Why
vote for President Obama in 2012?
(Click image to enter President Obama's official web site!)
Let
me just count the reasons why!
I used
to be a classic “swing voter.”
I have cast votes in the past for members of both the Democratic Party
and the Republican Party. My first vote for president was for Ronald
Reagan, when I was young and clueless. Why? Just because I liked his
character (a dumb reason to vote for someone, but that’s a swing voter
for you!). I then voted for George Herbert Walker Bush. Why? Because I
read his lips and took him at his word that he would not allow new
taxes to be imposed on the American public (fat lot of good that vote
did me!). Then, sick of empty Republican promises, I voted for Clinton.
Then I voted for Clinton again. Then I voted for Al Gore (I thought).
Then I voted for George W. his second term. Why? Fear – the #1 thing
that conservatives exploit to try to change hearts and minds among
political independents, conservative Democrats and “DINOs” (Democrats
in Name Only, like former Senator Ben Nelson, and the ones in New York who
stupidly voted to replace Anthony Weiner with a tea-bag Republican). I
was afraid of the terrorists from September 11th and I thought that the
best people for kicking their butts would be the conservatives. But
nothing really seemed to get done by George W. and his administration,
except a prolonged war in Iraq at great cost to the country. So I voted
for President Obama – I have proudly preserved the “I voted” sticker I
got from the poll-workers that day.
The Free Market.
Conservatives hang on tenaciously to a terribly
distorted, fantasy view of how a free market should operate. Let’s face
it, they think that they’re America’s primary money-makers, so they
think it should be easier for them to make more and more money here.
They are always pushing for an evermore, deregulated, free-market
theory of economics for this country. But what happens when you have
little-to-no governmental supervision of businesses in commerce? The
Sherman Anti-Trust Act! Ronald Reagan started a devastating
downward
spiral of deregulation in commerce in this country that provides
incentive to grossly bulk up CEOs’ paychecks to the sacrifice of hiring
new workers in the U.S. and putting money back into U.S. product
development, as was the case all the way up to the 1980s when we had a much healthier economy, and it finally culminated in the
atom-bomb burst of the housing market towards the end of George W.
Bush’s reign which poisoned our economy with a “Great Recession” that
will surely continue to impact us for a long time to come. We have seen
time and time again that an unregulated market results in commercial
predators ripping people off and forming monopolies that send the costs
of goods and services skyrocketing. Though it’s far from perfect, I
support the health-care-reform legislation passed during President
Obama’s watch, primarily because it was designed, in part, to rein in
the greedy, U.S. health-insurance industry that overrides doctors’
opinions and refuses to provide coverage for what doctors prescribe and
recommend so that those insurance rip-off mongers can make more than
just a buck off the rest of us. In the past, that kind of greed on
their parts has led to inhumane suffering and even death, as we learned
at the health-care, town-hall meeting sponsored by our congresswoman
before passage of the bill.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (“OPEC”) is a great
example of the result of a lack of regulation of commerce that is
costing us money needlessly. Because we cannot illegalize or otherwise
control their unfair oil monopoly, they are free to artificially
manipulate the price of abundant fossil fuel for their own pecuniary
gain. A free market is a good thing that works, but it can only go so
far before human nature takes over and starts hurting people in the
name of profiteering. It’s not “punishing” highly-successful people, as
Mitt Romney puts it, to regulate greedy profiteering. It’s making sure
that they do not hurt you and everyone else in their mad pursuit to
make more and more money at all of our expense. There must be
sufficient oversight of commerce. We know that our founding fathers
realized this because they inserted the “Commerce Clause” into the U.S.
Constitution which allows Congress to pretty much regulate any type of
business it wants to that takes place in this country.
The less-fortunate
and people in need.
Most, if not all conservatives
in this country oppose Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare
and other government assistance for the less fortunate in our America
(but they don’t mind getting their
monthly Social-Security retirement
checks, do they?). Most of them seem to think that everyone is equally
blessed with skills, abilities, strengths, aptitude and good fortune,
and that enormous entitlements above and beyond the nation’s ability to
pay are being given to lazy free-loaders who, if they would only pull
themselves up by the boot-straps, could do just as well as the rest of
us. (Former Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain, summed up and
confirmed their collective mentality in this regard when, in reaction
to the Occupy-Wall-Street movement, he stated to reporters: “Don’t
blame Wall Street, don’t blame the banks if you don’t have a job and
you’re not rich! Blame yourself!” What an ignorant, callous remark!) My
17+ years of practicing law and helping people who have fallen down on
their luck tell a vividly-different story! I have personally assisted
too many good people over the years who have suffered unforeseeable
medical emergencies, family violence, divorce, loss of jobs, death of
family and other situations, like drug addiction and alcoholism, that
arise through no fault of their own which result in homelessness and
hunger that have driven many of them to apply for government assistance
and to visit food pantries (and most of them have done so quite
reluctantly).
