2016 Talk Back

Norman Lear, the director, wrote me a letter the other day.  The Norman Lear. Yeah, he knows me from Adam! He’s pitching me for some political org.  So I wrote him back.

Dear Norm,

You and the rest of the well-heeled liberal set ignored the effects of the bank bail-out, etc. on a hefty portion of the country. Now, we are all stuck with Trump. Stop worrying about the banks, business, and immigrants and worry a little bit about people who are ALREADY Americans and on the skids, who have given up looking for jobs, etc.

With all due respect, McD

It’s the end of the year and I make it a point to talk back to the people who  richly deserve it.

The Nationwide Ins. made the mistake of sending me their fraud line and email address after they raised my rates almost 10 percent a month this fall. I phoned their fraud hotline to report THEM to themselves.

I have a lot of high profile friends—think Liz Warren & Alec Baldwin--writing my Yahoo account, which I reserve for these high profile folks.  Most fancy themselves tolerant liberals and want me to prove I am too by pitching in.

People, 

Shame on you! We have a secular society, and most respect it by not flaunting private religious symbols in public. When I lived and taught in Turkey, I did not go into the street in Bermuda shorts and tank tops because that is not done there, even in August when it is beastly.

Get your head in the game,(without a headscarf) McD

Good exercise for the Critique Eye if nothing else! Check out my piece on Mom here:  http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/The-Home-Forum/2016/1228/How-Mom-confounded-the-phone-man

Close Call for a Heathen Who Likes to Sing

Was going to church to sing Christmas Eve—honest, I was—but at the last minute ended up with a schedule conflict. In the run-up to the holiday, the weather was so inclemently below zero outdoor caroling was out of the question. Unless we all had fur coats, hats, etc!

There’s the dilemma: While I love carols, which would not exist without the pomp and circumstance of religion, church singing is also deeply disconcerting. What concerns me is that the inequities among the human race are dealt with through the myth, i.e. fecklessly. Major social reformers have not accomplished a lot through religion.

So, much of my life, I have gone to city council far more often than church. I see greater possibility for effectively dealing with inequity there.  However, gradually, especially in the last 30 years, I have seen those possibilities abrogated, ignored, or annulled at all levels of government national, state, and local. The most recent Cascade City Council meeting, case in point.

Thus, America enters a new political era with some of the greatest inequity in its society in the industrialized world. A developer is moving into the White House and I haven’t any greater hopes for him than the one out the road, or the old one that developed the southeast side of down, toasting his buns in Texas while the rest of us deal with the inequities he brought about.

A critical Eye wonders where to look next.

Will America Get a Snoot Full?

You might assert I have abrogated my commitment to this blog, since I have not posted a word to it since August.  In search of a larger audience, this fall I squandered my writing time editing and submitting to national publications.

Regrettably, the only place I scored was to a column in the Christian Science Monitor called “Home Forum” which publishes quaint, down-home tales like “Mom’s Worthless Lots,” the one I sold them. Though that was the first time I sent it out, they snapped it right up! There's a lesson.

And unlike a piece I had far higher hopes for that I submitted to a dozen+ national media outlets called “We Love Our Donald Trumps” describing the Trumpian behavior of several businessmen I knew and/or worked for in the late 70’s and early 80’s, when I was first editor, then publisher of a medical catalog in Denver.

The rejects only reinforce something I already know with 100% plus certainty. Something I see every time I go to city council, pick up a magazine, newspaper, turn on the TV or have any other contact with this society: business is king, considered an asset and businessmen are often low grade heroes. Only from my private, unguarded moments observing businessmen and their ethics, they seem quite the reverse. 

Maybe now that Donald Trump, the apotheosis of the business personality with all its arrogance, privilege and lack of morals and consideration for other people’s legitimate interests is set to take over—maybe now Americans will get a snoot full of business, business people, business’s bottom line ethic and all the rest of it. Maybe this is the year I will get my piece on some prototypical businessmen published.

The Critical Eye is however, not holding it’s breath!

