The Militant Moderate

COERCION BY POLITICAL BLACKMAIL

2011-06-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

Many of us wonder from time to time about the completely irrational and foolish positions taken by republicans. Sometimes it seems as if nobody in that party or its leadership is capable of thinking out the most simple matters or probable public reaction to the positions they take openly, even by votes in Congress.

Yes, indeed there are a number within their “celebrity” political group who appear to fit the weak-minded image that their comments and behavior conjures. But we also observe other more respected ones within the republican party putting out a line and calling for unanimity of support of idiotic measures. This seems to us incongruous. Surely they must know better, we say.

Various positions taken by republicans on reducing budget deficits and curtailing the growth of national debt leave us leave us somewhat awe-stricken. “Surely nobody is dumb enough to propose that,” we think.

Does Pawlenty really believe he can cut budget deficits by 40% in 10 years by cutting taxes $7.8 trillion, added to the $2.5 trillion lost by keeping the Bush cuts? He projects also a spectacular 5% growth rate in the economy, and a minus 1% unemployment. What does that mean? It is nonsense.

So it was with the proposal to repeal Medicare as we know it, and substitute a voucher for seniors to go out and shop for a policy from insurance companies. This is not really a sane proposal. Politically, it won’t fly. As an alternative to cutting corporate and other subsidies, it won’t be chosen. Nor will it be acceptable as an alternative to raising taxes for the wealthy among us.

It should be mentioned that seniors are not a market that private insurers want, and rates would likely be exorbitant. Also, nothing works in any budget unless health care costs are brought under control. Medicare, as it now exists, is the only major force stopping medical charges from running amok. Medicare declares what it will pay – and no more can be charged to them or the patient. This is highly significant to the economy of the nation. Would that we would adopt a form of Medicare for everybody, so we could put real brakes on costs.

So then, why would republicans take on such a loser of an issue?

The answer is: Every republican in Congress, and every republican candidate for office, is being coerced and threatened by an organization quite popular among their rich and corporate donors. The Americans for Tax Reform is headed by a politically ruthless man named Grover Norquist. He is the one who makes every republican candidate sign a “NO TAX” pledge in order to have his favor and the favor of all the political cash that he controls.

If a republican candidate refuses to sign the NO TAX pledge, he has no chance for financial support from the wealthy conservatives in the party. If he violates his pledge and succumbs in weakness to vote for any tax increase, or even now for cutting corporate subsidies (such as for oil companies), then that politician is assured of a well financed primary opponent in his next election.

It is just that mean and vindictive, and it assures almost 100% adherence to the party line by republican rank and file congresspersons. That is why the Ryan scatter-gun budget carried almost all republicans in the House and had few republican dissenters in the senate. That is why all the lines in the sand are being drawn by Speaker Boehner, confidently predicting the republicans will support no debt compromise that has any kind of tax increase in it.

When one understands that every republican is running scared, then one may begin to understand the foolish positions to which these people are driven.

It means that they cannot support revenue increases. Everything must be taken out of spending. The budget has two legs – income and expenditures. If one of these is ruled entirely out of the process for balancing, then it makes the job next to impossible. And, it forces consideration of inhumane and downright mean ideas as if they had logic or deserved attention. This is what is happening.

Republicans must be called out for their self-serving obeisance to the masters of corporate cash. Are they victims of political blackmail? Or, does their unthinking, slavish service of the money-masters involve something more like political prostitution?

It has been hoped that the democrats would bring in budget balancing ideas which would increase revenue, principally by making the rich pay their fair share, with the costs of government be borne more by those who are reaping the greatest benefits from the system. Also, we are hoping for a cleaned up expenditure plan with the elimination of lower priority programs and the cost of foreign wars. Give-away programs, foreign and domestic, need to be examined and curtailed.

Most of us are sensible enough to recognize that it will take both revenue enhancement and expenditure controls to bring our budget in with meaningfully reduced deficits. Call on republicans to shake off their money shackles and join others in sensible, patriotic, fiscally responsible actions.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

DOUBLE DIPPING THE STATE RETIREMENT SYSTEM

2011-06-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

For several decades there has been continuing concern among retired educators and others about the sanctity of the Oklahoma Teacher Retirement System. One concern has been about the tendency of the legislature to pass bills promoted by a single legislator to favor a particular retiree, or class of retirees, at the expense of the system. Much concern has been expressed about special legislation that allows schools and retirees to abuse the system for the advantage of a person and a school by double-dipping – being both retired and still working.

Currently scarce resources of the Teacher Retirement System are being exploited by schools to save salary dollars. Schools are allowed to hire back a retired teacher within a few months of official retirement. The teacher continues to draw a retirement check while the school pays him/her a salary. Usually the teacher makes more than before retirement, and the school saves a bundle on salary.

The Oklahoma Teacher Retirement System gets the fiscal shaft.

It is not the occasional hiring back of a retiree at less than half-time for a modest stipend that is of concern. That is not the real issue. But there is something wrong with retiring for three months, drawing full retirement, then going back to work half-time or more for second salary for doing the same job. Both the school and the retiree are abusing the system at the ultimate expense of all beneficiaries.

Both the retiree and the school are gaming the system. It is perfectly legal – since the legislature has made it so. But on close examination, it is easy to see that there is something inherently wrong about laws that allow exploitation of the retiree trust fund for the benefit of school budgets and a few privileged retirees.

However, some seem to think this is just great. Or, at least it appears so in the press. Not long ago facts were printed in a local newspaper about how much extra some rehired retirees were now making yet how much the school was saving on these salaries. These were mostly second echelon administrators who retired and returned, making more than ever before but costing the school district less. How delightful! Win – win! Everyone, including the newspaper people, thought this was just great. Nobody considered that the losers were little old retired folk for whose benefit the trust fund money was intended.

This same legislature that provided for a loophole for abusing the retirement system is constantly engaging in a harangue regarding the poor fiscal condition of the retirement system. They say that the system cannot afford even the pittance of a 1% a year COLA for its elderly retirees, while they allow fund coffers to be milked by schools and colleges and to be abused by some younger retirees.

Only about five years ago the legislature handed out lucrative benefit increases to the highest paid school personnel preparing to retire, They did so by removing salary caps and allowing certain buy back privileges for earlier years. This increased the unfunded liability of the system greatly. Perhaps worse, it added to the size and the unfairness of the chasm between the level of benefits received by newer, younger retirees and the elderly who have been retired much longer.

Newer retirees do quite well. There is no need for them to be concerned about COLA’s for years to come. But some who have been retired twenty years or more are hard pressed to maintain a decent standard of living. Some elderly retirees fall below poverty criteria. Nobody seems to care.

Younger retirees are better organized and more active that the elderly. Generally new retiree benefits get more attention and are better supported by the professional associations of the active professionals. In general, elderly retirees have had few champions to help them make their case to the legislature.

For several years, the Oklahoma Council of Retired College and University Presidents made legislative proposals to take care of the elderly with higher COLA’s. These have been introduced in bill form by friendly legislators in several sessions. But each time these have met a cruel fate at the hands of legislators who claimed to be concerned about the actuarial condition of the system.

The Oklahoma legislature has used the “one size fits all” negative excuse for any consideration of the human plight of the elderly retirees for which it has responsibility. While they can allow convenient loopholes for the exploitation of retirement system funds for schools or politically influential interest groups, they turn a blind eye toward a segment of the retiree population with the greatest need.

Then they hide behind a cowardly broad brush ruling, “No COLA’s unless the actuarial cost is paid in advance.” Let them look at reality instead and take care of the need.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THERE THEY GO AGAIN

2011-06-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

To most of us John Edwards was always a likable fellow. To some of us it seemed he had a message of empathy for those in our society unrepresented in politics and ignored by government. He was a handsome guy, impeccably groomed, no doubt contributing to his downfall. He spoke well, and he had a nice smile.

John Edwards was a family man. Having lost a son, tragedy haunted the family in the form of Elizabeth’s breast cancer. Yet through all this they gave the impression of a family united strongly against adversity, and driven to accomplishments for the public good. He had been picked as his party’s candidate for vice-president earlier, and he made a third place run for the nomination for president.

Then everything went awry. Edwards’ candidacy did not flourish in competition with the Clinton versus Obama war for the party’s spot. There was the resurgence of the cancer, and then the $400 haircut hit the media. The guillotine dropped with the emergence of the affair with a campaign media contractor, the existence of illegitimate progeny of that affair, and followed by all the cover-up attempts.

Down went John Edwards! His hypocritical behavior translated to despicable behavior, even for many of those who had been friendly toward him. Edwards correctly assesses his conduct: “What I did was wrong.” Everybody agrees.

So, he paid the price. His political future went down the tube. He lost his family at bad time. Elizabeth died. His name is mud. What more could happen to a prideful man like him, with high ambitions for his life? He had brought ruin upon himself and travail on those closest to him. He had been relegated to a reduced and tarnished stature, from which he would not be likely to rise again. What more?

Well, there are always those who are willing to kick the guy who is down. That appears to be more consistently true in politics than in life.

Now, three years later, after passing up on the prosecution of illegal conduct in the previous administration on such matters as obstruction of justice by Rove’s White House, outing of secret CIA staff, fostering prosecution of petty issues with opposing party candidates, and political manipulating of district attorney personnel to that end – this comes up. After clear violation of international law and our own treaties by criminal torture of prisoners and “rendition” of kidnapped suspects to foreign lands for torture, faking and lying to Congress and the country to provoke the Iraq War – despite passing politely on all these, we suddenly decide to make a federal case against John Edwards on shaky grounds of misusing “campaign funds” to cover up and to shelter his mistress.

It seems that our values a bit crossed. This guy has had enough. It is not necessary to go to the extremes that have been done to try to make a legal case against him.

Why would the “Obama administration” do this?

As it turns out, it is not Obama’s people who are pressing this case. The justice department prosecutor in North Carolina is a former conservative senator’s staff member appointed as an U. S. Attorney by Bush. Because the litigation department administrator is a democrat and Edwards’ own attorney was once in the Obama White House, there has been a reluctance to invite charges of “political interference” in what appears to be a political vendetta against Edwards.

So then, it’s a “hands off” policy for this partisan prosecutor.

Next, it turns out that the money for taking care of Edwards’ mistress did NOT come from campaign donations, but instead personal gifts made by a willing heiress through different channels for that purpose. So, first these other gifts had to be declared campaign donations, opposite statements made by the donor. After these were so declared to be campaign gifts, contrary to past legal precedent, then that made them illegal to be used for the purposes given -- besides over limits.

All this involves a legal stretch which is severely questioned by most non-partisan legal authorities. “This interpretation has never been made before in similar legal situations,” says a mainstream television legal consultant. That gives the prosecutor’s case against Edwards all the appearances of being “selective prosecution” – thus a violation of law itself.

But, there they go again. It appears again that there is a republican attempt to misuse and abuse the legal justice system for partisan political motives. John Edwards may deserve public defamation for his conduct, but he does not deserve a kangaroo legal prosecution and jail sentence for it.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

DEBT LIMITS: WHAT NOW?

2011-05-31T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is quite a worrisome, but totally unnecessary and inappropriate, political gamesmanship problem with potentially disastrous consequences. The obstructive stubbornness of GOP leaders, in obeisance to their Tea Party faction, threatens to bring the walls and roof down on the U. S. government.

There are several things we need to understand about the debt ceiling. Normally, it has not been an issue, because most people in Congress were responsible and somewhat sensible people. First, Congress votes to approve a budget, and commitments are then made under that spending plan. The various agencies of government then go about their business, spending up to the level budgeted.

That congressionally approved budget, or spending plan, has involved spending more than income. So, the budget included additional borrowing to cover the bills. Now, the GOP House, in its backwards and contradictory fashion, proposes not to allow borrowing the money it already authorized to be spent and reneging on promises already made.

Call this flip-flopping, call it irresponsible, call it playing the deadbeat, or call it GOP style politics. It amounts to fraud and amoral behavior on the part of any congressman who votes against the debt ceiling. This is true no matter how he/she voted on the budget. It is true no matter what excuses are offered.

If the budget was legally adopted, then we have legal bills to pay. This is too serious for game playing and political posturing.

Now comes the question: “What happens if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling now?” Of course, the fact is that Congress has already defaulted, and our executive branch has already been moving money and utilizing creative accounting so that the interest on our debt and our current bills continue to be paid in full.

But what happens this summer when these background adjustments will no longer work? Will we then default on our debt payments and send the world financial and currency markets into chaos? Yes, this is possible.

But some see a different scenario, one that nobody will like, and one with widespread grave consequences – stressful but short of world chaos.

If the republicans continue their obstinate position, then the president may well make a choice between paying the interest on the debt and paying the bills and salaries to run the government.

We may well hear a televised Oval Office talk which reminds us that the administration has put forth a responsible plan for reducing debt over time through cuts in spending and raising income. The President will explain that because of republican intransigence, he must now take necessary steps to cut expenditures so as to neither exceed the existing limit nor stop interest payments on the debt. These steps can include almost anything.

All grants for various community, health, educational, or scientific purposes may be suspended, including community grants, highway funds, college student aid, and all such. It may be announced that Social Security checks will be reduced or suspended, and that recipients will have to make arrangements to borrow from their bank until funding is put back on a normal level. The same could happen to Veterans’ benefits. Medicare could cease paying hospital and doctor claims, or cut these in half to reduce the outgo of money. Federal workers could be laid off, as well as state and corporate employees dependent on grants or contracts. Our military pay could be delayed by 20%. Courts could be jammed with suits, yet close the doors.

Indeed not paying one’s regular bills is tantamount to not paying one’s debts. The difference is the formality and legalities between bonds and bills. And neither is a good thing.

Yes, these and other action examples could become necessary if the irresponsibility of GOP members of Congress continues. Of course, blame for any such necessary actions would be unceremoniously laid at their political feet.

If the GOP members are politically dumb enough to vote for an austere budget bill that includes killing Medicare, then they may well be dumb enough to allow all this to begin to happen before hostile voters descend upon them in anger to force the issue to be properly resolved.

How long will the public stand for such obvious chicanery from one political party in tying up government with such unnecessary and irresponsible tactics?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

REPUBLICAN NOSE-WAVE POLITICS

2011-05-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

We wonder how many out there remember the thumb-to-nose wave? It is difficult to remember just when that became passé. Somewhere along the line the nose-wave just sort of disappeared, and it was replaced by the middle-finger salute. While as a youth the nose-wave was widely employed, including by this writer, to show disdain, disapproval, and disgust with others. It was also used as a form of waving that other person off as exasperating or insignificant in a disrespectful way.

Nobody ever fully explained the etiology of the nose-wave. Just what was the gesture depicting in its non-verbal form. Some said it was the equivalent of calling the person a bad name beginning with “son-of.” That may or may not have been true, but it was the equivalent of “go fly a kite,” “go to heck, and take your horse with you,” “stay the heck out of my way and out of my life,” or “I hope you die, you rascal you.”

The nose wave was never a gesture of favor, but neither was it considered in the same vulgar category as the middle finger salute. Some of us may have used the first but seldom the latter.

All this is prelude to a political application. Republicans love using the nose-wave when they feel safe in doing so. Of course, one never uses that gesture toward anyone within reach who can retaliate with force.

Republicans have found that the there are a number of people, and groups of people, to whom they may give the nose-wave safely. And they have begun to use this gesture quite often their pursuit of politics.

There is no hesitancy in showing disdain for the unions and their members with the equivalent of the nose-wave. Republicans do not expect their support anyway. This same attitude has broadened to educators, school administrators, boards, or other state and federal personnel. They no longer feel it necessary to be friendly toward schools. In fact, they find it to be popular with their base if they criticize schools, criticize teachers and administrators, and if they pledge to tear up the schools in the name of “reform.”

In Oklahoma, republican candidates for governor discovered several decades ago that they could be elected without showing proper respect to the education establishment. Educators and their friends simply did not have enough votes to swing a general election. This pattern of ignoring soon became one of animosity toward educators or anyone else paid with tax dollars for public service. In legislative elections, republicans have lately become so secure in their support of a growing number of malcontents and wealthy donors, that they no longer concern themselves to local education groups. Retired teachers are shown little courtesy and given the nose-wave when it comes to support of their legislative goals.

In the Oklahoma legislature, the right wing, tax cutting, anti-public servant, anti-government, republican forces have become so strong that they feel threatened by nobody other than the tea party type extremists in their own party. They compete as to who can get to the political extreme of the other. In such an atmosphere, anyone who is a part of government services, or who is a supporter of any government services such as mental health, public health, family and child services, education, or higher education, simply gets the nose-wave.

The nose-wave has been given also to culture, science, and the arts, as well as intellectual pursuits. The neo-conservatives ignore facts that become obstacles.

Nationally, the republicans have become so brave that they make budget proposals which would wipe out Medicare or fog up Social Security. They under-estimate the intelligence, organization, and the will of the elderly. There are those who see the need for these programs in their own later life. Apparently, they expect to “snow” people with their television advertisements about “reform,” about “saving” these programs, or offering “individual freedom” to medical bankruptcy.

They are thumbing their nose at a populous and prominent group, and they expect to get by with it by lies and by fear tactics. Sadly, they know also that there is a certain proportion within the groups to whom they give the thumb wave who will take no offense. These have past political traditions which apparently prevent rational thought, loyal professionalism, or self-interest. Shallow thinkers do not recognize when they are insulted. They are just gullible.

When the republican court changed political campaign finance rules allowing the corporate rich to pour millions of dollars into elections, republicans became emboldened in thinking that they can win with money. They seem not to fear challenging taboos of the past, such as Social Security and Medicare. They do so in the name of reform, rescue, or deficit control. Do we recall somebody in 2008 using the expression about putting lipstick on a pig?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE ENEMY OF DEMOCRACY LIVES

2011-05-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

Those who think that the killing of bin Laden took out the chief enemy of American democracy are all wrong. Of course, bin Laden was our avowed enemy, and he had successfully plotted killings and mass destruction against us. Bin Laden has been the enemy we can see.

Americans are much better at detecting and going after its enemies which manifest themselves in ways we can easily discern – ways which are obvious to the most simple among us. When our buildings are blown up by hi-jacked airplanes full of passengers, it becomes pretty obvious. But there may be a more devious, more formidable enemy lurking in, around, and among our people. This destructive force is ignorance.

It has been said that democracy has within it the mechanisms for its own ruin. The people hold the keys to success or disaster.

Various theories have been offered for the failure of the Roman Empire after some four hundred years. No doubt several of these offer valid contributions to understanding history. But one of the more interesting theories is the notion that the people themselves brought on failure.

In that day common people were referred to as “the rabble.” Some say that Rome had become a “welfare state,” and the rabble had become the spoiled beneficiaries of the largesse of the Empire. It is said that they demanded more and more from the emperor, whether in everyday needs or coliseum entertainment.

That theory holds that the insatiable demands of masses of people can bring down a government or an economic system.

On the other hand, there is a contrasting view that weakness and corruption of the empire system -- the accumulation of great wealth and land holdings by the nobility in contrast with the masses, and the failing military establishment brought on by its own decadence of that era.

But it is clear that a democratic government cannot long endure which does not see to the education and prosperity of all of its people.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said something like this: “The key to maintaining our democracy is an educated citizenry.” That philosophy led Jefferson to be quite an educational activist in his day. Not only was Jefferson a champion of early day public schools in Virginia, but he was a founder of the University of Virginia. Certain campus landmarks still bear his architectural design.

Ignorance may be thought of as either lack of information or misinformation. People who lack formal education often make up most of what we term as the ignorant. However, there are other ways to acquire knowledge. We once referred to bright, articulate, and knowledgeable people who lacked in formal education as “well read.” They read books, newspapers, magazines, and other material to become quite literate. With the advent of the computer, the internet, and video, there are now many other avenues for acquiring knowledge, and some might well use these to build their knowledge base – or to corrupt thinking.

Ignorant people are easily misled. But educated people may also be misled, thus becoming ignorant because of their lack of critical thinking skills. “Give me a person who knows he doesn’t know, anytime, over one who thinks he knows and doesn’t.” How often have we heard that old saying?

We have hosts among us these days who just think they know, and who are quite adamant. Yet they know not, nor do they understand that it is they who may bring about this nation’s failure in its long experiment with democracy. With the advent of mass communication, the ignorance of misinformation is being spread far and wide. It is being absorbed by an unsuspecting populace.

Knowledge without an accompanying system of human values is a dangerous thing. Religious passion without an accompanying sense of common humanity can be dangerous. Both these phenomena are observed far and wide in America.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” should be modified to add, “but wrongful knowledge and twisted logic are more dangerous.”

Too many in our voter population in this country are gullible to misinformation being peddled. This is another way of saying that we have a lot of ignorant voters. Voters who are ignorant are potentially hazardous. They can unknowingly become transformed into enemies of our constitutional democracy.

Many have already achieved that distinction, and they are alive and well.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

BACK SEAT DRIVING

2011-05-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

Many find the automobile is much easier driven from the back seat. Or, perhaps driven from the right, or another viewpoint less focal than behind the wheel. Women and republicans have often been accused of feeling a perceptual advantage and issuing instructions from that superior position. These are false accusations against women, of course.

This writer sometimes found it personally easier to discern the proper choices for the future of the college from his position as a professor, or as president of the faculty association, than was apparent from the front office of the president. Sure enough later, as a president, he found that various reality fog banks may cloud one’s vision and decisions are often less simple or certain than he had thought earlier. From the driver’s seat, or from the front office, there are complexities often not observed at all from the perspective of others.

Yet it is just from such a shielded perspective that this writer seeks now to put into words what some 80% of the American people may be thinking:

Is this not a good time to move decisively to extricate ourselves from all those foreign war entanglements?

With the killing of bin Laden, send out a search party now for that banner that Mr. Bush had hanging across the aircraft carrier saying, “Mission Accomplished.” Hang that out again, and then get our soldiers the heck out of harm’s way.

For some time now, two thirds of Americans have favored bringing our troops home from the Middle East. We suspect that it is now up in the range of 80% who see these wars as accomplishing little or no good -- at great cost to us. Listen to your people, Mr. President! Listen to your people, Senator Reid! Listen to your people, Speaker Boehner!

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are beginning to echo what they are hearing at home. This is enough! But leadership of neither party is hearing us.

Rep. Chaffety, republican from Utah, speaks for re-evaluation of the war “because the terrorist leader was found, not by 100,000 ground troops in Afghanistan, but by a small contingent of Special Operations Forces in Pakistan.” He says that too many are afraid to speak out because of being called soft on terror.

Senator Lugar, ranking republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says: “It is difficult establish that our vast expenditures in Afghanistan represent a rational allocation of our military and financial assets.”

Rep. Chaffety was rebuked by his party leader, Speaker Boehner, who says that the fight is not yet over. Senator McConnell, republican senate leader, has failed to take any separate or distinctive position on these wars.

Senator Reid says simply that he supports “the Obama plan,” while House democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, says there is a coordinated “transitional plan in progress.”

To these leaders of ours, including President Obama, we want to say that the American people are not that patient.

The plain truth to Americans is that Afghanistan after another five year planned stay will be vulnerable to a militant takeover within months, just the same as if we were to leave this year. If the Afghans are not ready now to stand up for a civil government of their own instead of accepting the Islamic dictatorship of the Taliban, then they will have the kind of government they deserve. Libyans, Syrians, and others would love to have such a choice now.

Nothing we can do will make much difference in the future of Afghanistan – either already or in another five-year stay. Nothing there is any more threatening to us than in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, or other places. We cannot occupy them all.

Those people really want us OUT. We should accommodate them now. Let them have their own country and be responsible for it. We are NOT appreciated there. We have no national reason now to stay. Occupying Muslim land only makes more of those people hostile toward us.

Bin Laden wanted to break America economically. With the help of some irresponsible business and banking tycoons here, the tax cutters, and the Texas cowboy wars abroad, he has just about succeeded. Why do we go on fighting over deficits, and cutting and killing domestic programs for our people at home for the sake of nation-building in the Middle East and these interminable wars with no end? The defense budget is up 70% since Bush took over. Target that.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

Has Palin Been Trumped?

2011-05-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

Pity poor Sarah Palin? Hardly. While some might be concerned that Sarah has been eclipsed lately in the media by the likes of Donald Trump and even Michelle Bachmann, we need not feel sorry for Sarah. She is still in there slinging it with the best of them.

It may be, of course, that there are so many republican hands in the mud bank that it is difficult to maintain a distinction in identity among them. The consistency of the material is about the same, and it has the same target. But, at times it appears that the mud bank is really a manure pile.

On the basis of his weird birther attack, the Donald rose to the top of the heap of rightist contenders for the honors of the party. Polls looked favorable for him, and not so good for Sarah last week. Palin has begun to look less like a candidate and more like a party celebrity. Her public appearances at republican and tea party events have continued at much the same pace, but there seems to be little structure or strategy to her appearances. Iowa and New Hampshire have been given no special place, for example, as has been the case with other contenders.

Palin’s ratings are not such as to be encouraging to her as a presidential candidate. She has an unfavorable rating of 57% with the general public, according to AP. But 65% of republicans still rate her favorably, although down from 80% toward the end of last year. Among that 40% of republicans not sympathetic with the tea party folk, her rating drops to just 38%. Among the tea party crowd, Palin has a strength of about 80% favorability.

Her rhetoric is still there in its same caustic style, even though the media have been watching the Donald. For instance, she sees nothing wrong to inquiring into Mr. Obama’s university thesis, or any other college or law papers he has written in those youthful times. She even suggests that Ayers, the old anti-war leader of the Viet Nam era, wrote Mr. Obama’s personally biographical books.

