government, and the church.

The church imposed faith above science.

The people were hurt badly by climatic change that created famine, pestilence and widespread poverty.

The upper classes engaged in conspicuous consumption even as the people starved and worked harder than ever paying more in tithes and taxes than they had ever before.

The middle class resented the relative poverty in which even they lived as compared to their peers in other nations who *gasp* had national health care!

The people resented the oppression and limitation of even responsible opposing viewpoints, which were deemed anti-patriotic.

Toujours les memes choses, eh?

A Paradigm Is More Than Two Bits

When considering the state of the American political and governing system, it is probably a good idea to think about the flip side of the coin: the governed.

I've always believed that it is important to stress to Americans that there is no free lunch. For too long, politicians on both sides of the fence have strived hard to come up with painless solutions to thorny problems, not trusting the American people to be a rational, intelligent and reasonable community of people.

That's probably an accurate impulse. I can't really blame Republicans for offering tax cuts to ignore or Democrats for offering grandiose schemes to solve intractable problems. The sense I get is that Americans of all stripes would prefer someone else handle the problem.

We're spoiled, in other words. This sense of "it's somebody else's responsibility" plays out in so many facets of life, it's not even funny.

You get hit by a car. You sue the other driver. He hires a lawyer and sues you back to try to prove that, indeed, it was your fault for stepping in front of his car.

Voter turnout in elections has been abysmal, even in 2004 when people took up voting arms against a sea of trouble and likely again this year, despite Barack Obama's encouraging and energizing candidacy.

You see a woman in an emergency room collapse. She lays there for 24 hours and dies. No one does a thing. Why? Because someone else should have handled it.

You walk down a street and a piece of newspaper blows across and wraps around your ankle. You stand next to a garbage can, yet rather than reach down, pluck the paper and toss it in the bin, you shake your foot and off it flies to litter again. Serial litter, I like to call this.

We fight a war in a far-off land, and the only sacrifice we're asked to make is to load up on debt and shop some more. Arguably, given what has happened, this might turn into the ultimate sacrifice for many of us, but that's a different story.

We ask so much of our country. We give so little in return. Perhaps in addition to a Bill of Rights, we should look into establishing a Bill or Responsibilities.

A Google search turns up roughly 300,000 hits on that term. Some of these "bills" are simply outrageously idiotic: really, the best someone could come up with was "you have the responsibility to be a loyal citizen of the United States of America"?

Memo to the Roses: WE ARE! (I won't embarrass them with a link)

I did find a rather intriguing Bill, and I wanted to share it with you:

Freedom and responsibility are mutual and inseparable; we can ensure enjoyment of the one only by exercising the other. Freedom for all of us depends on responsibility by each of us.

To secure and expand our liberties, therefore, we accept these responsibilities as individual members of a free society:

1. To be fully responsible for our own actions and for the consequences of those actions. Freedom to choose carries with it the responsibility for our choices.

2. To respect the rights and beliefs of others. In a free society, diversity flourishes. Courtesy and consideration toward others are measures of a civilized society.

3. To give sympathy, understanding and help to others. As we hope others will help us when we are in need, we should help others when they are in need.

4. To do our best to meet our own and our families' needs. There is no personal freedom without economic freedom. By helping ourselves and those closest to us to become productive members of society, we contribute to the strength of the nation.

5. To respect and obey the laws. Laws are mutually accepted rules by which, together, we maintain a free society. Liberty itself is built on a foundation of law. That foundation provides an orderly process for changing laws. It also depends on our obeying laws once they have been freely adopted.

6. To respect the property of others, both private and public. No one has a right to what is not his or hers. The right to enjoy what is ours depends on our respecting the right of others to enjoy what is theirs.

7. To share with others our appreciation of the benefits and obligations of freedom. Freedom shared is freedom strengthened.

8. To participate constructively in the nation's political life. Democracy depends on an active citizenry. It depends equally on an informed citizenry.

9. To help freedom survive by assuming personal responsibility for its defense. Our nation cannot survive unless we defend it. Its security rests on the individual determination of each of us to help preserve it.

