Pennywise and pound foolish

Shortcuts often lead to bigger problems. Something about the political scene from Madison to Washington these days reminds me of one of my Dad's old stories about being pennywise and pound foolish. In his case, the shortcut wasn't about easy money or political power, but a much more tantalizing goal: ice cream.

In the early 1930's pre-electricity Iowa, the only way to get to a tub of soft, cold ice cream was via a lengthy, hand-cranking workout. Wanting the ice cream without the work, Dad and his teenage brothers eyed the new Model T Ford, and wheels began to turn—literally.

Soon they had jacked up one back wheel and unbolted it from the hub. They cranked up the engine, and with Dad's little brother Willis holding down the clutch, they lashed the removable hand crank to the T's wheel hub, and then to the handle of the full ice cream bucket. Willis gently engaged the clutch and the idling engine easily turned the hub, which turned the engine crank, which turned the ice cream handle, which sent the boys into ecstatic cheers over their ingenuity.

Their cheers were premature. The carburetor began loading up and the motor chugged slower. It started missing, almost died, and Dad said to his little brother "Punch it!" They didn't want to unlash the hand crank from the hub to start it again—too much work.

The little brother dutifully punched the throttle and the hub suddenly accelerated. Sure enough, my Dad's grip on the ice cream mixer slipped and the mixer hit the ground, spilling the precious contents onto the dirt. The sisters erupted in laughter, and Grandpa watched, bemused, as Dad and his brothers slipped in the mess trying to rescue a few spoonfuls. Undaunted, the brothers coaxed their mother into making another gallon of mix, and were stubbornly about to try again when Grandpa stepped in, "Boys, you work harder to get out of work than you would have to work if you would just DO the work!"

Now that wasn't the end of the story. Other costly consequences of good technology applied to the wrong task were not foreseen. Repeated episodes of jacking up the model T rear wheel ultimately wore the spider gears in the differential. The axel broke loose inside the pumpkin and slipped out, the wheel rolled into the borrow pit, and the worn Model T smacked hard into the road giving occupants painful bruises. Saving a little work turned out to be harmful, wasteful and foolish.

We have a tradition in America of overcoming pound foolish mistakes. Fueled by a passion for justice and liberty, Americans rebelled against the British empire and won independence. Because of the courage of our most patriotic citizens, we abolished slavery, ended institutionalized racial oppression through the civil rights movement, and sent hundreds of corrupt bankers to prison after the Savings and Loans Wall Street scandal of the 80's.

The concept is enshrined in second verse of "America the Beautiful":

O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!

America! America! God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!

We must also remember that these visionaries faced firm opposition, even violent oppression and intimidation, from those threatened by the vision. To "mend thine every flaw" is an uncomfortable, even painful process. It certainly was uncomfortable for Bradley Manning, who valued American justice and liberty enough to serve in Iraq. His duties were sensitive: ferreting through the mass of war data accumulated in recordings of combat missions to determine targets to round up for questioning at Abu Ghraib prison. He did his job well. When obviously innocent people were mistreated, though, he pursued the errors. As his efforts to bring injustice to light were resisted, he began documenting his findings, and eventually released them to the public sphere.

Sadly, though, despite Obama's promises to offer protection to those who shed light on injustices, this whistleblower hasn't been protected. Like the Tories in 1776, slave marketers in 1880, and powerful politicians in the 60's-era South, our politicians today foment outrage against one who uncovers truth by labeling such actions unpatriotic. Manning's subsequent imprisonment on U.S. soil and possible execution now bear an uncanny resemblance to the way many at Abu Ghraib were treated, complete with solitary confinement, deprivation of clothing, and strip-searches. What a pitiful irony.

This tragedy is far beyond broken spider gears or spilled ice cream. The soul of our nation is at stake.