While following the Trump lead in her questioning, she admits that “he has the spotlight and the megaphone.” She has gone along with the birther conspiracy by saying, “Well, he should show us where he was born.” Sarah is still with us.

The strange phenomenon of the birther conspiracy myth, believed by tea partiers and a majority of the republicans in the face of constant exposure to facts to the contrary, has been this year’s most utterly goofy news story. The Donald has kept it in the forefront. With the president’s regular birth certificate printed in the newspapers, displayed on television, and circulated on the internet, and with state officials, hospital officials and personnel testifying to its veracity, these crazy people have continued to sound on the unbelievable mythology that could only be the product of a deranged minds passed on to one another.

The long form of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, obtained by special request from the state of Hawaii, was released last week. The birthers can now be identified as the ones with egg on their faces. But not the Donald. Well, probably not the other political lunatics either. They believe whatever they choose to believe.

Without as much as a curtsy to the new evidence of his foolishness, Trump promptly turns to demanding to know Mr. Obama’s college grade records. All this is to suggest that Mr. Obama might have been the beneficiary of affirmative action laws. If so, he would most certainly be a stellar example of their validity.

However, this moves the message from one that says “he is not one of us” to another with a less subtle form of racism aimed at national policies intended to remedy the effects of past racial discrimination, suppression, and bigotry.

The Oklahoma legislature has rallied to the clarion call of racists, and they have answered with a referendum vote to outlaw affirmative action in Oklahoma. Not that all of us, perhaps not any of us, believe in affirmative action as a permanent policy in the United States. It is not a practice we want to be enduring. But most of us see the need now for easing the upward progress of able people in our midst whom our forefathers suppressed through racial discrimination.

Fairness is sometimes a hard thing to understand. In its simplicity fairness may seem one thing, but in the nuances of its complexity mean another. Unfortunately, we can count on Oklahoma politicians and voters for simplicity.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE PRICE OF EMBARRASSMENT

2011-04-25T09:04:00.000-07:00

We now know the price of political embarrassment for Oklahoma’s new governor. The price to avoid such embarrassment is worth $54 million to Mary Fallin. This is the cost to Oklahoma taxpayers for Ms. Fallin to avoid embarrassment by being caught again voting against a bill in Congress, but taking the money as governor.

While Republican governors all over America are finding their embarrassment much less expensive to their state’s citizens, Oklahoma’s republicans find ideology more important this time – even if it costs us $54 million in a budget year in which that amount looks like pure gold to most Oklahomans.

Perhaps our governor was just not adept enough to make up a good rationale for accepting the money for organizing the insurance pools required by federal law. Other republican governors were able to think up some reason why it was a good idea. Their states are better off for their mental gymnastics.

Perhaps the cost could be phrased in some different ways than just money, i.e. in terms of what that money would do this year in Oklahoma. The money would prevent cuts in medical treatment for indigent children, cuts in services in prevention of child abuse, and cuts in food programs for poor children. It would alleviate some cuts to public schools, or it would prevent fee increases for college students and their parents. It would get more juvenile and drug courts established to divert youthful offenders from prison or provide costs for better supervision of adult prisoners allowing more to be kept outside of prison walls.

We hope the governor will ignore the bill coming to her desk from a legislature often found lollygagging off in right field, far away from the path of the ball.

But the greatest embarrassment for the GOP nationally this spring has to be Donald Trump. People know that Trump has always been something of a wing-nut, but many take him seriously. Trump has unleashed a torrid media attack on the President, and has often added some leaders of the Republican Party to his target list. The problem is that so much of what he is saying is ludicrous.

Most embarrassing to republicans should be Trump’s attack on the President’s birth in the United States. Of course, surveys show that 48% of Americans believe this lie, in spite of the proven facts. Maybe we should all hold our heads in shame that 48% of our people, almost totally republicans, believe such disproven tripe. Perhaps ignorance about race, the odd-sounding name, a Kenyan father, or the existence of the real state of Hawaii influences this foolish susceptibility.

If people are really this gullible to media propaganda, is it hopeless that we will ever again have an honest election based upon a contest of facts, logic, and personality? Since the high court gave corporations and the millionaires unlimited spending in politics, things may never be the same.

An electorate this gullible and impervious to facts and reality will elect anybody the media is paid to sell to them. They will believe all the conspiracy theories that are planted, promoted, and circulated by whatever means money can buy. They will believe in those so-called “grass roots” parties like the Tea Party bunch, although behind the scenes it is supported by the billionaire Koch brothers.

Considering all this, rank and file republicans ought to be embarrassed by the early fund-raising methods of all their new freshman congresspersons elected on all those wild but purist campaign presentations paid for by big business donations last fall. Of course, pledging purity while taking campaign ads paid for by the special interest groups in business should have been a bit suspicious to all.

For 87 of those new GOP freshmen the price of embarrassment during the first three months of their terms has been minimum PAC contributions of $50,000 or more each. For 18 of those GOP freshmen the price has been a little higher at $100,000 or more each from special interest groups these last three months. These folk are now a little hard to embarrass, of course.

Mr. Obama has been considering requiring federal contractors to disclose their political donations, replete with names of beneficiaries. Democrats and public interest groups agree this is a good idea, but business interests and republicans are fighting it tooth and nail. It makes us wonder just how bad things really are when they want to hide such information from the public.

Disclosure of how many federal contract dollars come back to their sponsoring politicians might indeed prove embarrassing. Public disclosure of the monetary connections between those who get government dollars with their vest pocket politicians could even be embarrassing enough to dry up some of that cash flow.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

REDUCTO AD ABSURDUM

2011-04-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Literally, the Latin phrase reducto ad absurdum means reduction to the absurd. It is used primarily in philosophy and similar areas of academic discourse to prove a proposition false by carrying it to its own ultimate conclusion of absurdity.

The method implicit in this term was applied to demonstrate the utter fallacy of the Ryan House republican budget plan last week by Martin Wolf, noted macro-economist and chief economist and associate editor for the Financial Times. Wolf was backed by Paul Krugman, Nobel economist and columnist for the New York Times. The ridiculing logic offered by two such men of repute in the field made a strong impression on this writer.

These and various other critics have pointed out the more obvious flaws of the Ryan-Republican House budget and deficit reduction plan. Throwing senior citizens out of Medicare and onto the streets with a shopping voucher for private health insurance, questionably available, is seen quickly as nothing better than a cruel hoax to be perpetrated on defenseless old people. Who is dumb enough, or heartless enough, to follow that alternative?

Putting invalids and the elderly poor out of the nursing homes on the sidewalks, cutting benefits to sick kids, and adding another 50 million poor people into the ranks of the uninsured would be the consequence of Ryan’s proposed cuts of Medicaid. Surely anyone would see this as an absurd ending.

Meanwhile, as the poor and the elderly are being thrown to the predators, Ryan’s plan proposes more tax cuts for the rich. All this is done in the name of job creation, of course.

Republicans believe that tax cuts for business and for the wealthy will create jobs. That notion was heralded by Ronald Reagan. It did not work then, as deficits skyrocketed to the highest seen at that time. It did not work for the Bush tax cuts, whose claims for prosperity were followed by diminution of wages for workers, the largest job losses in history, big deficits, the near collapse of our financial system, and a recession threatening to be another Great Depression.

Expecting these to work now exemplifies a major trait in mental illness – repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome.

One very serious flaw in the republican House budget plan is that it does not actually reduce the net deficit over a ten year period at all. The tax cuts for the rich cost more than the spending cuts save. The presumption that tax cuts increase income is wrong.

An important, but little mentioned, problem is that the new voucher system privatization of Medicare removes the only really effective cost control we have over increasing health care charges.

Have you ever looked at a hospital bill to see what people without protection are asked to pay for the same procedure a Medicare claim is discounted by 90% or so? That is frightening. What kind of cost protection is there for that private insurance voucher – just the modest discount the insurer can negotiate with hospital management, doctors, labs, and providers? Without Medicare as a pace-setter, such discounts would likely turn out miniscule.

Medicare is the only insurer that can get by saying to providers, “This is what we will pay for this medical procedure and hospital stay.” They can do so, because the provider has no practical choice. If you think they are not happy with Medicare reimbursement, just watch all the TV and newspaper ads seeking to woo older patients to choose their hospital.

The nation needs desperately to control health care costs. Our economic viability and prosperity depend on lowering these in relation to our gross product. In order to do this, we desperately need a single payer health insurance plan like Medicare for all our people. This may well be the only solution to our dilemma of health costs and competition in the global economy.

Republican rejection of the Affordable Health Care Act (Obama-care), only a small step, is against the national interest. Throwing out a successful program such as Medicare is double-dumb, and it is obstructing to the nation’s economic and social future.

It is almost unbelievable that the republicans would actually propose radical changes which make no sense in human values or in economics. If this is the tea party influence, what is wrong with those people?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

RADICALS AND ZEALOTS

2011-04-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

Radicals, zealots, and demagogues roam among us today. These are known to some of us, but not to all. The more radical the political demagogue, or the more zealous the religious demagogue, the more dangerous these are to society as a whole. The more numerous and zealous the followers of demagogues, the more dangerous they are to all of us. The more radicals and the more zealots there are standing around, waiting for a demagogue to follow, the more volatile our society and our country.

As a young lad during the late 1930’s, this writer recalls well the belligerent, shouting voice of Adolf Hitler on the radio. Even if not for that distinctive voice, I could sense the significance of those radio speeches in the attitude of adults.

On a summers’ eve one could hear that disquieting voice outdoors as it came through the open windows from radios all around the neighborhood. Adults, including my father, might be found gathered in small groups discussing in low tones what was happening. Lads like me with big ears were listening. “War” was often mentioned in a tone of dread and anxiety.

That angry, bellicose voice echoed around the neighborhood, punctuated by cheers of “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” from thousands of voices. It demanded attention, but it was also a bit frightening. Hitler’s voice elevated the naturally bombastic qualities of the spoken German language to a threat level. Instinctively we knew this man was up to no good, and we sensed that he was extremely dangerous as a result of the masses of zealots who followed him.

Some of us can also remember the voice of “The Kingfish,” Huey P. Long. the political demagogue from Louisiana, and we recall the enthusiasm of his followers. That voice was silenced by an assassin.

Vaguely I recall the screeching voice of Amy Semple McPherson, and the negative articles against her in the religious publications at my grandfather’s home. I gathered that she was taking money and leading people to hell, all in the name of religion. Her voice was soon muffled as well. But she had an impact on many, and she threatened mainstream religious people back in the 1930’s.

Not all would-be demagogues make it long in this world. From recent events, one might project that Glen Beck’s heyday on the Fox Channel is coming to a close. It is doubtful he will ever have such a platform again from which to spout his religious and political venom, conspiracy theories, or lies and near-lies. But he has had a huge following of gullible zealots. Who knows what comes next?

Still we have quite a line-up of demagogues among those mentioned as republican presidential candidates. Newt Gingrich has been a demagogue on the national scene since the 1990’s, and he still has a following despite his moral and policy lapses. Donald Trump ought to have “demagogue” stamped on his forehead, and just below that “bully.” While Gingrich is dangerous because he is smart, Trump is just a cagey bully, who happens to have a following that thinks he is smart. And, no, Trump does not really think President Obama was born abroad. He knows better. It serves his own shady purpose to spout lies and fools’ folly.

Michelle Bachman has taken over much from Sarah Palin. Each engages in her own kind of demagoguery, and neither has respect for facts or truth. Both are dangerous because each has her following of semi-literate, unthinking zealots. Both are tea party queens, known to be popular but ignorant and illogical. Perhaps that says enough. Just as the tea party has its billionaire backers, so do both Bachman and Palin. Either can raise millions in a few days.

Billionaire and corporate money make Palin and Bachman dangerous, along with the millions of gullible tea party zealots who should know better.

When radical zealotry and religious zeal run in the same crowd, a horribly combustible situation is created. Much of the political zealotry demonstrated in this country has an emotional religious base. These are loose cannons.

These zealots do not always recognize right and wrong, because God has spoken to them through his modern day prophets – or directly. Such people are irrational. They are difficult to reach, because they do not reason. Facts and logic have no place in their minds. Their perceptions are closed, and their minds are shut.

This is the state of “democratic discourse” in America. It is extremely difficult for those with positions based in humanistic values, facts, and logic to deal with those in politics who loyally comprehend only their own ideological zealotry. In the end, they must be held accountable for their irrational zeal.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

HAVE THEY NO SHAME?

2011-04-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

News headlines one recent morning featured the hiring of a new basketball coach at the University of Oklahoma. He will receive $16 million for a 7-year contract, it is reported. This writer was faced at home with the query: “With all that is going on in Oklahoma, the nation, and the world, is there nothing of greater importance to feature in newspaper headlines?”

That was not an easy question to field. Perhaps it would be correct to say, “Apparently not to them.” Or, one might have correctly have said, “Probably not to the majority of their daily readers in Oklahoma.” One might add, “It’s okay with fans that a coach makes 25 times as much as a faculty member.”

Admittedly, there is the shame of misplaced priorities in all that buzz. Misplaced priorities often reside in the same persons as ignorance and misinformation.

Then there was the report of a $120 million contract for a major league baseball player. Initial offerings to sign outstanding prospects for the NFL now run into the multi-millions. And so it goes in the sports world, sort of like Wall Street.

One does hear some complaints about the outrageous ticket prices for major league baseball, and other professional sports. Then there are comments about $10 hot dogs and $9 beer at these events. No longer can the father in the average working family attend these games, much less take his boy to the park.

It does beg the question: “Have they no shame?”

A current controversy on “revenue sharing” between billionaire owners in the NFL and their millionaire players is shameful. Their ticket prices are sky high, and they are gouging those who love the sport. They are also gouging the rest of us who watch on television, because there is a pass-through of added costs to us. The public has little sympathy for either party.

If we had our way we would reduce and cap salaries and regulate what the owners can charge the public. But then, that would be “big government,” wouldn’t it? Well, maybe there is another way. What is it?

But collegiate sports at the top levels are also competing for recognition in the “shame” category. Most of the money to support university sports must come from private sources. Universities manipulate their ticket sales so as to require contributions to purchase tickets, or they may package tickets for certain games in bundles to require purchases for less popular games. They withhold gate sales for empty seats to avoid spoiling their premium deals. Is all that necessary?

In such an environment, students are a liability. They don’t pay much for tickets, but they quickly become discontent if there aren’t at least a certain number of seats kept back for them. But what it was supposed to be all about – student sports?

Yet the “shame game” of misplaced priorities and shady practices is not confined to the sports world. It is easy to find predatory practices and shady dealings in the business world. When university athletics became a business, it inherited such. These often clash with the idealistic purity, but suspected favoritism and shady dealings suspected operant in such regulatory agencies as the NCAA or BCS.

Last week CBS’ 60 Minutes featured the relocation of companies’ headquarters to foreign countries with low tax rates on profits. Switzerland and Ireland were prominently mentioned. Several major companies, considered American, are paying no taxes as a result of this practice, and others are paying little because they are given tax breaks and subsidized by our government. These and others have also moved factories abroad to find cheap labor.

American jobs are being shipped out, foreign goods shipped in, and our tax base and currency are being undermined. Is there no shame in the business world?

Corporations are “citizens,” our republican Supreme Court says, and they have the right to “unlimited free speech” (meaning buying elections or sponsoring the tea party). Then should not corporations also have some requirements or duty of loyalty and patriotism? Have they no shame about that? Should corporate tax-dodgers abroad be able to buy elections here in the country they abandoned?

The tax-cutters and budget-hackers are busy now, wantonly hacking away at services to people, educational and cultural spending, regulation of safety and food supplies, research, food stamps, and other benefits to the poor -- while continuing to give tax breaks to business and the wealthy. Those who prosper most are given more, while the worker class recession victims are required to suffer more.

Have we no shame?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

IGNORAMITOCRACY

2011-03-31T17:35:00.000-07:00

No, we are not making up a new word, but we are using one that we believe is of quite recent origin. As best we know, this new word was coined and appropriately employed only a week or so ago by Paul Kruger, Nobel economist and columnist for the New York Times.

Neither our version of Webster nor our on-line dictionary has a definition for ignoramitocracy, of course, but a writer in the Daily KOS offers the following: “Rule by the Republican Party, or what a President Sarah Palin administration might bring to Washington, D.C.” The further comment is made: “It explains the current state of republican politics.”

Of course, we are familiar with the term aristocracy, which we know refers to those of high rank and privilege, often the hereditary nobility. A government of aristocracy would mean one ruled by the upper class elite, superior to others by birth and/or wealth.

In America we have resisted the aristocracy of “titles,” but espoused those of “power and pelf.” (Sir Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel”) Our founding fathers eschewed any use or recognition of hereditary nobility or title, preferring the common forms of address and courtesy versus obeisance to aristocracy of that sort. We have tended to overlook the fact that our forbears themselves were something of a “landed aristocracy” or from the “rich merchant” and artisan class. In fact, their rules allowed only male property owners to vote in those early days.

Those who believed in an aristocracy of the traditional sort believed also the doctrine of “divine right” of kings to rule. They accepted as God’s will the rule of the nobility and laws of primogeniture, and they believed that in bloodlines ran the right to rule, if not always the ability to do so. Religion of that historical era was criticized for being the “opiate” that kept peasant working classes in obeisance.

We have also heard and perhaps used the term “meritocracy.” In such a system, persons advance to leadership on the basis of ability and talent rather than privilege, birth, or wealth. It refers to leadership or “rule” by the most able and talented persons regardless of extraneous factors – including gender, nationality, or race. Many people fear any actual, true application of meritocratic rule. They distrust anyone who is much more intelligent or knowledgeable than themselves.

In a “democracy” we like to think that advancement is indeed based upon merit and little else. Such is not the case in reality, however attractive the theory. All kinds of extraneous factors prevent the working of that idealistic notion of a democracy, not the least of which being the accidents of time, place, and plain luck. But there are other factors, which are really sophisticated versions of aristocracy that intervene and sometimes dominate.

Wealth and power form a base from which political careers may be launched, either one’s own or the “sponsorship” of another who is more acceptable to voters. Name recognition is important. Appearance and personality have always been factors, and these have become highly significant since the advent of electronic media. Of course, such do not necessarily denote ability and talent.

An expressed ideology with connections to big money has become much more significant than merit in the ascendance of political personages in the new Republican Party. In fact, ignorance appears to be an asset to many of those now in favor with the money and power brokers of the conservative right wing. In the absence of ignorance, hypocrisy may help such ascendancy.

Writing in the Times, Krugman says:

“The underlying problem is that anyone with expertise and any kind of public profile – in short, anyone who is qualified to hold a position – is bound to have said something, somewhere that can be taken out of context to make him or her look like another Pol Pot. So what lies down this road? ….. A world in which key positions can only be filled by hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience, but unquestioned (political) loyalty.”

And, according to Dr. Krugman, there you have an “ignoramitocracy.

An ignoramitocracy is put there by ignorant and gullible voters who have been brainwashed through massive media buys by the wealthy elite and their corporations. Gullible voters have been led to think that these corporate “minion” officials will rule in the interest of the common man.

Unfortunately, an ignoramitocracy is not even competent enough to rule the country well in the interest of its own sponsors from the economic aristocracy, much less all the rest of us.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

DEMOS ARE DONKEYS --- REPUBS ARE MULES

2011-03-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

Too bad that we have this mixed up nomenclature for our party symbols. We really should name our parties after their style of conduct. In that case, demos could be deserving of their donkey symbol. Indeed they are a bit rambunctious and difficult to handle and organize at times. But, on the other hand, they are very sure-footed, and they are often employed in carrying people along the most hazardous and treacherous paths. They are most reliable in traversing the high mountain trails, and along the edges of deep gorges such as the Grand Canyon.

We trust the donkeys with our lives.

Elephants aside, it seems to us that republicans should be symbolized by the mule. Mules may be excellent beasts of burden, but they do not ride easily. Mules are considered both dumb and stubborn. It takes a lot of training to get a mule into the harness with others, but then they work well in gangs – witness the 20-mule team Borax, appropriately advertised by no less a personage than Ronald Reagan. They pull their load well, but it is difficult to keep them headed in the right direction.

And then, republicans are hybrids. They are a party with a misguided populist tea-party and religious base, mixed with cohesive conservative leadership, and carried by financing from corporations and billionaires. That is something of a mule.

Bing Crosby helped popularize a song back in the forties, when this writer was a young navy radioman in training during WWII. It was called “Swing on a Star.” Quite applicable to the behavior of our republican group, it went like this:

“Would you like to swing on a star,
Carry moonbeams home in a jar,
And be better off than you are,
Or would you rather be a mule?

“A mule is an animal with long funny ears.
He kicks up at anything he hears.
His back is brawny and his mind is weak.
He’s just plain stupid with a stubborn streak.
And by the way, if you hate to go to school,
You may grow up to be a mule.”

How could any casual observer of our state and national political scene fail to see the resemblance between the mulish behavior of today’s republicans and that lyrical description?

Who, other than the republican base, would constantly kick up a fuss over anything and everything they hear? That rumor mill runs rampant daily on the internet through mails and websites. Their deliberate perpetuation of such known lies as the birthers pass along is illustrative of stupidity – either plain or corrupted by evil intent. Their media spokespersons constantly vilify their competing political personalities with falsehoods, lending credence to an underlying mean spirit.

When in office and dominant in houses of Congress or the legislature, these mulish republicans eschew any decent, positive leadership toward goals helpful or productive for the people. Instead, they follow the whims of their most radical elements, promoting government interference with women’s personal matters, turning the country into a gun-toting wild west, persecution of any who are different from the rest or follow a different religion, and attacking education, culture, science, and the arts.

These hard-headed radicals want to use government as their tool to force their beliefs upon others to follow, often ignoring the Constitution to do so.

The other thrust of these mulish republicans is to push the agenda of their corporate and billionaire masters for cutting taxes. Of course, that tax cutting agenda concentrates of cutting corporate taxes, cutting taxes of the wealthy, and giving out tax breaks for the business constituency. These poor dumb mules probably don’t even know they are being used for nefarious purposes against the working class to which they probably belong.

They have been led to believe that it is good for America to cut services to the people, persecute public service occupations, and trade tax breaks for servile jobs.

Now set free by the republicans on the Supreme Court, these corporate and rich mule-trainers and drivers are afraid of nobody. They believe that they can go out and buy enough television advertising to convince a gullible public that black is white, evil is good, and that they are patriotically serving the nation and the people’s interest. Can they really do that?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

HIGH GASOLINE CULPRITS

2011-03-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

Who is to blame for high gasoline prices? We have a lot of ideas circulating around, most of which are not correct. While fault (or cause) may be spread around to involve several entities, persons, or events, it is unlikely that most of us are actually blaming the right people.

For one, the precipitating event or underlying cause may be easily identified, and about this there may not be a lot of disagreement. The calamitous change in the Middle East has caused anxieties about petroleum supply. These anxieties have, in turn, caused others to respond in ways that have caused a tremendous volatility in oil prices, which have translated into higher gasoline prices.

It should be understood that there is no actual shortage of global oil supply or oil supply in the United States. The shortfall in Libyan fields has been made up by expansion of production in Saudi Arabia and other places. Again, there is NO global shortage of oil, and none in this nation.

Further, there is no international shortage of gasoline being produced. This country is NOT short of gasoline supply. Nor has our American demand for oil and gasoline expanded. Rather it has tended to diminish somewhat due to conservation measures and smaller, more fuel efficient cars.

It should be clear then that our current high gasoline prices are NOT the result of either supply or demand factors. Yet we know from our study of economics that supply and demand vectors set the prices of goods and commodities. Have we been led astray by our economist friends? No, not at all.

It means that there are extraneous factors intruding into the oil and gasoline market, other than basic supply and demand.

We should hasten to absolve President Obama of direct blame for gasoline prices, and we should do the same for the former President Bush for those in his term. Releasing our oil reserves is not the answer, because there is no supply shortage. But there may be other actions within the purview of a president which could be helpful in avoiding or alleviating such crises. That will be discussed later.

One of these is anxiety, alluded to above. Anxiety tends to create ripe opportunities for Wall Street speculators in futures for commodities, in this case oil and gasoline. And, therein, lies the real explanation for high gasoline prices.

Of course, domestic oil companies tend to delight in high oil prices, because as suppliers they make a windfall profit from their local product. But they do not necessarily profit from the shooting global markets beyond the extent of their international operations. Oil royalty owners and producing oil companies in this country find themselves on a gravy train when global prices skyrocket while their local production costs go relatively unchanged.

So, yes indeed, oil companies are reaping rich benefits from spiking oil market prices. Their profits go up. Those of us who own a little oil company stock think we are getting ahead with our tiny share of that prosperity. But, we repeat, the oil companies are NOT necessarily causing the spikes in prices at all, although they may indeed benefit from them. Neither is OPEC, although they profit also.

We have commodities speculators nowadays who, through market machinations, drive up the price of almost all the consumer goods we purchase. These people are not only heavily responsible for the high oil and gasoline prices, but they are also responsible for the higher food prices we are paying at the grocery store.

Both suppliers and buyers in the commodities market employ futures contracts to hedge against sharp changes in price and assure themselves that they may sell or buy their product at a known future price. Sometimes called “hedging,” this is a common business practice. Your natural gas utility tries this, with varying luck.

The problem arises from others -- speculators, who enter the market as gamblers, making their bets and running up prices. As a part of the New Deal financial cures, the law gave commodities regulators powers to control speculation, so that market was dominated by suppliers and buyers. Until the first Bush’s term, speculators were highly controlled, but commissioners have since allowed growth speculator share to the point of dominating the markets.

