Teachers' Unions, Special Interest, Corporate Welfare and The Taxpayer.

We are at a very interesting place in this country right now because of the public discourse on so many social and fiscal issues and the increasingly apparent reality that we are becoming an impoverished nation. Despite efforts in the last twenty years to let free market systems drive down consumer prices through competition, to improve the quality of health care by shifting Medicare beneficiaries into the private insurance market, and all the supposed benefits of lower tax rates, our country has become poorer, further behind and less educated with each passing day. So what's the problem? The problem is that the myth that free-market capitalism and an economy driven by it benefits all the people who live in and depend upon that economy.

It is just a fact that the programs that have allowed the largest number of people to climb out of poverty, which helped create a middle class, that made this country strong in the aftermath of economic catastrophe and war during the early twentieth century were pro-labor and progressive programs built upon socialist philosophies. While corporate elite and the culture of conservatism have used the examples of dictatorships having no real relation to socialist philosophies to define those philosophies and the people who espouse them as radical, our country has benefited and come to depend upon socialism in order to thrive.

When I say progressive and pro-labor programs I mean labor unions, which are largely responsible for child labor laws, a forty hour work weak, health and retirement benefits, etc., Social Security, Medicare, and let's not forget about it, the Public School System. These are programs built on the idea that all people should be considered equal not just as political entities when it comes to voting, but as political entities in the way they are represented in labor disputes, in access to education and to opportunities that allow them to live out of poverty. They are built upon the principle that if you do work hard that you have the right to benefit with compensation and a right to improve your quality of life.

Public School especially is meant to everyone in this country to have access to an education no matter their background. Public schools were started as a means of giving people the opportunity to better their circumstances in the face of overwhelming disparities between them and those who control the environment of their labor. As our country has become increasingly diverse and as our population has grown the school system has become an increasing financial burden on the government and an increasingly complex system to manage. It has also been one of the most difficult fields to work in because while everyone demands quality education, they do not seem interested in making a legitimate commitment to financially and morally supporting those who those upon whom those demands are made.

Teachers have an incredibly difficult job. Not only has our culture become hostile towards education, and children raised in an environment of disrespect for the education system or for the need for and benefits of an education, but the responsibilities of teachers have increased with the increasing rates of poverty and stress in home environments. The conversation then becomes one of poorly performing teachers, of course which distracts from the many other issues plaguing the education system, not the least of which are the peripheral social issues that impact it so greatly. We see the effects of these peripheral issues so poignantly when we look at the disparity between the schools in poorer urban neighborhoods and those in wealthy suburbs. Somehow that comparison gets removed from the broader discourse as conservative politicians see an easy target for necessary spending cuts to offset their policies of tax cuts.

It is basic economics that you cannot spend more than you take in or you get a deficit. So the question becomes either 'why are you spending so much' or 'why aren't you making enough'. With conservative politics and politicians setting the tone of the discourse for the entire field of politics basically for the last thirty years, we have been stuck on that first question, and with the idea that somehow we have to cut out 'unnecessary' spending in order to sustain a healthy economy. One of the major problems with that is what is deemed unnecessary are always social programs that benefit the majority of the population. The reason for this is that it is politically expedient for a political movement in which evangelical Christianity partnered with corporate interests for the sake of overcoming the political party actually concerned with the general welfare of working people.

Because Scott Walker is trying to bust public unions, and because it has been the vanguard of a movement by conservative politicians throughout the Great Lakes region and elsewhere, it has constantly been in the news. Recent polls say that the majority of people in Wisconsin as well as the majority of people in this country favor unions and collective bargaining rights. This is in spite of the fact that the governor and his colleagues have made a vociferous case to their citizens of blaming public workers, who are of course part of the evil big government conspiracy to control the lives of regular people. This is a symptom, of course, of the 'big government' versus 'little government' argument and that somehow smaller government translates to greater financial security for the individual.

The problem with that is that most Americans depend on and take for granted the things that larger government provides, such as fixing roads and providing emergency services, not to mention Social Security and Medicare. The people most dependent on Social Security, the people it was initially set up to benefit, were the people without the means to save for their own eventual retirement. This is still true. People who depend most on the program are those whose jobs didn't offer pensions or retirement accounts and who weren't able to invest in a retirement plan on their own. Many Americans fall into this category. Something similar is true for Medicare where the beneficiaries are mostly people who no longer work and receive health benefits from their employer and who can't afford or don't qualify for private insurance. Ironically, in 2010 when polls were exploring the phenomenon of the Tea Party, those two programs were the two things people absolutely refused to give up or take cuts in. In fact they thought we should see increases in these programs. Those programs make up two-thirds of the national budget.

Corporations, however, don't have any interest in the public welfare or social programs. Because they are entities whose purpose is to make money, because they benefit from an uneducated population that can be paid little and either don't know they have potential for higher compensation or the right to ask for it, and because they need targets for cutting spending to offset their lack of tax responsibility, public employees and especially teachers become easy targets. One of the arguments, though, has some merit, since an employer needs to be financially stable in order to provide jobs and pay salaries and benefits.