10. To respect the rights and to meet the responsibilities on which our liberty rests and our democracy depends. This is the essence of freedom. Maintaining it requires our common effort, all together and each individually.

Freedom is a balance of rights and responsibilities. If one only assumes the rights of freedom without taking responsibility to see those rights are secured and maintained, one loses the rights.

If one only secures the rights of freedom for oneself, without ensuring those rights for everyone, one loses freedoms.

If one abuses, distorts, or otherwise diminishes the rights of freedom, abrogating one's responsibilities for that freedom, then one loses one's freedom anyway. Karma's a bitch.

If only enjoys the freedom to enjoy one's property, one's life, one's liberty, one's pursuit of happiness while even one other person is unjustly deprived of his or hers, then one loses his freedom too.

We've seen that. We've seen that in this administration and in administrations throughout at least my lifetime. And one could make the argument, indeed, that because Americans have never had the responsibilities inherent in freedom, Americans were never truly free.

Oh, we could fake it, to be sure. When this land was wilderness and a man or woman could ride an entire day without seeing another person, you have the illusion of freedom.

Oddly enough, those same people took it upon themselves to ensure their own freedom by standing up for themselves when that freedom was threatened.

A community, you see, is a balance between the rights of the individual and the needs of the population. We are the most important unit in our own lives, but we are not the most important individual in anyone else's life. We can't be. As I like to say, I don't care what anyone else thinks because no one else is going to climb into my coffin with me when I die.

That statement, however, implies that I can live with myself well enough that even I get into my coffin when I die!

Vigilance, involvement, activism: community.

I would quibble with some of these statements from the Freedoms Foundation. I'm drawn to article 9 as one that could use some fleshing out and tuning up, because it allows for all sorts of bizarre interpretations ("Why, I own this Abrams tank because you never can tell when Osama and his minions will come strolling down Cherry Lane, bent on taking out the Gas-N-Gulp!")

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

Right there in the Preamble to the Constitution is our mandate: to create community. A nation. A secure foundation to build our hopes and dreams on. To prevent tyranny and injustice, in whatever form it may take. To raise our families. To be free, all of us, not only those of us with money who can buy a home in a gated community (an oxymoron, that..."gated community"), but you, me, your children, my children, her children, his children.

As we ponder how to fix the things that are broken in America, we might want to pause a moment and see if as we point fingers, we aren't pointing many more back at ourselves.

I Hate To Say I Told You So, But...

The contract between a government and its people is understood to be one where the government has to not exercise its power entirely.

Parental, in other words.

A government which fully exerts its power over its people is a tyranny, a totalitarian regime, fascism.

A people who do not exert their responsibilities can be viewed as child-like, refusing to accept their position as necessary to the functioning of the nation as a whole. This is the paradox of the one versus the many: how much difference can one man/woman/vote/dollar make?

The Dalai Lama and other Buddhists will tell you, quite a bit. See, it's not ultimately about the exertion of influence but about the exercise of freedoms. The pursuit, if you will, of happiness.

To digress for a moment, one reason I agreed to blog after katrina urged me time and again was the opportunity I saw to influence even just one person to think differently, to let one other person know he or she was not alone in what they perceived around themselves. To understand that we are connected.
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I see the struggle for the political will of this country coming down to three factions:

First, the right, with its individualistic, opportunistic, capitalistic thinking that by each of us pursuing our own self-interests, we can lift the nation as a whole, on average, higher. This work, believe it or not, but it's not enough, clearly. For the first hundred and fifty years, this nation operated in precisely this fashion and for one hundred and fifty years, we left people behind.

Second, the left with its notions that every problem is so intractable that it demands we gather in as many resources as possible to allow the government to dictate solutions to us. This works in some instances, particularly in emergency situations when consensii must be reached quickly. Indeed, we've seen the failure of underactive oversight of government in the Hurricane Katrina debacle.

Third is the middle, the vast majority of Americans, some 60-80% of us, who sit there and see the failures of both sides as well as the successes and wonder why there cannot be a better way that combines the two.

I wish there was an easy answer for them but there simply is not. The political tides of this nation ebb and flow on the backs of these people: the philosophy that can capture more of public opinion will be the philosophy that prevails at that particular moment in time. When the left can exert influence, like during the 60s, progressive philosophies are tried, and while their strengths are revealed, their weaknesses are immediately exposed as well.

