Why?

Why are times so hard?

 

Why do times seem tough for so many people across the country and right here in Big Horn County?   We keep hearing about more and more young families who are unable to earn enough money to support themselves and their children.   It seems like even small financial setbacks are bankrupting more of us, who consider ourselves middle class.  We're losing the equity in our homes and our retirement funds are drying up.   That's before we start factoring in the devastation of medical costs (even for those of us with high quality health insurance coverage). 

 

Listening to the news of the day, you'd think all of this economic turmoil was being caused by people in our society who choose not to work hard.   These are the folks who receive public subsidies or "entitlements" in the form of TANF, Medicaid, or Medicare.  The theory is that these moochers keep our tax rates too high, which keeps us from being able to save and invest in our own futures.   Yet, I can't help noticing that a lot of mooching seems to be going on at the other end of the wealth spectrum. 

 

They are the ones who sold us on the idea that our problem is excessive government spending, not their revenue withholding. Here's a link to research sources proving a simple observation: ending tax evasion and tax havens for the moochers would be enough to bury our trillion-dollar deficit: http://www.nationofchange.org/add-it-taxes-avoided-rich-could-pay-deficit-1346074084

This source includes several logical ways to approach this one big elephant-in-the-Republican-room problem no politicians seems to want to talk about.

 

It reminds me of a situation we had out on the farm not too long ago.  We were troubled with varmints stealing into our chicken coop and dining on our chickens here on the Back 40.  I fastened chicken wire over, under and around every square inch of that coop to stop our chicken meat disappearing.   One morning, a few weeks after the chicken wire intervention, one of the chickens didn't exit the coop when it was opened.  My granddaughter noticed it struggling to stand up on one leg and sitting right back down. I crawled in, picked the bird up and found it only had one leg, and was still bleeding from the cavity of the missing leg. It took a while to find the blood stained chicken wire hole through which that leg was yanked and gnawed off. 

 

My simple solution had looked so perfect. I trusted chicken wire. It was obvious no varmint could slip through those holes.   While I was busy shoring up the chicken wire, those smart thieves were just waiting for a chicken leg to emerge from my carefully constructed security system.  They had all night to watch and wait, while I was busy taking care of farm business.  It makes me think of those wealthy varmints in our country.  These are the people who are increasing their own entitlement income while conspiring to replace Medicare and Obamacare with something to raise our own health care costs and their profits.  They only need to get one big bite out of each of us to make their fortunes.  We're left disabled, while they walk away with full bellies.  They're busy out in Washington D.C.  setting up a budget that will require raising taxes on all but the richest citizens, in order to fund special interests and continue corporate welfare.  In the meantime, we're worried about keeping those indigent people out of our chicken coops. 

 

The problem is that we lose to the moochers, regardless of whether they have more or fewer resources than us.  We become easy targets for those who exploit us by raising prices, sending jobs overseas, or lowering wages for higher short-term profits.  After getting their payout, CEOs have little compunction about bankrupting the companies they run, thereby devaluing our mutual fund portfolios (a.k.a. retirement accounts). 

 

Most of us simply don't discuss the divided economics and politics of why any more. It has become too contentious to speak of these things in public.  Our voice from Big Horn County may not represent many of the moochers at the top, whose voice is heard all over the media loudly denying the charges of, say, the Occupy Wall Street crowd. More of us are near the bottom of our economic ladder, dropped from the significant middle class of the 80's.  We resent being even remotely associated with living off the labors of others.  This may keep us from really thinking about what's happening to the middle class and how we are going to protect our own self-sufficiency in the coming decades. 

 

The national adversarial conversation promoted by the media victimizes us to blindness to any but one side of the answer: ours. News is no longer "The News," representing a variety of points of view rather than just one, like decades ago with David Brinkley or Chet Huntley. Now "News" on TV, radio, on line or cable is tailored to conform to a particular bias. It gives us ready answers, conservative or liberal answers decided by its perception of our point of view, with plenty of counterpunch ideas on why the other point of view is wrong, dangerous, unpatriotic, or totally stupid. Even in our families, we seldom listen to each other on issues that divide us, each with a different "totally right" answer to why the current state of the world, our nation, and Big Horn County is so dismal.