Because of the economic crisis this has been difficult. Because corporations seek greater and greater gains each quarter and regard that as a mark for the health of their companies, especially when it is a signal to investors as to whether to invest in the company or not, they need to find ways to cut costs as a means of boosting profits. If a company can't do that in one area they may move to another area, and that means that large corporations can threaten to leave a state and that threat is real because they have the leverage of many jobs to use against politicians. Because we've created an economy dependent on large publicly financed corporations rather than a diversified base of private companies we have allowed them to dictate the terms of their own regulation and legal responsibilities. We don't hold them accountable at all for making threats like this, nor for cutting and running when they see they can make more money by moving somewhere else.

Thus Republicans can make the argument that tax cuts for corporations are necessary, that they create or retain jobs, along with their general ideology of lower taxes all in concert with shrinking government. A necessary component of this is cutting spending, then. Public sector employees are a politically expedient sacrifice on both fronts, and especially teachers since education of children is a very emotional issue for most people and the quality of education in our country has been seen as a problem for some time. Dissatisfied parents then vote for people who identify the teachers as the problem with the system since teachers are for parents the most immediate face of the system.

The overall disaster with all of this is that education suffers when teachers are laid off and class sizes increase. That means fewer students succeed and then fewer become productive and skilled workers and our general labor force and the citizenry as a whole becomes less educated. Less educated people make fewer demands for their own rights and welfare and thus perpetuate a system where they are taken advantage of for the benefit of someone else. Usually this results in a small, very wealthy population, and a large portion of the population who are poor, without much in between.

Because our population is aging, and the bulge in the population are people of the 'baby boomer' generation, I can understand why Social Security and Medicare are such priorities and how the rhetoric of 'cutting taxes' in the interest of saving more money is attractive. The question is, are you really saving more money when you have lower taxes? Does it really benefit you and your community?

Average wages for the general work force who earn less than $250K has only risen by 2% over the last thirty years, while the average earnings for those above that mark have skyrocketed. All this time prices have increased everywhere. There is an incredible amount of financial burden placed on consumers and the shrinking Middle Class. Especially in the past ten years this has been during a time when we have supposedly been benefiting from the savings of tax cuts. So when are those benefits going to kick in?

In a free market system tax cuts are the answer to everything. But if a business can save more money via tax cuts why would they hire more people? Especially if they are a company which produces nothing except financial instruments like investments that don't exist except on paper and are almost entirely the province of the already wealthy? In a free market system competition is supposed to be able to solve the problems in the health care industry, by driving down insurance premiums and improving the quality of care, but the goal of the insurance industry is not to pay out benefits, but to make money. It only benefits when people are paying their premiums and when fewer and fewer people can afford private insurance where there is no collective ability to choose among competitors for the best price, they will have to raise the cost of premiums to cover that loss.

Plus, we have already seen deregulation of industries, such as the banking industry, and the result was a melt-down of our economy. financial institutions took on high risk investments with high yields because they made money very quickly. The same was true before the Great Depression in the credit industry. That is why those regulations that were more recently loosened were put in place. Loosening them was supposed to help stimulate business and give corporations the opportunity to create more jobs, but in the meantime we've seen not just manufacturing jobs go away. Many of us have seen the call-center and customer service jobs disappear as well over the last ten or fifteen years. Manufacturing has been disappearing for decades, but those white-collar jobs that were staples for college graduates everywhere are gone now too, and they are not coming back.

Corporations don't have an interest in creating jobs. Because their shills, who are mostly Republicans, have dominated the discourse over the last thirty years, they have been allowed to dictate to us the means by which we govern ourselves. The conflict comes when we are asked to make noticeable sacrifices and when those sacrifices infringe on values so fundamental that they are nearly universal. These values may not be expressed in the same way by all people, but they are realized in programs like Social Security, Medicare and Public Education. We should refuse to accept sacrifices when it comes to education.

The question shouldn't then be 'why are we spending so much'. The question is, why aren't we taking in enough? And I'm not talking about income tax, that just puts more of the burden on individual citizens. The question is, and especially after the financial meltdown that brought to light the staggering amounts of money made by financial institutions and corporations, why aren't corporations putting in their fair share. Most corporations have philanthropic divisions that do good work in helping to support communities, but for the most profitable businesses, that money isn't much more than PR to cover up the lack of real investment by many of companies in the communities of consumers they sell their products to. It means nothing to a corporation that hands out $10 million or even $100 million a year when their end of year profits are in the $10's of billions over and above whatever expenditures they take on, including that philanthropy.

To ask them to shoulder some of the tax burden for programs that most Americans depend on doesn't amount to a big sacrifice. Getting them to pay up when so many Americans have voted in ignorance for the party that greedily takes advantage of the money of those corporate interests is something else entirely.

