Why so mean?

April 8, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on Why so mean?

It's not about the budget; it's about being in power and being mean.

So much of Republican policy seems just plain mean to me: Kill health reform, attack people who work for a living while catering to the richest 2 percent, de-fund Planned Parenthood (which so many women rely on for basic health care needs), and then shut down the entire federal government because you can’t get your way.

My husband has a theory, and I hope it’s correct: He believes the clock is ticking for this hate-fueled movement and that its members want to do as much damage as they can before they lose power.

These old white Protestant men will have to step aside for a younger generation, the majority of whom are not afraid of gays and not fooled by the hate-filled rhetoric. In a matter of a few years, the so-called minorities of African-American and Latino people will be the majority — it’s happening already in border states like Texas and Arizona.

I don’t know if he’s right, but I hope so. As it is, it will take us generations to clean up the mess they’re making, and they still have plenty of money and power, and they’re bold. Look At what’s happening in Wisconsin, where thousands of votes for the conservative judicial candidate just “appeared” on the computer of a woman who has spent years working for him. It’s no wonder Gov. Scott Walker looked confident in the face of defeat yesterday — he knew this was coming.

Some of the policies are even to the right of my conservative son. A Georgia legislator introduced a bill that would force an investigation of every miscarriage to make sure it wasn’t an abortion.

My son is anti-abortion, but that’s one step too far, he said as he helped talk his cousin through a hard time following a miscarriage.

Here in North Carolina, as in Washington, Republicans are trying to kill, or at least cripple, social programs and Medicare and Medicaid. Killing reform isn’t enough; we have to be downright mean to people in need.

They have spent their time in office so far villifying the unemployed instead of creating jobs as they said they would during their campaigns. They’re trying to make policy conform to their narrow-minded view of the world and they’re focusing on things that aren’t helping people who are suffering.

They don’t care about the economy or working people; only about big corporations, the wealthy and their own filthy hides.

But if these are the final, desperate attacks of a beast that knows it’s dying, I can feel a little better.

Boston Tea Party was a Corporate tax break protest

April 4, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on Boston Tea Party was a Corporate tax break protest

The real story of the Boston tea party from an original Boston Tea party member, George Robert Twelves Hewes

Three years

March 30, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on Three years

Mike had such a wicked sense of humor. Yhis was typical of how it worked.

Today was Sunday and everyone who had come to say goodbye to Mike was leaving. We had Justin and Amanda, friends from Raleigh, James and Janet, Janet’s mom, Mike’s cousin, Christina. Kristy and Kathleen stopped by to make me take a few minutes for myself, and just as I got out of the hot tub, a neighbor I’d never met before came to the door to complain about all the cars parked along the street.

“You can’t have people all over the place like that,” she said. “It’s unsafe. I have to drive on this street, you know.”

I told her the people were here to say goodbye to my son, who would die in a few days and then the street would be more convenient for her. I wanted to really lash out at her.

Who the hell was she to come to my door and complain about having to drive more carefully when my son was dying? Couldn’t she have asked whether everything was OK first? The cars had been there on and off since Mike came home to die 10 days earlier. It was obvious we weren’t partying.

Well, maybe it was a party — a goodbye party for Mike.

She asked if there was anything she could do. I figured she had done enough, so I just asked her to drive carefully.

I relive these last few days every year. Friday — April Fool’s Day — will be three years without his maniacal laugh and his practical jokes, our late-into-the-night talks, his nagging as I cooked that I was doing something wrong and his total pleasure at the result anyway.The only thing wrong with my bread was that it wasn’t at his house.

Three years since we went into Great Smokies National Park with our cameras or watched Star Trek while we nibbled dark chocolate and talked about food.

Three years since he and Danny and Rob — rabid Yankees fans all — teased me about being a Red Sox fan.

Three years since I heard him say, “Love you, Mom.”

Mike was a Mama’s boy; he would tell you that as soon as he met you. We shared a birthday and we shared a wicked sense of humor, which we both got from my father — his hero.

As Mike battled and conquered addiction and then faced cancer with courage, grace and humor, he became my hero.

Three years ago tomorrow, the night before he died, he told me he was having a good time here with me.

I figure if he could be having a good time then, I should never complain again about anything.

But I do complain because I don’t think it’s fair that he was denied health care until it was too late to save his life. I think it’s wrong that he had to nearly starve to death before anything was done to help him. Twice in less than a year, and then they failed to treat a life-threatening infection.

If Dr. Herb Hurwitz at Duke hadn’t agreed to see him, he would have died from that infection. Dr. Hurwitz gave us two more years with him.