Politics is involved to the extent that one holdover republican commissioner, having a deciding vote, will not vote to curtail speculation. His term expires this year. At that time, there is some hope to regain market stability, if our president chooses and can get a different appointment through. It will not be easy.

If the names Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs mean anything from the late Wall Street meltdown, throwing our economy into recession, then label these two Wall Street giants as culprits again. Together they control most of the commodities futures markets. Those very same markets are running up your grocery bill, and they are running up your gasoline prices – more than could ever be justified by the anxieties over the Middle East.

But these two Wall Street firms are major political donors as well. If there were only a way for all of us to follow the money and really know what these people are scheming. Would that we could wrest control of our own political affairs back from the business interests which are dominating our country.

Where is the Tea Party when you really need them? Well, they are frolicking on the other side against the interest of the people, blissfully ignorant.

But you wanted to know why you are paying high gasoline prices, and this has been a very long answer. As one of my university professors used to say, “Well, I understand this now, so its time to move on.”

Edwin E. Vineyard

OKLAHOMA IS NOT A HIGH TAX STATE

2011-03-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

No matter what one may hear through the dominant news media of the state, Oklahoma is NOT a high tax state. It is likely that it was never a high tax state, not in recent decades anyway, and that it has always been a state that relied on its natural resources to fill in a gap between what people are willing to pay in taxes and what they are willing to see spent by the state.

We might add that Oklahoma is not a high spending state either. While Oklahoma is just low-average in its per capita income, it is further below average in its taxes and expenditures.

The Tax Foundation has produced an authoritative report on comparative taxes and expenditures among the states of the union. The figures accessible to this observer are factual only, and without analysis or interpretation. The information about Oklahoma is intertwined with that of other states, and it must first be extracted, and then analyzed as to meaning. (The Tax Foundation report may be found at http://taxfoundation.org/publications/show/2181html for those interested.)

The following information spread shows Oklahoma’s ranking in key areas. A brief analysis of this data follows. Readers may make further interpretations of their own, by examining some of the seeming ambiguities in the original data itself. Careful attention must be paid to differentiating state from state plus local.

TAX FOUNDATION: OKLAHOMA COMPARISONS

2009 State per capita income $37,464 Rank 33

2009 Oklahoma State and local tax burden per capita $3259 Rank 37
Per capita tax burden as a percentage of income 8.7% Rank 37
(Roughly one-fourth below national average on each.)

2009 State Tax collections per capita $2,226 Rank 31
2009 State Revenue per capita $5,092 Rank 22
2008 Oklahoma Revenue by source
Property 17% Sales 29.3% Indiv. Income 22.6% Corporate 2.9% Other 28%

Personal Income tax rates Oklahoma 5.5% (all levels above $8700)
Rankings ----- High for lower income levels (Most states have
Low for higher income levels brackets)

2008 Oklahoma corporate income tax per capita $99 Rank 40

2011 Oklahoma state sales tax rate 4.5% Rank 36
Local sales tax rates 3.83% Rank 7

2009 State sales tax collections per capita $590 Rank 36
State plus local sales taxes per capita $996 Rank 22

2011 Oklahoma Gasoline tax rates per gallon $0.17 Rank 46
2010 Oklahoma Alcohol tax per gallon $5.56 Rank 21
2011 Beer tax per gallon 0.40 Rank 12
2010 Cell phone tax 10.74% Rank 17

2009 Owner Occupied property Eff. Rate 0.74% Rank 32
2008 Property tax collections per capita $582 Rank 47

2009 State debt per capita $2689 Rank 32
2008 State and local debt per capita $4670 Rank 46
2009 State per capita income $37,464 Rank 33

Source: The Tax Foundation: How Does Your State Compare?
Presented under the auspices of the Oklahoma Retired College Presidents’ Council
Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, Exec. Secy.

HOW OKLHOMA TAXES COMPARE WITH OTHER STATES
(A SUMMARIZATION OF FIGURES FROM THE TAX FOUNDATION REPORT)

Oklahoma per capita income is low average (33). This is not a poor state.

Oklahoma’s state and local per capital tax burden is low (37). Oklahoma’s per capital burden as a percentage of income is low (37). The people of this state are under-taxed in comparison with others.

State tax collections per capita are low average (31). State revenue per capita is high (22). This means that there is other revenue entering the stream.

Oklahoma income tax rates are high for lower income people and low for higher income people, making the income tax burden below average. This is due to lack of a graduated bracket system. Correction is needed.

Oklahoma’s corporate income tax per capita is very low (40), due to fewer or smaller corporations, lower corporate taxes, or exemptions – perhaps all these.

Oklahoma’s state sales tax rate is low (36), but its combination of state and local sales taxes rank high (7). Locally voted sales tax rates are very high, but the state rate is actually low. Per capita income from the sales tax is low for the state, and average for the local governments. Rate vs. income disparity, lower income from higher rates, suggest poor sales or too many exemptions.

The Oklahoma gasoline tax rate is close to the bottom (46). This means highway users are not paying a fair share, and revenues that should be servicing other needs are being put into the hopper for highways and bridges. Correction is needed.

Oklahoma’s alcohol tax per gallon is average, and its tax rates on beer are high. The cell phone tax rate is high.

The effective rate for owner occupied property is low average (32). Property tax collections per capita are close to the bottom (47). The rates vs. collections disparity suggests tax breaks for commercial and industrial property, or perhaps an unusually poor quality level of property occupied. Study is needed.

State debt per capita is low average (32). State and local debt per capita is very high (46). This suggests a study of local debt is needed.

ON WHOSE BACK?

2011-03-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

We are just coming out of a recession precipitated by outrageously risky behavior by virtually unregulated Wall Street financial institutions and their executives. After their bailout, those institutions responsible are doing well enough that they have repaid most of their loans. In fact, they are doing so well that they are already passing out huge bonuses to their executives – many of whom are the same people most responsible for the country’s financial meltdown.

But what about the 9% of our workforce that is unemployed? What about those whose unemployment compensation has run out? What about those who are downgraded in their positions and their pay? Something is not quite right about all of this. The penalties appear to be falling mostly on the backs of working people.

Salaried people with 401K plans are still hurting a bit. Some are almost back, perhaps original values or more, but they have not been earning at the planned rate for retirement. These workers are getting no bonuses from anybody, with a few exceptions like GM workers who took a big hit to keep the company afloat.

Interestingly enough, American corporations have been going gangbusters in the latter part of this recession. They have two years of record profits, and they are carrying record cash on their books. S & P 500 corporations are holding $1 trillion in cash, while lesser corporations are thought to be holding perhaps another trillion. Little is being paid out in dividends, and practically nothing is being reinvested in jobs in this country to help put Americans back to work. Only the selfish insiders are really getting ahead.

American workers are going nowhere. They have lost share of the national income. Their real wages have been stagnant for two or three decades. On the contrary, the incomes of the upper 5% have been climbing away from the other 95% of people. Yet with all this, the republicans have fought tooth and nail to save the multi-millionaires from a measly 4.6% increase in their base tax rate.

How is it that we keep electing people who do not represent the interests of the majority of Americans? One relatively unknown business and economics pundit made a short statement on a news channel’s weekly review. After observing a graphic illustration of the increasing separation of the income levels of the upper 5% from the stable income levels of the other 95%, he made a simplistic explanation. “I’ll tell you why this is happening,” he said, “it is because this upper 5% is convincing the other 95% to vote for politicians who favor the policies that help those at the top to prosper more.”

In other words, the majority of voters have been gullible to the propaganda sponsored by the rich. This includes rank and file republicans, and it includes some sincere tea party types who don’t even know their own organizations, as well as their dirty political ads, are bankrolled by billionaires.

During the last thirty years since 1980, when Reagan was elected, the top 1% (multi-millionaires and up) have gained in their percentage of the nation’s owned wealth from 7% up to 23%. Corporate CEO’s made 24 times the salary of the average worker in 1965, but today the CEO’s make 275 times the income of their average company worker.

This nation is becoming a feudalistic aristocracy of the wealthy. Not acceptable.

As Warren Buffet, an unusually social-minded billionaire, has said, “There is class warfare all right, but it is my class that has been making war, and we’re winning.” Well said, Mr. Buffet. We also liked your comment that you should not be paying a lower tax rate on millions than your secretary makes on a reasonable salary.

Then came the great budget cutting process all across the country.

About the loss of 100,000 jobs as a result of a republican cutting proposal, Speaker Boehner has already declared, “So be it!” Not at all what his party had led voters to believe about them. Republican governors in New Jersey and Wisconsin have demonstrated the same crass attitude toward public workers and teachers in their states. Oklahoma republicans have the same philosophy as they go about cutting budgets of state agencies, messing with pensions, attacking public schools, and changing the work environments throughout.

The attitude of governing republicans seems to be, “Let the teachers and the public employees pay the price.” Their big talk about “sharing the load” never gets around to raising taxes on those who can afford to pay. In Oklahoma, they have actually cut income tax rates in the midst of third year round of cuts in agency budgets. Just before the angst in Wisconsin, republicans there actually passed a tax cut bill of the same value they are pulling out of teacher and public employee salaries and benefits.

Again, republicans have put the burden of the recession’s hardships in government squarely on the backs of public employees. Medicaid for children and similar benefits for the poor are also taking a hit under republican management. All beneficiaries of state services are suffering cutbacks, while those who enrich the campaign coffers of republican candidates ride free.

This is not “shared pain,” and it is not fair to Americans.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

GOODBYE, MS. CHIPS

2011-02-28T17:08:00.000-08:00

During the early part of this writer’s two decades of retirement, he accepted state leadership positions with the Oklahoma Retired Educators’ Association. It was a worthwhile public service opportunity, he reasoned, since retired educators were people who had dedicated their lives to public service through the instruction of the state’s youth. They were a worthy group. Apparently, not all agree.

There is little to regret about that ten years of volunteer work, other than the fact that when approaching state authorities for help on behalf of deserving elderly folk, one is doomed to failure for the most part. With the current conservative control of state government the battle has changed from advancing the cause of elderly teachers to defending them against predatory moves by republican legislators.

Many times I have sat amidst a meeting of retired educators attended by legislators, or in meetings of delegations at the Capitol with legislators and government officials. There I have heard legislators speak to these folk, as though talking to their partially senile grandmother, telling them how delightful they are, and how much their past service to the people of Oklahoma is valued.

Then, almost invariably legislators will notice some past teacher of their own in the group, and they will bubble over with gracious thankfulness for that teacher. If none is there, they will call to mind one or two from their past. We call all this “a pat on the head.”

Probably some of those should die and go straight to hell, based upon their insincerity, deceit, and hypocrisy. They have already bidden Ms. Chips goodbye. They would really like for her to go grey, fade into poverty, and stop bothering.

These legislators today do not really care much for Ms. Chips, despite their lip service to her in public. They would prefer not to see or hear about how her pension, based on her small salary of twenty years or so earlier with few pitiful adjustments since, has less than half its initial purchasing power. They do not mind that Ms. Chips’ pension is less than half of those retiring now with the same years of service.

“The pension account has unfunded actuarial liabilities,” conservatives declare, “Sorry, but we cannot afford to give you any, much less a decent, COLA.” Then legislators, in their righteousness, say: “COLA’s must be paid for in advance by appropriation. Well no, we don’t have any money to appropriate for that. We have lots of other needs and priorities.”

They might as well add also: “Legislators in the past gave benefits too generous. We have to straighten that out.” It is what many of them really think.

Never have we heard a legislator say, as honesty would require: “The legislature failed miserably in not putting sufficient funds into the pension programs when we had the opportunity. Instead, we very stupidly cut taxes instead of investing surpluses in the state’s future -- including putting the retirement systems on a fiscally sound basis, as we were reminded every year by education groups.”

Never have we heard a legislator say, as conscience might dictate: “The state has never treated you right, Ms. Chips, and you should not have dropped into the poverty level at age 80 after all your service. So, we are now going to do something about our past unfairness toward you. We can afford that because half of your age group has already passed, and your actuarial life expectancy is short.”

Ms. Chips has not always been able to represent her cause well before politicians. I discovered this when I attended my first county retiree luncheon, observing the grey hair and naïve talk about legislative affairs. Silently, I said, “These people need a helper.” Later, I decided there was no better calling than to try to be of help to Ms. Chips and her colleagues.

I was never rewarded more than one day in the Capitol, when we had a dozen or so like Ms. Chips in tow going through the legislative offices. I asked, “How many of you would like to break off and go with me to the Governor’s office?”

Still I feel a glow of warmth from the answer of a dear little lady from southeastern Oklahoma, who piped up: “We’ll follow you anywhere, Dr. Vineyard.”

Well, Ms. Chips, we tried. We won a few concessions back then. Sorry we didn’t do better. Sorry that it doesn’t look as though you will be properly respected anytime soon by the crowd in control at the Capitol now.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

HEY, DEFICIT HAWKS! LOOK HERE!

2011-02-22T14:00:00.000-08:00

There is a true story of the confession of a famed bank robber. When asked about why he robbed banks, the thief replied, “Because that is where the money is.”

But this is a lesson not yet mastered by some of our republican would-be contra Robin Hood’s who crave budget cutting notoriety and hero status among their wealthy donors and culturally backward voter support groups. Mostly they just want to gain status by robbing the poor and giving to the rich. But they do show a certain barbarism by going after anything cultural, artistic, or intellectual.

The republicans are really going after those spending cuts. But mainly they are working within that 16% of a very big budget that is called “discretionary” spending. So, they have gone after school lunches, nutrition aid to poor mothers and children, student aid, Head Start, and poverty programs. They have also voted to defund public and educational broadcasting, the arts, and the humanities.

Strangely, they have not yet found all the riches doled out to farmers across the country. They haven’t touched the oil and gas company subsidies, or the newer ones for ethanol farmers in the political state of Iowa. They haven’t found the sugar subsidies either. Since there are literally hundreds of such special interest give-away programs, one might conclude that republicans aren’t even looking to cut the considerable costs of all these.

And, neither the republican nor the democrat deficit hawks have found the wars in Afghanistan or wind-down in Iraq. In fact, they have hardly touched the military expenditures at all. Some leadership republicans had to be beaten down to allow the air force to discontinue an unneeded engine built in their area.

The war in Afghanistan is 112 months old, has killed 1400 of our young Americans, and wounded 8800 more. War related costs have amounted to as much as 25% of all the deficits since 2003. The war was carried “off-budget” during the Bush years, and put back on by Obama in a move toward fiscal honesty.

Hey! Hey, deficit hawks! Look here! Look here! There is big money to be cut! And, there are lives to be saved, and families preserved from grief.

The human and personal financial burdens of the wars have been borne almost entirely by the middle and lower income classes in this country. All of those wealthy beneficiaries of war prosperity have not paid one extra dime in taxes to pay for the costs of a war being fought for them by other Americans. Instead, they have been given huge tax cuts by their republican minions.

There is a lot of hullaballoo about Social Security. One would think that Social Security has been bankrupting the nation. Instead, it would be historically accurate to say that Social Security has been bankrolling the nation.

Year after year since the 80’s Social Security has run a surplus. Before running its first deficit in 2010, it had accumulated a reserve account valued in trillions. That has all been loaned (invested) in treasury notes, the most revered investment for banks and businesses all over the world. It can go on as it is for several decades, and with benefit reductions of 25% around 2040 it will go to the 2100’s.

Of course, it would be wiser to make some minor tweaks now than on down the road, but why all the screaming? That is simple. Social Security was brought from “off-budget” to “on-budget” in government accounting a while back. This was done by politicians so that the SS surplus would cover up some of their annual budget deficits, and they would look better to the people. Now that SS has run a year of deficit, instead of surplus, it adds to the annual government deficit rather than ameliorating the deficit’s impact.

Now, of course, some “deficit hawks” would like to claim that entitlements such as SS have been ruining the fiscal state of the country, so they are out to try to gut a program which they have always opposed on ideological grounds. Well, it was enacted over republican opposition in the 1930’s, and Bush tried to privatize it.

The Medicare program is not so fiscally fortunate, and it has more immediate problems. The republicans’ enactment during the Bush years of a prescription drug benefit program made matters worse much sooner. A lot of that came from a gold mine for pharmaceuticals with windfall pricing. With no funding sources added, Medicare was then on a collision course with reality.

Remediation of the drug problem been rebuffed by republicans. They have opposed all legislation that has sought to control medical costs, a necessity for reducing Medicare, including the recent health insurance reform bill. One might think they want failure. Well, yes, they did vote against its original enactment.

Republican deficit hawks, then, yell the loudest about expenditures going mostly to poor, old, or working people. They are still opposed to entitlements just as they have always been. They are opposed to paying their share of taxes, and they want to keep all of their rich friends’ subsidies. And, they would like to starve all those government services and agencies they are against.

Watch out for a government shutdown – if they can blame it on somebody else.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE BUDGET HAS TWO PARTS

2011-02-17T16:50:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, when this writer was at a university pursuing a doctorate, we looked at our bank records and decided that we were spending too much. Therefore, we planned on a program of austerity in our household of two, severely limiting our expenditures. We did not buy new clothes. Our meat diet consisted mostly of hamburger fixed one way or another, with an occasional chicken or chuck roast bought on weekend specials. We did not go to movies, eat out, or do any of the usual entertaining things.

After following a frugal life style for several months, we looked again at our bank records, studying them quite intently. We could not see much improvement. We had made no special expenditures, confining those just to those that were demanded in keeping house, body, and soul together. Still we did not get ahead.

So, then we looked at the other side of the budget – our income. My wife was an elementary teacher at the time, and I was bringing in the meager stipend of a graduate teaching assistant. Put together, those did not go very far.

So, we reached a startling conclusion: The way to get ahead is to make more money. Cutting spending alone has a very limited impact. Secondly, we concluded that it would be a while before we were able to resume the positive growth of assets that we had expected. This was not the time.

Our lesson learned on budget management is one that many of our politicians have yet to master, either at the state or the federal level. There are two sides of the budget! Controlling expenditures is one part of the equation, but the income brought in makes up the other side.

All the talk from the republicans, in either the Oklahoma legislature or the Congress, is about cutting spending. As we found, just paying our rent, our utilities, and maintaining a modest standard of living consumed our income. So it is with our state and federal governments.

Our Oklahoma legislature is actually allowing an income tax cut to trigger this year, reducing revenue in spite of another year in a series of annual funding cuts for state agencies. Somebody explain the fiscal logic of that.

Further, the constant stress on adding “jobs,” while an admirable goal, usually means another set of “tax give-away” subsidies for businesses. Unfortunately, most of those now on the books do not carry rewards to justify them. While it is difficult to believe that the “party of tax-cuts,” currently in charge, will ever significantly cut government give-away’s to their donor constituency, it will be most encouraging if they will actually make substantive cuts there.

There is bally-hoo in Washington about cutting “entitlements.” To republicans this usually means “something you are getting and I am not,” i.e. the benefits are going to old people, the disabled, the poor, orphans, the sick, the unemployed, or war veterans. The two largest of these are Social Security and Medicare.

Oddly enough both are fairly simple to fix, if we had the political will to do so. Social Security needs a very slight increase in the payroll tax and the applicable salary raised little by little as the years come. Retirement age and benefits need little adjusting. For Medicare the solution is two-fold: add a little on the Medicare tax and gain better control of medical costs with a similar, effective universal insurance similar to Medicare for all. Medical costs are the basic problem.

Simple enough, but to accomplish either of these will require a realization of the logic of increasing the income side of the ledger, and the political will to accomplish that.

In national budget management, too often we forget the awful fiscal load taxpayers are carrying with supporting a military, and accompanying industrial complex, for fighting multiple wars and continuing to perform the role of world policeman. We cannot afford this, and we should cut it way back –NOW.

Related to the problem of military expenditures is continuing to be the banker “sugar daddy” for the world with aid programs for any and all of our “friends,” however temporary these friends turn out to be. Most of the nations of world can now stand alone or with limited assistance. If we won’t tax ourselves to take care of our own, why are we taxing ourselves to subsidize economic competitors?

Sitting idly by watching Oklahoma state services shrivel, emergencies arise, and people suffer, while refusing to even discuss raising tax revenues, is the height of government irresponsibility. There is a limit to cuts, and it has already been exceeded in most cases. It is time to add to the supply side of the budget.

Are there no statesmen left?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

BARBARIANS AT THE GATE -- AGAIN

2011-02-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

“Then outspake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate,
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his gods.’”
From: Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas B. Macaulay

The last time this citizen lifted pen to write under the title above, it was during the period of the Newt Gingrich takeover of Congress after the elections of 1994. Mr. Gingrich immediately declared his first targets to be the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Humanities Foundation. Does anyone not see the logic of the metaphor of persons with hostility toward education, the arts, and culture taking over Congress, and the barbarians at the gates of Roman civilization?

Everyone familiar with history knows that the earlier barbarian takeover set back the progress of humankind for nearly a millennium. Fortunately, Mr. Gingrich was never so successful.

During the last few decades, the whipping boys of the ultra-conservatives have been education, culture, the arts, and intellectualism. Has anyone forgotten Mr. Agnew’s terms “effete intellectuals” or “the nattering nabobs of negativism?”

Although less semantically talented, the current crop of ultra-conservatives in the Congress and in the Oklahoma legislature are just as much in the spirit of anti-intellectualism as those in the past. This then translates into an active disrespect for the “establishment” in the schools and the colleges. While our common schools have their faults and may be in need of significant improvements, they have not deserved being made the target of consistently vicious negative attacks by conservatives in the media.

It should probably be said that historically public schools have always had their opponents. This has had nothing to do with the quality, or lack thereof, in their performance. It has everything to do with an age old ideology which holds that academic education is for the elite. The term “elite” in this context has never referred to the brightest or most mentally capable, but instead has referred to the children of those wealthy enough to send their children to private schools. Persons holding to that ideology believe that working class children should be educated in the occupations or skills of labor. The economically well-to-do, as a class, have tended never to fancy paying taxes to support the education of working class children with aspirations above their family’s ability to pay.

However, a basic tenet of democracy has always been that of equal opportunity. And the truth of equal opportunity lies in the open and free access to education of all kinds at all levels. This was enunciated well by Thomas Jefferson.

Schools have done nothing to justify the harshness of the continuing conservative media war against them. Yet that has succeeded in making the gullible half of citizens ready to support some kind of destructive “reform” moves against our public schools, the teachers, and the colleges who train the teachers.

This gullible half of our voters has unwittingly put in place a deadly combination of ultra-conservatives in the legislature and in the executive offices governing our schools. Those legislators are threatening to give despotic powers to an “elected” official, who is a declared enemy of the public schools system as it now exists, and who has espoused unproven alternatives to public schools which are set up to move money while evading all rules, mandates, and standards which have assured some semblance of quality and equality in our schools.

At stake is the entire funding formula for education. Who gets the money? Is it the urban schools? Is it only the rural schools which consolidate in some pleasing fashion? Will the rich get richer, or will the poor districts keep getting “equalization” money? Or, perhaps they will just siphon off the funding to “charter schools” letting public schools starve or close? Is that the goal? Is the ultimate goal the privatization of education, with attendant selectivity?

Are taxes the real problem? Lately it has appeared that any agency or public service that receives tax money is subject to vilification. Those who contribute the big money to candidates for political office just don’t like to pay their share of taxes. What if they could convert those pesky public schools into some cheaper structure? What if the taxes could be tapped to pay for private schools free of state regulation? Could it all start under the name of “charter” schools?

The future of public education is threatened by politics. The tragedy is not that those with contrary ideological views are storming the gates, the real tragedy is that the people themselves fail to see what is happening to their own beloved institutions of democracy.

The calls of those representing a modern day Horatius go unheard and unheeded. The beneficiaries of public education lie in their stupor of brain-washed ignorance while the barbarians pour through the gate. So shall it be written.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

TEMPEST IN A TEA (PARTY) POT

2011-02-04T08:01:00.000-08:00

The brief, but likely continuing, tempest in the tea party pot at the Oklahoma State Department of Education last week is illustrative of similar storms taking place in various states and cities in America. It surrounds efforts at “education reform,” which can mean anything from blowing up school systems with political dynamite, i.e. “throw the baby out in the bathwater,” to modest and needed changes of a beneficial and progressive nature. These different storms often contrast changes made by fiat of authority with those made by cooperative study of issues and solutions.

In the case of the Oklahoma State Department of Education tea pot fiasco, the signs all point to one person with a stick of political dynamite, which she calls a “mandate” -- from a poorly contested recent election in which the winning candidate had all the campaign money, most of that from right wing forces aided by millionaires and corporations.

Many do not accept that as a “mandate.” Voters in Oklahoma have a poor understanding of the issues behind the forces who pay big money to advertise for their vote. They do not really understand “charter schools,” the semi-private alternative to public schools which the new state school superintendent has espoused and is expected to push. She shows signs of doing her pushing in the fashion of a bulldozer.

The voters of Oklahoma did not vote to strip their public schools of funding and send tax money to semi-private entities, which may then choose to contract with corporations to essentially privatize our schools. They did not choose to strip our educational system of essential regulation and enforcement of standards of teacher certification, curriculum requirements, and accountability. They did not vote to allow private entities to skim off the students in the localities they wish, take the public tax money, hire cheap teachers, and do a cheap job of educating their student selection with their own curriculum while making a profit for “service” corporations.

Certainly, the public did not vote to pull students from public schools (and the tax money) and move them to a private entity which would make a fortune while offering cheap education via internet to students at home. This is sold to people as progress?

Certainly, the State Superintendent of Schools has a leadership and administrative role to play in the state’s common education system. But it is not an authoritarian role, and it has not been for decades. That office does not operate by fiat, nor by “papal bulls.” And, then there is the problem of a absence of acceptable professional credentials.