 

In my previous column I asserted that big government and big business have so mixed themselves up with each other we the people can't any longer tell them apart.  The corrupt conflicts of interest have made our arguments over blaming one or the other irrelevant. This week I am unveiling two kinds of moochers in our economy. The one at the bottom is featured in the media and highlighted by Ayn Rand and the Republicans, especially the Tea Party. The other is denied and justified, but its control of our national conversation over our economy are the reasons why we the people have given up even talking about the economic stress our families know today. This highlights the need to restore the legal structure of a fair economy built after our Great Depression and dismantled over the last half century. If we don't, the class warfare between the two grand moochers of our economy will spill out of our prison system into our streets, and racial conflict and revolution will attack our nation.

 

Some examples

Why in New York City are there more empty homes than homeless people? Is it only because these homes were foreclosed and are now owned by banks?

 

Last week, the Justice Department announced it wasn't going to prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for its shady activities during the mortgage crisis. The same day, Goldman disclosed in a regulatory filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had dropped an investigation into a troubled $1.3 billion residential mortgage-backed securities deal launched in 2006.

For more on this and other info on Banks: http://www.alternet.org/economy/uncle-sam-needs-you-bailout-6-reasons-another-big-banking-crisis-coming-our-way

 

Why does Jamie Diamond lose $9billion placing bad bets with money borrowed from his Chase Morgan bank, and get bailed out? Is in only because he regulates his own bank as a powerful member of the Federal Security and Exchange Commission, which gives him the power to grab taxpayer moneys to cover his losses? Who regulates such regulators? Why don't they do their job?

 

Why did Obama bail out mortgage banks to the tune of $700billion and not bail out the individual citizens losing their homes through mortgage default? More important, why did the subsequent $7trillion bailout subsidy of the financial sector get passed by congress with barely a whimper?

http://themoderatevoice.com/130732/secret-federal-reserve-loans-of-7-8-trillion-yield-13-billion-to-banks/

 

Why is BP in charge of the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill, and doing the job of the government program responsible for monitoring potential environmental disasters from our national fossil fuel appetite? http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/03/bps_oil_spill_cleanup_isnt_don.html

 

 

Why has our government abdicated its responsibility to us and turned over regulation to the interests needing the regulation? Doe self-regulation work? Can children nurture and raise themselves into responsible adulthood? Can foxes monitor the safety of hens in the hen house? Can chickens be safe from chicken moochers when the chicken wire doesn't work right?

http://dumpdimon.com/

http://gadfly.igc.org/progressive/corp-reg.htm

 

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
graberdb@gmail.com

The Biggest Lie of 2012

Republicans believe government must be smaller, that it feeds off the public, and that it reduces the self-sufficiency of families.   They believe government steals our money through taxes, and its touted hostility toward businesses sends those jobs overseas and previously middle class families suffer deprivation.

Democrats believe government has grown too weak to regulate the biggest business sectors like banks, energy and health.  They believe capitalism has gone cutthroat and lost Adam Smith's bottom line—the common good.  They believe the middle and working classes have lost jobs, homes, and lives due to corporate greed.   They also feel that millions of American families suffer deprivation as a result of high prices.

The leadership of both parties—read Romney and Obama—have left unchallenged the false notion that business and government are separate and in competition, like they used to be when our free enterprise system functioned. They aren’t separate anymore; the assumption they are separate is the biggest lie. Big business is now in bed with government more than ever before. Government is governed by big money more than ever before. Republican and Democratic leadership are the same flock of turkeys, noisily competing with each other over taxpayer morsels by the $billions. That flock has infiltrated the private and public sector so extensively that politicians/business execs easily and quickly exchange identities and claim exaggerated loyalty to us the people where there is none. So the real story, yet untold, involves politicians from both camps competing over billions of dollars in spoils from the dying middle class.  Could the weekly political crises, promoted for media outlet profit and fueled by people’s frustration, actually be contrived to divert people from this issue?