I think it’s immoral that no one even apologized for the way he was neglected.

I hate how big the hole is my heart is since he died.

I wish I had died instead.

Three years, and we’ve made so little progress in getting affordable quality health care for everyone. People are still fighting it and opponents are still spreading lies about it. The media still covers the lies as though they were truth.

Three years and 135,000 more Americans have died just the way Mike did, and there’s still no national outrage.

Every year now, I relive those last days with him.

Today was Sunday and I had two more days with him.

Aliens among us

March 28, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on Aliens among us

I’m a lifelong “Star Trek” fan. Well, since the original series came on in 1966, anyway. I was almost 14, and I was captivated.

In the series’ second incarnation, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a race called the Ferengi was introduced. They’re money-grubbing, power-hungry beings, guided by the “Rules of Acquisition,” which glorify greed and cheating.

Rule of Acquisition 1: “Once you have their money, never give it back.”

There are no labor unions among the Ferengi workers; the goal of every Ferengi is to become the exploiter. And women are forced to stay home and wear no clothing. When a Frenegi enters the home of a friend, he offers money for admittance.

When they die, their bodies are descicated and the family sells of pieces of it to raise money and so family and friends can own a piece of their loved one.

The Ferengi religion brings the dead to the Blessed Exchequer, where they can bribe their way into the Divine Treasury.

It was supposed to be fiction, but I saw this “photo” this morning and it dawned on me that these two really would make good Ferengi. Too bad they’re real and they’re ours to deal with.

For 30 years, the Kock Brothers worked behind the scenes, funding right-wing causes, buying influence, corrupting our political system and undermining Democracy. By the time they were outed last year by The New Yorker, their work was pretty much done. They had created the Tea Party astroturf movement and helped set up a system of disinformation that would tilt the landscape far to the right.

To the far-right, the Koch brothers are heroes, doing battle with the great villain George Soros.

Of course, Soros hasn’t poured but of fraction of the money into political movements has the Kochs have, and he’s always been above -board. I don’t think the Kocks and their ilk even begin to understand the difference.

The fraud isn’t by the voters

March 25, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on The fraud isn’t by the voters

State by state and even nationally, Republicans are moving toward requiring a photo ID to vote. It will help reduce voter fraud, they say.

They talk about dead people voting in Washington County, NC; they talk about noncitizens casting hundreds of votes.

Well, from the NC Justice Center, here are some numbers:

4—number of votes allegedly cast by dead people in Washington County (Zombie voters in Washington County, Under the Dome, News & Observer, March 1, 2011)

0—actual number of votes cast by dead people in Washington County after investigation by elections officials (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)

0—number of votes cast by other people using the names of deceased voters in Washington County.

637—number of legally present non-citizens who may have voted in North Carolina in last election, and who received letters from the State Board of Elections inquiring about their status  (Non-U.S. Citizens may have voted in N.C. elections, Under the Dome, News & Observer, March 2, 2011)

106—number of letters from “noncitizens” returned in initial batch of responses to Board of Elections inquiries. (Ibid)

105—number of “noncitizens” in initial response to Board of Elections who had become citizens and simply had not updated their drivers license information when the rolls were checked (Ibid)

0—number of the 106 people in the initial batch of responses to the Board of Elections not verified as citizens who voted in the last election (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)

212—total number of 637 people investigated as non citizens who the Board of Elections believes voted in the last election (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)

212—number of 637 people investigated as non citizens likely to have voted in the last election who election officials believe had become citizens (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)

6,102,163—total number of registered voters in North Carolina (State Board of Elections).

2,700,383—number of votes cast in North Carolina in 2010 elections.

0—number of people that voter ID supporters can prove voted illegally in either example currently cited as support for legislation (Bob Hall, Democracy North Carolina)

0—number of times that supporters of voter ID legislation have acknowledged that their claims about dead people voting in Washington County or noncitizens voting have proven to be false.

In other words, there is no voter fraud. Every case they have raised has been proven false, but they continue to insist we need this legislation.
The reason they want it is that a lot of people don’t have a photo ID, mostly poor and elderly people who don’t drive. These people tend to vote Democratic, so if you can deny them their right to vote, you have a larger percentage of Republicans voting. It’s exactly how the South held down the African-American vote for generations after slavery ended.
You start with the poor and elderly, you get rid of agencies that help make it easier for them to vote — like ACORN — and then you deny the vote to anyone who’s been in jail — a population that is disproportionally African-American and Latino, who also tend to vote Democratic.
Then you send out notices to predominately low-income and minority neighborhoods and give them disinformation on what date or where they should vote, and make sure there are too few voting machines and too few poll workers for the people who do show up.
Pretty soon you have a majority of Republicans.
Now, that’s what I call voter fraud.