Note the following added sources and information links:

David House, 23, is an IT expert who works for the Bradley Manning Support Network. This excerpt is from his interview with the German newspaper, Spiegel On Line:

House: I cannot fathom living in a country that executes whistleblowers and I hope that many Americans and people in other countries see it in the same way. Apart from that, Bradley Manning deserves access to a speedy trial.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: How realistic are the chances that those demands will be met?

House: The only way Bradley Manning is going to have a good outcome here is if there is growing international pressure on the US to take the option of executing a whistleblower off the table. We need the action of every citizen in the entire world who values the principles of government transparency.

For the full interview: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,750879,00.html

From The Guardian, of the UK, some 100 articles, this from yesterday, quoted here:

PJ Crowley, the official spokesman at the state department, has fallen on his sword after calling the treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the WikiLeaks files, "counterproductive and stupid".

The resignation followed Crowley's remarks to an MIT seminar last week about Manning's treatment in military prison.

Crowley had said: "What is being done to Bradley Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the department of defense."

For the complete article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/13/pj-crowley-resigns-bradley-manning-remarks

The International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) sent a notice to the Wisconsin Legislature, explaining that its attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers is illegal.

Anyone who has watched the events unfolding in Wisconsin and other states that are trying to remove collective bargaining rights from public workers has heard people protesting the loss of their "rights." (For more on the record turnout, see this story.) The ICLR explained to the legislature exactly what these rights are and why trying to take them away is illegal.

The ICLR is a New York-based nongovernmental organization that coordinates a pro bono network of labor lawyers and experts throughout the world. It investigates labor rights violations and issues reports and amicus briefs on issues of labor law.

The ICLR identified the right of "freedom of association" as a fundamental right and affirmed that the right to collective bargaining is an essential element of freedom of association. These rights, which have been recognized worldwide, provide a brake on unchecked corporate or state power.

In 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the NLRA, or the Wagner Act), it recognized the direct relationship between the inequality of bargaining power of workers and corporations and the recurrent business depressions. That is, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners, the economy fell into depression. The law therefore recognized as policy of the United States the encouragement of collective bargaining.

While the NLRA covered US employees in private employment, the law protecting collective bargaining in both the public and private sectors has developed since 1935 to cover all workers "without distinction."

The above 6 paragraphs quoted from the complete article: http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=38496&articleId=18599693&func=6&channel=News&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

The Golden Rule

This week I could hear the barking in the quietness of our back 40 all the way from Wisconsin, "Stop big government spending! End the deficit! Cut benefits for public employees!" But they're looking up the wrong tree. Let's stop twisting reality and do something real for those suffering in the wreck of our economy.

From my childhood Sunday School in the 40's until now, the standard memory verse Jesus said, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," has been twisted into: "Them that's got the gold make the rules." The original version has almost become a liberal conspiracy, virtually gone.

With 90 per cent of congress beholden to corporations instead of citizens, with a supreme court that gives legal privacy protection to public multinational corporations previously reserved by our Constitution to citizens, and with the escalating war against the poor in America led by Glenn Beck's Republicans and President Obama's "centrist" Democrats, we the people have been inspired by Tunisia, Egypt, and now Wisconsin. We know cutting the 15% "discretionary" spending is a drop in the bucket toward what's needed, and ignores the big problem.

The suffering on Main Street USA continues. Illegal mortgage foreclosures now made legal outstrip abortions, now in process of being made illegal. Families who worked to make end meets all their lives now find themselves laid off, unable to make health payments and house payments, and on the streets for the first time in their lives in their 60's.

Where'd the money go? Check the bailouts of Bush and Obama. Check the rising profits of the energy sector, health industry, insurance, and banking. Check a corporate ripoff and empire building system driven by war profiteering, cutthroat capitalism, and either silence or rabid distracting controversies from the media.

How'd it get taken from the people who need it, who earned it?

The Golden Rule is not all that got twisted in the last few decades. The words "tax" and "Big Government" have also been twisted, to facilitate the heist.