The Conservative 'Reality', or Facts v. 'facts'

There is a real problem in the news and political discourse today. There is what Rachel Maddow calls a 'self contained conservative media universe'. It's no secret that have a deep brain-love for Rachel Maddow, and although I don't trust her implicitly, she is in my opinion the most reliable pundit anywhere on the air. Now I'm a huge fan of Anderson Cooper and some others, but as a pundit, even with the clear political perspective with which she presents new stories, no one is as faithful to checking facts, to correcting herself when she gets it wrong, and despite having a clear progressive opinion she gives as fair of an interview as anyone on the air anywhere.

So, when I listen to Real Time with Bill Maher and she is on the panel I get excited. When, however, the guest who was a Republican strategist and Washington Post columnist calls one of Ronald Reagan's economic advisors a lapsed Republican, that is disturbing and a problem. It goes a long way to show how comically irrational the politics of the party has gotten. What maybe even more disturbing, and a trend that may have been going on since politics began, is the use of completely different statistics and facts by opposing sides of the political discourse. While facts from the Huffington Post or Salon.com may be questionable because of the habit of those two news organizations for using propaganda. When Rachel uses facts, however, and they are clearly verifiable and from relatively non-partisan groups like the Congressional Budget Office, and then someone refutes those facts, denies them, calls them illegitimate, that is a problem. Using different statistics, citing different polls, that is one thing. Claiming completely different numbers as from the same source is a problem.

It is incredibly irresponsible and completely unacceptable for members of legitimate media outlets to use erroneous facts or making up facts of their own undermines the entire arena of discourse. We cannot have any kind of discussion which results in solutions, nothing constructive and only rhetorical clashing if there are no facts that are considered solid, and specifically when there are no sources above dispute when their facts support one side or another. With Rachel, at least, I have seen her support conservative positions and respecting facts that dispute positions some consider progressive positions. When sources are delegitimized just because they are sources cited by Rachel or other progressives, then there is no way to have dialog.

Something that deeply angers and frustrates me is that the 'false equivalency', when conservatives represent their lack of action against the dangerous elements of their political parties as equivalent to the lack of action among progressive or liberal political parties. The same things happen when we discuss campaign funding, saying there is just as much if not more money funneling into Democratic campaigns as there is funneling to Republicans. That is just not true. The facts are not true, and we can see it in ways that don't revolve around the party reporting figures, we can track the actual spending of the campaigns, we can also track the ad space in print, radio or on television airing conservative ads. Moreover they identify themselves as victims of attacks from the left, they claim that they are seeking collaborative efforts and bipartisan conversation, but when you watch where their positions are, they refuse to budge, refuse to compromise, and refuse to even have discussions unless their opponents compromise their position or agree to major concessions before discussion can begin. That is not compromise. We saw it with a number of aspects of the health care legislation, and even more obviously in the tax debate.

Do we have rhetoric on all sides, yes. Is the rhetoric as vitriolic on all sides, perhaps. Is there a side whose media representatives are clearly more interested in reporting on and representing true facts, empirical data, and true realities, yes, and it's not the side that sides with FOX News or Republicans.

Took a hiatus now back with a vengeance: IA & Gay Marriage, Republicans & Rape, Republicans & Green Energy,

It's been a while since I have posted, but now I'm back with things to say. Rather than posting individual topical posts, I'm going to go through the gamut in one, so here goes:

Iowa's legislature has voted by large margins to pass a constitutional amendment, which will now go before the voters, to ban all same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnership laws within that state. There are a whole host of reasons that this is a problem, not the least of which was because the supreme court decision in that state that legalized same-sex marriage resulted in a hateful and bigoted campaign that successfully removed three of its justices from the bench during the last election. More than that, Iowa is at times a progressive state. It voted for Obama in both the primary and in the general election in 2008. It is also a neighboring state of my own home state of Minnesota. The LGBT community had hoped that the legalization of gay marriage in that state signaled a shift in politics on the issue. Of course those radical social conservatives who helped fuel the sweeping election of Republicans into Congress also ran one of the most hateful and disgusting campaigns in recent memory against it, and managed to inspire fear in enough Iowans that they voted out three state supreme court justices, including the chief justice.

There is a silver lining on the way, I think, with the federal suit against Prop 8 which will hopefully clear the appellate court soon. That case, I believe, will sweep away all legislation throughout the country that bans same-sex marriage. It is also a case that brilliantly and articulately presents the case for the legalization of same-sex marriage, proving arguments against it to be irrational by definition and to not be substantive legal arguments. That alone, the case built against Prop 8, is enough to make the suit worthwhile, and advocates across the country should be including language used in the briefs and arguments made by the lawyers for the case to rebut and repudiate all those who are virulently pushing for discrimination. Studies have shown that children raised by gay parents suffer no harmful effects because of their parent's orientation. Moreover, children raised by lesbians are statistically more likely to be successful in school and psychologically stable than either those raised by gay men or by heterosexual couples. That is proof that the argument for child safety is not based on fact or sound reason, i.e. irrational. It is also irrational to argue that the principle purpose for the civil contract of marriage is procreation and that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry because they cannot procreate. Not only is that not true, it does nothing to inhibit individual's actual reproductive capability, but it also calls into question the millions of couples who either choose to not have children or are unable to have children.