It seems like we must force people in this country to do the right
thing sometimes when it comes to people who are less fortunate than the
rest of us. We have the Americans with Disabilities Act because our
society had to be forced by law to accommodate people in wheelchairs
and who have other disabilities because people in our society did not
want to voluntarily shell out the money to help the disabled have a
fair and equal shot at getting around and living in this country as
people who are blessed with full, physical abilities, strengths and
good fortune. And simple genetics means that not all of us are
intelligent, healthy and able to make our own way in the world. Some
people genuinely need help and it is cruel, immoral and uncivilized of
us as the world’s leading developed nation not to provide help for the
unfortunate of our nation when we are fully capable of doing so. The
founding fathers realized this, too – they inserted Article I, Sec. 8
into the U.S. Constitution that says, among other things, that Congress
shall have the power to provide for the general welfare of the United
States – really, go look it up yourself! But many conservatives
among us do not want any money to be paid out even from the coffers of
the ultra-rich in this country in order to alleviate social inequities
and hardships. (Billionaire Warren Buffet, who has advocated for taxing
the super-wealthy in this country more, is my HERO!) Conservatives have
always railed against raising taxes, in part because they do not want
to have to pay anything to support the less-fortunate in our society
because they believe in the myth of the “American dream” and that
anybody can achieve anything that they want to here if they just put
their minds and muscles to it (incidentally, the modern concept of the
“American dream” was started, not so much as a corner stone of our
nation’s birth by the founding fathers, as so many conservatives think,
but many decades after the nation’s founding by immigrants to the U.S.
in the 19th Century – go look that up, too)! If the right-wing, fantasy
version of the American "dream" were actually true, you can bet that
I’d be in Warren Buffet’s billionaire club. I do admit that the welfare
system in this country has been seriously abused in the past. But did
you know that together, AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children)
and Food Stamps are by far the largest items of the welfare budget and,
in 1992 (when welfare fraud was at a peak in this country), AFDC formed
only 1% of the combined state and federal budgets? Food stamps also
only took up a measly 1% (source: Library of Congress, Congressional
Research Service, "Cash and Noncash Benefits for Persons with Limited
Income: Eligibility Rules, Recipient and Expenditure Data, FY 1990-92,"
Report 93-832 EPW and earlier reports). A study in Massachusetts showed
that vendors committed 93% of welfare fraud. This aspect of the welfare
system drastically needs reform because it’s harming recipients as well
as taxpayers. But all of the political attention is on limiting the
amount of money going to recipients. And, although the fraud by welfare
vendors is atrocious, it’s nothing compared to the burdens on the
American taxpayer posed by military fraud, government waste, and
corporate welfare (according to the conservative Heritage Foundation,
government could save $20 billion a year by eliminating just three
dozen corporate giveaways). The Savings and Loan bailout alone cost 132
billion dollars!
Back in the ‘80s, Ronald Reagan threw all the mentally handicapped out
on the streets by ending federal funding of mental-health care
programs, and we have had an exponential increase in homeless, “walking
wounded” out on our streets since federal money for their care was
nixed by him. Liberal opinion holds him out to have been a good
speaker, but not the national hero that conservatives make him out to
be – do not forget the illegal Iran-Contra scandal that Reagan denied
he knew anything about (sure he did!), and keep in mind that he should
not be given any credit for bringing European communism to an end,
after all; a Polish shipyard-union leader and Pope John Paul II are the ones
who ultimately prevailed over European communism. So what was so great
about Reagan? Looking back, I can’t think of a single thing. In fact,
what does come to mind more often than not about Reagan was his utter refusal to act in the face of the AIDS epidemic, when being HIV+
usually led to full-blown AIDS and a certain death sentence for not
only gays, but people who contracted it from blood transfusions and
falling victim to cheating spouses who contracted it from prostitutes
and heterosexual love affairs, and passed it on. I also remember him
pronouncing the word liberal like it was some kind of racial epithet.
That was not cool.
And, speaking of “walking wounded,” I’ve never seen so many
people walking around with such sad expressions on their faces and
looking completely lost in this recovering economy. Nobody smiles
hardly anymore, it seems. While stopped at a traffic light a few months ago, a
young gal walked past my car to the other side of the street – she was
crying; tears ran down her cheeks. My heart went out to her, and the
image has been haunting me ever since. I prayed for her. I pray
for all of them. And I blame Republican politics over the past 30 years
for creating the economic conditions that are surely contributing to
all this new, human fall-out now.
Socialism is not a dirty word,
especially in a modern world governed by
the enlightened and compassionate. Look at Scandinavia - those
countries are all socialist with well-regulated, free-market economies
that thrive. They have some of the happiest, healthiest people on earth
living in those countries! Too bad that 100% of conservatives in this
country are socially illiterate and automatically equate the word
socialism with communism.
What have Republicans done for this
country?