When we fill up at Dolly's we hardly notice the sticker on the pump, "Federal tax 20%, state tax 20 %" because it's transparent, public information, by law. It's collected and managed by the people we elect, beholden to us.

But there's another energy tax, in fact a tax all across our economy levied by a government beholden only to stockholders, along with rules and loopholes to benefit the few wealthiest. It's the government of the corporations in America, that not of the people, by the people, for the people. What part of each dollar I spend at the pump goes to them? It's not public information, and it varies from week to week, usually upward.

Remember High School Economics class? The bigger the economic sector, the more the regulations. When economic activity grows and wealth accumulates, regulations grow, too. Palen, Beck, Limbaugh and company forgot their lessons, and have fabricated a farce. It plays into the hands of the corporate governors of our government, the biggest taxers and spenders of our money.

That's why our founding fathers wrote our constitution. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Smith etc. knew government functions best when required by law to be governed by the people. With corporations now governing our government, we have progressively concentrated wealth making the greatest disparity between rich and poor this nation, or any modern nation, has known. This is class warfare in America, waged by the rich against the poor.

Now if the citizens of this nation had enough for reasonable survival, and if they didn't it was their own fault, we could ignore the mess. But that's not the case here, nor in the Middle East. So the poor are beginning to resist. We in America have a tradition those in the Middle East are now trying to emulate: government of, by, and for the people.

For God's sake, I hope Glenn Beck, Robert Koch, Rupert Murdoch, President Obama, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers, and libertarians return to our best American values for government. I hope they all remember our Bill of Rights, the primary document of protection for the poor, is part of our Constitution.

Listen to the people; they run the micro economy that matters. Start with the farmers and ranchers of Big Horn County. They know the real Golden Rule.

Following is a continuation of the column in the BHC news March 2:

So the biggest problems in America are government spending and the deficit? That's both true and false, but mostly simply laughable because of who's deciding the rules and who benefits: not those of us caught up in the controversies between the tea party of the Republicans and the radical left of the democrats.

Oh for the days of Grandpa J.D. in Kansas, 1924! We can learn from those days, even though we can't revert to them. That's when we had a functioning micro economy in the energy sector, controlled by ordinary citizens. Refineries in small towns all over Kansas bought crude directly from citizens who had oil wells on their property. He and other citizens of Elyria in the 20's were not happy with the price of gas for their new model T's. Grandpa hammered together a lid and nailed it on top of the sideboards of his model T truck, loaded his fat shoats (pigs) under the lid, and tied a 300 gal. tank on top. He drove to Wichita, sold his pigs at the livestock auction, set the tank down on the bed and drove to the Chevron refinery to fill that tank with gas bought with the pig profit. He returned with the tank full, parked it at his gas station pump with the tall lever and the glass measuring tank, and connected the hoses. Word got out. Grandpa's station had the cheapest gas from McPherson to Newton.

So where's a micro-economy that operates like this? Try Communist China, one small bright spot in a land steeped in fear and propaganda. But their bosses wisely know that a billion people depend on a free micro-economy, unlike our country. I saw it in action. There are more private entrepreneurs in China per capita by far than in America. I had to learn to bargain for everything I bought. I was amazed to find such pervasive free enterprise Communist China. The difference was the size.

The growing macro market economy of China has not yet swallowed up the people's micro economy. It's still a huge slice of the country's GNP.

Of course, both neoliberals and neoconservatives would be laughed out of Pixian County, Sichuan, PRC, if they even dared promote their ideology, just like they would have been laughed out of Elyria, Kansas, USA, in the 20's, when the market economy was micro and belonged to the people.

All of it comes down to an idea repulsive to the writers of our constitution, and standard dogma today in America: that the rules for our marketplace should be written by and for a few elite with the largest property holdings. By writing governing regulations for trade and exchange in every economic sector that gives the most power to the fewest, the conservatives then believed, the majority will prosper. Wealth trickles down, so goes the theory went.