Decades ago, the office of the state superintendent was indeed a highly authoritative role. Superintendents such as Dr. Oliver Hodge, well-known to this writer, did indeed operate in a rather authoritarian manner at times. But Dr. Hodge began the democratization of the department’s functions. He shared his authority, coincident with that of the state board of education, with those who fell under his care. Many of us served on teacher education, professional standards, graduation curricula, school size, funding formulae, and other commissions and committees. The state’s regulations, and many of its laws, came from such a shared process.

Others followed Dr. Hodge’s example with even more democratization and shared authority, giving professionals in education a huge participatory role in forming the guidelines by which the system would function.

Still the public and the legislature did not always feel comfortable with so much authority over public education residing in just one “political” official. Likewise, that one person often felt more comfortable with the board taking a stronger role and sharing the responsibility for tough policy decisions and recommendations on education. Thus, the State Board of Education came to have a much greater customary and legal role of authority in education. It has its place, and it is there for logical reasons.

Unless one believes that the best changes occur through destructive explosiveness, i.e. blowing up and destroying the system which has developed through the years, then it would be wise to approach change as some kind of an orderly process that involves the participation of those being governed. Normally this takes longer, but it works better. And, the results are better and last longer.

Of course, all this presupposes there is present a genuine desire to have the best public school system in Oklahoma that is within our cooperative reach. If the goal is really to do away with public education in Oklahoma, as some suspect, then let us hope that is made a hotly contested battle by public school forces.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

LEGISLATORS LOSE SENSES

2011-01-31T07:22:00.000-08:00

As an observer of the Oklahoma legislature for more than forty years, this writer cannot claim to penetrate the darkness of the legislative psyche sufficiently to understand the thinking (or lack thereof) of some current members. So frequently now, questions haunt us, such as: “What are/were they thinking? What fugitive from a psych ward thought of that? Are these people really as crazy as they act? What kind of dope are they smoking these days? Don’t these people have any sense at all? Who let the idiots out of their villages?”

Well, you get the drift.

In the past not all legislators who appeared a little off the deep end were as strange as they seemed. This writer well recalls a state senator friend from down in Okmulgee County who regularly proposed legislation to castrate convicted rapists. Of course, this would not seem strange when mixed with some of the crazy bills we have floating there every year now. Other than the one peculiar stance, that senator was a good supporter of everything progressive in Oklahoma – including colleges and public schools. And, he was a graduate of my college.

But those who are sponsoring the crazy bills now do not appear to have such redeeming qualities. At least, none show.

The craziest of the loony bills in this legislative session are those proposed by the gun nuts. Can you really imagine college campuses with anyone and everyone carrying concealed weapons, i.e. everyone who takes the little gun-handling short course and gets certified? It is difficult to imagine streets and stores like that, much less colleges and vo-tech schools.

But, lo, there are also legislators who are sponsoring legislation to let anyone carry guns in the open just about anywhere they go. That is, we can all strap on our six-shooters (excuse me, 31 bullet automatics), and go to college classes, the grocery store, and maybe even the saloon. Evidently college administrators, faculty, store managers, and bartenders will then be carrying their guns in order to protect themselves, the students, the customers, and to keep order.

Folks, even Wyatt Earp had a better system than this in old Dodge City, checking in the cowboys’ guns when they came to town. And, in Tombstone the Earps and Doc Holliday met Ike Clanton and his boys down at the OK corral for their deadly gunplay – away from innocent people. Who cares about innocent cows? PETA does, so that would not be allowed today. But innocent people are okay.

We have had a rash of really ugly immigration bills, all aimed at chasing the undocumented Mexicans out of the state -- and making legals uncomfortable.

But those bills that threatened the interests of Chamber of Commerce member employers of undocumented residents soon got sidetracked or amended. Now we have some legislators going after the Mexican kids, trying to take away their rights to citizenship by birth although that happens to be a provision of the U. S. Constitution. They’re called “anchor babies.” It is hard to deport the parents and not the child, but some are working at it.

Denying rights to Mexican children of undocumented workers is another regular target. Deny them medical attention, deny them schooling, and deny the graduates of state high schools their in-state college tuition rates.

It is not hard to reason why all these harsh immigration bills are introduced. They are pushed by the same people every year – the ones whose faces we see on television so frequently appealing to their tea party type voter base. They love the TV camera and the publicity they get from these efforts.

We fear that similar motives drive those who each year come up with some new legislative twist to have government interfere with a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Strangely enough these same politicians who push such legislation intruding into the personal and family lives of women are the ones who loudly cry out against big government regulating health insurance companies or big banks in an effort to protect citizen consumers. Nevertheless, such foolishness appeals to their religious right wing voters.

Clearly some legislators have motives of their own, primarily political in nature, for doing the dirty work of some overly zealous, misinformed, bigoted voters out there. Too bad! But it is still very hard to understand where the “gun nuts” are coming from. Maybe the NRA is promoting all this, and we don’t even know it. We don’t receive their black-hearted propaganda, of course.

To a former college administrator who allowed no guns on campus, in dormitories or anywhere else, these gun bills seem completely, utterly, and incomprehensibly puerile, and just plain stupid.

This writer has had the actual experience of confronting an angry man on campus, carrying his gun and looking for vengeance. I do not buy the notion that if I had been armed that day I would have been safer. The peaceful resolution of the problem could easily have been quite different with two guns present.

I would not want my campus vice-president son carrying a gun, or his faculty doing so, in order to meet the challenges of disorderly gun-toters on campus. They are not policemen. But neither would I want my son or other professionals trying to do their jobs peacefully amidst an armed student body -- or in a town where everybody is free to carry a gun.

I cannot understand legislators who would promote such conditions, nor parents who would tolerate such a circumstance.

If it comes to all this, what kind of state is this going to be?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE

2011-01-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

Having appeared at an untold number of graduation exercises, this writer has been exposed to the piece “Pomp and Circumstance” enough times that it has become a familiar tune. But it remains music to celebrate a noteworthy achievement or event of cultural importance. This listener will never tire of music with such dignity.

Upon achieving the necessary level of authority to make the calls on commencement music, however, I chose instead “The Triumphal March” from Aida. This is perhaps the most stirring and exciting music I have ever heard. Replete with trumpets and complete instrumentation, there is nothing comparable to produce a prideful surge in one’s spirits.

The reader might well respond at this time, “Who said there was something wrong with either the holding of formal commencements or the playing of uplifting, inspiring music in celebration of intellectual accomplishments?” At one time, it may have been difficult to find such, but today it is not hard to find those who see little value in the formalities of pomp and circumstance. There has been change in priority given education and intellectual or cultural accomplishments. We may go through the motions, but a common coarseness has taken over.

In fact, some of those being honored at these formal ceremonies will choose to skip them. Others show disrespect for the occasions by their manner of dress and by their conduct and that of their guests. While in earlier years parents would cross a continent to attend the ceremony for the new graduate, perhaps the first in the family, some will not now drive across town to be on hand for the big formal event. The current disdain for formalities, dress occasions, or anything cultural, is quite disturbing.

But it is reflective of the larger culture of which we are a part. It is personified by some of our political leaders and pop culture icons.

After having shown disrespect by non-attendance at the commemoration event at the University of Arizona held last week for those killed or injured, and for those who performed heroics, new Speaker Boehner this week also refused to attend a state dinner for the president of China at the White House. On the former occasion he was attending a fund raiser cocktail party, and on the other he said he had to stay to vote to take away public protection from marauding health insurance companies (although that vote was over much earlier than the start of the dinner).

Some say that Speaker Boehner doesn’t like “glitzy, pomp and circumstance” affairs. That does not appeal to his “base,” they say. Well, heaven help us if our third in line for the presidency cares more about appealing to a red-neck base than he does in performing the social duties of high office.

Of course, others point out that Mr. Boehner attended state dinners during the Bush presidency. So, then, Mr. Boehner is left only with the smirch of bad manners brushed across his well-tanned face. Others have suggested the “Southern solution” as the real reason for snubbing invitations not only for social events but also political discussions in a White House occupied by a black man. This writer would rather believe that Mr. Boehner is a social boor and a bad-mannered clod.

But our American culture as a whole lacks proper respect for propriety, good manners, courtesy, respectfulness, and what might be termed the “social graces.” We would rather be slouchy as to be dressed. We fail to appreciate anything “high brow,” yielding to our peers of lower brow for whatever goes by “pop” these days.

Worst of all, we lack respect for intelligence and most things intellectual.

Some ignorant politicians regard the conclusions of our scientists on global warming to be some kind of hoax or fairy tale. Some with narrow interpretations of scripture seek to bar teaching of real science from the public schools by substituting their religion. When the nation’s most learned economists come together to make recommendations for government actions to combat recession, some politicians trash expert opinion, filling the air with old clichés about spending, tax cuts, socialism, and “big government.”

Ignorant political appointees to boards and commissions seek to rewrite textbooks in history and science. Legislators who know nothing about instruction seek to rewrite curricula, schedules, and mandate minutia for schools with little regard for professionals. Lay boards and parents interfere in the professional work of teachers in their schools, dictating content, methodology, or discipline. As a cheap alternative, we siphon off funds for semi-private, charter schools upon which we make no demands or legal requirements and set no standards.

While many Americans hold on to a form of their rugged, frontiersman culture, they wonder why their schools are falling behind those of the mainstream world. Then they blame this on their scapegoat, public schools, upon which they habitually cast their most vile criticism. University people are just a bunch of eggheads and elitists, who plant a lot of liberal ideas in the heads of the young.

Two generations have grown up since Americans have shown proper appreciation for scholarly and cultural activities in our schools. Instead, the public has demonstrated neglect and an unhealthy disrespect for genuine academics.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard

EDUCATION REFORM

2011-01-22T09:57:00.001-08:00

Everybody is an education reformer, i.e. everybody has ideas on how to reform our schools. Those who know least about education tend to have the most radical ideas on education reform. Those who know the most about education, the ones in the trenches doing the work, also have their ideas for reform – but usually less radical. Politicians have ideas for change, normally the uninformed kind. Researchers and theorists in our universities have their ideas too.

Long ago when this writer was studying and practicing education, or later teaching educators, counselors, and school psychologists, he learned that sound practice and productive change must be based upon research. That research comes from trial and analysis of new ideas under controlled conditions. Analysis needs to be mathematical and objective. This does not mean there is no room for empiricism, i.e. experience based knowledge or traditional practices, because these often have some scientific basis. But laboratory studies, controlled group studies, and controlled practical experimentation must not be neglected.

Basic learning psychology studies have much to offer. For instance, these can tell us much about ideas for the four-day week, 90 minute period, and organizational structure. For younger minds “massed learning” has been proven by research to be less efficient and less effective. Especially in complex subjects, such as mathematics and science, spaced learning with reviews has proven much more effective in laboratory and classroom research.

Why would we not look at such research before we play around with study periods, days, weeks, or with curriculum? Have our colleges and universities not passed along such knowledge in professional classes during the last couple of decades? Are school administrators and teachers ignoring what they were taught about the psychology of learning? Are lay boards ignoring the advice of professionals? Are there too many administrators and teachers functioning without proper professional education credentials?

Are our politicians, encouraged by their party and by some in the media, undertaking wholesale changes in our educational system, its structure, and its academic standards and requirements without consultation with knowledgeable professionals? Are we about to embark on changes without looking at research relevant to these decisions? Although we have an aversion to looking at practices elsewhere, especially internationally, we are nevertheless constantly comparing our student product and test scores. Should we not also look at their practices as well?

For instance, if we are comparing our high school graduates and scores with others internationally, should we not look at the selectivity taking place in some of those national systems? Holding to our ideals of open opportunity for all in high school, we may find unfavorable comparisons with systems which allow only the upper half to advance to that level. Is that a proper or fair comparison?

As long as we hold to the notion that every student is equally able to learn any and all subject content, we are creating ourselves an educational problem. Some might call this a dilemma. High schools harnessed with one type of graduation credential and one set of graduation requirements, essentially academic college preparatory courses, are indeed saddled with a dilemma. Teachers must decide if they are going to pass only the half who master the content, while failing the other half, or is it best to modify (water down) content and standards so that most can pass some of the basics? This is a dilemma.

There are some recent theorists who claim that anyone can learn anything if taught the right way and given sufficient time. These have done a disservice to schools, teachers, and especially to those pupils caught in the ignominy of frustrating and failing circumstances. Bright pupils are also deprived of the opportunity for rigorous learning experiences, properly preparing them for advanced study.

Learning research tells us that “one size fits all” is not right. There should be no single set of requirements foisted upon every student. Students should be allowed to have different life goals, and to choose different routes in school toward different credentials. School counselors know this, but it seems everyone else has forgotten. Parents often unwisely demand college prep for all.

Some educators may have forgotten what research has taught about education, or never learned about the profession. Perhaps we are not listening to knowledgeable professionals, or we are simply choosing to ignore the accumulated knowledge that could guide us in our efforts to improve our schools. This approach will lead only to change for the worse.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard

PRACTICING SOPHISTRY

2011-01-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

In order to make a point, personal anecdotes are often helpful. This piece contains two such personal stories, which hopefully will be drawn together to illustrate a point. That point regards the persistent vein of sophistry being practiced by one segment of our political spectrum as a form of denial and defense in the aftermath of the Tucson massacre.

This writer was once accused of sophistry, and while in some intellectual circles in early Greece that might have been a compliment of sorts, it was not perceived as such by this former professor. Having been called to the academic vice president’s office in one of our major universities regarding the work of an outside statewide committee which he chaired, this writer was told to disavow their recommendation which I was to present to another state governing body shortly. After my reply that began: “With all due respect,” all heck broke loose.

In the harangue which followed, I attempted to provide logical answers why I could not conform to his order. These were met by other demands, and by accusations that I would hurt the university. At one point, while stating a requirement of conscience, I was accused of sophistry. On that, I left. But I did survive, integrity intact, and the university never fell apart.

An accusation of sophistry, i.e. skillful but fallacious and deceitful reasoning, can be a quite insulting to an academic.

In one of our regional universities, where this writer was once headed the student counseling services, he had the unusual experience of listening to a student with quite different problems. She was an attractive woman of about 30 or so, and she was referred to my office because of her complaints about being sexually harassed by one of the faculty members.

She related to me that Dr. X had made sexual advances to her. That seemed strange to me, as it had been to the referring faculty advisor, since we both knew Dr. X to be one of the older, conservative, fuddy-duddy types on our staff, even a bit dull and dowdy. She was non-specific in describing the nature of those advances, what he said, or the “looks” he gave her. Then she began to tell me about others who had also done such. She had complaints about the woman driver of her car pool, whom she mistrusted. That progressed on to her story about not eating in the college cafeteria because somebody there was poisoning her food. She had also had trouble with a downtown restaurant poisoning her food.

I recognized that I was dealing with a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. I offered to make an appointment for her with an area doctor (psychiatrist). She was to come back. But the next time I encountered her was in the president’s office, where she had gone to complain that I had “roughed her up.” After we clarified the meaning of “roughing up,” I asked her to relate to the president about the food problem. Hearing that he became quite agitated, called that “crazy talk,” told her to go, and to follow my advice.

The driver of her car pool came to see me and asked, “Dr. Vineyard, do you think she is dangerous? Am I in danger?”

I answered, “No. Not unless she decides some day that you are the one who is poisoning her food. If she decides on who that is, they could be in some danger.”

This brings us to the point. Mentally ill people may be quite benign in society, except for requiring care and treatment, which many are not getting. But there are many out there who may be potentially dangerous with the distortions of reality in their thought processes. They are susceptible to voices, both imagined and real. They may have pent up impulses and repressed behaviors waiting to be loosed.

In other words, they are out there, but they are relatively benign – UNTIL THEY ARE TOLD WHO IS POISONING THEIR FOOD. When one of those breaks loose, and goes on a rampage that may include killing a bunch people at a political gathering, it is rank sophistry to offer reasoning why the rhetoric of violence and hate practiced by the right wing bears no responsibility.

The talk of “in the cross-hairs,” “lock and load,” “Second amendment solutions,” “get your ammunition ready,” and all such are enough to focus the mind of a deranged listener on a target. Many of us have warned that the rhetoric and the symbolism of the tea party are suggestively violent in nature. Some tea party speakers have advocated outright destruction at targeted offices, of which the Tucson congresswoman’s office was one vandalized.

Carrying guns to political affairs is threatening. So are the signs carried insulting our democratic government. Use of Hitler, Nazi, communist, or tyrant are inflammatory. Speaker Boehner’s exclamations of “Hell, no,” or his use of words such as “job killing health bill” or “death panel” and “death tax” are meant to be inciting to emotions. Hooliganism and shouting at town halls, fomented by tea party sympathizers, have no place in civil discourse.

The incessant beating of the same drums by a certain television “news” channel and by certain radio commentators foments and incites anger and hostility.

Denying any responsibility for violence against political targets, when it occurs, requires rank sophistry. But there is also the matter of incubating genuine fanatics who perform or condone such acts as the shooting of the Wichita abortion clinic doctor, because they are provided the thought that it is right, necessary, or God’s will. There, too, we find similar sophist reasoning as a defense – just as in politics.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard

VILIFYING HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM

2011-01-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

For more than a year now we have heard the health insurance reform program passed by Congress vilified by those with political bias against it. Often called “Obama Care” by republicans, the enacted legislation is really a mere shadow of the proposals made by Mr. Obama and his advisors. After all the compromises made in the course of getting enacted, the bill did not represent the views of mainstream progressive democrats very well at all, and left many longing for something better.

The “health care reform” bill enacted simply corrects some of the past abuses of health insurance companies against the public, and particularly against their own policy holders. Then it also sets up a plan whereby health insurance might become accessible those 40 or 50 million people in this country without any coverage at all.

This is not a “government run” health care or insurance program. Medicare is a government run insurance program. Most progressives would have much preferred “single-payer” government run insurance resembling Medicare for everybody. But that is not what was enacted.

When citizens were polled on the individual provisions of the law, the results were always 60% to 90% positive for the various components. Yet with the constant vilification of the law by republicans, its overall support has dropped from 60% to about 40% in this past year. One must conclude that this negative political effort has been successful. But when those citizens opposed are asked to specify what provisions they are against, they are often unable to do so. Some provide answers showing lack of understanding of the program’s contents.

So, a lot of people are opposed to the health insurance reform plan, but they don’t know why. But they have been told it is bad, and they believe it.

Perhaps the rhetoricians, such as Mr. Boehner, have colored their judgment. He always calls it “the job-killing Obama health care plan.” That is scary enough. When persons like Rep. King of Iowa spends 58 minutes on the floor of the House, as he did this past week, with assurance that God does not want the insurance companies regulated, things are going from scary to weird.

Republicans were autocratically bringing the bill to the House for repeal in its unitary entirety (although the Tucson tragedy may cause a change in schedule). No effort is made to identify the good from the part they don’t like. No effort is being made to amend any parts not liked. No opportunity is being given to debate the different features. One can only conclude this is a political game and not an effort to improve legislation. It is a political game played with no thought to the harm done to people affected by repeal of patients’ rights and protections granted in the program.

The court system is being utilized for part of that political game. States are suing to stop the law. Their main legal objection has been “forcing individual citizens to have insurance.” In other words, it is something similar to our auto insurance requirement and for similar reasons. Persons who don’t have health insurance are parasites on the rest. They get expensive emergency room visits, surgeries, and some expensive acute care anyway – at the added costs to all our bills and our insurance premiums. Why would we not want to have some sort of planned universal coverage if we are all going to have to pay for the uninsured some other, more expensive way?

This repeal effort is based upon fallacies and lies. No one involved is actually trying to improve anything for the people.

We are suddenly told that this bill will increase the deficit. When confronted with the facts that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has calculated that the program will actually reduce the deficit by $230 billion in the next ten years, Mr. Boehner says, “Oh, they can have their figures, and we have ours.” That is a silly, stupid answer. No sensible person says such things. But it typifies republican tendencies to ignore facts when it pleases them.

Mr. Boehner’s “job-killing” accusation needs examination. His idea, of course, is to reduce labor costs for all of the nation’s businesses.

The fact is that some of America’s industries are handicapped in global competition by worker wage levels and by worker benefit costs – particularly the cost of health care. Health care costs are hurting our economy in that and other ways. Too much of our GDP is going to the health care sector. Health care costs MUST be reduced. The Obama bill tried to do this, along with increasing access to basic health care to reduce expensive emergency and crisis care. Reducing excess profit margins of insurance companies was another goal.

There is no doubt that health care costs need to be controlled and reduced, but is this goal to be achieved by denial of care for those unable to pay or by denial of benefits and wages to workers? Do we want to cut the standard of living for our middle class and starve the poor? Or, is it better to reduce the flow of cheap goods made by cheap labor into this country through tariffs and other controls.

Would it not also be better to have a single-payer, government run health insurance program like Medicare for everybody? Through such a program real constraints could be placed on escalating health care costs. It would be fair to everyone, and everybody would benefit. There would still be a big “Medicare supplement” insurance market out there for the insurance companies, because no government program is likely to have first dollar, deductible free coverage. American industries would still need some protection, to maintain our standard of living.

It is time to be honest and to stop playing political games with the health care of the people of this country.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard

MEAN MARKETING IN POLITICS

2011-01-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

We have often heard the saying, “Sex sells.” Indeed, it appears that it does. Everything from toothpaste to automobiles is marketed with a direct or oblique appeal to the sexual motivation of people. But in politics, sex works mostly as a negative and against democrats. With some exceptions, republican peccadilloes are less damaging, even in that party touting “family and religious values.” Perhaps this is because their mean marketing is targeted toward their opposition.

It seems that we have turned full scale to “mean marketing” in selling our politics, particularly to the naïve, the uninformed, the ill-informed, and the gullible. Negative television advertisements are obvious examples. Attack ads could almost be understood without any verbal adds. The dark, foreboding images of the opponent depict that person in a manner usually reserved for 1930’s era gangsters and jail mug shots. Tainted words like “liberal,” “socialist,” or “death panels” appear, along with demonized party icons such as Obama or Pelosi.

Mean marketing may include fear mongering. Whatever voters with vulnerable minds might fear is used prominently in mean salesmanship. Pictures of Hitler and swastika emblems are shock provoking and employed frequently. Capitalism fears socialism, and capitalists pay for lots of ads, so socialist, communist, Nazi, death tax, and “socialized ____, “are often used. Of course, these are often used along with American flags, eagles, stars, and emblems of patriotism to depict themselves and those who are paying for the dirty ads.

But there are political movements that should generate genuine fear in thoughtful voters. These are the political rallies or “town meetings” with burly thugs standing around, guns strapped around their waists or in combat military gear carrying rifles. We have a right to be disturbed by people carrying flags turned upside down, or those carrying signs saying “take our country back” and demonizing our democratically elected government or our government officials.

There are those who speak at microphones, even candidates for public office, advocating a “second amendment solution,” obviously referring to guns and militias as a way of solving our democratic government’s shortcomings, real or imagined. These should be frightening to those of us who believe in civility in debate and peaceful transitions through regular democratic processes.

There is an e-mail currently circulating carrying the title “Ex-marine Stuns Crowd.” In this a middle-aged, partially-bald man takes the microphone at a tea party rally and sings the fourth verse of the Star Spangled Banner (as written in 18l4, used since 1916, and adopted by Congress in 1931). He does a marvelous rendition of this verse of the anthem. Unfortunately nobody identifies this singer as the unsuccessful southern tea party candidate who became a flaming evangel and icon for the most militant tea party people in the last election.

As memory best serves, this man advocated personal violence and property destruction as political tactics against incumbent congressmen and opposition candidates. These tactics included bricks through windows of homes, cars, and offices, advocated on the right wing airwaves and done. Other stations carried excerpts of incidents. Also, he referred to secession and taking up arms to achieve “political goals.” To many of us, this seemed beyond free speech and into the treasonous and criminal category. Certainly, this man does not seem one to be honored as a patriotic icon, when many think he belongs in jail instead.

We should also fear those who want to change our Constitution to suit their own political ideas. These people try to stimulate fear in us that unless we change the Constitution something bad is going to happen to us. God is going to be banned from the nation. The Muslims are taking over. Or, substitute black people or Mexicans for Muslims in that sentence. Better yet, just be fearful all three are taking over, accompanied by the secularists, atheists, Jews, gays, and intellectuals.

They say that if we don’t give up some of our liberty and our freedom, we will not be safe. Or, conversely, they say that the government is taking away our freedoms and must be stopped by making some kind of constitutional change. Or again, they may say that we must let them go beyond the Constitution and the courts to do things that will save us from our enigmatic enemies.

We have a good Constitution. It is the charter of our democracy. It protects our individual freedoms from the majority and the government itself. It has been constantly maintained and updated by decisions of the Supreme Court through interpretation of its words and its principles. There has been an ebb and flow in terms of political philosophies, and properly so, but in general the courts and the Constitution have stood the tests of time.

The last thing we should do is allow any lunatic political fringe activists to change even one word of our Constitution.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

OVERKILL

2010-12-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Our society is a bit strange. We go from almost a laissez-faire attitude, or a benign admonition, to criminalizing or quite punitive measures against the pranks, exuberances, or peccadilloes of our people. Almost anything can set off political zanies with an overkill response. Senator Inhofe’s boycotting the “holiday” parade in Tulsa is overkill. So seems the $11million Christmas tree in Abu Dhabi.

Let us take for example the tripping case of the assistant coach for the New York Jets. That assistant coach was fined and suspended for tripping a player opponent who was running down the field out of bounds on the white strip so provocatively close to the Jets’ bench sideline that he was within inches of brushing them. It should be against the rules for a defensive player on the kick-off team to run up the field out of bounds. Evidently it is not. Nevertheless, the player is off the playing field and he is fair game if he passes so close to the opponents on the sideline as to make it possible for an almost undetectable extension of a foot to trip him.