As I just mentioned, they
have always railed against higher taxes. But when have they ever done
anything about the U.S. tax code? When Republican presidents have had a
Republican majority in both houses of Congress (George W., for
example), why did they not totally revamp the tax code, as they have
always been saying they would like to do? They always promised not to
raise taxes, but they always end up doing so (“Read my lips!” Right?).
All those promises that they have no business making have given rise to
the obstructionist tea-bag movement among them now. George W. just gave
us all a measly $300 tax refund. That was stupid! He inherited a budget
surplus from Democratic President Bill Clinton and completely
squandered it with an illegal war that he arguably started for personal
reasons in Iraq and by giving away the country’s tax revenue in the
form of small rebates to us. Republicans just can’t get anything
meaningful done. They blasted President Obama and the
Democratically-held House and Senate for being able to get their act
together and push the health-care legislation through. They were
obviously jealous that the Democrats got something on their agenda
done. And Republicans said that they had a better health-care plan all
along. Really? Where was it when they were in charge of everything and
had their chance to introduce a health-care reform bill? Please. It’s
obvious that Republicans would never try to put more checks and
balances on the crooked health-insurance industry – there’s just too
much money being made through it.
Maintaining good health is a fundamental, human right
(like conservatives view gun ownership), and not something to profit
from. But that’s how the conservatives seem to want to treat the issue
of Americans’ health – as something that should be up for grabs for
free-market profiteers. It’s a disgusting position for conservatives to
take, and I unequivocally reject it, along with millions of other
liberals and independents.
My Republican father-in-law (whom I do love and respect very much,
except for his misguided political views, of course) asked me what
President Obama has done for this country. My answer: He has done
more for liberals and independents in less than one term than Reagan or
George W. did for conservatives in two terms, and that Nixon did in his
1½! In less than a single term as president so far, President Obama (1)
finally got a law passed that reforms health care and the health-care
insurance industry for us, (2) he saved our economy from going from the
Great Recession to another Great Depression after the housing bubble
that was the direct result of Republican deregulation over the years
popped, (3) he finally made it okay for gays and lesbians to serve
openly in our military, like so many other proud, modern nations do,
(4) he greatly improved the international image of the United States by
winning a Nobel Prize after idiotic-sounding George W. trashed the
country’s reputation abroad (and I know this first-hand from traveling
abroad and speaking with people overseas), (5) he’s an
intelligent-sounding, Ivy-league constitutional scholar - literally -
who got two fair Justices appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court who will
help balance it more to the center, and (6) he did something that I
fully expected the Republicans would do, but utterly failed to do – he
had the courage to make the tough, risky decision that allowed his
Democratic administration, with the help of a few of our military’s
very finest, to kill Osama Bin Laden for all of us, liberals,
independents and conservatives alike. Then he caused to have killed American-born,
radical-Muslim, terrorist-traitor cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki hiding out in
Yemen whom the Bush-era Republicans couldn’t get at to save their
lives. Thank you, President Obama (and no liberal or independent I know
buys Dick Cheney’s claim that W.’s administration had an early hand in
killing Bin Laden for which they deserve credit – that’s just B.S., so
don’t you be dumb enough to buy it, too)! Of course, my dad-in-law
would not let me finish this list because he threw a hissy-fit and
walked off before I could tell it all to him (it was like a scene
straight out of All in the Family!).
Republican presidents come off as
stupid.
All right, I admit that this
part is largely just an opinion that I share with countless liberals:
With the exceptions of Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and
Arizona’s Senator John McCain (Sarah Palin not
included), the
Republicans keep nominating and voting for people in more recent times
for president who are, despite their lofty educational degrees, very
inarticulate and who, frankly, seem dumb. Remember Vice-President Quail
(who had a law degree) and “potatos”? I refused to vote again for
George Bush, Sr. because he refused to dump Quail the second time
around (he made me too ashamed of our government to give him another
term)! George W. always came off as a country bumpkin and made some
really stupid decisions (i.e., Iraq War against his savvier father’s
advice and guidance). And then they were all hot for Rick Perry? He’s
was referred to by the media as “Bush 2.0” because, you have to admit,
he looks and sounds just like the impersonation of George W. by former
SNL cast member, Will Ferrell. And just look at some of the other
former, Republican front-runners: When asked by reporters during her
run for
vice-president with Senator McCain if she could describe the “Bush
Doctrine,” Sarah Palin could not explain that, basically, it was to
strategically preempt terrorism with military action in other
countries. Come on – any Republican candidate for any office, let alone
vice-president, should have gotten that one at least close to right.