I was reminded of our current dilemma yesterday, as my family's flock of turkeys followed me around the fields.  My granddaughter, Hannah, taught our seven baby turkeys how to scratch and peck last spring.  Now this August, they are perfectly capable of fending for themselves, as they range the farm.  However, they much prefer that I catch insects for them.  I gave in to their begging yesterday, mostly because they're so darn cute, and offered up a large grasshopper for their consumption.  I was quickly overwhelmed with the demand for more, as turkeys began pecking at my buttons and eyeglasses.  At that moment, those little creatures seemed to really believe that their existence depended on me, even though they had the skills to feed themselves.  Of course, they really do need me to help them out of a jam, like when they get caught on the wrong side of the fence and lose their freedom to range where they want. 

I wonder how we can get back to a philosophy of working together to help each other in times of genuine need, without creating systems of dependency.  Is there a way to back out of our current all or nothing thinking regarding the evils of government or the evils of the corporate take-over of America?  I wonder whether we all find ourselves believing the same big lie, that government and industry are easily distinguishable enemies. 

Those hating "Big Business" want to keep their social security payments and medicare benefits as a safety net for retirement.  Those distrusting government programs want the business sector to guarantee retirement benefits and health care insurance.  Either way, we fall prey to the lie that the two have not become one.   They have.  In the meantime, we have a big mess with our economy, class warfare is threatening, and basic freedoms are falling by the wayside.  Families who have gone broke or suffered human losses from inadequate health care have little hope since Obamacare and Romneycare, and whatever either winner might regurgitate after November 11, will be caught in the same confusion. 

Witness the turkey gathering around Medicare, Medicaid and social security, the big cash cows congress and investment banks have conspired to peck into for a century. Says Romney on CBS, "There's only one president that I know of in history that robbed Medicare, $716 billion…" Yet that's precisely the Congressional Budget Office estimate of the savings to this country under Obamacare. Further, the GOP plan keeps that Obamacare savings plan intact. Yes, Romney and Ryan are reasonable enough to know Obamacare is right for America, so their plan duplicates the savings of $716 billion.  

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57494197/romneys-$716b-medicare-cut-attack-is-dubious/

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/aug/15/checking-facts-700-billion-medicare-cut/

So why do these turkeys so badly misrepresent reality? Why are Republican leaders sold on Obamacare's central plans to slow the growth of Medicare over the next decade, eliminate overpayments to private insurers, reform provider payments for greater efficiency, tie reimbursements to improvements in economic productivity, and set up programs to reduce fraud and abuse? Because it puts a useful band-aid over the bleeding of America, while keeping in place the confused network of myriad conflicts of interest between government and the private sector, involving trillions of our American dollars to be gobbled up. Some turkeys.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/aug/15/checking-facts-700-billion-medicare-cut/

Perhaps we could start by restoring the clear separation of government and business so that we, the people, can again clearly monitor what's going on between them.  That's what our founding fathers believed. It's what President Eisenhower warned us about. It's what the Glass Steagall act was designed in the '30's to remedy. It's what the Roosevelt trust busting program was about. And it's what Republicans and Democrats conspired together to mix up and confuse in the last half-century.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

How we got gun un-control

Gun control is such a taboo subject among my friends and family in Big Horn County it's hard to find the correct language for a rational discussion.