The Essential Olympic Question

Seems the Olympic Spirit is alive and well with the American swimmers who lied to the Rio police about vandalizing a gas station. They claimed they were robbed, but the police had a video of them knocking down a door and harassing a security guard. The day before their antics, the top European Olympic official, Pat Hickey, was arrested in his bathrobe for a ticket scam he was running. This follows the long-standing tradition of Sepp Blatter, for years head of the Olympic Committee who was finally banned a couple years back for taking 1.35 million Pounds under the table. He's been deposed but is still under investigation by the Swiss and American officials for other misbehavior.

This--or any other blog--isn't nearly long enough to recount the history of political payoffs and scandalous behavior of contractors and local officials especially in China and Brazil uprooting and terrorizing poor people in their own countries to build Olympic venues. They are the most vulnerable people and the pain inflicted on them so colossal as to defy the imagination. Ironic, too, because the public money spent on stadiums and pools should be used to help these people.

Of course, the Russian Track & Field Team was not even allowed in--state sponsored doping. And stay tuned, because certainly there will be a dribble of retracted medals when they do retests and other irregularies emerge. But ask yourself: isn't there something diabolical and predictive (of the above) about pitting the finest athletes in the world against each other the way the Olympics does?

Yet people around the world support it, and sports in general, by buying expensive tickets and watching. If you lend your ears and eyes to this highly questionable enterprise, you are essential to keeping it going. So the quintessential Critical Eye Question is: Can you to regard yourself as a moral individual, and support the Olympics with its recent and past history?

A Little Recommendation

Was trying to make a point to someone about the Clinton Administration's financial legislation in 1999 revoking the Glass-Steagall Act, enacted after the Great Depression.

Glass Steagall protected U.S. taxpayers from the greed and avarice of banks for the balance of the 20th Century but of course, not from Savings & Loans, which we had to bail out in the early nineties.

Looking online for info on comparing Glass Steagall and what the Obama Administration managed to replace it with, the Dodd-Frank Act, I discovered this:   

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/08/dodd-frank-versus-glass-steagall-how-do-they-compare/

Pam & Russ Martens, who wrote it, are by no means the only economists insisting that Dodd-Frank doesn’t protect us. The Republican Party platform includes a plank to bring back Glass Steagall  Old Socialists and critical eyes might have to consider voting Republican, now that the Dems, washed out Bernie. Check it out.

Social Media=Better Democracy or Higher Hysteria?

Certainly, the fact that I have not made a post to this blog for 3 months belies some busy days, especially with all the rain lately, but more often I am asking myself what is the point? Especially with social media raging so inanely. 
Yeah, occasionally I go on Facebook, but it feels like group-think and I inherently don't share its values. Despite Google's desperate desire and best efforts to connect all my accounts, devices and computers, I do my best to route friend/relative traffic to my Hotmail account, political and solicitation of all sort (companies) to Yahoo and editors and professional conversations to Gmail.
Every time I open a Yahoo message from Friends of the Earth, the Sanders campaign, or Credo, they want me to sign a petition and forward encouragement to do likewise, to all my friends and relatives. Right.  Sure. Count on it. My friends can figure out what to think/sign for themselves.  They wouldn't be my friends if they couldn't. I am rather lucky in relatives on that score.
The kind of group-think underway in the wake of the Brexit, all things Trump, events in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Minnesota is just what organizers are after.  They want everybody to sign on and endorse their idea or movement before considering the situation. Sometimes on the basis of a tweet.  
A functioning democracy requires if not reflection, at least a little thought. This is the reverse: wild, roaring group hysteria in the internet coliseum

Checking Out of NPR

This morning President Obama asked the country a provocative question: What might you be doing to reinforce the circus the 2016 presidential campaign has become?

As I haven’t had a TV since the mid-80s and now only have Netflix, I had to look to the radio, on which I listen to NPR news, but with which my dissatisfaction has been growing. Initially, NPR was much like BBC: funded almost totally by government and its editors independent of legislators—the way it must be.

The Republicans, I believe, kyboshed that by reducing taxpayer funding, so public radio is forced to hustle money, and as a result has begun pandering to listeners and funders, so we hear far more denatured news, sports and music features.