Michelle Bachman? Another lawyer who claims to have a lot of
experience working in tax law for the IRS – this was debunked by a
number of her former colleagues who worked with her at that IRS office
in Minnesota who told National Public Radio in the summer of 2011 that
she was hardly in the office due to her family obligations, and that
she was the least-knowledgeable and least-skilled of their attorneys
(because she got her first law degree from a bottom-tier,
Christian-fundamentalist college, she had to get a Master-of-Laws
degree from a better school so she could actually go to work in the
legal sector)! Besides trying to make people catch on to saying
“one-term president” to describe President Obama, she railed furiously
against “big government” handing out jobs and entitlements. But she has
very hypocritically subsisted off of one government job or hand-out
after another herself for most of her adult life (long-time,
foster-parent benefits from the State of Minnesota, IRS job with
federal paycheck, Minnesota-Congresswoman job with federal paycheck,
significant federal subsidies for the farm she owns together with her
bigoted, anti-gay doctor-husband who set up a clinic program in
Minnesota to “cure” gays with Bible teachings)! She had classic,
Republican foot-in-mouth syndrome BIG TIME. So much so that her
popularity quickly dissipated among conservative voters in polls taken
so far during the 2011 Republican debates to the point she sank
to the bottom rung of the Republican contenders and was ousted from the
process. Pity –
President Obama could have debated her clear out of the picture for the
2012
win!
I openly wept when I watched Richard Nixon’s funeral on TV. Why? Not
because I admired him or thought he was a great man – it was because because he went
to his grave with impunity for his shameful, embarrassing criminal
conduct while president. What’s the worst thing a Democratic president
has done? Clinton allegedly got a blow-job in the Oval Office. That’s
not exactly a felony, like Nixon finally admitted to having committed
in the end when cornered back in ‘77 by reporter, David Frost.
“Big government.”
Republicans constantly bemoan our supposed “big
government.” Let’s do the math: supportingevidence.com cites
“[i]n the mid-1960s government employment rose rapidly from about 6.5%
of the population to about 7.75% and has remained generally level
through 2006.” This number, as a percentage of the entire U.S.
population working for federal, state and local government, which
includes both full- and part-time, is pretty consistent with other
statistical sources. So, taking 7.75% of the 2010 U.S. population of
308,745,538 = 23,927,779.19. So, only about twenty-four million people
running federal and state/local government for over three-hundred
million people is bloated? Really? Really???
Give me a break – that’s
an absurd, twisted and very warped way to think!
And government is actually shrinking as of the time of this writing.
Conservatives basically don’t want any of their tax-dollars going to
support a government that serves as a huge employment agency for people
who regulate their businesses. They say they’re all about jobs
creation, but they don’t want government providing badly-needed jobs to
our people? But the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported in September of 2011: “Government employment
continued to trend down over the month (-17,000). Despite the
return of about 22,000 workers from a partial government shutdown in
Minnesota, employment in state government changed little in August
(+5,000). Employment in local government continued to decline. Since
employment peaked in September 2008, local government has lost 550,000
jobs.” In September of 2011, the conservative blog, Business Insider,
described the following characterization of public-sector, governmental
employment by the Center for Economic and Policy Research as defining a
“bloated” government-employment situation:
“In a recent report, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
found that state and local government employees pay a wage penalty of
about four percent for working in the public sector, relative to those
at the same age and education level in the private sector. In the “raw”
data – that is before controlling for age and education – state and
local government workers appeared to earn about 13 percent more than
private-sector workers. But, state and local workers are, on average,
about four years older than private-sector workers and half have a
four-year college-degree or more, compared to less than 30 percent in
the private sector. Once these differences in age and education are
factored in, state and local public workers earn less, not more, than
their private-sector counterparts. But what about benefits?”
And, yes, what about the benefits? If you want to attract the brightest
and most talented people to work at lower rates of pay in the
government sector, you must offer handsome benefits. It’s that simple,
unless you want the least-talented, least-educated people in society
running our government. It’s a no-brainer. But, of course, untalented,
uneducated people running the government would be the ones who would
utterly fail to regulate commerce, and the conservatives would then be
able to get away with ripping people off and trashing the environment
all they want to for bringing in more and more profits. Ah, the
American Dream!
Jobs.
Conservatives insist that giving lots of tax-breaks to big, fat,
rich corporations and the wealthiest Americans who can certainly afford
to pick up more of their fair share of the cost of running this country
will create new jobs. Oh, really? Then why have so many of those
conservative-owned/operated American businesses outsourced valuable
jobs to India and China over the years? Where are the jobs that they’re
creating in the U.S.? Long-time eBay C.E.O., Meg Whitman, ran for
governor of California in 2009 on the Republican ticket. EBay is guilty
of outsourcing lots of valuable, customer-support positions to call
centers in the Philippines. Go ahead and see for yourself by calling
eBay customer support. Though you can call eBay’s direct,
customer-service number - (866) 540-3229 - I have better luck
getting around their automated, runaround nonsense to eBay live support
people by calling PayPal customer support in Omaha at (402) 935-2050 to
get directed to eBay’s Philipino call centers (just ignore PayPal’s
auto-system when it asks you to enter the last four digits of your
Social Security or telephone number; frequently say "AGENT" over and over to get a
live person to help you)! If you want to speak with American eBay
service people to avoid struggling to try to understand the Philipino
eBay staff members to whom eBay is giving away those precious American
jobs, then you have to ask to be directed to their “Trust & Safety”
staff in Salt Lake City. And, even though their primary call center
appears to have been outsourced to the Philippines, just try getting a
hold of eBay customer support after midnight (good luck with that)!
