Citizens’ Call June 2011
an e-mag on citizen information
Republican Economics
Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen
The only people who should be excited about Republican economics are some dead economists who can’t vote.
Republicans ran up the national debt with tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens, a needless war in Iraq, and support for an almost unregulated banking establishments that squandered trillions of dollars of wealth. Now they are proposing debt solutions that take it out on Medicare patients and that slash health, education, social services, alternative energy, and every other remotely useful program.
Even wealthy CEO’s and high-paid investment speculators need to notice that Republican economics will lead to the destruction of the economy that has so unfairly rewarded them. Taking money from struggling citizens who have to spend it and giving it to those who don’t need to spend it does not stimulate the economy. Trickle-down economics is an illusion. Republicans actually favor trickle-up economics. Theirs is an economics of downright thieving from middle and lower classes.
Of course money isn’t everything. Republicans also promise to pamper your racism and religious bigotry. If you don’t like a brown-faced president and want to believe Obama was born in Kenya, some Republican people-pleasers have pretended to agree with you on that weird story. Or if you think that your religious beliefs have to be forced into the bedrooms and doctor’s offices of people who dare to believe differently than you, some Republicans have made a career of pretending to agree with you on that bit of old-world theocracy.
Or how about this one? Some Republicans pretend to support you in the illusion that this country of immigrants should shut its doors to Central American workers and potential immigrants in order to preserve an American culture that has never existed.
Even if you don’t believe that money is everything, most of your Republican politicians do. All the questionable social issues that may or may not interest you actually mean nothing to most Republican office holders. They are only interested in money for their wealthy supporters. Money is indeed everything for them. All else is subterfuge and downright lying to get your votes.
How can can we ordinary voters put up with Republican lying about Medicare in order to enrich some health insurance companies, lying about global warming in order to enrich some oil and coal companies, lying about banking practices in order to protect greedy bankers and speculators, lying about Democratic candidates in order to give their mostly incompetent money-pushers a chance at the polls?
So is there any reason for an ordinary Fannin county voter to vote Republican? None at all.
Shall we believe the fiction that Democrats are just a bad as Republicans? Democrats are not perfect, that is certainly true. From my perspective their deepest flaws have to do with going along too much with Republican nonsense. But in general, Democratic office holders (minus some bad apples) are concerned for the well-being of ordinary citizens, the rescue of the U.S. Economy from its worst warpings, the forging of an honorable foreign policy, and an openness to hear from you and me on how they can serve us better. I for one have a lot to say about that. Some Democrats at least listen.
If I am exaggerating about how badly Republicans are lying to us, it is only because there are a few libertarian Republicans who actually believe that government should let the corporate money handlers do whatever they want unimpeded by big government regulations. They honestly claim, it seems, that everything will work out gloriously if we just let the free-market solve everything with its supply and demand magic. But this magic is not as wondrous as claimed, and besides that we do not have free markets. We have markets controlled by the biggest money pools. So we might as well laugh the honest libertarians out of the conversation and get down to business on how to regulate businesses so that businesses serve the pubic good rather than the biggest pocketbooks.
Basically, I am calling upon all citizens to throw out every Republican office holder and never vote for another until Republicans clean up their act. We can deal with the cowardly and half-hearted Democrats after that. This is a democracy. Citizens count. It is way past time for we ordinary citizens to actually be counted.
How Can We Solve the Jobs Crisis?
by Sarah van Gelder
Excerpts from
Yes Magazine
May 11, 2011
At a time when millions of Americans are without work, the political debate has taken a bizarre turn. Instead of discussing how to make the public investments necessary to get Americans back to work, the political right has used the deficit “crisis” to push for cuts in workers’ rights and pay, without explaining how the economy can recover if potential consumers are too poor to buy anything.
What we need is livelihoods, fairness, and ecological sustainability, which together is our best bet for an economy that can support American families.
There are millions of people with talents, skills, and the desire to work. There is a backlog of work that needs doing: people who need food, homes, and education; communities that need bike lanes, rapid transit, renewable and reliable sources of energy, and rebuilt bridges and water systems. There are empty factories and offices, natural resources, and skilled workers ready to pitch in.
The problem is not that we’re broke. It’s that transnational corporations and the extremely wealthy have captured federal government decision-making, skewing policies to allow the exhaustion of the Earth and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of billionaires, while undermining job security for everyone else. Government money floods into unstable big banks and financial institutions, while small businesses, homeowners, state and local governments are left to sink or swim on their own.
Creating sustainable jobs will require restructuring our economy to more equitably share the work and wealth of this country, without destroying the foundation of all economies—the natural world.
So What Can We Do Right Here in Fannin County?
By Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen
We need to vote Democratic, but more. We need to challenge the lies being told in our local newspapers, churches, public meetings, and casual conversations. Politics is a matter of understanding some basic things about our common life and talking about them. We do not need to adapt to the foolishness around us into order to elect somebody. We need to change the foolishness so that the population can elect and support the leadership we need. Let us keep thinking about how this can be done. This is the CALL to Fannin CITIZENS.
Is Horrific Weather Related to Global Warming?
By Gene Marshall
Bonham Citizen
No particular hurricane, tornado, drought, or flood can be directly tied to your car driving or your electric power plant, but it remains true that the rising average temperature of the planet is caused by fossil-fuel burning and that a higher average temperature on Earth makes weather events more extreme and more frequent. Global warming results are already happening. What we are experiencing was set in motions decades ago. And our current fossil-fuel use will produce even more unwelcome results for our grandchildren.
For a more detailed discussion of this important matter here are a few paragraphs from Bill McKibben:
A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!
By Bill McKibben
Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.
It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.
If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.
It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.
Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?
Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.
It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.
Bill McKibben is founder of the global climate campaign 350.org and a distinguished scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont.
No comments:
Post a Comment