But it’s the coverage that is truly lacking. NPR and other U.S. organizations gave us “experts” who opined that Donald Trump was a temporary phenomenon, and who, as he won primary after primary, had to admit they were wrong. Trump is not gone; he’s going strong.

These “experts” can’t even help us connect the dots, either. This afternoon, NPR will air report on a drug epidemic in Indiana.  What is the correlation between this and the demise of the middle class, the personal misery it entails, that probably propelled the rise of Donald Trump? Don’t hold your breath to hear.

Most NPR stories are sympathetic to immigration, both in Europe and here. This is where coverage ends.  I want to know the effect of immigration on the whole society. To what extent has it been responsible for demise of American unions? The depressed minimum wage?

There are an abundance of climate change features on NPR, always describing the sea level rise, the effect on a particular animal or area, but never really zeroing in on what we know the is source of it: people.

News organizations seem to have forgotten how to approach a story. Rather than plumb the most neurotic, obsessive or sensational, such as NPR did this morning on the question of obesity, they need to tell us how it affects us all—the whole rest of the society. With more people are insured under Obamacare all of must pay because of the correlation between overweight and medical conditions.

Though I have supported NPR for over 30 years, but lending a critical ear to their coverage, has forced me to refuse to do any longer. Eric Sevareid, where are you when we need you more than ever before?

Eulogizing Mr & Mrs Trickle-Down

Though it would have been the perfect moment to connect the political changes of the last 30 years—notably the progressive dissolution of the American middle class that has resulted in current ugly election campaign—no pundit did so. Rather, it was a round of eulogizing Nancy Reagan when she passed this week: Her contributions to stem cell and Alzheimer’s research were lauded; more embarrassingly, her slavish devotion to Ronald, whose policies precipitated this disaster. Now, incidentally, tearing the Republican Party apart.  

When he died in 2004, Reagan himself, the author of this horror, who espoused free trade, which became NAFTA, supported even by Democratic President Bill Clinton, was praised to the high heavens. We see now what free trade has wrought— the 1% obscenely wealthy, everybody else on the skids, the American Dream undermined, and Americans on the warpath. It hasn’t even helped poor Mexicans that much.

            Not that Mr. Reagan was content to stop there: he opposed universal health care and kept ordinary citizens of the still wealthiest country in the world from having what all other first world and many 3^rd World ones have. He reduced taxes, cut back social services, built up the military, and conned most everybody with his trickle-down and rising boats theories.

            Americans voted for this handsome con man, and despite the damage he did, Ronald Reagan remains one of our most popular presidents. Until we honestly assess this couple and the damage they did to America—which we apparently won’t do it means acknowledging our role in the con, we are not going to come to terms with it.

            No matter how ugly the debates get.

Florida Ironies 2016

     Retirement is the dominant fact of Florida life: most of the people in the street, at the pool, driving cars, in stores, seem to be retired.  You have to wonder what each makes of the overall impact of Boomers on this place. And does it make you feel a tad guilty?

     An NPR report last night that Florida alligators have grown smaller and scrawnier. Scientists blame it on the destruction of the Everglades--nearly damned and diverted out of existence. There is a restoration project underway and El Nino 2016 has helped with additional rain, but they didn't mention the proliferation of boa constrictors, with no natural enemies who have played have havoc with the rabbit, rat, and raccoon populations gators rely on.
     A human-caused problem, naturally, as is most of the rest of what ails the Everglades. Smack in the middle of the state, is a new development called Ave Maria, FL, the handiwork of the owner of Domino's Pizza, who has built a Catholic church and school, a sprawl of houses for young families, condos for seniors, swimming pools (filled with Everglades water), a college, exercise rooms, tennis courts, saunas and a golf course--utterly without irony named "Panther Run!"
     Of course, panthers won't run anyplace near humans. The day we hopped a free trolley for a tour, a jolly pot-bellied guy with a Brooklyn accent drove us around and raved about Mr. Domino & Mr. Collier, a man who bought vast tracks of South Florida for 25 cents an acre and this county was named after.
     These are the men we admire (even if we are ostensibly religious) and while most of the rest of the couples were (I suppose) plotting how to afford a place, so they can swim, sun and sauna, I was just grateful I couldn't. Thinking I would probably right in there participating in the destruction of Florida if I could afford to!