Boycott eBay - they suck (I know lots of Americans who would love to
have one of those jobs in the Philippines)!
They’re not about creating jobs in this country unless it fattens their
pocketbooks. I and most liberals and independents I know have no
problem with anybody making a fair and reasonable profit in this
country. But when the bottom line dictates decisions that put Americans
out of work, I and most liberals and independents I know draw the line.
They don’t care about you, just their bottom line, and that’s not how
it should be in the U.S. So, after 30 years of following the
Republicans’ philosophy that giving hefty tax incentives to the super
wealthy and big corporations will produce jobs for the working class,
where are the jobs??? The answer: There are no jobs produced from this
failed tinkle-down, economic philosophy. It has now solidly and
undeniably proven itself to be a loser idea. The super wealthy and
fat-cat corporations are sitting on their money, rather than creating
jobs with it in this country. That’s now obvious in this slowly-recovering
economy when we need them to start popping for some jobs for us here.
FEAR MONGERING.
As I mentioned at the start, fear is the #1 thing
conservatives are using as a tool to drive more people into their
ranks. Glen Beck has got to be the worst - and craziest - offender of
them all (and to think I used to call myself a Libertarian, like him!). Throughout the country,
radio talk-shows are dominated by conservatives who complain
incessantly about anything they can and continuously instill fear in
their audiences relative to social-political issues, promoting a
conservative, political agenda. Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and “Dr.” Laura
think the
sky is falling because of fast-and-loose (i.e., progressive), liberal
ideas and policies! They make ignorant, scared Americans even more
ignorant of things they do not know and/or understand, and that makes
them even more afraid which, in turn, brings them to support
conservative politicians who promise to save them from unstable and
dangerous liberal progressives who want to throw their money away on
lazy free-loaders, throw the borders open to every Tom, Dick and
terrorist, and who want to take all of rocker Ted Nugent’s rifles and
hunting gear away so he cannot defend himself from the criminal element
in the Michigan countryside where he lives and shoots things. It’s just that simple. It’s just that crazy. I suppose
they are what they think is the answer to what they perceive to be a
liberally-biased, national news media. But they only serve to epitomize
the Republican Party as the “Party of No,” the “Republican’ts.”
No high-speed rail between Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and Minneapolis,
which would provide jobs and also enable transportation-disabled people
trapped in the inner-cities to take jobs outside their areas. No
commuter-rail service between Milwaukee and its neighboring counties
with all their conservative, white suburbs so that Milwaukee’s
inner-city minorities have broader job prospects. No! No! No! I recall
one of my wife’s conservative relatives who lives out in the suburbs
complaining one holiday about plans by Wal-Mart to build a super store
in their area and how it would bring all of “them” into the area. I
asked what she meant by “them,” and, without waiting for an answer
(because I knew good and well that she was talking about minorities
from Milwaukee), I told her not to worry because “they” already have
their own Wal-Mart super store in the ‘hood and that “they” wouldn’t
even be able to travel to her neck of the woods in the first place! You
know, I love all my in-laws to death, but that seemed uncomfortably
racist to me, though I’m sure she’s not a racist (I hope she’s not,
anyway).
Conservatives are
“pro-life,” except when it comes to executing
possibly-innocent, fully-grown people.
Refusing to follow Liberal
Illinois’ moratorium on all executions due to terrible flaws in the
American justice system, Georgia’s Republican governor refused to stay
the execution of Troy Davis on September 22, 2011, despite the fact
that there was no DNA evidence, nor any direct physical evidence at all
supporting the jury’s flawed verdict. Additionally, nine (9) witnesses
recanted their trial testimony. Of course, the conservative District
Attorney told reporters that he wouldn’t be surprised if slick
defense-team manipulators hadn’t gotten to those witnesses and talked
them into recanting (this, even though he never produced any to come
forward). And this is what most conservatives stand for, even though they claim to be
“pro-life,” fundamentalist Christians? Can you say H -Y- P - O - C - R -
I - T - S? Thank God I live and practice law in a state that has no death
penalty because I really am
pro-life (though I do not buy in to forcing
a 14-year-old incest victim to risk her own health, sanity and, not to
mention her very life, by having an in-bred baby)!
Profit before
ecological caution and preservation.