But it hasn't. Now we have state governments and the Middle East in crisis, believing a farce.

Maybe we should pry into how we got into this mess. If the following has any truth, then those barking about the big budget deficit found the wrong tree.

Americans in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are waking up. They know the financial crisis facing our nation is contrived. All across the country, citizens are learning that the utopian dream of an unfettered market paves the way for big industry to game the system. Corporate fat cats have regulated the market to foster the biggest wealth redistribution any society has suffered at any time, with cash being funneled from most of us to the top 1%. The ones who scream loudest against big government are often the ones who know there is no such thing as an unregulated macro economy (if they remember their high school econ class). All big markets are regulated–the bigger the sector, the more the regulations. It's only questions of who does the regulating, for whose benefit. This is exploited by the right, and seldom acknowledged by the liberal left. It's the biggest lie believed in America today.

There was no clue in Walker's pre-election position statements. Only now, after the Koch/Murdoch clan had orchestrated bankrupting Wisconsin's state coffers, does the real Walker come forth. With an electorate mandate to govern, his utopian philosophy says democracy ended that November election day. Now his big government dogma roars forth with a united Republican majority. That's why the people, including many Republicans, have risen now by over a hundred thousand to protest at the Wisconsin state house. The people see through the sham conservatism at the core of the Republican and Tea Party folks as well as the sham of liberal Democrats, with its utopianism going bankrupt in America, Egypt, and around the world.

With corporate control of our elected government still escalating, even the Supreme Court gets into the act by transferring free speech rights to corporations, reserved in our constitution for individual citizens. Our biggest tax bill is erroneously considered legitimate profit in our socialist macro economy for those whose businesses are too big to fail. It exceeds what we pay our elected government every time we go to the gas pump, visit the local pharmacy, shop at the grocery store, or check out a new car.

Almost every big government regulation opposed on talk radio and "proven" bad for our economy has a hidden agenda. That agenda is to replace those transparent regulations, set in place originally by our honest elected representatives in government, with regulations written by representatives who could only win an election with corporate backing. Some 90% of congress, and majorities in state government as well, are similarly bought off by the corporate control of our elections. Without corporate sponsorship, winning is impossible. So it's not small government at all. It's the big government the anti-big-government buffoons want, secretly, for their benefit. What hypocrisy.

Stop the petty ludicrous national pastime with controversy and talking points, and get to the substance of real people's needs for an end to wasteful spending. Start with questioning budget items beyond the 15% that's supposedly "discretionary." Does that word mean the last two wars we're still fighting are not discretionary? Why not? Does that word mean the billions of $ subsidy of most sectors of our economy are off limits? What about foreign military aid to nations that would otherwise live more at peace with their neighbors? What about manufacturing for the military?

Our national choices are not made according to cost/benefit analyses for the people, but rather for the engaged corporate interests. So the big government rules are written by the closeted few, for the secret profit of the few, at the expense of the many, with the endorsement of both political parties and even the so-called grass roots libertarian tea party. The people of America better start being heard, not only in Wisconsin.

http://www.truth-out.org/news

OPINION | February 27, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Why Wouldn't the Tea Party Shut It Down?
By FRANK RICH
This battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts.

OPINION | February 25, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Madison, Wis., is looking a lot like Baghdad in 2003, with government officials exploiting fiscal crises for fun and profit

OPINION | February 26, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: Absorbing the Pain
By BOB HERBERT
At a gathering in Philadelphia this week, the deep pain of working Americans was readily apparent.

Bill Moyers: We must be exposed to truth even when it hurts.

http://www.alternet.org/world/149925/bill_moyers%3A_america_can%27t_deal_with_reality_--_we_must_be_exposed_to_the_truth%2C_even_if_it_hurts/

Democracy weakening in America?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?emc=eta1

Danny Shechter, "Will Banksters Get Away With It?"

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/2011226131635826806.html#

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org