IT HAS BEEN A WHILE

It has been a while since my last post.  You get caught in the stress of trying to survive.

My income dropped precipitously in this wonderful free market economy, not that it was substantial to start.  Then at the end of the year my brother committed suicide.  I will never fully comprehend his reasons.

The past year has seen the increase of racial tensions in the United States, or perhaps they just became more obvious.  We had the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the choking death of Eric Garner in New York City.  Both victims were African-American males killed by white cops.  There has been a constant stream of stories of abuse of African-Americans by the police since then.

Terrorism, particularly by fundamentalist members of Islam, has rocked the world.  We've had beheadings of captives.  We had the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  We've had people slaughtered in Nigeria.  We're in the twentieth century, but we could be in the Middle Ages in terms of our progress.  We have people with Medieval beliefs who possess modern weapons.

REMEMBERING BARTCOP

Terry Coppage, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, based blogger, died on March 5 from leukemia.  Mr. Coppage was the author of the website bartcop.com, one of the very best liberal and progressive sites on the Internet.

I first discovered bartcop.com in 2000 when I first ventured onto the Internet.  I bought an iopener, a small device that allowed you Internet access, but not much else.  I had a dial-up connection back then.

Bartcop.com combined humor and outrage to expose the venality and hypocrisy of the political right in the United States.  Mr. Coppage had a unique online personality that allowed some of his personal, as well as political passions, to come through to the reader.  I will never think of tequila, for example, without thinking of bartcop.com, or Bixby corn, or the band Garbage.

THE HIGH FLYING RICH

A day or two ago the San Francisco Chronicle's website sfgate.com had an article about the reporter flying in a private jet to get a taste of how the very rich travel.  These jets cost millions and they ferry the very rich hither and yon where they do the things the very rich do.

A study was just released saying that 85 people at the top of the economic pyramid have as much wealth as the poorest one-half of the world's population.  Then we had some guy on TV saying that he thinks it's fantastic that there is such wealth disparity because it "motivates" people.

The crassness of the very rich and their defenders is almost beyond comprehension.

WE SHOULD GET RID OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

All those years of the Cold War we worried about a nuclear missile attack by the Soviet Union while never really considering the danger of having nuclear weapons in our midst.

Eric Schlosser has written a non-fiction book that is in many ways as terrifying as a Stephen King novel.  

Schlosser reveals that a nuclear device was accidentally dropped over the United States just days after President Kennedy was inaugurated.  We were very close to a nuclear blast.  We've had other incidents when we've come perilously close to a nuclear detonation.

Now we find out that the Air Force has suspended security clearances of 34 missile launch officers for cheating on exams to measure their qualifications and for illegal drug use.  How do you feel about a missile launch officer being high while on duty?

The book is called Command and Control.  Check out this article at Mother Jones at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/interview-eric-schlosser-command-control-nuclear-weapons-accidents.

A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION

I was just observing a forum that has a debate about taxes on the rich.

You usually get a few standard defenses of the status quo.  The rich "earned" their money.  The rich "pay most of the taxes."  I never got a job from a "poor" person.  You generally will also get a few other homilies such as claims the rich create jobs and higher taxes are "job killers."

Why are people defending a system that makes most of us servants to the rich and powerful?  The rich don't give anyone a job because they're benevolent folks with good hearts.  They give someone a job because that person can create a profit and more riches for the rich person.

The rich pay most of the taxes, not because they're treated so grossly unfairly, but because they have most of the money and property.  Just where would people collect taxes to pay for the infrastructure that makes a civilized society possible?  Do you collect it from the people at the bottom who don't have anything?  And who benefits most from the infrastructure we have?  Is it the poor or the people at the top of the wealth pyramid?

The rich "earn" their money because of the collective efforts of lots of other people who make it possible.  And a good part of what they "earn" is  interest and other perks that come with having lots of money.  They aren't earning it by hard work or creativity.

There's nothing wrong with people having wealth if that wealth is created honestly and with integrity.  There is something very wrong with a system that exploits the majority of the people for the benefit of a few.

A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION

Happy New Year.  And let's hope we can make some progress against the forces of darkness this year.  It has always been a struggle and progress has been achieved with considerable pain.  We've come a long way, but there is a long way to go.

I've been reading a book called The War of the World by Niall Ferguson.  It's pretty heavy reading at times.  He talks about the mass atrocities that occurred during the 20th century, which included pogroms against the Jews in Russia,  the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks, the barbarity of Josef Stalin, and the Holocaust conducted by Nazi Germany.

I hadn't thought about it, but Hitler got many of his ideas about eugenics from laws that existed in the United States.  For years and years interracial marriage was actually illegal in many parts of the United States.

Ferguson notes that forty-one states used eugenic categories to restrict marriages of the mentally ill.  Twenty-seven states even had laws mandating sterilization for some categories of people.

In many ways the United States has been the light of the world, but we have some dark blotches in our history.

A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION

I watch a lot of old TV shows from the 50's and 60's.  In shows like Leave It to Beaver the family is happy and middle class.  The mother is a stay at home mother, the dad wears a nice suit, they have a nice two story home and a late model car, and life goes pretty smoothly.

We know that Leave It to Beaver wasn't real life.  It didn't show racial segregation or poverty or the mind-numbing existence of working in an office or factory.  But what is sad is that the working life has gotten worse since the Leave It to Beaver days.

Treaties like NAFTA were supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.  It was an achievement for all those people who pound their chests and yodel in praise of the free market.  But the free market exacts an awful price on working people.  It is capital seeking the cheapest labor and the cheapest resources to make the maximum profit for corporations and the very rich.

It means salaries and wages have eroded.  It means worker rights have decreased.  It means security has become just a memory.  It means being a cog in the great free market machine, ready to be discarded in a moment.

More to come