Similarly, as in the 80s, when a right-wing philosophy is experimented with, whatever strengths it exhibits is coupled immediately with its weaknesses.

This opens the door to communication and marketing, of course. This is why we no longer talk about policies when comparing two candidates, but about the effectiveness of the "message" and the messenger. This is why politics is now covered like a horse race rather than a debate. The right had seized on this secret during the Reagan years and managed to massage it for decades. Indeed, if Bill Clinton hadn't won in 1992 by stealing this technique from Republicans, it is likely that President Gore would now be talked about for a third term. It's not so much that Reagan did anything remarkable during his two terms that had people talking about his image on Mt. Rushmore, but that he followed nearly twenty years of malfeasance, corruption and perceived incompetence. All you needed was a trained chimp at that point, and twenty five percent of the country would rejoice for the Second Coming.

Sort of like Dumbya, now.

We are on the cusp of a moment which cannot be denied. People have grown weary with right-wing bromides of privatization and laissez-faire economics and benefits for the rich. So long as these were not perceived as hurting the hundreds of millions in the middle, the middle was content. While it is conceivable that John McCain could steal away this election, it would be only a temporary delay. The age of progressivism seems to be upon us, yet again.The pendulum has swung once more and to the left.

The question is, what to do about this? The 2006 elections showed us an interesting mandate: while Americans are tired of the right-wing "lower taxes will solve everything" mantra, they clearly have become indoctrinated to the right wing message of "left=anti-America." This is one reason the Obama flag pin trope worked so strongly during the primary campaign, both as an influence on leftists who had to abandon Edwards and Kucinich ("See? He ain't buckling under to no flag pin wearing fascists!") and on rightists ("See? He ain't American!").

The 2006 elections saw the rise of the middle left: people like Jon Tester and Claire McCaskill, rookie senators who won in traditionally red states by running not as Democrats but as disaffected Republican-could-bes. Yet, they support many progressive ideals-- some are pro-choice, some are pro-healthcare, some are pro-safety (antigun, the right would call them).

This has created a gulf in the Democratic party, as the puffed-up chests of MoveOn.org and dKos over the sensible and calculated moves by Obama to move to the center in time for the general election are rolled out. Democrats.com, in fact, has asked its supporters to escrow their donations to Obama by banking them with truly progressive Congressional and Senate candidates, thus indirectly supporting him while not allowing him to take advantage of their support.

Madness, but they have every right to be infuriated. Obama set himself up as a candidate of the left, and did nothing during the primary campaign to dissuade the Obombers from believing he was anything but in sync with them.

Well, see, that's not entirely true. He did flip-flop on the NAFTA and on a few other issues, taking first a strongly progressive view and then whittling it back and effectively kneecapping his original position.

In point of fact, it is the Obombers who have to suck it up and understand they got bamboozled. Anyone with a lick of sense, yours truly among them, realized this would happen.

Friends have asked me if I had painted myself into a corner with my strong support for Hillary and my strong denunciations of Obama. Possibly, but you'll notice something: I'm not the one who's disliking Obama more and more each day now!

Paradigms For Sale

The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation, the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. Liberty in each of its phases has its history and connotation. But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process. -- Chief Justice of the Unitedt States Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, WEST COAST HOTEL CO. V. PARRISH , 300 U.S. 379 (1937)

There, in a nutshell, is what a liberal, progressive platform should be.

"We will protect your freedoms." Ok, the wording needs to be cleaned up, but the image we need to leave in voters' minds is one of a knight or a hired gun, taking on the bad guys and beating them back.

True freedom, true liberty, can come only when the individual in a nation is free from worry, from inequality (not talking about prejudice, altho that is part of it) and from power of any kind.

The best society is one where people have banded together to watch out for each other without interfering in each other's lives. That is freedom.

Government, by extension, works best when it provides opportunity and protection from the inequities of power as represented by influence and wealth. When wealth can avail itself of the advantages of power and the advantages of governmental protection, an inequitable system has been created where working people, whose income is wholly dependent on the monied classes, can and likely will bear the brunt of protecting society as a whole.