In addition, the speech delivered by Zach Wahl eloquently identifies the amendment as outright discrimination. His speech illustrates the unequivocal similarities between gay married couples in committed relationships and their families, and those families of married heterosexual couples. He provides an example of at least one family where the same-sex parents raised a successful, motivated, and intelligent child who is likely to succeed in life and plainly states that he was sure if he was the child of one of those legislators at the hearing, that they would be just as proud of him as his mothers were. It is an illustration of how the amendment then calls into question whether the families of same-sex couples are real families, and also tells them they are not as worthy of either full citizenship or legal recognition. He points out that voting for the amendment was truly and inarguably a vote for discrimination.

The next thing that I wanted to talk about was the recent abortion legislation presented in Congress. Rachel Maddow pointed out some time ago, before the elections, how the large number of high profile Republican candidates this last cycle who expressly did not support the exception to outlawing abortion in cases of rape or incest was evidence of how radical the shift in conservative politics was. That used to be the standard tagline, the moderating factor to a candidates otherwise staunchly right-wing stance on abortion. Now it has become part of the standard for the social conservatives that took over the Tea Party from whatever actual independents were out there. Everyone talked about taxes this past cycle, but the fact remains that the electorate, and specifically the Tea Party cowed Republican Party, advanced radical social conservative politics in a historic way.

Now the legislation proposed seeks to end federal funding of abortions through social programs such as Medicaid, limiting the definition of rape to 'forcible rape'. Those who are victims of statutory rape, then, do not qualify for funds. It also forbids use of federal tax benefits, such as the pre-tax money set aside in an account for medical purposes. The implications of this are broad, especially in cases of date-rape or spousal rape by a married partner. I have no doubt in my mind that if they could erase the incest exception as well, they would do so. In spite of the rhetoric from progressive women's groups for the last twenty years about threats to Roe v. Wade, Republicans are ideologically at the point where they feel they have a referendum approving their efforts to make that a reality.

Update: The Republicans have now removed the language that classified only certain types of rape as part of their 'no federal funding for abortions' bill. It is also important to note that actual abortions are less than ten percent of their actual activity. Also, there was already legislation in place that made federal funding for 'abortion' illegal. The funding received by Planned Parenthood was for the purpose of and used for many other health services provided to women, especially to minorities and the poor.

In spite of the rhetoric from Republicans that their first priority would be jobs and debt has proven a lie. Their priority, the bills they've put for first, have been about health care and abortion. Once more the discussion about health care can shift from the idiotic rhetoric about death panels and constitutionality toward discussing the real issues that went into shaping that legislation. We can discuss the quality of care, we can discuss the price of care, the price of insurance, qualifying for insurance or qualifying for keeping their insurance rather than being denied coverage or having coverage being cancelled because of illness. We finally are able to discuss coverage for children and health care options for families struggling financially.

The Republican Congress and moreover the Republican attorneys general and governors are turning away federal money meant to help implement the changes, some of which was money meant for state social services. So, here's the problem: What are they going to do instead? Let's say that the constitutional question goes their way and the health care legislation is overturned altogether. What are their ideas and what are they going to do to address the staggering costs of health care? I just listened to Real Time With Bill Maher and somewhere in the last couple shows the conservative, a Republican strategist, said ideally the government wouldn't have anything to do with paying for health care, meaning cutting Medicare and Medicaid altogether, and even businesses wouldn't have to offer insurance and individuals would have to buy insurance directly from providers out of pocket.

My answer to that last is, What? Really? Has that strategist every had to try and get health insurance out of pocket? I was lucky to sign up for insurance during a push a few years ago when BlueCross BlueShield was offering options to try and get twenty-somethings on insurance. Before that, however, I was on Cobra after losing my insurance from my employer. That insurance was $450+ dollars a month for insurance I payed less than $100 for while insured threw work. That premium was also low because I was a single person. For someone over the age of forty, for anyone trying to carry kids on their Cobra policy, that price becomes staggering. So, really? A party who is against any government regulation, will they just rely on the good will and altruism of insurance companies to offer low premiums and make sure that people are going to get the care they paid into and quality care?

If anyone thought that or thinks that Republicans are at all interested in the middle class or saving America from economic disaster, can you really gloss over these things? I'll deal with the 'facts' v. reality in another post. That's it for now, though.

Southern Poverty Law Center, Family Research Council and the Rhetoric of Hate

Recently the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization with its roots in the civil rights struggles of the African American community published a list of organizations it identified as hate groups. These groups were actually added to an already existing list compiled by the SPLC which was made up of white supremacist organizations like the KKK. Included was the organization the Family Research Council, which has since fired back at the SPLC by saying they are simply representing Christian values and a perspective shared by the majority of Americans. This is in fact patently false.