The politics of scarcity

March 20, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on The politics of scarcity

We are on the side of the people of Libya, but it is a third war, which we can afford to fight even as we prepare to make draconian cuts to human services because we're too broke.

Apparently, we have enough money for another war.

We don’t have enough to give access to quality health care to everyone.

We can’t afford to make sure schools aren’t shortchanged.

We can’t improve our public infrastructure or expand or modernize public transportation.

Upgrading the electrical grid is beyond our means.

We have to take away collective bargaining rights for people who work for a living because it’s just too expensive.

We’re talking about draconian cuts to human services because we’re in such a financial crunch.

Workers have been losing ground for 30 years because the government just can’t keep spending on regulation. And besides, it’s just too intrusive for big corporations to be regulated.

But we can afford another war.

We also can afford more tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, which we turn around and make up for with more cuts to human services.

There is enough for everyone to have what they need in this country. The gap between the rich and the working class has never been wider, but it is the middle class that is asked to sacrifice everything — including our children, who are the ones dying in these ill-conceived wars.

We don’t need a draft if we can keep working Americans down because their children will join the military for the opportunities it offers. That is, if you come out alive after repeated tours in the wars that are enriching huge, corrupt corporations.

It’s time for real change. If the people of the Middle East can take to the streets, perhaps it’s time for more of us to do the same thing.

It only adds up for the wealthy

March 14, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on It only adds up for the wealthy

Protesters gather in the Capitol Building in Lansing, MI, to fight for their rights to govern themselves.

Attacks on the working class are stepping up in ferocity.

In Wisconsin, the union-busting bill passed in the middle of the night with no debate and no quorum, using parliamentary trickery.

In Michigan, things are even worse. Newly elected Gov. Rick Snyder has decided he can declare martial law and send his people in to govern towns and school districts with no elected power whatsoever. He can even dissolve cities and towns.

All he has to do is declare a fiscal emergency to set all this in motion.

What’s worse, he’s not the only one who can set it in motion:

The governor can hire a private company to declare financial emergency and take over oversight of the city. So now a private corporation can declare your city in a state of financial emergency and send in its Emergency Manager, fire your elected officials, and reap the benefits of the ensuing state contracts, completely ursurping the power of elected officials — and the voters who put them there.

Of course, it’s easy to create a fiscal emergency when you sign in $1.8 billion in tax breaks for the wealthy and big business and then declare you need $1.7 billion in taxes from the elderly and the poor, and whatever you don’t get back from that, you get from cutting social services.This was a direct transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy.

It all just gets more brazen as time goes on. Walker gets away with his strong-arm tactics to kill collective bargaining rights and then Snyder declares dictatorial powers.

This is how facists take power: Create and emergency and then declare you’re the only one who can deal with it.

What’s next, and when does President Obama stand up and call these people out in no uncertain terms?

A big double standard

March 11, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on A big double standard

Corporate pimp James O'Keefe, whose lies might give the Republicans the excuse they want to de-fund NPR.

Scenario one: A conservative governor gets on the phone with a person he believes is a big corporate supporter and brags about how he will bust the unions. They essentially make plans for the corporate takeover of the state. People get angry, but he doesn’t have to resign because he knows it will blow over.

Scenario two: The head of a public broadcasting group talks to a fake Muslim fake donor and NPR could lose its federal funding.

So what’s the difference here? Maybe it’s that liberals have a sense of shame. It’s possible to embarrass us.

But the key here is that the videos here involved the fake pimp whose videos gave the Republicans an excuse to shut down ACORN, one of the most effective voter-registration groups in the nation.

James O’Keefe, a true pimp for corporate interests, devised a fake Muslim group that offered $5 million to NPR.  Executives at the broadcasting company never intended to take the money and actually questioned the tax-exempt status of the group. But the willing right-wing media made a big deal out of it, just as they did the fake pimp videos. It proves NPR has a liberal bias.

It’s OK for Fox News to be the mouthpiece of the right, but it’s not OK to have a news organization that broadcasts real truth. Even the supposed “liberal” media jump all over it, believing the right-wing hype to be real news because “people are talking about it,” as a former editor of mine once put it.

Of course people are talking about it. If you put it out there again and again, people will talk about it, just like they talk about Charlie Sheen. It’s a perfect shiny issue. “Don’t look at the rape of American workers, look over here; this is shiny.”

It’s a double standard, pure and simple, and it threatens to take down our Democracy.