The Environmental
Protection Agency (the "EPA") is just the Republican money-makers’
worst nightmare,
isn’t it? That’s because conservatives insist on being able to
make money at the risk of destroying peoples’ water resources and
species of animals that, once gone, are gone forever. On the subject of
global warming, none of them want to believe it’s happening because,
were it to end up being accepted by everybody as a rock-solid fact, it
would eat in to fuel-industry and other profits that are making some of
them fat and happy at the expense of the rest of us. Failed, Republican
presidential nominee, Rck Perry, stated in the 2011 debates that the
science of
global warming is unsettled and, therefore, no money should be risked
or wasted on it. Jobs in the petro-chemical industry should not be
risked at efforts on this nation’s part to do its fair share in
controlling the effects of pollution on global warming. So, Republicans
harp continuously on being responsible to the next generation by not
leaving it with a fiscal nightmare to pay off, but they do not believe
that it's right and moral to leave them with a stable, clean planet to
live on? Even if the concept of global warming is
scientifically unsettled, are we to completely ignore it, as Rick Perry
advocates? It’s an unreasonable position conservatives take when not
even
considering whether a balance can be obtained between both interests
(that’s what politicians are supposed to do, after all). The planet is
slowly warming up above normal, past temperatures – water levels in the
oceans are rising because the polar ice caps are melting, and this is
endangering sovereign, island nations friendly to the U.S. by eating
away at their territory (the Maldives off the southwestern coast if
India, for example). That’s a fact, and something out there is causing
it. I am convinced by the science that I have seen so far that it may
be because of a naturally reoccurring warming trend on our planet in
combination with a rise in fossil-fuel pollution. I do not, however,
believe that it’s all our fault – the pollution build-up from all the
black, raw coal that got burned to warm peoples’ houses in the former
Communist East Block in Europe, and poorly regulated industry pollution
in India and China are far more to blame! But I believe that we, as the
United States of America, need to spear-head efforts to get it under
control and, as has been the case in the past, set an example for
countries like India and China. At the very same time that those
Republican debates were taking place in 2011, unprecedented wild-fires
burned and burned across huge swaths of Governor Perry’s Texas like
never before in history while Texas soundly broke past temperature
records with three-digit-degree heat. Hmmm . . . I wonder what is
causing all those record-breaking, high temperatures and unprecedented
fires to rage so out of control like that? Hmmm . . .
The “T.E.A.” in
Tea Party stands for “Taxed Enough Already.”
Okay, I
agree. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that I probably pay far more in
taxes than most tea-baggers do. But being solely obstructionist, even
to the “normal” members of the Republican Party who want to get
something done, will not get our taxes lowered (but it did get our
country’s credit rating lowered from being best to second-best by at
least one credit-rating agency – good going, tea-baggers!). There’s
simply no negotiating with them. The pity is that their impossible
attitude is starting to infect the rest of the Republican Party. It’s
their way or the highway. Period. And their way simply is
not feasible because steep budget cuts cannot be solely relied on to
reduce the deficit or government debt – there must be an increase in
revenue, too! Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy were only supposed to be
temporary, but conservatives keep pushing to keep them in place,
eliminating a steady source of national revenue that the government had
always had in place before Bush. The tea-baggers are falsely misleading
the American public by recklessly mischaracterizing the badly-needed
reinstatement of that old source of national income as “raising taxes.”
But it’s futile trying to talk any logical sense into their heads with
the heightened level of tunnel vision from which they’re suffering. A
vote for them is a wasted vote.
Again, I pay extremely high income tax every year. As a
solo-practitioner attorney, I am treated as being self-employed by the
tax code. That means I must pick up my entire share of my
Social-Security contribution, FICA, etc. I usually make six figures a year, but
I pay Uncle Sam and the State of Wisconsin almost 40% of it as income tax. I am in a veritable
catch-22 hell with my income taxes. The more I make, the more I have to
pay in taxes and the less I actually end up with! I have always been
angry as hell about it, and I have voted for Republicans in the past in
the hopes that they would finally take care of it, as they have been
droning on and on they would. George W. did absolutely nothing for me
in this regard.
And now some Republicans are pushing to reduce and/or eliminate the
Social-Security benefits that I have coming to me for my retirement
from all the money I’ve paid into it!? It appears that I will
continue to suffer the highest tax burden possible in this country for
the foreseeable future. That being the case, I want and I will need the
socialist benefits that the Social-Security system was designed to
provide me and my wife. Democrats are never dumb enough to touch the
Social-Security “sacred cow,” like Republicans are now doing. Sorry,
but W. was the last chance they had of ever getting another Republican
vote out of me!
Occupy Wall
Street.
“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the banks if
you don’t have a job and you’re not rich! Blame yourself!” No, Mr.