It is important to recognize the nature of the FRC and its activities. They are known among many mainstream groups as a far-right advocacy organization that specializes in two issues, gay rights and abortion. Not only is the information they put out not widely considered legitimate research, but they are known to in fact be heavily committed and involved in political campaigns. Most recently they partnered with the National Organization for Marriage, who themselves are widely recognized for their far-right political views, in committing a virulent and riotously bigoted campaign to vote out of office the three justices of the Iowa Supreme Court who were up for election this past November. Those justices included the chief justice and were part of a unanimous decision by the nine judge panel that LGBT citizens in Iowa were constitutionally endowed with the right to marriage. They have since been very public about their intentions to continue their crusade in the next election cycle until all of the justices who participated in that decision are removed from office. I say committed a campaign because the campaign against these three justices was not only fraught with the use of the most virulent and bigoted rhetoric against members of the LGBT community, but it also included outright harassment of those justices by members of their organizations, which were summarily recorded on video and circulated on the internet.

While the rhetoric of the FRC is presented as 'research' which has been somehow independently vetted and verified, it is nothing but that, rhetoric. This far-right organization does their best to present a public face of reasonableness and rationality in the media, however it only takes a cursory investigation to see the depth of bigotry ingrained in their message. All of this is while representing themselves as tolerant Christians who are not anti-gay, but merely seeking to protect the welfare of children and society through the institution of marriage.

The research and statements of this organization are actually categorically false and the list of organizations or news outlets who present them as even remotely possible is short and telling. Recently FOX News interviewed Tony Perkins, the president of the organization, in response to the SPLC's labeling of them as a hate group and he firmly declares that organization as a far-left fringe group desperately trying to hold on to being relevant when their leftist platform of promoting a homosexual agenda is losing soundly, as represented in the last election, he alleges. Not only is this not true, but it presenting a lie as fact to a large portion of the public who watch FOX News and consider it a legitimate news organization.

The Facts:

According to a 2009 USA Today/Gallup poll, while the majority of Americans are opposed to gay marriage, those numbers swing dramatically when you consider how they break down, with 60% of people under the age of 30 thinking gay marriages should be legally recognized and have the same rights and status as heterosexual marriage. The majority of self-identified liberals and moderates support gay marriage, with only self-identified conservatives representing an overwhelming majority against gay marriage.

While the country remains split pretty evenly on the issue of gay-marriage, recent polls show that the majority of Americans do believe that there should be some sort of legal recognition for same-sex couples, including legal rights and protections similar or equal to those of heterosexuals. It is interesting, however, to note that while those polls are pretty evenly split in general, Republicans and self-identified conservatives still strongly oppose gay marriage.

The country, though, isn't evenly split over the issues of LGBT people serving openly in the military. That same page on PollingReport.com shows that the majority, ranging from two-thirds to three-fourths, of Americans believe gay people should be able to serve openly and would vote for open service if it was on a ballot.

So, when the FRC represents themselves as being in step with even a large number of Americans, they are either lying, or they are really referring only to self-identified conservatives. Even among those conservatives, or among Republicans, polled there isn't a unanimous consensus. This is the same fallacy touted by pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and even Bill O'Rielly. These people state as fact that the 'liberals', or according to O'Reilly the 'leftist pinheads', are losing this imaginary culture war they have concocted over the years. To them it is just an easily recognizable truth that their political ideology is the majority opinion, which means that they have the right to impose it on all of us by encoding it into law, and that somehow because they believe they are a part of the majority that that somehow makes them right and that the reasoning behind those opinions are factual and moral truth.

Here is the truth: In another ten to twenty years same-sex marriage will be a reality in this country. In fact if the court case against Prop 8 continues on to the US Supreme Court and is successful there, which is the inevitable ruling if it is ruled on its merits, then gay marriage will be a reality in this country far sooner. As far as I know, the striking down of a state constitutional amendment, which Prop 8 was, by the SCOTUS would then overturn all of the laws, statutes, and constitutional amendments set in to law across this country. While this may create an outcry among people for a host of reasons and would, of course, be labeled as legislating from the bench or judicial advocacy by the right-wing, and then likely thought of as that by much of the rest of the country, within a short period of time it would become a non-issue, as it has in MA. In that state, despite all of the anti-gay energy poured in, the constitutional amendment did not make it through the legislative process in time to stop marriage licenses from being issued and then has subsequently, since 2004, not been a serious ballot issue. Once the majority of Americans see how much of a non-issue gay marriage will be in their daily lives, how it will in fact not significantly impact their freedom of religion or the operations of their churches, and how it won't lead to the indoctrination of their children by public schools, all of the uproar will go away and any continued opposition will be relegated to the far-right fringe, as has opposition to legalized abortion.