We don’t have a dog or a favored team in that fight, but it seems that the league was grossly over reacting with throwing the book at that poor assistant coach who yielded to temptation under seductive circumstances. A slap on the wrist would have been sufficient for his indiscretion.

It seems to us that police and prosecutors have a way of over reacting to lesser drug offenses of juveniles and younger adults. That young lawyer in Ponca City may be an example. We don’t know all the facts of the case, of course, but for one ounce of cocaine in his pocket he had the book thrown at him. A later search of his car found a gun stowed away, so that added to the list of charges and the seriousness of the other charge. All that seems a bit much.

Lots of people carry guns in their cars. While we do not condone that, we have had acquaintances volunteer that they always carry guns in their car for safety. With some of our crazy state legislators wanting to legalize carrying guns everywhere, it hardly seems that it should be such a serious offense for an adult to have one in a car or pickup. That young lawyer needs a rehab program and time away from his profession, but we don’t see the need for that time to be spent in a jail at our expense.

Even our conservative state legislature is beginning to realize that our “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” mentality in Oklahoma is out of step with more progressive states and terribly expensive for a state budget to carry. We are depriving other state services in order to keep a bunch of people locked up who either did not need to be there or have been there too long. Since state facilities are full, county jails have had to warehouse their prisoners. This too has led to the expenses of over-crowding, bond issues to build new jails, and related tax costs.

Fox News has over-performed its function for the republican party to such an extent that it is no longer recognized as a legitimate news service, but rather accorded a shameful designation of propaganda machine. Recent mainstream news has revealed overkill memos from the head of Fox, admonishing all on-air people to use certain degrading, negative terms when referring to certain people and certain issues. They regularly issue their people talking points and terminology. Persistently they circulate stories contrary to facts already out.

This accounts for the findings of a research study reported this week which showed Fox viewers to be more misinformed, uninformed, and ignorant on a number of significant issues which have permeated the news stream during the past year. We have said repeatedly that if a person watches only Fox News and listens to Rush Limbaugh that explains their biases, misinformation, and weird political ideas. Of course, explaining is not excusing such cultivated ignorance. Nor does it excuse the boorish behavior of those full of confidence in their false information.

At this writing the House just killed a child marriage bill that passed the Senate almost unanimously. Some zany right-to-life republicans had circulated a memo which alleged the bill opened doors to federally subsidized abortions and other evils. A reading of the short bill of less than ten pages would have shown this memo to be false, but the bill protecting young girls from sexual exploitation failed. How sad!

Overkill can work both ways, of course. A recent law passed as part of the democratic agenda, loosed some onerous IRS requirements of red tape and paperwork on small businesses. This was a prime example of a fault for which the feds are frequently accused. But overkill can be corrected, and in this case it was a clean-up bill removing the more onerous red tape requirements.

We wish we could clean up other prime examples of overkill as easily, as new ones appear daily in our sight. But foibles of people will no doubt continue to abound, and the art of dirty politics will continue to soil hands, mouths, and minds.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

IRONIES, CONTRADICTIONS, AND "PLUTONOMICS"

2010-12-07T15:23:00.000-08:00

We live in a world of inconsistencies, some of which have little logic and may reveal character flaws and ulterior designs. Our social and political environment seems full of such.

Two years ago Mr. Obama was swept into office on a popular agenda of change, and this year the republicans regained a share of power after saying “No” to all changes and obstructing any they could. The people spoke in 2008 saying that they wanted Washington to work in a bi-partisan fashion for the good of the people. Even though the republicans ran on a platform of “country first,” they immediately set out to defeat Obama on every front, make him look bad in every way they could, showing partisanship by attempting to block every move made. Now, the people’s voice is for a return of the harshest form of partisanship?

For the past two years the Obama administration has refused to respond to public clamor for investigations of the lies concocted inside the Bush administration to justify war and the approval of torture in violation of international treaties. Now, even prior to taking over the House, republican leaders are talking about investigating the Obama administration -- for what? We suppose over anything that comes to mind – perhaps his former church preacher or some guy in Chicago who sometimes attended the same local civic or political meetings. More Whitewater baloney?

Republicans are demanding tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% to 3% of the population, even though these same people have had increases in income of 10% a year the past decade while the incomes of middle class have decreased. S&P 500 corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, but they are refusing to expand operations and hire people. Corporations have just finished their most profitable year in history and stock markets are up, but unemployment is at 9% among common people. But the republicans want to lower corporate tax rates and cut off unemployment benefits.

During the last decade, republicans in power ran up trillions in debt with unnecessary wars and with unnecessary tax cuts for the rich, but now they have become deficit hawks demanding that every measure which might benefit ordinary citizens in stress be paid for in full by spending cuts somewhere else. Republicans are deficit hawks in rhetoric, but they consistently force the military to spend extra money to buy unneeded and unwanted weapon systems made in their home districts or by lobbyist campaign donor companies.

Republicans do not believe in global warming and they pooh-pooh scientific research, particularly that collected by Mr. Gore, yet some of their own constituents living on the eastern seashore are having to leave their cars parked on streets away from their homes because the rising level of high tides is now bringing water to their yards, driveways, and frontal streets. Although they have praised the first nuclear control treaty with Russia negotiated by their president, Mr. Reagan, republicans are now blocking ratification of an extension of that same treaty negotiated by their nemesis, Mr. Obama.

In 1985 the richest 1% held $8 trillion in wealth. In 2005 this same group held $40 trillion in wealth, a five-fold increase. During that same period the average American family found not its wealth, but its debt, increasing at an alarming rate. Some have referred to this as effects of “plutonomics.”

Republicans now support taxing worker health insurance benefits, home mortgage interest, and retirees’ Social Security checks, and then lowering tax rates for the rich and for corporations as solutions to deficit problems. Yes, really!

Republicans point to Reagan as their iconic conservative president, yet during his term of office the national debt increased more than under any president before or after until the second Bush presidency. Reagan’s “voodoo economics” claimed that when the wealthy were given tax cuts, prosperity would “trickle down” to the rest and that the result would be greater federal tax income and reduced deficits. Despite the opposite results for Mr. Reagan, the republicans are still claiming that very same voodoo: cut taxes for the wealthy, increase prosperity, and reduce the deficit. What is it they say about repeating the same failed action over and over compulsively being the sign of a fool?

President Obama has proposed continuing the tax cuts for everybody except the top 3% of our taxpayers (incomes over $250,000). This would reduce the projected deficit for 2011 by $400 billion, from $1.3 trillion to $900 billion, a sizeable reduction with no ill effects to the economy. Yet republicans totally reject this notion, and they are standing hard for that 3% who are the wealthiest among us.

Could all this have anything to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars in business and corporate donations to republican campaigns this fall? Why else? Why else would republicans want to continue the taxes of billionaires at lower rates than their secretaries?
With government tax policies that clearly favor the wealthy, the dynamics of a “plutonomy” have been clearly present for several decades. Is it any wonder that America is drifting from a democracy toward a plutocracy in the character of its government? The minions of money can be selfish and cruel, and their tentacles reach far, wide, and deep.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

PETER PRINCIPLE POLITICS

2010-11-27T14:32:00.000-08:00

This writer well recalls a long airplane ride from Oklahoma City to Washington, seated beside Father Peter Green, president of St. Gregory’s College, and reading together a brand new book called The Peter Principle. We would read a page, then pause to chuckle and comment. It was a most enjoyable trip, whereas most of those trips were not – even absent the current draconian airport security measures.

Succinctly stated, the Peter Principle said that sooner or later everyone tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence. The author made his point quite well. We have all seen this principle borne out all around us in our contacts in the business, artisan, and professional world.

This point was brought home again this past week in one of our rare instances of tuning in Dancing with the Stars on ABC television, and in reading newspaper accounts quoting one contestant in that show’s competition. Bristol Palin finished third after a dismal performance that evening. A “last dance” from a contestant dropped the previous week was dramatically better than two of the three finalists still there, including Ms. Palin.

Later Bristol was quoted as saying that her wanting to win came from a desire “to give the middle finger to all those who hate my mother and hate me.” I understand that a lot of people detest her mother, but “hate” is an inappropriate word for most. I really do not know anyone who hates Bristol, although there may be some.

But I would like to say to Bristol: “Young lady, you have it all wrong. People don’t hate you. You did not make it as far as you did in the contest on your merit. You made it on the basis of your mother’s intense popularity, and some politically motivated contest voters who campaigned by hook and by crook to keep you there. It is not anyone’s fault you are out. You advanced way past your level of competence.”

In the rounds of commentary, I would like to note further that her mother, the ex-half-term governor Sarah Palin, has noticeably advanced way past her level of competence as well.

This woman demonstrates this time after time. Last week it was “all the 57 states,” and then the latest gaffe was referring to North Korea as “our good friend and ally.” But she regularly makes new ones as often as she speaks from anything but a prepared script. We’d wish that all of these were deviations in use of the English language, such as her Bushisms, or slips of the tongue. But lo, many come from just plain ignorance. Others come from faulty reasoning, or accepting platitudes and talking points provided to her as a rationale. Worse, she does not seem to know a lie when she tells one, but she goes right on.

Despite her status as a political celebrity, which most of us have difficulty understanding, Ms. Palin is in no way ready for political leadership in government. Her incompetence was demonstrated in her failed attempt at a governor’s duties and responsibilities. She then walked away from those troublesome problems to pursue the money making machine of being a celebrity.

Ms. Palin’s popularity has been fed largely by the media. In a similar fashion, Paris Hilton has a name that is known in the households throughout the country. Should Ms. Hilton decide on a right-wing political career, one might suppose that she would receive lots of publicity and would advance rapidly in popularity among a segment of Americans -- and thus shortly reach her level of political incompetence.

Without constant media coverage neither Ms. Palin nor Ms. Hilton would matter much in the universe of human concern. Ms. Palin’s flower would fade and wither because it has no other sustenance. Some of us would, of course, be much less irritable people if this were to be the case.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE DEFICIT CONUNDRUM

2010-11-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

President Obama mistakenly placed confidence in the “bi-partisan” deficit commission he appointed to study and make recommendations about reasonable ways to reach a balanced budget in five years. From the report released by the co-chairmen, it would seem that the work of this group was hi-jacked. No democrats are pleased, but a few republicans like it. One leader has flippantly made the best suggestion of all, observing that he might need to go into a witness protection program to escape the public wrath.

Even as a starting point for talks among the commissioners most of these ideas have little merit. We need not commit now to raising the retirement age for social security to age 70. Doing away with tax deductions for the middle class, such as health care and mortgage interest, while cutting the tax rates for high income earners and corporations is a notion dead on arrival.

While not unrelated to the deficit, reforming the tax system is a whole different issue. Likewise, just as related to deficits is the whole matter of health care costs in this country. Proposing a government-run, price-controlled system like Medicare for everybody would have been just as appropriate and highly effective in curtailing deficits. How far would that have gotten with the republicans?

It is difficult to see the value of some of their ideas, even as points of discussion for the commission. But perhaps the shock will jar some of us out of our sense of complacency.

Perhaps it is strange to say, but Social Security is NOT the immediate problem. Some thirty or so years ago, politicians decided to put SS “on budget.” Social Security itself has been running a surplus for years, right up to now. Politicians wanted that SS surplus to offset and minimize the annual regular budget deficits they were running -- so those would not look so big. They created confusion.

ALL DEFICITS during recent decades were actually much bigger, but showed up less because SS ran surpluses. Now it is headed for a tougher period, and the actual deficits are going to show up big – unless taxes are raised or spending cut. But SS is NOT the real deficit problem! Neither is Medicare, now.

A few tweaks will fix SS for a hundred years. Make a month or so advancement in retirement age every few years. Increase salaries upon which payroll taxes (SS & Med) are levied from $106,000 by $1,000 each year for a decade or two. Increase payroll taxes by 0.1% each decade for three. As a result, Social Security is fixed for a century and Medicare can be made better by a similar increase.

But the rest of the budget is much more of a problem. The big expenditure is military. Stopping wars and reducing our presence abroad in numerous unneeded military bases would be a huge start to a manageable budget. War costs the last decade have exceeded $2 trillion – all unpaid for with tax levies. This is the 800 pound gorilla in the budget room that nobody wants to recognize.

Then we can give up all those fiscally silly and politically hypocritical ideas about cutting taxes – anyone’s taxes. All of the Bush income tax cuts must be allowed to expire now. That takes $1.8 trillion off the anticipated deficit for the next ten years. For fiscal responsibility, that is NOW.

Third, there is a need to reduce the advantage of the rich over everybody else in present tax rates and tax dodges. In 2007 the top 1% got 24% of the income in 2007, compared with 9% in 1976. Their income grew at 10% a year from 2002 to 2007, while the middle class lost purchasing power. That is a tax system out of control and grossly unfair to the working American. It has to be stopped. Raise tax rates, and change the rules favoring the rich over everybody else.

Next, all of our working age people need to have employment, either private or public. America cannot afford the failure of productivity from a huge segment of its population. Unproductive people not only rob the economy of any contribution, but they are a liability and a burden on the worker-producers. Something has to be done about those in our population who do nothing productive, yet draw down the bounty of productivity from others. Those able to work, without private sector jobs, should be trained and working on infra-structure and public service jobs.

A final remedy, as a money producer and a booster to the economy, is a consumer tax on imported goods and services. That may be called a tariff, but it does not deserve its bad reputation. Starting points should be crude oil and manufactured goods. It is unrealistic to expect to maintain our high standard of living and at the same time compete with the low wage levels being paid in much of the world. Some believe that we need a major consumption tax. Rather than retail sales and gas taxes, which have no economic growth value, let’s just tax those things we import and increase domestic production and jobs at the same time.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

ELECTION A MEDIA SUCCESS

2010-11-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

While pundits everywhere are assessing the blame and the rewards, and awarding accolades and censures to antagonist parties and their leaders, let us properly frame this election what it actually was – a remarkable success for the right wing media.

This election was not a repudiation of Mr. Obama’s agenda, upon which he was overwhelmingly elected just two years earlier. The election was not an endorsement of the republican party’s obstructive policy of negativism toward everything.

Studies indicate that the majority of voters never really understood Mr. Obama’s legislative proposals for such intricate problems as health care, unemployment, the banking system crisis and regulation, stimulus program, or any of the other major initiatives. Although in the election of Mr. Obama in 2008, voters gave positive affirmation to generalities and principles of corrective action, they had never seen the details nor did they ever comprehend the legislative process by which a cobbled version of these appeared.

Indeed, voters never understood the proposals or the enactments, even though some became vociferously and viciously antagonistic. How did so many voters go from being basically in favor of fundamental changes in reforming our health care system to a position of totally rejecting an enactment which contained features they had previously endorsed -- without ever giving the careful study to be informed? This brings us to a most significant understanding of the meaning of the election, which appears to be forgotten by many who pontificate as political pundits and columnists.

The fact is that the voters did NOT reject Mr. Obama’s programs on health care, nor most of his other proposals for solution to America’s problems! Instead, voters rejected the CARICATURES of Obama programs shown in the media. Some may have also rejected the CARICATURE of Mr. Obama himself, as depicted to them constantly by the right wing republican media.

Obstructionist republicans made no serious proposals for any of the problems facing the nation. They opposed the effort to stop collapse of the banking system, popularly identified by them as “the Wall Street bailout.” (Nobody notices now that all that money has been paid back.) Likewise they objected to saving America’s auto industry, a success which has also mostly been repaid. When gobs of campaign money came to them from lobbyists, republicans tried to emasculate or kill the banking regulatory and consumer protection bill. Although the stimulus bill successfully created enough jobs to reverse the loss trend, republicans have vilified that as “wasteful spending” while grabbing projects for their own states.

None of this logically adds up to anything but a success for the democrats, yet the republicans have painted a picture of an over-reaching, socialistic government abusing its power, regulating and taking away freedoms from the “people,” anti-business, and not in the nation’s best interest. We have seen the Hitler mustaches and insulting signs. Their media outlets handled those lies for them for them so repetitively well that gullible voters have swallowed it.

Mainstream media are not exempt from blame in the spreading of false and misleading information to the public. Unfounded accusations have no place in the news of ethical journalists and stations. Outright bias and criticism, flying in the face of contradictory facts, have no right to demand news coverage from honest media. Nevertheless, in addition to their own wholly owned media, such as Fox and right wing radio time, the republicans have been able to enjoy a prosperous, but undeserved, pulpit from the mainstream media. One wonders why?

Unfortunately, republicans and their media were not satisfied with their advantage such free and donated time on the air. They also wanted to buy the airwaves for their candidates and their version of the issues. Obliging them, five republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that individuals, groups, and corporations could donate unlimited sums in the support of favored candidates and issues.

From this came a unending plethora of attack advertising like never seen before. In highly contested districts, the blitz must have been a veritable nightmare. No one knows just how much was spent on supporting republican candidates by sources outside their district, outside their state, and even outside the country. Sums gathered by such groups as the U.S. Chamber, Rove’s group, tea party support groups, and others with patriotic sounding names passed well over the $150 million mark at last count. No one really knows because there are no required legal records of either the amounts or the donors. Republicans blocked that disclosure from a vote in Congress.

What a shady way to run an election! Money in the hundreds of millions coming from unidentified sources remaining anonymous in the shadows – is this democracy?

This is certain to bring government by special interest groups with big money – operated in the interests of people with big money. A hundred million – or two or three – is chump change if it does nothing but save these same people $700 billion in taxes over the next ten years by extending the Bush tax cuts favoring them over average citizens. (Look no further for reasons why they hate Mr. Obama.)

Yes, this election was a big victory for the republican media and the special interests, and it was a big money maker for the mainstream media owners.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

PROFLIGATE REPUBLICANS?

2010-11-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

“If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing,” so says David Stockman, budget director for President Ronald Reagan, writing in an opinion column in the New York Times.

Stockman says in his Four Deformations of the Apocalypse that this nation’s fiscal woes come “not from big spending democrats, but instead the republican party’s embrace of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”

Who would ever have expected such views from the principal fiscal advisor to the iconic conservative republican president revered by all his followers from 1980 down to the present time? One can only presume that (1) Mr. Stockman’s heart may not have been in some of the actions during that past administration; (2) he considers this an entirely different time and circumstance; or (3) he has learned much from studying the economic and budgetary effects of the Reagan tax cuts and the Bush tax cuts. We suspect the latter of the three.

Pointing to the growth in the national debt which he says may become as much as $18 trillion under present projections, Stockman says this huge sum will be 40 times its earlier size of $450 billion in 1970. He points not to growth in spending programs, but to the cutting of revenues. In other words, he is again saying it is not “big spending” but short-sighted revenue tax cuts that are creating the problems now and on into the projected future.

He says, “It is the ideological tax cutters who killed the republican fiscal religion.” Thus he indicates that maintaining a sufficient and reliable revenue stream is the first necessity of true fiscal responsibility.

Stockman says that by 2009 the tax-cutters had lowered the federal revenue stream to only 15% of the gross domestic product, the lowest since 1940. “Republicans joined in a shameless free-lunch fiscal policy,” he says of the tax cuts.

Reagan’s fiscal advisor goes on to name bad tax policy as a primary cause of the current recession, and he abhors the fact that it has weakened the middle class and led to much greater wealth concentration among just a few within the American population. Stockman points to the statistical facts that “from 2002 to 2006 the upper 1% among us received two-thirds of the national income while the lower 90% received only 12% of the nation’s income.” While not mentioned, mathematically that leaves the 9% of the population just under the top 1% (making up the rest of the top 10%) getting a whopping 21% of all income, or two-thirds of that not already taken by the top 1%.

Stockman says that this represents “the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.” Under any standards of judgment, the gross imbalance of income in this nation is unfair and discriminatory in favor of the wealthy. Paraphrasing Mr. Stockman, “It stinks.”

Those who make such calculations tell us that just re-enacting the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy adds another $400 billion a year to our debt. Re-enacting all of the Bush tax cuts would add about than $1.3 trillion to our debt projections for the decade. No true fiscal conservative can rationally justify such actions.

Mr. Stockman is also concerned with “deformations” other than tax-cuts and a tax policy with bad social and economic consequences. He points toward allowing the loss of manufacturing jobs out of the country, both in trade policies and tax policies allowing our own industries to take jobs out and ship goods back. Our trade policies wreak devastation on our economy, our jobs, and on our tax collections.

All of the talk about cutting discretionary expenditures will not solve America’s fiscal problems. No really knowledgeable person believes that this alone will even make a dent in reducing our projected deficits and debt. It is time for politicians to stop lying to the voters about this.

There is nowhere that this basic lesson is needed more than in low tax myopic Oklahoma, where revenues have been successively cut and special interests served with tax breaks and exemptions, until there are insufficient revenues to provide for a decent quality of services to the people. Here we have illogical voters demanding and expecting a quality education system, humanly decent penal institutions, children’s protective services to save the mistreated children, and all the other accoutrements of good government without being willing to carry a tax burden above the lowest states in the nation.

Republicans expect above average schools from below average tax support. They expect the same miracle in more and higher quality degrees from our colleges and universities with barely marginal support, transferring costs to parents.

It is time to stop the political posturing and the grandstanding plays before the voters, and it is time to start facing the hard problems and talking truth. Most rational people, like Stockman, know that it is time to stop blowing smoke at the public and to start making real progress through revenue enhancement, as well as carefully screening expenditures.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE DUMB HAD BETTER BE TOUGH

2010-10-29T09:59:00.001-07:00

Just a few days ago, I received a cartoon via e-mail from my son. It pictured a scruffy-looking, tea party type hunter in a sweat shirt holding a dead bear cub high in one hand and mugging for the camera. In the background coming over the stack of logs behind this hunter was an adult grizzly bear. The caption read, “If you’re gonna be dumb, you’d better be tough.”

Although this was not intended to be a political cartoon, and the hunter was not really supposed to be representative of the unruly tea party crowd, it was so much on target that one could not help forging an analogy.

In particular, that hunter who thinks he has a trophy worth photographing so represents this year’s crop of ignorant voters who are so confident that they have a winning strategy and winning candidates everywhere. These candidates, supposedly representative of the regular guy, even if backed by corporate and billionaire money, are supposed to “take our government back” for those tea party folk. And, they have some of the craziest, screwball, nut cases for candidates one could imagine.

In any other year these candidate heroes, as well as those parading celebrities of the tea party, would simply be laughed out of town. But not this year. We wonder why?

Probably Mr. Obama’s biggest problem with many of those folk is that he is black. A second problem is that he is a democrat. Third, he is progressive and he wants to change the way the country has been run to benefit business, banks, and corporations, and make it more responsive to the people. All these combine to incite big money from the business types who have had free rein in the country for the last eight years, and entirely too much influence for the last fifty years.

With the sinking of the economy and job market, in spite of valiant efforts of the president and his party to save these, there has been enough general dissatisfaction to make a large segment of the public vulnerable to seductive slogans vilifying the president and tolerant of vicious words pillorying him and his good efforts. There was a right wing fringe rabble ready to take advantage of those feeling the economic pinch, but who have failed to reason well about the cause.

All this right wing rabble needed was a few good slogans, the financing from a few billionaires, and the coordinative work of some political pros from the republican party to bring this “grass-roots” movement into the limelight. Aided by the right wing radio talk shows and Fox News channel the group had much more publicity than it deserved. Mainstream media always apishly pick up on anything that is different and attracts attention in some controversial way.

So, there we have it. The rabble turns into a faux populist movement and the ignorant and the gullible jump onto the bandwagon.

Some of us recall the movements of the sixties and the seventies of the last century. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” was the cry. Obviously, that excluded anyone with any experience at all with anything.

The cry of this movement has been, “Don’t trust any career politician!” Don’t trust intellectuals!” Those include people with college degrees, in research and analysis, or with expertise of accumulated knowledge in various areas of endeavor. “Don’t trust the elite!” “Put the man-on-the-street in charge!” “It’s time they listened to us, we’ll tell them!” “I’m just like you, vote for me!”

And, sure enough, we have a bunch of candidates wearing the republican label who just fell out of the political tree and onto the turnip wagon. Some of these are as nutty as fruitcakes, and know just about as much about governing as George Bush’s White House mutt. These people, along with the entourage of negative republicans who just can’t say “Yes,” possibly may make up a ruling and obstructive coalition of congresspersons and senators in the new Congress.

What a fiasco that would be!

This writer once had a philosophy professor at O.S.U. who boldly declared, “I am not a believer that from pooled ignorance springs forth knowledge.” Neither am I, Professor Scherich.

The voters would do well to look for the brightest, best educated, most knowledgeable, and most experienced candidates among us who believe in government for the people versus government for special interests and corporations, and who are best qualified to lead good government for this nation.

We should not be looking for candidates whose crowd of supporters carry the American flag upside down, who put racial slurs on their signs, who speak of “second-amendment solutions” against our democratically elected government, who dredge up and misapply evil names like “Nazi” or “Hitler,” who vow to wreck our security systems and safety nets, and who don’t know a government run health program (Medicare) from health insurance company regulation (recent health bill).

If you vote to put ignorance in charge and cast out knowledge and experience, then beware of the consequences. Let the corporations and the billionaires buy this election with paid propaganda and you pervert your vote.

But if you are going to be dumb, you had better be tough. And, so had we all.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

DON'T GO TO THE MINES

2010-10-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

As we have been observing the plight of the Chilean miners trapped far beneath the earth for weeks, we recall from Oklahoma history and family lore the historical vicissitudes of miners in our own state. Fortunately, those Chilean miners had a safe haven, communications were soon established, and supplies were funneled to them. Happily, all were eventually extracted and brought safely up from the depths into the waiting arms of their families.