Meanwhile, the working classes will receive the least benefit from this society. After all, freedom is just a word for nothing left to lose, and the less you have, the less you need physical protection. You can be free, because who would want to take anything from someone who has nothing?

Conversely, the more you have, the more you need physical protection.

This is in large part the rationale behind a progressive tax system: those who have and continue to benefit the most from the bounty of this nation are required to fund a larger proportion of its needs.

The nifty trick the right wing has accomplished is in equating the rich and powerful, and in particular, corporations, with "the people", thus populising that which by definition is elitist. When conservatives talk about "the people," or "compassion," or "economic freedom," you can bet this involves giving more booty to the richest among us.

Leaving the check for the rest of us to pick up.

The revolution starts by taking the weakest link in the chain back out: government. Government is the only entity with both the resources and the force of law behind it to protect people like you, and me, and him, and her, from the predations of rampant abuse by those who should know better and moreover, should be more grateful to us.

We, the people, deserve universal health care.

We, the people, deserve universal public education through college.

We, the people, deserve universal child care for working parents.

We, the people, deserve a voice to speak up for us, collectively, against those who collect against us.

We, the people, deserve guarantees that no longer will government and corporations conspire against us to deprive us of our God-given freedom.

We, the people, deserve the opportunity this nation has promised us from the cradle onward.

We, the people, deserve our nation back!

Paradigm Lost

Sure seems like I have a lot to say on this topic.

I happened to watch Michael Moore's "SiCKO" last night, and this theme of paradigms of American culture and politics swirled through my mind yet again.

If you've seen the film, then you likely recall Moore's trip to England and France to investigate "socialized medicine" with its concommitant horror stories of people dying in waiting rooms and postponing critical surgeries and bureaucracy out the wazoo over the slightest protest in treatment, how you can't choose your own doctors and how doctors are badly underpaid and treated and...

Well, you get the drift of the right wing talking points regarding single-payer healthcare.

Naturally, Moore pretty much debunks those forthwith. Yes, the film takes a POV that is probably at best generally accurate but biased towards only showing positive stories ("So how much did you pay for the delivery?" "Nothing" "You mean you can just walk out of the hospital with a baby and no bill???"), however, the generally accepted truths of nearly everyone he speaks to in England and France is that American health care is the pits compared to European healthcare and that the system in place in Europe works without creating an undue burden on the taxpayers.

People still drive nice cars and doctors can afford million dollar homes, and even the middle class can afford a comfortable apartment and a nice television on $80,000 a year combined salaries. In France. Where you get unlimited sick leave, a 35 hour work week, and minimum five weeks' paid vacation.

Sweet deal, huh? Mind you, the average French worker is more productive than the average American worker. Gee...can't imagine how treating a human adult like, well, an adult might engender a better sense of loyalty than all these "team building exercises" and sloganeering!

Makes you wonder what is wrong with this country?

There were a few telling incidents and quotes in the movie that made me think about this column today, which I had planned on writing anyway.

1) Tony Benn, a Socialist former member of the British parliament was interviewed by Moore on camera. Put it this way: even the British call him a far-left winger. He had some interesting things to say, including the following: Keeping people hopeless and pessimistic - see I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them...An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.Pretty remarkable statement, when you ponder it for a moment.

What is the best way to keep a nation frightened? Yes, a terror attack works, of course, but that has limited impact on long term governance, a goal of both parties here.

No, the best way to frighten and demoralize a people is to make them think the enemy lies within our borders. It could be the blacks. It could be the undocumented workers. It could be the latte-sipping liberal elite. It could be the John-Deere-cap-wearing rednecks. It could be the working classes that cling to their guns and their God in their desperation, even.

But the enemy lies within our borders and we must be vigilant.

The enemy DOES lie within our borders, but it's not the enemy we think it is.

2) In summing up the differences, not just in healthcare but in the attitudes of the citizens of nations like England, France and even Cuba, Moore says They think of 'we first,' not 'me first'.