Cain, we blame you Republicans who have been deregulating the economy
to the point that it is now trashed and people are losing their jobs,
their homes and their hope for the future of this country. People who
lost their jobs and homes in the Great Recession, and young people who
cannot find jobs out of school, who are sickened by the fact that banks
and Wall Street got huge bail-outs after ripping them off or otherwise
economically exploiting them for so long are voicing their opposition
to it all. The pity of it is that the fat cats on Wall Street and who
were running the banks had to be bailed out because they were free and
unregulated to the extent that they were able to very cleverly engineer
the country’s finances such that our economy has become inextricably
intertwined with their institutions. Letting them fail with no
bail-outs would be tantamount to letting our economy fail. See what
deregulation of mortgage lending resulted in? The housing bubble
grew and grew due to their institutions lending huge sums of money to
financially unstable people so they could buy homes that they simply
could not afford. Now, why would those banks lend huge sums of money
for mortgages to people who could not afford them? So they could take
advantage of making a fast buck off of historically low federal
interest rates (the Fed lowered its interest rate to 1%, and that was
like free money to the banks to manipulate for their profit).
Thankfully, it is now like it used to be before so much deregulation. A
potential mortgage borrower’s income and credit-worthiness must be
actually verified in a long-form lending procedure, and a down-payment
is required, before a mortgage loan will be granted.
In my law practice, I have seen immoral and illegal lending practices
by mortgage brokers. I remember mortgage brokers in federal criminal
cases in the 1990s who routinely used correction fluid to white-out
information on short-form applications that potential borrowers filled
in before pushing the applications through to the lenders who, more
often than not, were encouraging those immoral, illegal practices.
Incomes were not verified. Often, borrowers did not understand that
they would be paying a certain amount in monthly mortgage payments, but
that the amount would drastically rise after three to five years, and
that they would need to refinance in a timely manner to prevent that
from happening. It was only when we went to refinance our mortgage in
order to take advantage of lowering interest rates that I discovered
that our mortgage payments would increase drastically in less than a
year, even though we did not take out an “ARM” (adjustable-rate
mortgage) loan – we had been sold some weird, risky hybrid mortgage
product thought up by the banks to make more money that our broker
represented to us was a fixed, 30-year loan! (Now, you know that I read
everything very carefully, ever since I failed to read what the
recruiters had me sign back in the ‘80s and I ended up in the army for
most of that decade – and even my legal training and experience did not
enable me to figure out the true nature of our first mortgage until it
was almost too late). So, if it could happen to us, it could happen to
anybody. Many people who got those loans that they could not afford are
walking away from the properties because the banks won’t refinance them
now. So now they’re walking away from the properties and occupying Wall
Street. Conservative commentators, like Fox’s John Stossel, sternly
condemn that practice, insisting that it’s immoral and wrong. But even
more immoral and illegal (not just wrong) bank-lending practices led to
all the walk-aways. John Stossel really needed to take a closer look at
the situation and think about it a little more before running his mouth
on Fox news. I used to actually respect him back in the day. So much
for that!
And what became of all those crap mortgage and other loans? The banks
“bundled” them (i.e., hid them) in loan-packages with loan-accounts
that would get paid by the few people who actually could afford them,
and sold the packages off as derivatives to investors, like the
investors who are in charge of peoples’ retirement funds. Why would
they buy investment bundles containing crappy, worthless loans that
were never going to be repaid? Because Wall Street rating agencies, who
were getting paid by those banks who originated the crap derivatives,
gave them gold-standard, AAA ratings. Then the bank chiefs convinced
the federal regulatory commission which was at one time charged with
regulating how much banks can borrow to change the rules and let the
banks determine their own borrowing limits. Without sufficient
oversight, they started to leverage obscene amounts of debt, which
included the crap loans that they knew were never going to get repaid
by all those ineligible borrowers to whom they gave the money. The rest
is history – those bankers paying themselves outrageously huge sums of
cash pulled off the biggest financial scam in the history of the world
with, as it turns out, total impunity. So no, Mr. Cain, we blame the
greedy people running the banks, not the banks themselves! That’s why
Wall Street finds itself occupied by the 99%.
Conservative
Xenophobia.
It seems as if most, if not all conservatives
seem to be awfully afraid of people from other countries, don’t they?
This, despite the fact that America has the history and world-wide
reputation of being built, populated and maintained by immigrants to
our shores (even Native Americans have been genetically linked to the
people of Mongolia, so they, too, migrated here from another continent
long, long ago). The famous poem on the Statue of Liberty proclaims, in
part “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these,
the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden
door!” Then why the big argument to build a Berlin-style wall
along the border with Mexico? Why all the discussion among
conservatives about restricting immigration and even cash-generating
tourist visas into this country? To Rick Perry’s credit, he
sanctioned giving college scholarships to the children of illegal
immigrants in Texas. I know Newt Gingrich has travelled abroad and
enlightened himself first-hand through travel over seas about other
cultures and other peoples (he’s been to Greece), but do
Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman even have a passport? Like me and the
Mrs., Rick Perry has been to Israel. But it appears as if he only
travelled there because of his fundamentalist, Christian beliefs and
not because he wanted to enlighten his cultural knowledge and
experience!