  

What Happened to the "Population Bomb?"

    

One hears endless and eloquent discussion of environmental problems--global warming, sea level rise, air and water quality catastrophes, desertification, shrinking wild animal habitat, species extinction, and chemical pollution from a dizzying variety of sources. Such reports are logical, well-documented, and, when presented on TV or film, breathtaking as well. 

Mysteriously though, none ever mentions the primary reason for this environmental assault: that being the burgeoning human race. It's always a proximate cause that's described and decried--excess carbon monoxide, sewage, mining, burning coal, farming practices, lack of rain, etc.   But ask yourself why are we doing this mining, cesspooling, crop raising, building heating and cooling, car driving and swimming pool-filling? Yes. Us. Me, you and all the rest of us. The world is overrun by the human species, but nobody seems to be able to even articulate it anymore. Much less do anything.

  I had an uncle, may he rest in peace, who thought that fashion and religion were the primary ways the human race arrogated itself: as in, "Well, if Christ died for your sins, you must be something!" It goes without saying, if God gave you dominion over the animals, you must be king of the hill. Turns out that "dominion" is (as so often happens) a mis-translation of a word that should have been rendered as tend, keep, guard, watch over, or even serve, but too late now.

      In spite of the cruel, negligent and occasionally blatantly immoral behavior that characterizes the  human race, a large portion of it is convinced that we are God's handiwork, his best production, his piece de resistance. As far as I know, God has not been contacted for his opinion on this. Nonetheless, some people feel to entitled to procreate as many mini versions of themselves as possible. Some even marry multiple women and fill up dormitories or tents.

           A gander at the top ten countries with almost 50 births per 1,000 inhabitants, shows that with the exception of Afghanistan (38.6), they are all in Africa: Niger (45.4), Mali 44.9, Uganda (43.7), Zambia (42.1), Burkina Faso (42) Malawi (4l.5), Somalia 40.14), Angola (38.7), Mozambique (38.5). The irony of population is it often highest in countries where poverty is highest leading to surfeit of young people who seem to manage to get on the Internet and TV, see lifestyles to which they cannot aspire in their own countries and are understandably discontent.

            There are a couple of other non-surprises in a table found on line at www.cia/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2054rank.html:  The U.S. and China are back-to-back close to the bottom at 12.5 births per 1,000 as are several other European nations--France (12.3), UK (12.2), Australia (12.1)  Norway (12.4),  Sweden (11.9), Belgium (11.4) and Luxembourg (11.3).  Slightly above the middle of the pack are both India (19.5) and Mexico (18.8) along with most of the countries in South America.

Now this is no Modest Proposal, but if we can figure out how to keep the Iranians from getting a nuclear bomb, we ought to be able to figure out what to do to keep certain groups and countries from exploding the Population Bomb. Mysteriously, when I was in college this was reckoned to be a serious issue, one seldom even hears any reference to it

"Je Suis Charlie" Anniversary

Not a jolly one, but we can hardly ignore it. The first week of January 2015, a dozen people were killed in the Paris editorial offices of Charlie Hebdomadaire.

Of late, it seems that every time a couple of my liberal friends assemble, we get onto this issue. As I am perhaps the farthest left of the lot of us—a European-style democratic socialist—I am not insensitive to the eyebrow-raising the apparent glitch of my insisting Muslim women should not be allowed in public wearing headscarves constitutes, but Europe provides us a very useful illustration of how democracy fares on this question.

To “celebrate” the anniversary, watch (on Netflix) a documentary called Je Suis Charlie, which tells the story of the shooting. At the end of the film, one of the intended cartoonist-victims who lived asks this provocative question: “Who is going to risk doing a drawing, if the penalty is death?”

Read the news out of Koeln (Cologne) Germany. It appears that on New Year’s Eve there were informal, unorganized attacks on women by immigrant men, who apparently felt women shouldn’t be out and about celebrating New Years or not.  

What we need to ask ourselves is not simply: Who is going to risk going out, if you might be raped or beaten up? but what should you expect when you offer democracy to people who do not believe in it?  What choices does this leave us—and every other democracy in the world?