It isn’t over yet

March 10, 2011 progressive living Comments Off on It isn’t over yet

Democratic Representative Nick Milroy of South Range in northwestern Wisconsin was trying to retrieve some clothes from his office in the Capitol Thursday night when police tackled him and arrested him for trying to enter the building.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker thinks he has won in his battle to squash the public employee unions and slash public safety net programs.

The problem for him — and the hope for the rest of us — is that he violated open meeting laws, and perhaps a few others. Unless the courts are as corrupted by corporate America as he seems to be, the law can not be upheld.

Video of the meeting shows Rep. Peter Barca, the Assembly Minority Leader, pleading throughout that the meeting was illegal, that he hadn’t even been given a chance to read the law.

But none of this is about law; this is about seizing control of the state and subverting laws for the financial gain of the wealthiest. It’s about getting rid of the middle class because it’s such a bother to these corporate-owned clowns and allowing people like the Koch brothers to control America.

They already control the private sector. We have watched the unions there lose power and the workers’ benefits and real wages fall. Look at the ads on TV about help with crushing debt and “underwater” mortgages, payday lending and car-title loans. These are the equivelent of the company store, where workers couldn’t possibly get out of debt because necessities were more than the workers’ weekly wages.

Studies have shown that it takes from two to three times minimum wage, and sometimes more, to eke out a living in any city in America. Those figures don’t include such things as eating out, cable TV or other entertainment.

This is the real agenda, to take American workers back to the days of the robber-barons of the Industrial Revolution.

Gov. Walker gave away the same amount in tax breaks to the wealthy that he’s demanding back from state workers and poor people in cuts to wages and safety-net programs.

We all need to get behind the workers, do what we can to protest, to fund the reccall elections, to get the word out that this kind of illegal bullying will not be tolerated in our America, because if we don’t, we will have lost the last vestiges of our America to the corporations and their allies.

We made a difference

March 8, 2011 a world of progress, progressive living Comments Off on We made a difference

Health care advocates from across North Carolina filled the gallery this morning when the NC House Health and Human Services Committee met to consider House Bill 115, a bill that would hand over the control of the state’s health insurance exchange to the insurance companies and their allies.

They had a bit of the deer-in-the-headlights look as they saw the gallery filled to overflowing. There wasn’t even any standing room.

As of late last week, the plan was to push H115 through to the House Insurance Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Jerry Dockham, the insurance broker who introduced it.

But we advocates got the word out about the bill, despite the reluctance of most of the state’s media to pay any attention to it, and filled the gallery. Without saying a word, we let them know the word is out and we will fight them on this.

The bill that was supposed to create the health exchange was being drafted by a diverse panel of experts including health care providers, advocates, consumers, physicans and more. The group was put together by the NC Institute of Medicine, and it met several times to turn a suggested federal bill into a framework that would work for the protection and benefit of people of North Carolina.

But the insurance companies wanted control. They wanted to be able to “pre-authorize the expensive diagnostic tests that drive up health care costs.”  Sounds reasonable enough, right?

Wrong. Last year, they forced my husband to wait two days for a nuclear stress test after a bad EKG, very nearly killing him.

They wanted to be able to “offer consumers a wide variety of plans from which to choose.”

Like the catostrophic plan a friend of mine chose with a $10,000 deductible. When she developed breast cancer, she was told her chemotherapy wouldn’t be covered because it was outpatient.

What they want is to be able to confuse people into buying something that covers little more than the insurance company’s butt.

Then they asked for a voting seat on the board of directors, and nearly everyone at the meeting said it would be a clear conflict of interest. A couple weeks later, H115 appeared, before the Institute of Medicine panel could finish its work, giving seven of the 11 seats to insurance companies, brokers and their allies, all of whom opposed reform.

This morning, committee chair, Rep. Bill Current (R-Gastonia), said he didn’t even know “why we’re bothering with this since Obamacare is unconstitutional anyway.”

Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin told him it’s a good idea “just in case,” because if the Affordable Care Act isn’t unconstitutional, and North Carolina doesn’t have an exchange, the federal government would operate the exchange. Then he went on to make some proposals from what the IOM panel has worked on:

  • A seven-member board composed of people with technical expertise and no financial interest in the exchange. The board would be complemented by five advisory committees that would include insurance companies and consumers.
  • Compliance with open records and open meeting laws, something H115 lacks.

The committee decided to meet again to discuss the insurance exchange in two weeks, which gives advocates two more weeks to get the word out that health reform in North Carolina is in danger of being subverted by big business and big greed.

If we don’t stop the takeover here in North Carolina, other states will follow suit. If we do stop it, big insurance will be on notice that we’re watching and we intend to put a stop to their efforts.

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