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah
and Colorado were all once part of Mexico.
The U.S. invaded Mexico
before the Civil War, militarily occupied Mexico City, and held a
proverbial gun to the Mexicans’ heads, forcing them to “sell” us half
their country (the land which comprises those states) against their
will (Arizona doesn't want its schools teaching these historical facts
the its children of Mexican herirtage)! Spanish is actually one
of the two official languages
(along with English) of the State of New Mexico. So nobody in this
country should bitch about having to press #1 for English on the
telephone, and everybody in this country should at least make an
attempt to study Spanish!
Liberals need to
consistently vote.
I believe that liberals far
outnumber conservatives in this country at this time in history. The
reason Republicans keep getting elected is because liberals do not have
the same cohesion as conservatives once had, before the advent of the Tea Party. They are not as well organized as
conservatives used to be, and they are not lock-step in their political thinking,
like most conservatives have been in the recent past. And they don’t always vote! They
don’t always vote because they know they outnumber conservatives and
they think enough other liberals will go vote such that it will take
care of business for them. Wrong.
We can occupy Wall Street until the
cows come home, but we also need to exercise our right to vote or it’s
all for nothing!
I have faith that, eventually, politics in this country will inevitably
take an irreversible turn to the left, as is the case in Europe, by
virtue of sheer numbers of liberals which increase every year. I’m
living proof of the increase, and I’m voting for President Obama again.
My dad-in-law told me that there’s not a living Democrat for whom he
would vote. Well, there’s not a Republican/conservative, living or
dead, for whom I would ever vote (again)! Democrats have complained in
the past that their party is too differing in opinions and not cohesive
enough to get things done. But that’s not exactly what I saw when they
held majorities in both the House and Senate under Obama – they didn’t
exactly kick ass and take names, but they got it done! They got
something of significance accomplished for America. I think the
Republicans are going to be in deep doo-doo in the 2012 election cycle,
but it doesn’t matter how deep the doo-doo is unless liberals come
together and get out the vote for President Obama.
Here in Wisconsin,
our dysfunctional electorate made the sorry mistake
of voting for a college drop-out for governor by the
narrowest of margins, not exactly giving him a mandate to
do whatever conservatives want to in this state. But he just doesn’t
get that (he is a college drop-out, after all) and charged forward to
ride rough-shod with his Republican legislature anyway over government
unions, teachers and others in the name of balancing the budget,
insisting over greatly-differing opinions by reasonable, educated
people that the state is absolutely “broke.” It is no secret at all
that Scott Walker, a career, right-wing politician who is, for the time
being, this state's governor, has never liked unions and used an
imaginary budget crisis as a pretext to start busting them here. It’s
that obvious. He belligerently laughed off furious public outrage that
resulted from it, until he lost his Republican majority in the state senate
who supported his 2011 agenda in recall elections. Since he lost a majority in our state Senate, he’s adopted the occasional use
of the word bi-partisan.
Republicans then used the recall
elections as an excuse to stall the legislature for some reason.
Democrats also faced recall elections along with them (none of them
lost their seats, however), but they were not heard to complain at all
that the recall elections had so impacted things that they could not
start back to work right away afterwards. Walker is now
facing a recall election himself this year. Right-wing
organizations are running propaganda ads on TV
here, and they even were in anticipation of the recall effort.
Republicans in the state
senate tried to introduce a bill that would derail the recall-election
process right away, but Senator Schultz, Republican, District 17, put
his foot down and firmly pledged that he does not think that this
change is necessary and will not support the bill. Thank you,
Senator Schultz, for being reasonable and
accomplishing in our state what Washington, D.C. badly needs -
bi-partisan functionality!
On October 17, 2011, I heard liberal radio and TV
personality/commentator, Ed Schultz, say that he was, more or less,
enthralled by Wisconsin’s movement against Scott Walker and his
Wisconsin Republicans, citing the protest movement that basically
occupied Wisconsin’s capitol the summer of 2011 as the source and
inspiration of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. But I think he’s
wrong. I think that this movement actually started in Spain, not in the
United States (we just gave it the “Occupy Wall Street” name). In May
of 2011, we spent a couple of weeks in Spain. Protesters
were camping out and occupying the city-centers of Madrid, Barcelona,
Valencia and Seville. They started it because they were initially the
ones hit the hardest by U.S. banks and their international banking
partners going belly up and needing to get bailed out by their
governments. Spain’s youth were experiencing a 40% rate of unemployment
when we were visiting. Our country and its crooked,
hugely-unregulated financial sector is partially to blame for that.
The occupiers in lower Manhattan were seen carrying signs and were
heard chanting on the nightly news in the fall of 2011:
“What does democracy look like!? This is what it looks
like!”
Pass the link to this page along to liberals and independents, and vote for President Obama in 2012!
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Thank you!