I learned to handle a gun and to hunt almost by the time I could walk to school. We needed to hunt to put food on the table back then. I remember carrying my new .22 single shot to school and hiding it behind coats in the cloakroom so we could hunt on the way home. But the teacher found it, and Dad put a stop to this. He was a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and sympathetic, but he also believed in teaching us how to safely and responsibly handle firearms. By the time my two brothers and I graduated from a Benjamin BB gun pump air rifle to a single shot .22, Dad paid the dues for us to join the NRA. As junior members, well before it was required to get a hunting license, we took a county NRA gun safety course for teenagers. The NRA supported government regulation of guns then. From their course I learned responsibility to society and to the American government. That was before it was taken over by gun marketers/politicians.

I remember, as a young teenager, trying to buy ammo at the local hardware store. I was turned down because I wasn't old enough. I also remember helping a neighbor grind off the small nib in the action of his .22 automatic rifle to make it fully automatic. Then we went rabbit hunting, and held the trigger down for a dozen very fast shots—emptying the tubular magazine and scorching the barrel—while tracking the running rabbit with the open sights and ruining the meat with multiple shots. That was great fun until Dad informed us we were violating the law. It was against federal gun regulations to have in possession a fully automatic weapon. He told us the police could come take that gun away. We tried but succeeded only in making the action jamb every time for the second shot. I felt bad about helping ruin that gun.

Things changed rapidly after the assassination of JFK, in 1963. During the following months and years, political assassinations escalated. That's when the NRA changed its focus from supporting hunters and promoting family hunting into political action. Their attempts to remove government regulation of gun ownership have been astonishingly effective. It's amazing when you consider that the American people have maintained their power to regulate automobiles, fireworks, dynamite, and pesticides. All of these can and do become lethal, and can even turn into lethal weapons. Yet, the NRA has succeeded in propagandizing America citizens to accept placing firearms out of reach of the oversight and safety rules of our elected government representatives. Children, criminals and psychopaths can now bypass government regulations via private citizen dealers at gun shows or the internet and purchase firearms making huge profits for gun manufacturers and marketers.

It didn't take long to convince people that any regulation of destructive weaponry was a violation of their Constitutional rights. The NRA became an association of gun marketers and manufacturers, who promoted a lucrative political conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate our guns. Money continues to pour from gun business NRA affiliates to media and political coffers to help support this propaganda. When you follow the money trail, it's easy to see who benefits the most from the last decades of removing more and more government control of guns.

 
My Dad was troubled by the NRA's change in focus. He didn't want to lose the right to own his double barrel ten-gauge, but also couldn't understand unrestricted access to weapons of mass destruction. I think many of us struggle with this all or nothing interpretation of our Constitution. Guns with huge magazines and capacity for rapid firing, built in the US and sold around the world, are now being designed and marketed to kill and maim human beings en masse. Features making little sense to hunters, but appealing to a criminal mind, such as easy concealment, stealth, silencing technology, and long range sniping ability have become NRA-promoted selling points.

I still have my guns, plus a few more. I continue to laugh at my brother, who claims I am naïve in thinking the United States government has never and will never confiscate my guns. My two brothers bought the propaganda, have become part of the NRA marketing clientele. The many non-hunting weapons proliferated here and around the world, purchased by law-abiding citizens such as my family members, could do massive carnage if the Armageddon predicted by a sector of Christians here and nationwide were to become a real civil war. I question whether those who happen to own the most weapons should have the power to overthrow our elected government. If our government has gone wrong, we have a more effective and legitimate means to overthrow it: the ballot box.

The Bible says we should love our neighbors, but I'd feel better if mine didn't have weapon stockpiles in their backyards or machine guns at the movies. How about you?

Follow the links below, also available on Alternet.org, to significant gun-un-control measures where a majority of citizen NRA members oppose the NRA leadership:

 

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/16/opinion/la-ed-guns16-2009dec16

http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/editorials

Gun control's NRA supporters

 

1. Editorial from LaTimes

A poll finds surprising support among NRA members for some aspects of gun control.