This goes hand-in-hand with the great cultural divide, I think, I referenced in point one. It's hard to think of "we first" in America for a slew of reasons, not least of which is simply the massive physical distances between "us" and "them". "They" are the flyover states, or the coast-dwellers. "We" are the true Americans. "We" know better than "they" do.

It's hard to think of "we first" because we are all hyphenate-Americans. We all self-identify with another place: Irish-American, Russian-American, Dominican-American, African American. Hell, we even have to refer to the indigenous people with a hyphenate, Native American, so as not to exclude them! Our tribe comes ahead of all others.

This diversity has had some profound and good impacts on America: from different backgrounds, we have not only derived different "American" foods (hot dogs, German; pizza, Italian) but different ideas, different perceptions have become inured into American culture.

But only after the feared "enemy within" was absorbed and assimilated.

All this, however, is hung on a backdrop of the very American "Protestant work ethic"...a German import, by the way.

3) While pondering the French culture, with its universal healthcare and its government-paid college tuition (not a loan, a grant and out of pocket costs are nominal, under a thousand euros), and dollar-a-day childcare for working parents, Moore points out that the French government is terrified of its workers, and proceeds to show footage of various strikes across France.

Hm. A government serving the people, instead of the people serving the government. Interesting concept!

While we here in America are trying to downsize our government, put the "people's money back in the people's business community's pocket," in other nations, they take the people's money and use it for the benefit of the people!

Wow. Any coincidence that the US is ranked 37th on the list of health care services, just ahead of Slovenia, despite the fact that we outspend every other nation on the planet, including China (which doesn't even place in the top 50, so at least they're getting bang for their bucks!)

We need to reorganize the priorities of this country, and sadly, neither Obama nor McCain (nor Clinton, hedging my bets) is going to pull the levers and push the buttons necessary to do this (maybe Clinton might. Might.)

We collect hundreds of billions in tax revenues, and the complaint about universal healthcare, or any one of a number of social programs, is "it's going to cost the taypayers money."

Yea. And as Tony Benn put it, If we can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.

Americans are among the most generous, giving people on the planet. When a disaster strikes in Myanmar or China or Peru, Americans are the first with their wallets open, giving to the Red Cross, or to Doctors Without Borders.

I would advance the cause of universal healthcare (first) with a simple question: "If you could help your neighbor in a crisis, would you give him a dollar?"

"People pay taxes not because government needs us to. People pay taxes because other people need us to."

That ought to be the mantra of anyone running for President. We've lost a sense of community in this country. That community threatened the entrenched interests of the corporate and administrative sectors. People had a bit of power, but lost it in the 70s and 80s.

President Clinton tried to bring it back, but even his attempt was derailed by the powers that be. President Bush has further eroded and blunted that power under the guise of "homeland security," a permanent terror state devised to punish people who get out of line along with genuine threats to the nation.

To think that the next President won't use these tools is like asking me to stop using my perfectly good left hand. That's simply not going to happen, no matter how well-intentioned I might be. I'll slip up and so will the next President.

We have to take the country back.

Why I Think Hillary Should Fight On

I'm often asked how I can support the "corporatist" candidate in the Democratic primary.

As opposed, I assume to the non-corporatist candidate who magically pulled three campaign financings out of his ass, for legislature, Senate and now President. Anyone who believes Obama isn't as beholden to corporate interests as any other candidate is fully deluding himself, but I'll get back to that in a moment.

Believe it or not, on the liberal scale, I consistently score to the left of Dennis Kucinich, so no, Hillary does not come close to representing the ideal changes I'd like to see in this nation.

But she's the strongest step in that direction.

Here's how I view political history: the cyclic nature of short-term changes is one of broad sweeps of the pendulum from one end of the spectrum to the other, extremist and ultimately unhealthy to the nation's well-being.

But like all pendulums, there are larger forces at work besides gravity: momentum, friction, and periodicity all play a part in change.

Long term, it would hard to deny that two opposing forces struggle against each other: the isolationism of effectively an island nation, bordered by only two other countries (no other major nation save Japan and Australia has fewer), and the inevitable march of time forcing us into new technologies and exposure to new ideas and cultures.