Oklahoma’s historical experience with mining disasters, while replete with a few miraculous escapes and a couple of instances of heroic rescues, has not been nearly so positive. We have had terrible tragedies. Witness the once-popular ballad of the plaintive coal miner’s daughter, the lyrics of which are shown as follows:

MINER’S CHILD’S DREAM

A miner was leaving his home for his work
When he heard his little child scream;
He ran to the side of the little girl’s bed
She said, “Daddy, I have had such a dream.”

Chorus: “Oh, Daddy, don’t go to the mines today,
For dreams have so often come true.
Oh Daddy, oh Daddy, please don’t go away,
For I never could live without you.”

I dreamed that the mine was all covered with fire,
The men all fought for their lives;
Then the scene changed, and the mouth of the mine
Was covered with sweethearts and wives.

The miner was stroking his little girl’s face,
And was turning away from her side,
When she threw her small arms around her daddy’s neck,
She gave him a kiss and she cried ….. (chorus)

“Go down to the village and tell your dear friends
That as sure as the bright stars do shine,
There is something that’s going to happen today;
Oh, Daddy, don’t go to the mine.” ….. (chorus)

Thought by some to have been written in commemoration of the Wilburton mine explosion in 1926, the year of this writer’s birth, this tune is actually a folk song adapted from Victorian England. It was sung to him often as a child by his mother, usually producing tears. After a time in the midst of the rural coal fields of western Arkansas, the site of that horrible tragedy would ultimately become his own hometown in early 1939. Perhaps the worst of Oklahoma coal mine disasters, the Wilburton explosion entombed 105 men forever in the bowels of the earth.

It may be surprising to some that in eastern Oklahoma, formerly the Indian Territory, there have been some 500 men lost in coal mine disasters. It is no surprise to our friend and former governor, George Nigh, who grew up in McAlester, taught history there, and represented that area in the Oklahoma legislature. He tells me of his surprise at encountering in an unexpected place a picture of his own mother serving meals to distressed miner families. Neither have any of these incidents escaped the attention of our friend and celebrated Oklahoma journalist, Frosty Troy, also of McAlester.

Explosions around McAlester include: 2 killed in 1905; 30 lost in 1908; and 30 killed in 1930. Nearby in Krebs 100 were killed or entombed in 1892 when a mine exploded with 400 miners working underground, a rival for the worst such disaster. Close by in Alderson 12 died in 1919, and 10 at Dow in 1902. In 1908 Haileyville lost 29 miners, with newspapers noting that some were “foreigners.”

Wilburton had lost 13 miners earlier in 1905, and a nearby Lutie mine lost 13 killed and 17 trapped in 1930. In all, 17 coal mine accidents have been documented for the eastern Oklahoma fields. Numbers cited here are mostly from contemporaneous newspapers, hence may not be official or final.

While these are mere statistics to most, they are family lore to others. Before I was born, my father spent short stints in the Arkansas coal fields and at Picher, Oklahoma. My father-in-law spent time in the mines. I attended school with miner’s children, and spent time in their homes. We played with carbide miners’ cap lights. We saw fathers come home with blackened bodies and dark, gritty overalls. It was always easy to recognize a miner, even on Sunday.

A few schoolmates were orphans from mining accidents, and some had relatives killed or injured. A number of my classmates were the sons and daughters of immigrants who came there to work in the coal mines. Most were Italian, but there were some from Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Slavic region, or elsewhere.

In the thirties it seemed that there were three main causes of disabled and maimed men – World War I, farming accidents, and mining injuries. When miners worked free of injury, there might later be “black lung” – not properly recognized or understood. Of course, there was neither workers compensation nor Social Security disability provisions in those times. Men and their families had to live with the personal consequences of their work injuries. Survival was made even more difficult by the dark times of the Great Depression.

No one rejoices more at the good fortune of those who escape from traps in the dark depths of the mines of doom than do those who grew up in communities in a culture shared with mining and its concomitants.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

STATE BALLOT QUANDARIES

2010-10-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Many voters are in a quandary about the upcoming state ballot questions. Most have heard about different ones of these, yet few have actually seen the alignment which will face them on November 2. Certainly most have not had sufficient exposure or opportunity for considered study to give them confidence in facing their voting choices. The summary below is provided as an offering toward such an educative experience.

744 Requires OK to spend per pupil average of surrounding states
This is a highly significant issue, and the television has been full of advertising. It poses conflicts for most supporters of public education, particularly those in higher education. Since it carries no added tax to pay, it would force a “no-tax” legislature to take funds away from higher education and other state functions. The consequences could be devastating. It is opposed by leaders in both parties and higher education. It has stirred bitter attack ads from anti-tax groups.

746 Requires voter government-issued photo ID
It is supposedly intended to prevent voter fraud. Since that has not been much of a problem, it is seen as an unnecessary hassle increasing voter time and lines and costing money. Some believe it is aimed politically at immigrants or poor people, and it adversely affects older or disabled people who might not have a driver’s license.

747 Sets term limits on all state elective offices
These would be 8 years for all elective offices except Corporation Commissioner, which would be 12. This is based upon faulty reasoning that experience is somehow a deterrent to performance. The legislature and the state suffer now from that false premise.

748 Legislative Redistricting
The governor, the pro-tem, and the speaker appoint 8 democrats and 8 republicans and the Lt. Governor chairs the Commission. New provisions add to the power of legislative leaders.

750 Lowers petition signatures required
This would make it easier for various interest groups to get measures on the election ballot for a vote. It allows special interests to go around the legislature and load ballots with “hot” issues or fiscal items, some difficult for the public to understand. It would make for abuse of the initiative process, as has been seen in California. This list of state questions demonstrates similar abuse of the referendum process by the legislature.

751 English language in “official actions” of the state
This has been debated in the legislature for decades. The fact that it is being pushed by legislators with less than friendly records in immigrant affairs makes it suspicious. There are exceptions for Indian tribes and federal requirements. This is offensive to the feelings of the Hispanic minority, and it is difficult to point out good reasons either for or against it.

752 Workers’ Comp Court Judges
The Governor will now appoint from a list provided by the (changed) Judicial Nominations Commission, and confirmation by the Senate is now required. Places controls on appointments, and makes them subject to legislative blocking. “Reform,” restraining adjudication of worker injuries, has long been an issue for republicans and their employer supporters, and this would put them into control of that judicial system if they dominate the legislature. Workers oppose this as biased and unfair to their injured people.

754 Anti-744 Amendment
This language negates any use of averages, practices or processes of other governments or entities in determining appropriations of the legislature of the State of OK. It overturns the requirements of any other amendments passed simultaneously or in the future which would make such requirements. This is an effort to void #744, if that passes, and to prohibit all future amendments of like nature. This seems unwise and bad over-kill policy.

755 State courts limited from applying Sharia or international law
This prohibits state courts from referencing international law or Sharia (Muslim) law in deciding cases, as if any had done so. This question was sponsored by the usual and customary radical suspects in the legislature. This appears to be a vote looking for a relevant issue and finding none – a case of shameful referendum abuse.

756 Nullifying federal health care law
In 2014 citizens who can afford health insurance, but do not have it, will be required to purchase health insurance (thus removed from taxpayer dole). There is a fine if they fail to do so. Sponsored by the usual and customary radical suspects, this amendment is a vain attempt to nullify federal law with a state constitutional amendment. (harkening back to start of the Civil War). The “commerce” provision of the U.S. Constitution has been consistently court-construed to cover all such federal requirements. Should some future Supreme Court declare otherwise, they would put such federal laws as Civil Rights and the Disabilities Act, among others, into question. Not likely. This is futile political ballot referendum abuse.

757 Increasing Rainy Day fund
Because of the immense shortages in funds from one fiscal year to another, the legislature is requesting the Rainy Day amendment be altered to allow up to 15% (now 10%) of the previous year’s budget to be deposited into the rainy day. Current state income problems make this irrelevant for a long while. Providing there is no legislative trickery involved (not spending money on hand), this would seem to be a sound long-range fiscal policy change. It would increase that fund by half. It is supported by responsible leaders of both parties.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

CAMPAIGN CONFUSION AND CORRUPTION

2010-10-09T08:52:00.000-07:00

Having watched any number of current campaign TV ads in the Oklahoma governor’s race, I find that somebody is confused. It could be me, but logic points toward the designer of those ads.

One ad tells me that Ms. Fallin went to Washington for a while, but did not like it there. That part I understand. But then the ad goes on to say that she is coming home to run for governor to fight Washington. She now wants to fight the President and the “Washington liberals” by running for governor of Oklahoma.

Now I could be wrong, but wasn’t Congress the place to fight with all those other folk in Washington? She represented Oklahoma there for several terms. Oklahoma has its own problems, and most of them have nothing to do with Washington.

Our major problem in Oklahoma is the lack of sufficient state funds to finance education, higher education, corrections, mental health, children’s support services, homes for the mentally and physically challenged, highways, and other needs. Washington has done more to help us with that problem than anyone else, in spite of our state legislature.

Our fiscal problems have been exacerbated by the tax cuts made recently by republican legislators. Only the democrat-sponsored federal stimulus funds, criticized by republicans, have enabled the state to keep its school house doors open and to fund other needed state services at severely reduced levels. Why then is “Washington” the problem in Oklahoma?

Then there is the matter of the outsider attack ad accusing her democratic opponent of voting against legally allowing everybody in Oklahoma without a criminal record to carry concealed guns. Well, duh, the only ones in favor of that were her party extremists in the legislature. They also had bills to allow anybody on college campuses to carry guns. Remember? What sensible person would not oppose such crazy legislation? Even Wyatt Earp kept Dodge City in better control.

What about the accusation of voting against tax cuts – in the midst of a financial crisis threatening the state with bankruptcy, bond failure, and ruin? Who are the fiscally foolish ones on that issue? Who cuts income with the wolf at the door?

And, her opponent voted against “spending limits,” an ad says. That is not a very specific accusation. There have been a few attempts to “freeze” everything in place, as though whatever is now is right forever, and as though conditions and needs will never change. Bills and referendums like that are foolish, and they have proven disastrous elsewhere.

Then there is the ad saying that the republican candidate is against “government run health care.” But any informed person knows that the new health bill regulates insurance companies, and it tries to provide ways for everyone to buy private insurance from some company. The only “government run” health programs in this country are Medicare, Veterans Administration, and Indian Health Care. Eliminate those? Do we not know the difference?

What about that hated “bailout” measure, sponsored by Bush and passed by democrats over republican opposition, to save the nation from breakdown of its banking system and throwing the economy into panic? It turns out that pay backs have already reduced that $700 billion cost to less than $50 billion. And, it worked.

A lot of money is coming into Oklahoma to finance those attack ads. Billionaires and corporations have been made free to try to buy elections legally by a vote of the five republicans on the Supreme Court. They are taking advantage of that opportunity all over the country.

Money coming into republican political attack groups this year is running past $80 million, compared with $16 million two years ago. Republicans have a 7 to 1 advantage over democrats on money coming into their interest groups. Their political groups are airing attack ads against democrats all over the nation.

These republican political attack groups go by high-sounding names. American Futures has given away $7 million already, all to republicans. American Crossroads, handled by Karl Rove, has handed out $18 million to republican ads and is due to spend $50 million to defeat democrats this next few weeks.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the bastion of big business, is funneling $75 million to defeat democrats, some of it alleged to come illegally from foreign corporations. From the United Arab Emirates has come 450 donations of $8,500 each. Notice any odor about that?

The faux grass roots tea party movement has been sponsored by billionaire money. Enough is traceable to know that is true. They are a “front” for big money and most don’t know it. But tighter efforts are being made by these special interest groups to keep their donors secret. Not in the public interest? Then tell that to the republicans in the Senate who have blocked the bill to make all donor lists public.

This next election may well be in the process of being bought by corporate and billionaire money.

It all depends upon the gullibility of the American voter to their campaign attack war. They are counting on voters being ignorant of the facts, and easily swayed by simple, false arguments repeated over and over. Buying an election means buying a government. Voters beware!

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

SPES ULTIMA DEO

2010-09-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

On the Saturday past, my wife and I went for a morning excursion to two inside-type home sales. We don’t do that very often these days, but in so doing, we came upon a veritable treasure trove.

At the first house, we found some exquisite Italian glassware. These had a golden label, shaped like a coat of arms, with the phrase “spes ultima deo” across the bottom. At the second house we found a living demonstration of that motto.

The three-word Latin phrase is literally translated to mean: “hope last god.” “Spes” was the Roman goddess of Hope. So, the phrase means, Hope, the last goddess; or, something to the general effect: “Hold onto hope, after all else fails.”

Visiting the small white frame house on the east side of Enid, the older working class area of the city, we found something of an embodiment of that motto. It was a rejuvenating experience, a moment of epiphany. There we found not only a trove of out-of-stock glassware matching a collection of our friends, but we also encountered an interesting assemblage of nice people.

The mother of the household, a mature lady whose pleasant appearance bore signs of both work and worry, greeted us and took us quickly inside to see the advertised items, and eagerly explained everything. When our eyes drifted toward some homemade craft work, she explained, “I made those when I was sick and couldn’t hold my job.” That incomplete set was gifted to us as we bought several boxes of the coveted glassware. Two fresh-faced, wholesome teen-agers helped pack them and carried everything out for us.

While exchanging names concerning a possibility of more business, a younger woman spoke up, “Your son must be Dr. Vineyard at NOC. He was my teacher in macro-economics.” She went on to characterize him as a “great teacher” who made her, a recent divorcee with children and a bit frightened, feel comfortable and gain self-confidence. “He made us all believe in ourselves, that we could learn and succeed even though it was a difficult subject.”

Then came the coupe-de-grace, “I went on to graduate at NOC and then graduate from Northwestern. I am teaching in the elementary school here in Enid.”

Of course, we were proud of our son, who heads NOC-Enid. But I was also proud of this young woman, who by her own efforts, the help of others, and probably federal financial aid, managed to pull and push her way upward. I offered her commendations, but she was also proving the college a success.

I was also proud to have headed for 25 years a fine two-year college serving all comers from all socio-economic classes and of all levels of academic background. The two-year college has earned a reputation as “the Opportunity College, and well-deserved attention as making a great contribution to democratization in America.

For some years I served as a member, officer, and report writer for the National Commission on the Rural Two-Year College, publishing a monograph and journal articles on its work. We did our best to bring a national awareness to the role of these non-urban institutions, some 800 of them, scattered across these United States.

We extolled the virtues of these colleges as actualizing the American principle of equal opportunity for all. We pointed out that equal opportunity is possible only if equal access to higher education is provided. We pointed to the two-year college as the open doorway to the universities of this land.

Sadly, as time has passed, it has become more difficult for two-year colleges to play this opportunity role. With decreased public financial support, two year colleges have had to rely too much on tuition and fees. Private donations and philanthropy go mostly to the big universities, along with an increasing share of public money.

These institutions of democracy are no longer quite the open door they once were. Only with the availability of financial aids, mostly federal, have these colleges been able to keep serving those students who cannot go elsewhere. They have a demonstrably significant role to play in American education.

The local public two-year college might well be given the motto: “Spes ultima deo.” For they are indeed the last hope for many.

TRIVIALIZING THE SIGNIFICANT

2010-09-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

We have had a number of hot media “flaps” lately. Some come and go, and others stay longer. These would best be classified as tempests in teapots were it not for the relationship they have with an issue or principle of significance to us.

Let us take first the building of the mosque and the burning of the Quran in the pyrrhic news of the recent past. These were made out to be related, although not properly so. However, they are similar in that each involves an insensitive action contemplated which is within a constitutional freedom.

While it is their right to build a mosque near “ground zero,” it is callously insensitive for Muslims to pursue this in view of the natural reactions of many Americans. The Florida reverend might be within his rights of “free speech” in burning the Quran, regarded as holy by Muslims, but this was a hate-based action, both unwise and repugnant.

Both involve the trivialization of basic freedoms of speech and religion.

In Oklahoma, there has been a brooha over the substitution of “sooners” for “brave” in the national anthem at football games. This might ordinarily be regarded as a manifestation of arrogant redneck adolescence not atypical of O.U. sports fans, and acceptable because they are the sooners and they win football games. At the same time it is a continuation of our pattern of disrespecting the sacrosanct in America. With the Banner, it began with outrageous rendition by Jose Feliciano three or four decades ago, and it has progressed downward.

Oklahoma University sport fans are trivializing something significant to Americans.

Now, about the provocatively clad blonde pseudo-reporter in the men’s pro football locker room getting a few hoots and hollers. Most of us would still say that it makes no common sense to have women in men’s athletic locker rooms while they are undressing, showering, and re-dressing in various degrees of nudity. But because women reporters complained about being excluded while men were not, the equal rights rule prevailed. Of course, they should have just kept all reporters out, even if the press complained.

Nevertheless, this pretty, sensually clad woman is provocatively trivializing a significant principle of women’s rights.

Perhaps the most serious, but least recognized, example of trivializing the significant has been the disrespect shown for high governmental office by selecting grossly unqualified, vacuous persons as candidates. No office has been disrespected more often than that of vice-president, most recently by John McCain in selection of Sarah Palin. What was he thinking? What were those voters thinking?

Voters continue to make a mockery of the high office of senator, as shown by the characteristics of at least five party nominees for that office currently. What serious, well-informed, intelligent person can possibly imagine those vacuous tea party candidates from Nevada, Delaware, Kentucky, or Alaska as meriting election to this nation’s senate? If the republican party espouses and supports these, then they dishonor the office and this country.

This brings to mind the ill-conceived practice of higher education governing boards bringing in politicians, bankers, lawyers, or business people with little or no work experience in academia to run our colleges and universities. This disrespects the high office of college president, and it is disrespectful of all who work in academia and strive to advance in their collegiate careers.

Putting its leadership in the hands of amateurs trivializes academics and education as a distinctive professional endeavor.

New data shows that Oklahoma is one of the national leaders in the percentage of its 15 – 19 year old girls who are pregnant. This should be a big media and political issue, but it is not. Instead, our state politicians’ issues in this vital sector center on efforts to prevent young girls from receiving real sex education and counseling (not religiously-inspired abstinence), to restrict their access to contraceptives or “day after” medication, and to prevent their access to pregnancy termination.

In all instances, these involve the unwelcome interference of government into the private lives and freedoms of girls and women, thus trivializing their human rights and forcing them to bear unwanted babies. What kind of an enlightened nation is this?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

GOING DIRTY

2010-09-17T17:40:00.000-07:00

It was just a matter of time. All free-thinking observers of Oklahoma politics knew that it was just a matter of time until the republican machine went dirty in this general election, as has been their custom.

Dirty campaigning has always been around on all sides. Lee Atwater, Nixon’s campaign architect and advisor to the first Bush, brought a science to “dirty tricks,” as it was then called. Karl Rove was an understudy of Atwater and brought practices into the modern era with “swift-boating” tactics. Not that they are the only party to do dirty campaigning, but their national organizations have brought it to a new low across the country.

Of all things, the Oklahoma democratic candidate is being accused of being a “liberal.” And, she is accused of being soft on immigration -- just like the president. Being liberal and being soft on anything is declared not to be the Oklahoma way. Now, who in the world would have thought that?

Jari Askins is capable of defending herself, but we might make a few clarifying observations. First, Jari is not a liberal. She has never been as liberal as Mr. Obama, although the president himself can no longer be classified a true liberal either. Real liberals think that the president has gone way too far toward the center, and they are unhappy about that.

Ms. Askins is a centrist. She is too conservative to be a liberal. But, of course, she is not conservative enough to be acceptable to the right wing-nuts. As a general thing, a relatively small proportion of the people either classify themselves as liberal, or could properly be classified as such. Mainstream democrats are now broad center, and not the extreme.

On the other hand, the republican party has been moving more and more to the right. However, they have not moved fast enough to suit the extremists in their midst who now give themselves a new name of tea party. Actually, these are just extreme republicans, and with the help of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh they are pulling that entire party to the extreme.

These ultra-conservatives have been aided in their progress by money from billionaires. The two Koch brothers, multi-billionaires in the energy industry, have been backing the group called “Americans for Prosperity,” led by Dick Armey, which in turn has been financing, staffing, and organizing the tea party movement.

They have successfully exploited the dissatisfaction of citizens with the economic and social conditions of the country, and of those who feel threatened by a new black president with a people’s agenda. But they are not a grassroots movement in a true sense, because the yeast behind their rising has been billionaire money. That money is trained on the corporate agenda, and they are being manipulated for that agenda.

Moving our attention back to the dirty ad directed at Jari Askins, one will notice that nowhere in that does the voice of Mary Fallin appear saying, “I am Mary Fallin, and I approve this ad.” On all advertisements sponsored by the Fallin campaign there must be this statement accepting responsibility. So then, that ad must NOT be sponsored by Fallin’s office.

One must look at the faint print in the dirty ad mentioned above to distinguish that the commercial is really sponsored by the Republican Governor’s Association. Now does anyone recall who has been giving money to that association to distribute into republican campaigns across the land? We could begin with Rupert Murdoch, the Australian transplant and owner of Fox channels, who recently gave $1 million to the republican governors to lead the pack of big money doing the same.

With the 5 to 4 decision by the republican Supreme Court to allow unlimited private and corporate donations to political support groups, billionaire money has been turned loose to buy elections. We can expect more of this now. And, we can expect not only more corruption of the election process of democracy, but also more corruption of government itself.

Anyone who does not see the connection between the republican party, and its tea party wing, with billionaire money would have to be daft. Anyone who still believes that the Fox channel is really a legitimate, ethical news organization has to be a bit daft. And, anyone who really believes these dirty commercials paid for by tainted, undercover money must be more than a wee bit daft.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

MANIFEST SELFISHNESS

2010-09-08T16:45:00.001-07:00

There is a large political group among us who wear their religion quite visibly on their sleeves, i.e. these people loudly avow allegiance to the Almighty, claim to follow the teachings of the Bible, and declare to be followers of the Way. Although both inappropriate and unnecessary in political elections, there is nothing inherently wrong with individuals who do this in their private lives. They can be so zealous as to be obnoxious to others, but little harm is done and perhaps some good on occasion.

While making a show of personal religion may be inappropriate in politics, it should also be irrelevant in a nation that values freedom to worship as one chooses highly enough to put into its constitution a clause which prohibits government from making any laws establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. But it becomes logically ludicrous when those very same religious/political zealots become a part of a political movement which is contradictory to their avowed religious values.

Although religion should be irrelevant in politics, when candidates interject it into their qualifications and agenda for their candidacy it becomes open to scrutiny. How their religious proffers square with their politics in issues of economic policy and societal good is of appropriate concern. What about all this caring for the poor, the widows, and the orphans stuff? What about ethics of social justice? How does that square with rugged individualism?

How do those who claim such teachings and endorse such values, then be supportive of an unbridled capitalism that would prey upon the weak and the poor? How can they oppose a definite role for government as a mediator or enforcer of fairness in the economic, social justice, and political systems?

How can government for the benefit of all the people, rather than the few, be considered an enemy? The answer would have to be: “Not by rational and ethical people.”

Republicans, the party favored by the “religious” crowd, are fighting tooth and nail to extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 rammed through by the “reconciliation” procedure, now so demeaned by that same party. These cuts produced $1.65 trillion in deficit. Without those cuts, the debt would now be $5.2 trillion, or 37% of GDP. Instead, it is $7.5 trillion, or 60% of GDP. The greatest increases in debt come from those tax cuts and the $1.3 trillion Iraq War, not the mere $780 billion stimulus spending effort to avert our sliding into a depression.

Nearly all of the money from continuing the cuts, beyond democrat proposals, goes to the richest 1/10 of 1% among us. That is the richest one in one thousand among us, who make an average of $7 million a year.

How does all this square with principles of fairness and equity? Campaign money comes heavily from the rich, so does this speak to political corruption? The republican court has opened the way for corporations and the wealthy to pour huge sums into campaigns. What does it say about the blindness of many of our citizens to the discrepancy between their religious principles and their politics?

But there is still another side of this selfishness manifest by the rich in preserving their advantage over all the rest of us.

Almost any financial news section will call attention to the enormous sums of cash that corporations are hoarding at this time when the nation is so in need of money being put into productive circulation. Our companies continue to be extremely profitable, made so primarily by cutting workers or moving jobs abroad in search of cheap labor. Right now the S & P 500 companies alone are sitting on roughly $1 trillion in cash, a huge and unnecessary amount above security levels.

Instead of investing this $1 trillion in productive activity and hiring back their workers, these companies are sitting on hoards of cash. Instead of distributing these earnings to stockholders as they might, these companies are hoarding the cash. Other than paying executives exorbitant sums, all that cash taken out of our system in profits is doing absolutely nothing to stimulate revival of prosperity.

Corporate cash hording is a manifestly selfish act on the part of big business, a complete disregard of the common good in our country.

Why such selfish corporate behavior? Some might say it is worry and insecurity about the future. But others say there are political motives attached to delay of a jobs comeback until after another national election. Who knows? The motive is not certain, but it is suspect. It is unhealthy for our nation.

The manifest selfishness of those who have big money is prolonging the hardships of those who have no jobs. The unwillingness of the wealthy to pay their taxes is running the nation further into debt. How about all those patriotic folk with “Christian values” who claim to put country first? With whom will they stand?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

WHEN DID WE LOSE IT?

2010-09-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

Mr. Glen Beck, the right wing ego-maniac prophet from Fox News, has been up to something that might have been good if sponsored by somebody else. Of course our first questions should be, “When and where did we lose it?” Then we might move on to say, “A rally called ‘Restoring Honor’ could have been a fine thing if sponsored by somebody or some group that has some --if they answer sensibly the first questions posed above.”