December 16, 2009

Gun control is one of those culture-wars issues on which liberals and conservatives often don't even seem to be speaking the same language, let alone coming to consensus. Gun owners -- especially the hard-core enthusiasts who belong to the National Rifle Assn. -- are often thought to oppose any restriction on their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Except that, according to a recent poll, they don't.

The gun-control debate is replete with suspect polls and fishy statistical analyses, so when Mayors Against Illegal Guns set out to survey gun owners, it knew it would be accused of putting a liberal slant on the questions. That's why the group, a coalition of 500 mayors started in 2006 by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, hired a conservative pollster to do the job: Frank Luntz, an occasional commentator on the Fox News Channel. Luntz surveyed 401 NRA members and 431 gun owners who don't belong to the group, and came up with some surprising results.

 

2.  Controls on gun purchase and ownership.

If you are put on the U.S. terror watch list you cannot board an airplane. You can, however, still purchase guns and explosives. According to the Government Accountability Office, "From February 2004 through February 2010, 1,228 individuals on the watch list underwent background checks to purchase firearms or explosives; 1,119, or 91 percent, of these transactions were approved."

NRA members understand this even if their leadership stubbornly tries to protect the gun-ownership rights of terrorists (but they're patriots, I tell you!). Eighty-two percent of NRA members think this gap should be closed.

 

 

3. Tiahrt Amendments

Named in honor of all-around clod, former Kansas Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt, this is part of the NRA's constant effort to hamper, harass and harangue any government effort to get to the bottom of how guns came to be used in a crime. These amendments, attached to federal spending bills, do their best to severely limit law enforcement's ability to access, use and share data that helps them enforce federal, state and local gun laws.

Not surprisingly, while these are a big hit at NRA HQ and among those members of Congress so graced with their campaign contributions, 69% of their own members have come to the logical conclusion that this is a pretty bad idea, as have 74% of non-NRA gun owners who think there should be no barriers to information-sharing between federal agencies and police when it comes to gun crimes.

 

 

4. Reporting Lost and Stolen Guns

Supporting provisions requiring this would seem to be only common sense. But there is not much of that present among the NRA's leadership. For example, the NRA has not only fought all efforts to make reporting lost or stolen guns to the police a requirement, but in Pennsylvania, where scores of cities and townships have picked up the slack by passing these measures themselves, the fine Americans and conservative-lawsuit-abuse haters at the NRA have actually threatened to sue to overturn these laws. Yes, you read that correctly, our friends who love state and local rights when it comes to allowing a kid to stay on their parent's healthcare policy until they are 26, don't feel so much the same way about guns.

NRA members would seem to disagree: 78% of them think this provision would be a good idea, as do 88% of non-NRA gun owners.

 

 

5. Sharing Records With National Instant Background Check System (NICS)

The Fix Gun Checks Act, modeled on ideas developed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, was introduced in the wake of the carnage at Tucson by, among others, Senator Chuck Schumer in March 2011. Besides closing the gun-show loophole (see #1), it also sought to fix a huge problem in the current federal background check system--a lax attitude by many states and some federal institutions in sharing records of those ineligible to buy firearms due to criminal record or mental health defects.

For example, Seung-Hui Cho, the mass murderer at Virginia Tech, had been declared mentally unfit by a judge in Virginia, and Jared Loughner had been rejected by the military for admitted drug use. Both of these men never should have been able to get anywhere near buying a gun legally. But these records were never shared.

The Fix Gun Checks Act would provide both incentives and penalties to states so that all these records are shared in as timely a manner as possible. But NRA leadership has gone to war with this bill, as with all other efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unfit. Yet, a poll of swing-state voters taken around the time the bill was introduced showed overwhelming support for this concept among gun owners. In Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Arizona and (most ironically, and sadly) Colorado, more than 82% of gun owners believed states should be fully funded in their efforts to share these records, while 91% supported requiring federal agencies to share information on potentially dangerous persons such as Loughner.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

graberdb@gmail.com