In conclusion, there is a reason that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the Family Research Council, among other anti-gay organizations, as a hate-group. Despite the exterior it likes to present of a moderate Christian organization devoted to researching issues related to families and its positions and research suggesting that civil rights for gay people somehow negatively impacts society, it is actually a far-right organization who are motivated by continuing to impose their religious doctrine on our political process. One need not look past the rhetoric used in their campaigns, in their literature, and its political affiliations to see that. They raise money for the purpose of affecting public policy through political campaigns and do so with rhetoric that the majority of Americans, as evidenced by legitimate polling data, disagree with, and I would assert would be disgusted by. For any news organization to represent them as anything but a conservative, if not arch-conservative far-right, political organization is both a lie and an injustice to the majority of Americans. An organization that presents them as a reasonable and rational contributor to our political process and its discourse truly identifies that organization, or news channel, as part of or pandering to that far-right fringe.

If We Don't Have Science, What Do We Have

The Republican representatives up for chairmanship of the energy committee, as far as I know the only large committee dealing directly with environmental protection and climate change on a regular basis, are of course all global warming deniers. That's not a shock when all the new incoming representatives are deniers. These senior representatives, however, are in a place to drastically affect all policy regarding protection of the environment and energy policy and that should be disturbing to most Americans. At least one of them has said that if he gets the chairmanship he is going to have extensive hearings into 'climategate', the fake controversy over some snarky comments made by a climate scientist via emails, a controversy dug up and fabricated by the conservative media universe and especially FOX. They are determined to have hearings exposing, essentially, the fraud of global climate change.

This poses a serious risk to all of us, to our way of life and to the long-term health and national security of this nation. One key area of impact, for example, is the way Congress deals with and supports renewable energy. It will not be long before most developed nations will have cut their use of fossil fuels to where their needs will be satisfied by domestic production because of their development of renewable resources and green technology. In that scenario, we will be in major competition with nations in the processing of developing for those resources and will have become irrelevant in the global debate over the industrial and technological production of green solutions and environmental protection. Moreover it indicates to me a shocking disregard for the future welfare of our children, something that has at least rhetorically been so important to conservatives.

Overall, though, this indicates a disturbing and dangerous disregard and disdain for science and scientific reasoning. This goes along in some ways with my previous post regarding the demonization of education and the educated. It is a major problem for us as a nation if we decide that a major branch of science, one of the central branches in fact, which is Biology and the environmental sciences that arise from it, is irrelevant and inconclusive. There are in fact few credible scientists who disagree with the basic statement that man-made greenhouse gasses are at least partly responsible for the phenomena called climate change as an effect of global warming. The assertion of those on the conservative side of politics and especially the media have made the argument that many credible scientists who would argue with the science of global warming don't do so publicly for political reasons and because of the pressure they're under from the leftist green movement. Really?

Now, it baffles me why science as related to weapons and energy development is trustworthy to politicians yet the similar types of reasoning when applied to global warming is not. If nuclear technology and science is credible and rock solid science, why aren't the principles of thermodynamics as related to geophysics and climatology? In a similar way, why is the field of genetics, especially in relation to the work being done to cure cancer and treat diseases like Alzheimer's, so inarguable yet evolution, the basis and instigator for the study of genetics, is not?

All we have in terms of the ability to observe, measure and interact with the world around us, including the environment, is based on similar principles of scientific reasoning and analysis. They are based on the principles of skepticism and a desire to find empirical data and facts to support hypothesis and theory. If we cannot rely on these principles and the outcomes from them, than we are lost and America will never again be the scientific and technological leader we once were. If we cannot pursue policy that even our most scientifically ignorant president in recent memory, George W Bush, has come to believe is important, policy that is based on scientific knowledge agreed upon by 151 other nations who signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990's, that we are doomed to diminish and eventually become a wasteland of pollution and ignorance.

Surviving Republican

Dear Republican Party:


You have won back the House of Representatives in an election year rife with unrest over the economy and jobs. To do so, however, you activated the farthest reaches of the right wing electorate and by doing so gave legitimacy to a kind of crass disregard for truth and facts that is outright dangerous for this countries future. Even more than that you have given legitimacy to candidates and a movement that actively spurn the value of education and being or becoming educated. You have demonized and marginalized large groups of minority voters, minorities who statistically are fast growing parts of the electorate. All of this in the name of politics.

It would be unwise, however, to believe the rhetoric of your recent victory speeches in saying that this was a referendum on the overall policies or agenda of President Obama. You should also not think that it is somehow a show of support for your own party agenda. While it is politically expedient to posture in front of the media, polls say that more of this country supports the Democratic Party than they do your party, that most people like the individual policies of the president and the Democrats more. What you should take this election as a referendum on is job creation. Tax cuts are nice, and they are important, but without putting people back to work, it doesn't matter to them what their tax rates are. They want a job or want to not fear over keeping their job.

Another mistake would be to waste time talking about 'Obamacare'. If the Democrats had done an effective job selling the message of the legislation to the American people from the beginning, you would never have gained the upper hand in the media. Much of what the bill does is supported by the American people. Of those who do not support the overall legislation there is a significant number who think it did not go far enough. It would be dangerous for your party to mistake the slogans and spin of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News as fact or as the prevailing sentiment of most of the country.