Mr. Beck is definitely not the person to talk about honor. Some of the people appearing on his program are not the kind one would invite if he were really serious about such a theme.

Understanding why Mr. Beck is doing this defies even the most loquacious pundits to provide a logical answer to the query. Maybe a simple answer might be “because he can, and he just loves proving that.” He loves to be a showman. His programs are about showmanship. Also, he loves playing roles, and his latest is “Messiah.”

Mr. Beck may be a “flash in the pan” of politics, but he is a potentially dangerous one. He has moved from right wing politician, with all kinds of fringe political notions and conspiracy theories, to becoming a “flaming evangel” for right wing religious zealots with all kinds of bizarre depictions of a world of unreality.

Mr. Beck’s message, his personality, and his following seems to be more of a cultist phenomenon that either a valid political or a truly religious movement. His ideas are sufficiently radical to be rejected by both mainstream politicians on the moderate right and mainstream moderate religions. In other words, his stuff is weird, and he appeals to a weird bunch.

Normally such people as Beck, come on the stage, entertain and entice for a while, and pass away as they become more transparent to the public and to their following. They may have their effects, but temporarily. So it was in the case of the rabid evangels of the last century such as Huey P. Long, Joe McCarthy, Amy McPherson, Ron Hubbard, George Wallace, Ross Perot, and others who had hopes of leading this nation toward some Shangri La.

But one cannot forget the lessons of history. It was just such a person who rose to power in Germany in the 1930’s proclaiming himself the founder of the Third Reich which would endure forever. He, too, preached the restoration of the honor of Germany, tarnished by WWI and the Versailles Treaty. There must be a continuous vigil for such who come in the name of patriotism, honor, and God.

Now, let’s address the question: If we lost our honor, just when was that?

Is that something Mr. Obama has done? Is it something about Mr. Obama’s persona? Is being black a problem? He is not a Muslim, and he was born here, but do some still think not? Is it something Mr. Obama has done? Has he lied about intelligence and taken us into unnecessary wars? Has he authorized torture of prisoners in violation of treaties? Has he muffed the memos warning of attacks on America? Does he butcher the English language, causing embarrassment? Has he had peccadilloes with women?

Now further on matters of honor, has he taken money from the poor and given it to the rich through preferential tax cuts? Has he driven up the deficits quietly by putting all the costs of wars off-budget? Has he tried to privatize Social Security and Medicare? Has he lied to Congress, or protected staff who did?

If one concludes that Mr. Obama has not been found doing any of these things one might think dishonorable, while the past administration is thought to have done most, is there not something logically incongruent about radical republicans seeking to restore honor now?

Mr. Obama has done battle for those without medical coverage, and those unjustly denied insurance. He has led in saving thousands of jobs at American car companies, lest the nation’s whole supply be foreign. He has prevented the collapse of the banks and finance system. He has led in putting money into the revival of jobs, and prevented the loss of millions. He has sponsored middle class tax cuts. He has led moves to restrain banks and protect consumers’ rights.

The republicans have battled against all these honorable efforts for the American people. Should these tea party republicans be coming now talking to us about “restoring honor?” First, demonstrate honor, then talk!

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE UNPOPULAR SIDE

2010-08-27T09:32:00.001-07:00

Democrats have frequently been caught on the unpopular side of sensitive issues during elections. That does not necessarily mean the wrong side, just the side that is unpopular with a large portion of voters. What may appear to thoughtful people as the right side may, in fact, be viewed as the wrong side by a majority of the population.

Republicans have often framed elections in just such a fashion. They have managed to have controversial ballot issues appear in the fall elections. Their group has frequently had a petition or referendum dealing with defense of marriage, abortion, or an anti-gay issue. Or, perhaps it is some issue dealing with God in the schools, creationism in the classrooms, posting of the Ten Commandments, flag burning, or something similar that brings out the religious right voters negative to the democratic candidates, who may take the unpopular side of these controversies by principle.

In the upcoming election republicans and their powerful media propaganda machine have managed to take even the accomplishments of the democratic administration and make these controversial to many average voters. They have misconstrued a huge step forward to more affordable health care for all the people, and they have made it seem something sinister. The TARP bailout enacted under Bush by democrats saved the financial system from the brink of disaster, and it has already made billions in profits. But it has been made to appear as a taxpayer giveaway. The banks, mortgage funds, and the car companies are paying the money back.

When the administration pushed through regulation of banks to help consumers, republicans have labeled this as “big government” evil. While demanding tax cuts for the wealthy, republicans have pinned the label of “lazy” and “welfare” on unemployment insurance.

One could defeat such wrongheaded propaganda in a society with a really open and unbiased mass communications system, or with a nation of educated, thoughtful, open-minded people. But, sadly, we have neither.

Calling themselves the Tea Party, there is a large group of ultra conservative republicans who seem to pride themselves upon their ignorance of issues in depth and upon having a straightforward, simple-minded position on nearly everything. Being ignorant or foolish by accident of birth and upbringing is one thing, but being deliberately so is another. These folk have chosen to associate and listen only to those as ignorant or biased as themselves.

There are issues which are now being framed by republicans for the next election. Some of these are simplistic slogans around their concepts such as big government, freedom and patriotism, entitlements and the welfare system, tax cuts, or big spending and the deficit. They are adding to that mix Muslim hating, immigrant hating, and gay baiting.

Democratic candidates will likely find themselves defending gay marriage, the New York Muslim mosque, and “anchor” babies, and illegal immigrants. Some level of mass fervor on these issues is being strategically fomented all around the country. By and large, democrats have been taking “constitutional” positions on these issues. But that may not turn out to be the most popular position by the time the republican media machine does its work, and the fall election rolls around.

Who would have ever thought that it would become unpopular to defend the provisions of the first amendment which guarantees the freedom to worship without government interference? Republican presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich and others have already boldly declared: “No more Muslim mosques.” The New York mosque, and the freedom of religion, will be an issue this fall with many voters.

There is a movement among republican leaders to change the 14th amendment, which brought citizenship to the slaves freed by the Civil War, stating that all born or naturalized in this country are citizens. They are concerned about the so-called “anchor” babies of illegal Mexican immigrants born in this country, and therefore citizens. No doubt some Mexican families have taken advantage of that provision, and they have pled their case to stay in this country based on their child’s citizenship. Many people think this is not quite right, in spite of the Constitution.

Courts have been busy making marriage a fundamental right of freedom under the 14th amendment’s preservation of basic rights (reference Declaration of Independence) under the due process of law. Many democrats may question the far-reaching nature of those decisions, but they have great respect for the Constitution and for the rights of the people. But there is a large segment of the public who will never agree with that interpretation and application of marriage. They will just not buy that definition of marriage rights, and the issue will be used against democrats.

If the fall elections hinge upon issues such as those described, the democrats will have difficulty. They will be taking the less popular positions. These are harder to defend before a public ill prepared to understand legal and ethical nuances and prone to simple slogan thinking on moral questions.

Because the republican positions on all issues tend to be slogan-like and simple, it will be difficult for democrats to put together a big enough block of voters resistant to that siren song of darkly accusative simplicity in republican ads and their media. That will be the democratic challenge.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

WHO IS THE ENEMY?

2010-08-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

This political season’s crop of republican candidates for office have all taken the firm stance exemplified so admirably by Pogo. None of us have been allowed to forget that several decades ago that noble comic strip adventurer boldly announced, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

The republicans have all bravely and with faux patriotism declared that the enemy is our own government. Yes indeed, the enemy is that democratically elected government and president duly elected by the people of the United States. This government does not even have the stain on its legitimacy of having the votes of any state invalidated by a political 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision. It received the popular and the electoral vote.

It all goes back to Ronald Reagan’s stupid remark, “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” That has been treasonously morphed into: “Government is the enemy.”

These candidates say that this constitutionally and democratically elected government is their enemy, and the republican candidates have been lining up and running ads claiming that they are going to “fight” that federal government. Not only is this grossly unpatriotic, but as the writer’s distaff side is constantly remarking, “These people are against the government that they are running for a job to join.”

These same folk who want to “fight Washington,” also claim to be super-patriots, and one is constantly flashing a recognition awarded for service as a lawyer in Iraq. He has claims nobody should call him a politician, because he spent a year “fighting for our freedoms” in Iraq. Yet he has been in politics for a decade, and he claims to have saved us all by cutting taxes when he was in office.

Look at the financial mess the state is in now, and measure the success of those republican tax cuts here and in Washington. There is a $1.3 trillion in deficit from federal tax cuts enacted by republicans eight years ago. In Oklahoma, perhaps we ought to phrase those tax cuts in a different way.

Would you vote for a guy who brags about cutting your school’s funding? How about one who votes to cut funds for saving abused children? What about cutting funding leading to the possible closing of a state institution housing mentally retarded, disabled children and adults? What about the legislator who votes to cut funding to your colleges, causing constant increases in college tuition for your son or daughter?

What do you think of a person who accepts charitable gifts, and then goes out and becomes a vicious critic of the giver and wants to fight him? Republicans have done just that.

The so-called “stimulus” funds, which republicans voted against in Washington, have saved the State of Oklahoma from complete financial disaster for two fiscal years (until 2011). Without these funds, we would have fired thousands of teachers, closed down schools, limited enrollments or closed colleges, closed prisons, shut down services to half of those clients of abuse or with mental health needs, put old ladies out of nursing homes on the curbs, and many other dastardly deeds. There would have been little or no highway and bridge program without stimulus funds. Would you vote for the guys who do this?

Yet these candidates who are vowing to go and fight Washington or the president have given no credit to “the enemy” for having saved this state and many others in similar straits. They give no credit for the good that “the enemy” has done over their objections and without their support.

One wonders if the voters will really turn out to be as ignorant as these candidates think. They are counting on just that, of course.

The republicans sent to Washington have done nothing to help solve any problems these past two years. They vote “NO” and obstructed every effort of the other party and the president to do something positive. Does no one ever stop to question: “What kind of awful mess would we be in today if those yahoos had been in charge or had succeeded in having their way?”

The president and the democratic Congress have been busy trying to do something good for the country. It has been difficult. The republicans have fought against every proposal, large or small, for the people of this country to get a break in their struggle against corporate and other special interests. Examine every republican position taken over the past year and a half. Invariably these favor the wealthy and the powerful over the common man.

Is government with an agenda centered on “by the people and for the people” really the “enemy” of the voters? Are we voters just a bunch of dumb driven cattle with no minds of our own? Evidently some think so.

Every time a politician says he wants to go and fight our government, he displays a seditious disloyalty to this nation and its constitution. He should be run out of town.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW ......

2010-08-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

How often have we begun an oral comment with those words: “There ought to be a law ……?” When we view a political commercial, does it ever evoke that comment? When we observe political pundits peddling their gab on the television tube, do we ever propose that there ought to be a law?

Are there too many commercials, especially political ads? Yes? Well, thank the deregulators for that. Back during one of those deregulating administrations the Federal Communications Commission rescinded a rule limiting the number of minutes of commercials per half-hour. They said something like, “Free market competition will control this. People will not watch the station that takes the most in commercial time.”

Like most such pronouncements deregulating business, that market justification was a lot of baloney. It seems that networks have an unwritten code for airing about the same time in commercials, and an uncanny ability to schedule them at the same time – an empowerment somehow enhanced since the advent of the hand-held remote control. (An open agreement, of course, would be a violation in restraint of trade.)

But you are right -- there ought to be a law about that. But just try getting one passed. Notice how hard it is to pass regulation bills lately? Big government is good for consumers, but bad for business.

However, there is another glaring problem with political commercials. Nobody holds these to any standard of truth or fairness, like we are supposed to have legally with other advertising. Shouldn’t somebody have such a responsibility? Politicians seem to be able to say just about anything about anyone or anything, not necessarily their opponent, and get away with it. Should they be able to do that?

We notice that most republicans are running against President Obama to whom they attribute egregious offenses, motives, and outrages as factual. We notice also that they run against “Washington,” or some other vague but dark and evil entity, which is threatening horrible and heinous acts against us. They are able to get away with various lies, misrepresentations, and weird conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama, Mrs. Pelosi, Mr. Reid, and the “liberals” doing harm to our country, even robbing our children. Should they not be required to offer proof or evidence of such allegations? Should they not be limited to that which is factual or validate opinions?

Should there not be some non-partisan group to view and put a stamp of ethical standards on political commercials? Maybe something like the Good Housekeeping Seal or the UL stamp on appliances and electrical stuff?

When nearly 40% of republicans think the president was not born in this country despite clear facts, is that not proof that somebody has been lying to them? There ought to be a law.

Free speech should not really be an enabler for people to lie. At least, not to more than two people at a time – three’s a crowd. Remember?

Should opinion not be separated from facts? Should any offer of opinion validation in ads or by political pundits not be disclosed with some sort of disclosure as to who supports that organization and what the organization’s political orientation has been? For instance, when one refers to the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the Club for Growth, or the Public Expenditures Council in Oklahoma, should one not have to disclose who the major donors or class of donors are that support the bias of these groups? Should they not all be labeled as “republican think tanks supported by business and corporate interests?”

Removal of limits from political donations by the republican court will bring new money, big money, into play this election. There will now be all kinds of political groups with high-sounding names. There ought to be a law requiring disclosure of supporters. Oops! There would have been a law, but republicans blocked it in the Senate with a filibuster.

Should pseudo news channels like Fox even be allowed on the air? If so, should they be allowed to use the term “news” to represent what they do? Should they not be prosecuted for ever having used the slogan, “fair and balanced,” for their network? If allowed to broadcast should they not have to register a disclaimer, at least every 15 minutes, reminding viewers that this is not a news program but a presentation of the network owner, staff, and advertiser bias? Should there not be a law requiring them to tell the truth? Okay, so this law would force Limbaugh off the air. Great!

We see and hear political pundits representing differing points of view on various networks, and this is all well and good. But should these pundits not be confined to telling the truth? We have seen some of them sit there and tell bald-faced lies, totally in conflict with known truth. Whoever may be trying to debate a liar is at something of a disadvantage. Why should we allow pundits to deliberately state untruths? Should there not be a law?

Well, okay, so we now agree there ought to be some “truth laws” out there. All we have now are libel and defamation, and that is limited civil protection for private individuals, not criminal. But if we had “truth laws,” just how could they be enforced? How about a government commission? Yes, the FCC could do more, but any political board is going to have bias problems.

We need a kind of non-partisan truth commission which operates something like Snopes.com on the internet, but which is empowered to demand facts and commandeer time on any offending medium to give its findings of verity and force corrections of improper verbalizations made on that network. Such a law would make networks more responsible for self regulation of content they send out to the public.

The public has a right to know the truth. There really ought to be a law.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

MUSLIM SHRINE A BAD IDEA

2010-08-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

Pointing to the first amendment provision on prohibition of government interference with the free exercise of religion, most of those who consider themselves to be bona fide respecters of the Constitution are saying that it would be wrong to prohibit the building of a Muslim shrine near the site of the 9/11 tragedy. But even these will privately admit to having misgivings about being trapped within the purity of their commitment to strict constitutionality in government.

Despite the fact that he has always been a strong respecter of constitutional principles of law, this writer will admit to being one of those who is bothered by these plans to build a 10-story mosque, museum, and cultural center for Muslims at this particular place. He must be counted among the conservatives who think that this is a bad idea.

However, one would like to think that his motivation is different than most of those who are loudly protesting this shrine. Certainly this writer does not agree with the defamatory language of their protestations, nor with the hostile, bigoted slogans on their signs. In fact, one tends to feel very uncomfortable being on the same side with such zealots or with the usual members of a tea party type crowd. It is quite embarrassing to find oneself amidst a group of haters of any sort, whether it be Muslim-haters or Obama-haters.

But the premise taken here is quite different, even if it be just by nuance. We are saying that building such a Muslim shrine at that location is a bad idea – it is unwise. It is provocative of the very reactions which it is receiving. It is evocative of emotions and high negative tensions toward all Muslims. It has all the appearance of an “in your face” gesture on the part of its Muslim organizers, and that tends to be generalized by the public toward all Muslims. People have good reason to wonder from whence and why will come the millions to finance this construction

Indeed, it is a bad idea. However, it is legal. It could be argued that it would indeed NOT have been a constitutional error to have had restrictions on new buildings within a certain zone -- such as a five block circle of 9/11 ground zero. Building codes exist everywhere. But that particular board in New York City, being politically correct and overly sensitive to racial and religious issues, wrongly approved the structure. Again, that may prove to have been a very unwise action.

So, the Muslim shrine there is legal. But it is still a bad idea for Muslims to push. One would think that any Muslim leaders involved would be sensitive to the mood and feelings of the people of New York City, the relatives of the victims of 9/11, and the mood of the nation in general. One would think that if these leaders are insensitive to feelings, then other Muslim leaders should have counseled them.

This writer has had association and relationships with Muslims in various ways. He has found most of these contacts quite congenial, with a few exceptions as could be said for all groupings. Most Muslim students attending the college where he presided tended to be polite and cooperative. Their squabbles were mostly with one another, rather than with American students.

We had the honor of a campus visit at our small college, arranged through our State Department, from two of Egyptian cabinet secretaries. One spent time in this writer’s home visiting, even interacting with his Baptist adult class. A half-dozen educational dignitaries from Jordan spent three weeks each as campus guests learning our ways. When they brought the need to our attention, we arranged a private room at our gym so they could say their prayers as the proper hour came while attending a basketball game. We tried to be sensitive to their needs, and they were highly appreciative and very friendly.

For almost ten years we lived as neighbors with a Muslim family. Nowhere would one find nicer people. The children were mannerly, and the adults were always friendly. Interestingly enough, at Christmas time the lady of the house always brought her neighbors a lovely tray of traditional Egyptian goodies. These were among the most sensitive, polite, pleasant people on earth.

We just cannot see our friendly Muslim neighbors being party to any action or project as insensitive as putting that Muslim cultural center near the site of a tragedy killing thousands of people perpetrated by misguided criminal fanatics from the Muslim world. This would simply not be the nature of our former neighbors at all.

The conclusion of this writer is that no sensitive Muslim would be supportive of building the New York shrine. Therefore, those who are promoting this indecency are expressing an unwelcome callousness toward Americans’ feelings about the incident of a decade ago. At its best, this is an unfriendly, insensitive act of rudeness and irresponsibility.

This movement should be corrected from within the Muslim community itself.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE CLINTON WEDDING

2010-08-02T17:21:00.000-07:00

The wedding of Chelsea Clinton has created something of a mild tropical storm in a large teapot. Most of America is happy for the young couple. They take personal pleasure in seeing young Chelsea grow from a gangling, ugly duckling type of kid into the swan of a beautiful young woman. She is also a young woman with intelligence, grace, and charm.

Well, so young Chelsea does seem something of a princess to some of us who have admired and supported what the Clinton family has done for this nation over a period of years. A part of the “ruling class” they are, but Bill Clinton will always remain one of the people. He is made after the pattern of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. He will always be of the people and for the people.

Like some others, we may have raised the question: “For heaven’s sake, why did the Clintons not plan a simple wedding?” Then it occurred to us that in actuality they did plan a fairly simple one. No, they did not have a home wedding with only a dozen family guests, but for a “celebrity affair” the wedding was planned to be fairly modes considering what was a politely necessary large guest list.

The Clintons did not plan a media circus. They planned something as quiet and secluded as one might practically expect. But immediately the affair was pounced upon by an ever intrusive media being consistently hounded by an insatiable public desire for news about everything surrounding the wedding.

To be fair there were actually very few “celebrity” types attending. Spying media were only able to pick up a half dozen, none currently in the “hot” category. If Oprah were there, nobody had her picture at this writing. There were indeed a few former political figures present, and nobody really knows whether there were former donors attending – even though that allegation has been made by critics.

In fact, there are a lot of critics of the wedding. It was too costly, too political, just an opportunity for publicity, another chance for the limelight, and all such statements were voiced. Some thought Chelsea was being exploited by the elder Clintons for political reasons. To all such critics, we say simply: “Hogwash!”

President Clinton is and was a brilliant man, a Rhodes Scholar attuned and dedicated to public service throughout his lifetime. Only after the presidency has he accepted any work for personal gain, and even then most of his activities have been on the part of the Clinton Foundation’s service for the poor around the world. He has had a prominent role in relief work for the tsunami in Malaysia and the earthquake in Haiti. No former president, other than Jimmy Carter, can boast of so much public service involvement.

Bill Clinton would be ranked by any objective source as one of most intelligent presidents of the last hundred years. Numbered among that group would also be such intellectually outstanding men as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Barrack Obama.

As president Clinton enjoyed the comparison between himself and the idol of his youth, the late John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s years became known as those in which there was a revival of culture, art, music, literature, and intellectual and artistic pursuits in America. For one brief moment there was again the shining city on the hill which was Camelot.

Guests and programs in the White House once again reflected traditional arts and the modern movements of the day, as in the days of the Kennedys. Government programs enhancing the arts, sciences, and such activities as educational public television were promoted during both administrations.

Entirely too much was made of the Clinton peccadilloes, both factual and fictional. Wealthy men paid thousands of dollars for aspiring “journalists” to pursue National Enquirer type stories about Bill Clinton from his Arkansas years. Witnesses were bribed and books written full of untruths. A business misadventure was made the subject of a two-term legal inquiry full of leaks and falsehoods, only to be finally dismissed as lacking evidence at the end.

An allegation made by a former government worker in Arkansas was eventually turned into a legal circus, through the sponsorship of a rich Clinton-hater and the willing cooperation of political prosecutors. The one apparently real peccadillo became the focus of an ever-expanding legal crusade of harassment by a politically motivated prosecutor into the private lives of the Clintons that endured through all his term, causing the family and the nation much embarrassment.

Both raucous comedians and the right wing media have continued to focus on the mostly unproven negatives about Bill Clinton, his presidency, and his entire family.

There were many Clinton-haters during his years in the White House, although he presided over a period of unbridled prosperity for the rich and the middle class and left the government in the rare circumstance of running a surplus and paying off debt.

There are also those who revel in the presidencies of only average men who have made bad decisions, followed bad policies, and run the country deeply into debt for wars ($1+ trillion) and with tax cuts for the wealthy ($2 trillion). Even that paragon of virtue for republicans, Ronald Reagan, drove up the national debt more than any president before him since World War II. He did that with tax cuts for the wealthy.

Although constantly harassed by his enemies, Bill Clinton managed a presidency which excelled in comparison with others. He is a man of the people. Let’s allow him to revel in that role.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

COUNTING ON BIAS AND GULLIBILITY

2010-07-28T07:17:00.001-07:00

As the airwaves have been filled here in Oklahoma with commercials from mostly republican candidates, some of us have become not only increasingly irritated but also mentally challenged to make any logic or sense out of what we see and hear. Of course, everybody is running against President Obama.

It matters not what office they seek, they are running based upon their alleged past records or future intentions to single-handedly bring down the Obama administration and to reverse all of its accomplishments. We don’t understand the logic of all that, and we believe little or none of the rhetoric.

Guys and gals, that campaign rubber will only stretch so far. If your party electorate had any sense of electoral logic and ethics, they would vote for whichever of you actually made positive proposals for something good you intended to do, or related to them truthful stories of your positive accomplishments. The electorate should want to know what you favor and about your positive proposals for the good of the people. They should not be falling for whichever of you has the harshest rhetoric for the president or for one another, whichever peddles the more vile allegations, nor the one who brags the most about his religion, family values, and patriotism.

Unfortunately, the candidates who have stretched the truth the furthest, alleged the most negative things, opposed everything good that a democrat has done, promises most to undo whatever good has been done, rails the most against the taxes needed to run government and schools (and fight wars), rhetorically most fiercely opposes our own democratically elected constitutional federal government (while claiming patriotism), and then viciously attacks his own party opponents – those will probably be the winners when this piece appears.

What a shame on all of us!

This is a strange and crazy country when the candidates of one party rely primarily upon ignorance, bias, and gullibility to sell themselves to the voters, when in truth it has worked consistently against the best interest of those same common citizens. They really expect, with good reason, that the voters really do not understand their own self interest. Likewise, they count on their party media propaganda machine having done its job in creating voter bias and emotion which will favor their vicious political tactics.

How is it that a president who has proposed no program not believed by the best experts available to be in the best interest of the country could be maligned so easily and so successfully? How is it when a president who has worked several successive positive programs for the people through congress with consistent loud opposition, delaying tactics, and even filibustering from the republicans, yet is looked upon favorably only by some 44% of the people? Don’t people care about saving American jobs, propping up failing state government finances, reforming and controlling health insurance companies, reforming Wall Street bank shenanigans, protecting consumers, or any of those things?

Don’t the people of Oklahoma know that President Obama’s economic stimulus program has kept our state government functioning, our schools and colleges open, and that the state might have had to practically shut down these two years because of previous short sightedness of republican legislators in cutting taxes? Now, they are running against him? Are we all that ignorant? Are they ready to nail plywood on schoolhouse windows?

Such irrational public response can only be understood in the milieu of the meanest, most vicious, political propaganda machine ever devised and operating legally outside of some fascist or communist country. Constantly hammered by right wing talk show hosts and Fox News staff and talking heads, perhaps it is little wonder that so many Americans have become ditto-heads with unthinking minds of their own.

How else would we account for the fact that nearly 40% believe Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim, when all the evidence has been repeatedly put before them showing those rumors to be maliciously false? No doubt those represent more than three quarters of that 55% or so who look upon President Obama with views of less than “favorable” in some polls. (Favorable votes have been running 44% to 48%.) That is to say, most of these negative views of the presidency generate from roughly the same folk, a majority of whom are already irrationally hard core right wing in their politics.