Ultimately, it is THIS battleground that I want to win a progressive agenda on, and if that means sacrificing the short term liberal agenda (which in truth, is nothing more than another group of elitists imposing their will on me), then so be it.

Now, to Obama. Run with me a little on this, it will involve some suspension of disbelief:

As a result of an unhappy circumstance, I was forced to watch "All the President's Men" last night on DVD.

As I sat there watching it for the umpteenth time, discussing it with my daughter with regards to how all political campaigns involve dirty tricks and how hard it is to uncover them if they are financed and backed with a lot of money, a few tumblers clicked in my head.

In the world, as a free agent, is a man who is fully capable of executing the ultimate "rat fuck" on the Democratic party: Karl Rove.

In watching how the Watergate investigation revealed this entire netherworld of Republican operatives only too happy to do the dirty work to set up the nomination of George McGovern, it occured to me, "what if this was the scenario that played out in 2008?"

Think about it: Hillary was the nominee-presumptive in December, and despite her missteps and gaffes along the way, has garnered more votes, and certainly more Democratic votes, than any other nominee for President. Ever.

And still hasn't secured the nomination and sure looks to be a fair distance from doing so.

What if these nickle-and-dime contributions to Obama's campaign weren't from honest citizens, but were part of a larger campaign to push a different candidate for the November election, one who would be almost guaranteed to lose the important states that Democrats need to win: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Michigan?

I added those last two, mostly because in those instances we have overt evidence of Republican involvement in the Democratic campaign: both Florida and Michigan (Florida more so) moved their primaries ahead of New Hampshire and Ohio, and as such have been punished by the DNC, hampering Hillary's efforts and crippling her chances of taking the nomination on the first ballot.

The Florida initiative was promoted and passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed by a Republican governor.

Florida. Remember them?

The Michigan case is harder to make, as the governor is a Democrat (but an Obamist) and half of the legislature is controlled by Democrats, but that still leaves significant input from the Republicans.

Too, Obama had significant support from Republicans who crossed over to vote for him in (nominally) Democratic primaries that were open to all (which is why Hillary has a case that more Democrats voted for her than Obama, nevermind more votes, full stop.)

Indeed, at one point when it looked like Obama might knock Hillary out early on, Republicans suddenly started voting in large numbers for Hillary, primarily in Texas.

Apparently, the powers that be that would run this kind of trick didn't want to show their hand too early. They had to extend the season a bit to cover for their own candidate, whomever that might be (at that time, the race for the GOP nod was still in the air).

One more point to make before getting on to conclusions: much if not most of Obama's support comes from states which held caucuses. Caucuses are ideal places for infiltration and dirty tricks, since there's no real paper record of what transpired: you stand in a room, are counted, and then recounted until one person wins a majority.

How hard is it, particularly since caucuses tend to be open to all, for a Republican squad to dispatch posers? Not hard at all.

You think this is all unlikely, yet in 1972, there's Nixon's CREEP running a dirty tricks operation that not only had Muskie knocked out of the race on a very trumped story about him crying over the "Canuck letter" (even then, the media played lap dog to Republican politics), but ensured the weakest possible candidate would take the nomination.

So, here's the scenario: you have an uberstrong candidate, clearly unbeatable in the general election, and a really weak case to make for your own party, no matter who the candidate is (Nixon was despised in 1972, almost as much as Bush is today)

You have the media in your back pocket. No one can deny that Obama benefitted clearly from the Hillary hatred of the media...the GOP-owned media.

You have a candidate who is irresistible to liberal Democrats: a first-term Senator, African American, who espoused 6 years ago his opposition to the war and four years ago his desire to bring the country together and heal its wounds.

Let's call him the Manichaean Candidate.

And you have a political machine that has shown its ability and propensity in the past for stealing elections (Ohio in 2004, Florida in 2000, and Austin in 1994).

In all of these, Karl Rove has played a vital role, indeed, the key role, in swiping these elections.

Would it be too hard to imagine that, given the intricate mechanics of the Watergate scandal, that Rove took a look at the environment he grew up in in the party, and saw how to improve it and to nearly bulletproof it?

Apparently not.

Now, yes, this has been a fairy tale, but....

If it turns out to be true, remember you read it here first.