What is also a mistake is not to listen to moderates like Rudy Giuliani. It is time for your party to stop allowing candidates to run racially divisive campaigns. It is time for you to ease up on the social agenda that has dehumanized and degraded gays and lesbians. You have already lost the culture war on those issues. The country is becoming more diverse rather than less and more accepting of LGBT people and their civil rights. You will loose this part of the debate and history is already attesting to that. As Meghan McCain says, if you want to be relevant as a party in the future you have to not alienate massive portions of the electorate in the minority and young voters in order to guarantee the vote of a proportionally smaller group of white heterosexual Christian voters.

So what's the solution? For now, concentrate on the message of fiscal conservatism that was supposedly the hallmark of the Tea Party. If you think you can balance the budget and get the economy going again with conservative policies, do it. Set aside the social agenda many of the arch-conservatives in your party are proposing and really just concentrate on budgets. One of the other things that was consistently of concern to voters was the gridlock in Washington, which means the stalling and partisanship. You cannot complain about partisanship and point fingers if you have an opportunity for true compromise.

Does that give you cover with the Tea Party? For many it would, as fiscal issues is a #1 topic on everyone's mind. What will be more problematic, however, getting nothing done except trying to make Obama a one term president or getting something done that you can actually run on as an accomplishment? The choice is yours, but 2012 is not going to be all about tearing down the Obama agenda and administration, nor will it be all about the Tea Party, which prevails in a midterm but can't hope to rally the entire party for a presidential election. But either way, don't choose the few, choose the many, choose all of us.

Why did I go into $110K in debt for an education?

There is an issue in this country with education. I'm not talking about education with a capitol 'E' as in the Dept. of Education, or even the problems facing our schools or us fixing the system and become a leader in the world in terms of education. I'm talking about a basic belief that has come through clearly in this election that education is evil. While we say education is key to the future, we tell our children that if you want to be successful and happy you need an education, if you want to climb out of poverty or have options for a career you have to get an education. Everything about our individual and societal future depends on education.

So what's the problem? The problem is that because of disparate groups in this country galvanizing in the 1990's around the Republican Party, because they felt validated by the election of a president who did everything he could to endear himself to the American people by pretending he wasn't one of the wealthiest presidents from one of the most privileged backgrounds in our history, and lately by the Tea Party and their attacks on Barack Obama. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell and Sharon Angles, we now have a social and political narrative that tells us that if you are educated, if you are intellectually above average and successful because you are talented and innovative and intelligent, and if you have any inkling about the makeup of Congress, current events or READ, than you are elitist. Not only are you elitist, but you are out of touch with the rest of the country and unfit to lead in any legislative or executive office anywhere in the country. Because Sarah Palin couldn't name a single newspaper or magazine off the top of her head in the Katie Couric interview in 2008, because she couldn't handle questions from any news outlet except FOX News and the conservative media, everyone but those friendly stations became the 'Lame Stream Media'. Thanks to those and others, disseminated through the media exposure and organizing of the Tea Party movement over the past several years, being a person with an education in this country makes you of less value.

Now, it has been true for a long time that intellectuals are often targets for totalitarian regimes, for fascist societies and political movements. Intellectuals think about things, and argue things and talk to other people about things. When intellectuals then disagree with a movement or regime they have to be silenced lest they foster unrest that erodes that regime or movement's power base. If that regime or movement is overtly and ideologically oppressing their people or if they are enforcing policies that have a broad reaching negative impact, more and more intellectuals speak out against that movement or regime. That is what we have here and it gets more and more insidious.

One topic that floats out among social conservatives in this country, and it floats around on all levels of government, is about the administration of our public schools. A central aspect, philosophically, to this topic is the issue of teaching 'Intelligent Design', which in reality is another word for creationism, the teaching of biology through the Biblical narrative of God creating the Earth and universe and all things and all creatures. This has been a point of contention over and over again in local and state school boards with parents advocating its teaching in place of evolution, or at the very least as a 'viable' alternative to evolution. At the national level, one of the areas of the budget most Republicans are willing to cut, or at least they say this as they're campaigning, is the Education budget. Sharon Angles and a number of other fringe candidates even want to dismantle the Department of Education. Christine O'Donnell mentioned, in reference to teaching ID (creationism) in public schools, that all those curriculum decisions should be made on the local level, that everything should be on the local level.

There aren't general education standards in this country, despite all the testing to grade schools and districts on their proficiency rates. There are, however, standardized tests required by colleges and universities. Why? Because they want to see that a student is able to handle the academic requirements, that they are a desirable candidate for their school, and that they have long-term potential to become successful in the world, thereby reflecting well on their alma mater and donating money as an alum. Whether or not this is a major hurdle for students in this country based on race and socioeconomic status, it would only become that much harder when there is no nationally funded government agency to help support the administrative infrastructure for testing. It would only become that much harder by removing even the appearance of some national standard of education and putting curriculum on the local level.