Of course most professionals in politics understand fully that they operate in a struggle with the opposition for the minds of band of perhaps 25% to 30% of swing voters who deny having prior biases and mental commitments. Honest “leanings,” however, are hard to assess with any accuracy at all.

Perhaps the big question is: “Which voters have their biases set most in concrete?” One would have to peg that on the hard-core right wing group, since they appear impermeable to either facts or logic. These are the voters the republican political machine counts in its pockets. They are the majority of that party’s core voters, so they are the ones republican candidates must impress with the tone and quality of their ads.

This explains much of what we have been seeing on our TV stations. Ugh!

The question which remains is whether that broad center range of voters have been sufficiently gullible to the steady flow of propaganda from the right wing media. Have they succumbed to being told what is for their own good by those whose mouths are bought and paid for by other contrary interests?

Just how gullible will American voters be come next fall?

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

TEA PARTY DEFENDERS

2010-07-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

“Are you going to believe me or your own eyes and ears?” This question should have been posed within the comments made last week by republican leaders, conservative editors, rightist media pundits, and other tea party defenders such as Sarah Palin.

This past week in its national convention, the N.A.A.C.P. passed a rather bland resolution which asked leaders and members identified with the tea party movement to disclaim those in their midst who had been engaging in racist conduct or expressions. Anyone who has observed the videos, read the signs carried, or heard the shouts of some of those attending -- or even speaking -- at tea party gatherings, should have no problem knowing that such racist incidents have actually been happening.

But the immediate response of republican leaders and tea party defenders has been to attack the NAACP as being overly sensitive or just plain racist itself. The tea party express leader has even mocked the emergence of blacks from slavery.

All this is certainly akin to raising the question: “Do you want to believe me or your own eyes and ears?” No admission of any racists among them; just attack viciously those who have spoken in any negative fashion, however courteously. That is the right wing, tea party way, of course.

It is constantly amazing to this writer how frequently spokespersons for the opposition party, especially the more reactionary and louder ones, are quite willing to ignore the clear truth in front of them and go right on uttering contradictions to what is in plain sight to all. We fear this incident is just another glaring instance of their willingness to lie baldly, with no rational protection. They count on ignorance and misinformation among the public.

Has everyone forgotten the behavior of tea party demonstrators outside the national Capitol during final consideration of the health care bill? Or, do they just wish we would all forget the attacks on entering democrats, including racial slurs and even spitting at black democrat congressmen? Such conduct is indefensible under any circumstances, yet it was done by tea party activists in the name of their group. Now they are all in denial.

Has everyone forgotten the racist caricatures, cartoons, and slogans on the signs carried at tea party rallies, and the shouts of the crowd? Have we forgotten the pictures of republican congressional leaders speaking to those tea party rallies with the racist signs and slogans displayed in front of them? Have we forgotten that republican leaders spoke in a zealous, inciting fashion to those same tea party protesters who spit at their black colleagues? Do we even remember minority leader Boehner’s speech to that tea party crowd: “Not just no, but hell no!”

Did we see and hear Congressman Tancreado, controversial anti-Hispanic activist, speaking to the tea party convention saying: “We elected Barrack Hussein Obama president because this country has no literacy tests for voters.” That statement was remindful to many of those decades in the twentieth century when black voters were kept from voting throughout the South by the use of literacy tests as a legal scam to disenfranchise them. Yet that tea party convention cheered such remarks.

The tea party’s constant, false insistence that President Obama was born elsewhere, and that he is a Muslim, is seen by many to be racially toned and religiously bigoted. It is difficult to understand why they insist on either, since both lies have been disproven. One might guess that since nearly 40% of the people believe one or both, it just might be another instance of lying for political gain among gullible voters. Maybe their party leaders should forget that stuff about giving literacy tests to others, and instead give intelligence tests to their own recruits.

Attacking the NAACP in defense of the tea party, Sarah Palin said that she was “saddened by the NAACP claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for constitutional rights are racist.” Maybe she is so dense that she does not know the difference, so to her those disorderly racist tea partiers we saw were really just patriotic Americans standing up for all our rights.

Ben Jealous, president of NAACP, has said in response to Palin and others: “We are not asking for much – just that you expel the bigots and racists among your members or else take responsibility for their actions. We will no longer allow you to hide like cowards.” In another context, Jealous said, “We are just asking that you disassociate from members who peddle racism, intolerance, and fear.”

No, that is not a lot to ask. This writer might just add the admonition: “Get rid of those loud, crude, rude, rowdy, redneck hoodlums from your midst as well.” But will there be anyone left? Well, maybe a few anti-tax wealthy backers.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

THE ECONOMIC SOLUTION: SPEND OR SAVE?

2010-07-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

The question of spending versus saving, so frequently discussed in American households across the country in the past two years, now plagues the nation in general. It is now a quandary that politicians all across the land are facing as they debate public policy in the halls of government and in the public forum of the upcoming elections.

The best advice for reconciling the question of spending versus saving may or may not be the same for the government as it is for the individual family.

One will recall that early in the Bush administration, when faced with a mild recession, families were urged to spend. Their solution was to encourage people to go out to the malls and shop. No doubt this would have been helpful for the national economy, but most doubted that this was good advice for many families already deeply in debt.

Every personal finance advisory column we have seen for some time has advocated that consumers reduce debt and save more. Plans are offered on how best to do that. Paying off personal debt, developing a three to six month cash reserve fund, and then keeping all payments current are stressed.

However, economists have NOT been recommending an analogous plan for the nation. For two years almost every reputable economist has stressed government spending to stimulate or jolt the economy back into gear. The president and his administration bought this idea, and they have pushed their stimulus plans vigorously. Progress has indeed been made.

Most economists still recommend strong stimulus plans with temporary deficit spending, warning that a “double dip” recession may hit if this is not done. However, a tidal wave of political criticism of deficit spending is spreading across the nation. Much of this is being pushed by the emotional, logically nonsensical people identifying themselves as the tea party.

These tea party types are joined, of course, by the Republican Party itself. Supporters include the usual wealthy individuals who back any and all anti-tax efforts. Anti-tax, anti-deficit hawks now include those in the upper income brackets who benefited from the republican tax cuts, and those republicans in Congress who previously put the first $1.3 trillion cost of the Iraq War “off-budget,” directly onto the national debt.

Reading the political tea leaves, pun intended, some economists are now coming out for a strong temporary spending plan to stimulate job development combined with a long term plan for deficit and debt reduction. This should prove politically and economically practical, but unlikely.

All this brings up the broad expansive question about what kind of plan would actually put this nation back on its fiscal feet? What would a long-range plan for living within our means really look like? If we had to political will to actually do it, just what would it take? Is it all that complicated?

Long range financial good health of the United States of America would require the following general steps:

• Secure the future of Social Security and Medicare with “tweaks.”
• Cut the military budget:
Bring home the troops scattered around Europe and Asia.
Bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Cut development/acquisition costs of unneeded weapons systems.
• Reinstate taxes on upper 5% in income and 1% in estate wealth to near Reagan levels.
• Enact a modest consumption tax, including tariffs on oil and imports.
• Cut out corporate welfare and subsidies. Stop off-shore tax cheats.

Securing the future of Social Security and Medicare is not difficult, except for the political will to actually do it. A slight change in retirement age for non-physically stressing jobs, slight increase in the base incomes upon which payroll Social Security and Medicare taxes are levied, and then a sensible adjustment in benefit growth decades in the future. This is called “tweaking.” It is not rocket science.

Budget balancing is done by both increasing income and reducing spending.

The military is the only huge discretionary sector of the budget. Stop playing world policeman, and bring home the roughly 100,000 troops from some 38 countries where they are stationed around the world. These countries should meet their own defense costs, not continue to rely on American tax payers. This saves billions in the defense budget.

Some argue, of course, that we have no business in Iraq now, and perhaps never had any business there. They argue also that it is not our job to maintain the shaky, corrupt government in Afghanistan against insurgency, and that those people should stand on their own. They argue Al Quaeda is a CIA problem, not soluble by huge military efforts. Stopping these wars in the Middle East would net hundreds of billions per year in savings.

Then comes the matter of taxes. Those who spend the highest percentage of their income stimulate the economy the most. This happens to be the lower 95% of the citizens. Who benefits the economy the least? Obviously, it is those who spend the lowest portion – the upper 5%.

Contrary to old economic thought, the rich are not reinvesting their capital into production, and thus jobs. Similarly corporations, still making billions in profits, are not expanding activities or adding jobs – in America. Most are not paying decent dividend rates or taxes. They pay their executives exorbitant salaries, they bid to buy one another, and they hold their cash. None of these things stimulate the economy much.

A return to tax rates of the Reagan years is overdue. Given that and this country should be on the road to paying off its accumulated debt.

Perhaps an initial move would be to eliminate all the special tax breaks and subsidies to our businesses, mining, and industrial activity. Oil companies alone enjoy $45 billion in subsidies from the national government while racking up record profits. These and other welfare programs for big business need to be cut out.

This may be a highly simplified of the remedies needed in this country. We may not have the political will to enact them. Surely we won’t solve the problems as long as we have nitwit politicians running around spreading harmful nonsense and playing on people’s emotions.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

SHARED VALUES COMMERCIALS

2010-07-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Each new election period we are again bombarded with political commercials. Some of these are okay. They tell information about the candidate and about his/her agenda for the office sought. But even the best made, the most ethical, and the most appropriate political commercials can be tiresome when repeated too often. Yet most of us bear with this, thinking it a necessary form of communication with voters in a democracy during this era. Of course, that may not speak too highly for the voters.

With the republican Supreme Court giving corporations and the wealthy unlimited rights to make political contributions, watch out for a really nerve busting commercial media jam for election season this summer and fall. They will be legally trying to buy elections now.

Most of us are irritated and angered by attack commercials -- more by some than others, of course, dependent on their level of viciousness and perhaps on our own bias. But anyone who really enjoys an attack commercial should question his/her own inner values for gentility and civility. If we really were a gentle and peaceful people, valuing civility, politeness, and self-control, then the candidates who run the most attack commercials would lose. Such does not appear to be the case.

If we really were a people who value honesty and integrity, any candidate who ran commercials with unfounded accusations, lies, distortions, or half-truths in attacking another would lose. Such does not appear to be the case.

So when those same candidates talk to us about traditional American values, Oklahoma values, Judao-Christian values, integrity, honesty, truth, and similar values, then many of them must themselves be liars when they utter those words: “I approve of this commercial.”

Further, many among us believe much of candidate commercial advertising must at best be targeted toward the naïve, or at the worst just toward the plain dumb, ignorant, and gullible among us.

But surely our candidate who tells us that he/she believes in God, country, truth, decency, the American flag, motherhood, and apple pie, must be a good one, filled with great integrity, and fully prepared for whatever office he or she seeks? Good grief! But one might be led to think so, when listening to those commercials. When one observes the success of such candidates, one has major cause to question the intelligence of the voters.

Such values are highly desirable in any candidate for office, but taken alone these values, if they were present, would qualify a candidate for no office at all. Ability, knowledge, training, and experience count as well.

Then there are those candidates who tout their conservative values, often adding in patriotism, the founding fathers, freedom, Christian beliefs, the family, the right to carry guns, and other perceived values of the American people. But such conservatives often add to the mix their intent to cut taxes, to cut wasteful spending, to reduce the size of government, to reduce the deficit, and to stop immigrants and other free-loaders. Beware of all such, for they do not portend well for the average citizen.

We really need to question what is included in basic American values, in Judao-Christian values, and if freedom also includes opportunity. A candidate to promises to cut taxes and improve public education is contradicting himself. A candidate who says he wants to reduce expenditures but save Social Security and Medicare is lying. A candidate says he has Judao-Christian values but advocates actions which will cut off school lunches for the poor, shut down homes for mentally retarded, toss old people out of nursing homes on the sidewalk, and cut children’s protection is either dumb or a liar. A candidate who wants bridges and highways but doesn’t support new fuel taxes is a hypocrite.

Should we go on? Most of the federal budget is for the military and for the major entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. Of course, there are all those other “minor” things such as veterans programs, highways, law enforcement, food and medicine oversight, and subsidies for agriculture. Then there are billions in wasteful subsidies for big oil, big sugar, big banks, and big business in general. There are tax breaks for businesses, for the wealthy, and for those living on investments rather than earning taxable wages. Which of these do these tax cutters really propose to drop? Give us a list! Maybe we should look at the candidate’s donor list. Reckon?

The state budget is predominantly for public education. Do we not support good free schools for our children and good colleges within reach of all our youth? Do we believe in equal opportunity for all? Is that not an American value?

Then there are the other state services such as overcrowded prisons, the human services for elderly, abused children, orphans and the like, law enforcement, mental health, and highways and bridges. If we campaign to lower taxes, are we not campaigning against these public services being adequately provided? Let’s look again at those advertised “values.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if candidates could count on public support by commercials telling us how they were going to improve public services without claiming they are going to reduce revenues or cut expenditures at the same time? How about if they were honest and told us that improving our services would cost a little more money, and that it might be necessary to raise a tax, put in a new tax of some sort, or even just to cut some specific exemptions now being given to special interests.

That would be a different approach, all right. Unfortunately, we dumb voters have rejected it several times before.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

CONGRESSIONAL ARROGANCE

2010-07-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

The ubiquitous arrogance in Congress has never been more apparent than in the conduct of some republican senators in the confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee this past week. For anyone presumably qualified for such a high post of dignity and responsibility in our government to have to endure such personal, political, off-the-wall tirades from senators is embarrassing to the citizens of this nation -- at least to those who still have sensitivity to such.

Rather than ask sensible questions, these republican senators have spent their time grandstanding for a particular political constituency back home – a constituency that makes one wonder what kind of voters they must have out there. Of course, there is that other constituency, donors and lobbyists, to which all congresspersons play to some extent. What that lady has had to endure from those senators is way over the line of decorum, courtesy, and decency.

To what extent should any public servant have to endure the accusations, taunts, and lectures from a member of any legislative body? True, these folk have been elected by somebody, although one may often wonder how and why. Those in public service leadership positions must in some ways be responsive to them, the law and the Constitution says so. But we have seen nothing in the Constitution or the law which compels a public servant to endure unjustified abuse from members of a legislative body.

On a different level and scale, the history of Oklahoma higher education is replete with instances of the attempted browbeating of college and university presidents at the hands of some arrogant legislators in committee hearings on appropriations. No president dared not go and answer legislators’ questions as respectfully as their temperament would allow. Some of these were good, even penetrating, questions. Most were superficial, often based upon complaints heard. Many were “gotcha” questions based upon a legislator’s superficial perusal of a few financial or purchasing documents in the state finance office.

The late and legendary Dr. George L. Cross, president of the University of Oklahoma, used to tell a story of such hearings to remind the rest of us of the benign frivolity of it all. He told of encountering a legislator’s question, “What about this expensive brassiere the university paid for?” The legislator cited the cost of several hundred dollars and wanted to know who it was for, and why such an expensive brassiere. Dr. Cross said, “I pondered and pondered, trying to figure out what this man was asking. Finally, it came to me that he was referring to an ancient Egyptian brazier which had been bought for the university’s museum collection.”

We recall an instance when a legislator, armed with copies of claims paid through the finance office, inquired pointedly of the late, great president of Tulsa Community College, “What is this I see here where you signed a claim for a suit of clothes? Would you explain to me why the State of Oklahoma is buying a suit of clothes for somebody?” Dr. Al Philips, in a calm and dignified manner, explained that the claim was for a security guard’s uniform.

Usually, by the time they got down the line from the major universities on to me, the questions were short and perfunctory. I liked to think that was because we had few glaring, publicly noticed faults. One year during a time when state finances were bad and the appropriations committee was particularly tough, I observed the cross-examinations of those before me and became more and more angry.

At my turn I mistakenly undertook to lecture the committee. “You are asking all the wrong questions,” I said. “Instead of grilling us, you should be asking what you can do to help us serve the higher education needs of the young people of Oklahoma. You should be concerned with assisting us do a good job, rather than with trivia.”

When I paused for breath, four or five legislators immediately started to attack me, while several others jumped vocally to my defense. The late legislative leader of some renown, John Miskelly, the committee chairman, came up from the back of the room and restored order with words that went like this: “Leave this man alone. He’s a friend of mine. He’s telling you the truth. You need to listen to him.”

And, thus I escaped the wrath of some arrogant legislators who were accepting of nothing but subservience from agency heads dependent upon them for budget finances.

Returning to the hearings of this past week for Elena Kagan, nominee for the Supreme Court, she is enduring what might be thought of as some sort of initiatory verbal hazing which one must experience before admission to that holy sanctum. It should not be so.

Democrats are ordinarily more civil to nominees of a republican president, not totally so but much more so. Only in the Robert Bork case, for good cause, has there been any such rough treatment of a republican nominee as experienced by each of the democrat nominees. Only in that instance has there been any serious threat made of filibuster. With the current republicans in the senate, every matter is one for a potential filibuster stalemate threat. This is the most obstructive senate in modern history.

Some pundits are saying that republicans fear appearing to be compromising or being seen as bi-partisan on anything. Tea party assaults on colleague republicans in recent elections have produced an aura of fear in incumbents of their own voters. They are afraid to be senatorial and statesmen. What a shame!

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard
AKA The Militant Moderate

REGULATING BANKS AND CORPORATIONS

2010-06-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

Everybody has been angry with the executives of the Wall Street banking and financial interests, whose fiscal foolishness and greed caused the at least a temporary loss of about 45% of the wealth held by individuals, rich and otherwise, in this nation. People are angry enough to do something -- except for the republican leaders in the Congress. While most are demanding recompense, and even criminal prosecution, some republican politicians are holding back on any meaningful reform correcting the fault in regulation and oversight which allowed shady practices leading to disaster.

Some assertive moves by the president and his administration aside, nothing substantive has yet come from the Congress providing oversight that would prevent the same problems from reoccurring in the future. It has been over a year since all this despicable behavior came to light and almost brought the nation to its financial knees. Who would not want regulations put in place to stop it from happening again?

Obviously Wall Street executives do not want their playhouse supervised. They do not want some of their brainy schemes to fleece unsuspecting investors investigated or stopped. Most of all, they do not want anyone interfering with their lavish system of bonuses and obscene salaries. They are working hard in lobbying those politicians most closely allied traditionally with the business and financial world, who profit most from political contributions from this sector. That would be their republican friends in Congress, and some democrats.

Almost everyone in Congress knows there must be greater regulation. The lack of agreement has been about how much. Democrats have favored a thorough overhaul with measures enabling executive authority and commissions such as the SEC to regulate assertively with penalties that bite. Republicans have favored a more gentle form of oversight. There is disagreement also on enabling needed oversight and internal corporate controls of executive compensation.

Democrats are proposing much more direct and effective involvement of stockholders, other than directors in setting limits for executive compensation and controlling bonuses. Perhaps this issue is worth some examination here.

While the wealthy hold huge baskets of corporate stock, and while some corporations are held in majority by a single person or family, vast quantities of stock is held by public or private pension systems, public agency trusts, 401K plans, mutual funds, and individuals at large. The first big questions which loom: Who votes that stock? In whose interest is the stock voted?

The last question is easier to answer. In most instances the stock is NOT necessarily voted with the interests of the individual owner or beneficiary in mind. It is true that trustees and officers of pension systems generally favor interests of their constituency, but their contracted money managers probably do not. Employee members of 401K plans have little or no voice in how their equity holdings are voted, since that is handled by plan managers or the employer. Mutual funds do not offer their share holders voting privileges for their stock equities, and their own fund managers tend to do that. Even equity holdings of eleemosynary foundations normally are not voted by their trustees, but their professional fund managers do so.

Under such circumstances, corporations are rarely accountable to any degree to their actual individual investors. Instead, other professionals within the financial sector are doing much of the voting, setting up all kinds of possibilities for mutually beneficial insider deals and conflicts of interest – none of which are in the stock owner’s favor. This problem needs to be addressed by Congress.

Those readers who do own stock in companies directly will recall the mailings offering opportunities for proxy voting instead of attending a meeting far away. These are quite interesting.

The average stockholder is not ordinarily informed on the voting issues, but a booklet comes with the technical information. Usually the board has taken a position, and the ballot encourages voting their recommendation. Then there is the mandatory one-choice vote to ratify the board’s selection of an accounting firm. And, there’s a vote for board members as listed.

The ballots for election of board members often offer only two options: for and withhold. Interesting enough, the way those votes are counted – a candidate could receive 10,000 “withheld” votes and 100 “for” votes and be elected. “Withheld” simply means that, your vote is held back and not voted at all, so that the candidate still gets the majority of real votes. At regulatory encouragement, some companies are changing the “withheld” to “against.” While that is preferable, it is still almost impossible to defeat a board nominee without some massive, well-coordinated stockholder campaign to wrest back control of the company – often coming from a big owner with his own agenda.

All these are matters which need to be considered in the process of revising regulations for the financial and corporate world, making them more responsive to the public interest and the interest of their stockholders. Otherwise, we will continue to have a corrupt, or potentially corrupt, group of insiders operating the corporate business sector with little accountability to anyone.

Our financial markets, big banks, and financial institutions must be brought back into compliance with honest, open, and ethical business conduct. Other corporations need reform and oversight in the interest of stockholders and the public. Without government intervention there is little that stockholders are powerful enough to do alone in controlling the very companies in which they have investments.

And, we haven’t even spoken of tax dodges, off-shore shell offices, and shipping not only manufacturing but other jobs overseas. Nor have we addressed how to do all this in light of the recent Supreme Court legalizing corporate contributions for issues and political campaigns.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate

STENCH MAKES US SICK

2010-06-21T13:34:00.001-07:00

The stench surrounding the oil slick is making us sick. But we are not speaking of the oily muck itself. We are speaking of all the politics being played out around Washington and in media circles around the country. Not only is it dirty and silly politics on display, but we are seeing some of the sorriest displays of personal arrogance and gamesmanship in recent history.

Nobody really knows much more to do about containing the damage from the oil slick than is already being done, prepared, or planned. But nearly everybody in politics, and all of those in the media, have better ideas than any of the experts. And, of course, all of them know how to handle it better than the president.

It seems that everyone actually doing anything in this disaster is clumsy, dumb, and inept while everyone observing from the cynics’ chairs could have been doing so much better. It appears that our president, who is stubbornly and deliberately trying to do something, never does the right thing. Why is this?

Some people are criticizing our president for not doing enough, while others are criticizing him for doing too much. Those political ideologues who think that government is too big now think that the president should have taken charge and wrested control from the private company. Others among them are afraid that he might do that, thus expanding government’s role too much.

There is a horrible display of arrogance on the part of congressional committee members interviewing officials from British Petroleum. Some hard questioning may be in order, but never hostile, arrogant ranting at an invited guest, now turned captive, who must silently endure berating and browbeating some ignoramus who knows little.

Of course, President Obama consistently catches the harshest criticism from the least knowledgeable and thoughtful of our citizens. He also catches similar criticism from the congresspersons those same voters send to the halls of Congress to represent them.

Who elected the talking heads of the media, and just how did they get so omniscient that they continually criticize the president whatever he does? After his recent prime time speech to the nation, there seemed to be no one in the media who was not critical. He wasn’t emotional enough. He was too nice. He gave an informative, educational lecture on the details of the problem, they said. He talked about the energy policy agenda. He met nobody’s expectations except for a large segment of the American people, who didn’t listen to the pundits telling them what to think. As one sympathetic writer said, “The President has experienced a gusher of criticism.”

The $20 Billion escrow deal with the BP, set aside to be administered by a third party, to meet all claims without court adjudication was indeed a remarkable accomplishment. It demonstrated the results brought forth by a competent and forceful president working behind the scenes. It showed the company and the government were now on the same page – trying to do something to provide security for alleviating problems of all those impacted by the catastrophe. This was a landmark deal, securing the welfare of those along the gulf coast.

My word! One would think from all the media chit chat and political uproar that some satanic bargain had been made. Again one could query: “What more can you ask or expect in the way of due diligence from either the president or the company?”

Republican Joe Barton of Texas, ranking committee republican and the recipient of $1.4 million in campaign money from oil companies, apologized profusely to the executives of BP for the unpardonable “shakedown” perpetrated by the president. He said he does not want to live in a country where the government can deal with a corporation that way.

Who does that guy represent? Certainly not any of the American people or businesses impacted along the Gulf Coast or elsewhere affected by this disastrous event. Obviously he represents his big oil donors.

Nevertheless Texas Sen. John Cornyn joined with Barton’s condemnation. Michele Bachmann, republican from Michigan, called the deal “a fleecing.” And 114 House republicans signed on a policy document rejecting the agreement as a “shakedown” of BP by President Obama. Other prominent republicans are said to be philosophically concerned that this agreement may “empower the government.”

But after the public backlash, Barton was called in by republican party leadership in the House and chastised. Then he apologized for his remarks.

Yes indeed, without even touching on some of the state and local politics involved in the gulf region, the stench of the politics surrounding all of this nationally rivals the smell of the oily muck itself contaminating our shores.

For what it is worth, this writer does not share the joys of others in seeing some congresspersons arrogantly attacking their witnesses from their lofty perches in catbirds’ chairs. This often seems an abuse of power. Witnesses deserve professional courtesy, especially those in positions of responsibility in the private or public sector. Watching some of our congresspersons berate and belittle BP executives was not a pleasant experience, in spite of some of that company’s failures.

It is a short step from plain discourtesy to demagoguery.

Dr. Edwin E. Vineyard, AKA The Militant Moderate