Of course conservatives want the curriculum decisions to be placed on the local level. They want religious to conservatives to have more control over their kids' education, they want to have more control over the 'moral' or 'social' issues brought up in the schools. Evolution then wouldn't be the only thing for the chopping block. Another perennial issue is 'sex education', or what the rest of us know as health class. Effectively they probably would be most comfortable to return education in this country, and some have said this explicitly, to that of the 1950's. All of that is representative of the incredibly romanticized version of that period in history that many in this country believes in. They may want this for many reasons, too many for me to speculate, but the effect would be to indoctrinate all of our children in a worldview that isn't even recognizable to our modern world. It would ignore the empirical evidence of climate change and the effects of industrialization on the environment, convince children that industries have our best interests at heart as they cut costs to produce food more cheaply, all while promoting the idea that America is the greatest country in the world to the exclusion of everyone else, not just that we can but that we have the right to take unilateral action in the pursuit of our own perceived national interests.

Not incomprehensible is the connection between these conservative ideas of 'local' control and the religious fundamentalism that has become pervasive throughout the Republican Party. It has allowed people of generally less political knowledge, awareness on current events, and general education to congregate around some very well funded party leaders masquerading as outsiders. The rhetorical device of 'educated elite', especially representing them as all from New England, sits really well with working and lower class voters in other parts of the country, and especially in rural areas. These voters then were duped into trusting candidates whose own funding can be traced directly to insider political action groups and often directly to enormously wealthy individuals and corporations. Their own lack of political knowledge and savvy let them vote against their own interests in candidates who we are now seeing turn against some of their own campaign messages and a party interested in nothing but obstruction and further economic problems. At odds with this are the many labor unions who activated their traditionally Democratic base and supported Democratic candidates with money and people-power. These unions recognize the connections between corporate interests and financial groups and the deeply held principles of the Republican Party's conservative agenda antagonistic to the working class.

Where does that leave us as a country? Well, on climate change for instance, 151 nations signed the Kyoto Protocols back in the late 1990's. President Clinton abstained, as did India and China, because it called for a large reduction in fossil fuel emissions. That means that 151 nations, including all of the industrialized nations we call allies and who have historically stable economies and governments, recognize the threat of global climate change resulting from global warming and its involvement in destroying ecosystems and the environment. With every new Republican member of Congress stating during their campaigns they do not believe in global warming, and with several of them looking to hold public high profile hearings to prosecute the 'hoax' of global warming, how can we even think about being competitive in any meaningful way. When evolution, a central principle to all of science, the cornerstone of the field of Biology and it's resulting disciplines, and to the field of genetics so crucial to the fight of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's, how can we expect to progress in any of the sciences when it is not just questioned by our politicians, but policies put in place that discourage it from being included in classrooms and promoting religiously inspired doctrine instead?

Something that gives me hope, and something that has always made the socially conservative politicians in this country call academia 'liberal', is that in universities and colleges, you are required to prove your points by citing sources, defending sources, defending theories and hypothesis and the process you used to develop those from the evidence you collected. In science, for instance, you are required to present all of your evidence and facts in a structured way and cite any sources. If there is anything faulty in your research methodology, in the quality of the sources or in the logic in whatever argument you're making, your professor gives you a lower grade, talks with you about how you went about your work, or helps to correct errors to strengthen your work. Other fields of study follow similar methods, they call it critical thinking, and it requires you to think beyond just the words on a page, to develop connections and ideas with other material or sources you've read or encountered, and to argue your point in a clear and convincing way. We all have to go through this when we go through a college or university education. We all may not be at a school with the same level of academic intensity, not all of us are able to compete at the same academic level or are interested in pursuing a very academic career path or studies, but we are all challenged to learn and think beyond the superficial.

That is what really is at the heart of the whole idea of 'educated elite', which then translates to 'liberal elite', or if it's about a schism between Sarah Palin and the real Republican Party, the 'establishment elite' or 'Washington elite'. Somehow it's always about 'elite', and how the 'elite' is bad. Well, when you are dealing with multinational corporations, with international trade or political policy, when you are dealing with micro- and macroeconomic issues, with stabilizing and incredibly diverse economy and understanding the intricacies of a multicultural and multilateral approach to prosecuting a war, instead of just sending planes to bomb the hell of out whomever, don't you want the elite? Doesn't 'elite' mean the best, the highest order of whatever it's being applied to?

Of course some random housewife with a mediocre education and no policy background will never be considered to be qualified to become president. Running the nation isn't anything like running a household, despite whatever she might say. Stabilizing the world's largest economy during major global economic uncertainty is nothing like balancing a family checkbook or paying household bills. No, 'common sense' solutions have absolutely no place in Washington, D.C. because that's where we want the smartest, brightest, most talented people in the fields of economics, political science, law and international trade to be and to be working. Sarah Palin is a million miles from any of that. And if an ignorant housewife with no business experience and who has no political skills at all other than being an agitator within her own party can become president, then what the hell did I take on $110K in student loan debt for?