The Koch brothers: a statewide and nationwide embarrassment for Kansas and the country

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?   --Bob Herbert, Columnist, The New York Times

That is, an embarrassment unless you're one of the wealthy who benefit by their influence.

Apparently, when you're wealthy in America now, there really is no shame.

Or accountability.

Noblesse Oblige'.  How quaint.

Try to enjoy your Sunday, y'all.

Link to original post:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp

Since we're all talking democracy lately

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.   --Bob Herbert, Columnist, The New York Times

...and we let them.

We're cheering the Egyptians on this week but not paying attention to what our leaders, corporations and their money are doing to us and turning us into here at home, it seems.

Link to original post:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp

1967 to today--not enough has changed

It was 1967 when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. endured a hurricane of criticism when he came out publicly against the war in Vietnam and called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”


Fact is, he hadn't seen anything near what we've become in that respect.


Sick.


And we're still not analyzing that any.  


Not really.  


Not yet.


Link to original post:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/opinion/25herbert.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

Quote of the day--on being principled, then and now

"While the myriad issues facing the U.S. have changed and changed again since (President John F.) Kennedy’s time, the importance of being guided by the highest principles and ideals has not. We are now in a period in which cynicism is running rampant, and selfishness and greed have virtually smothered all other values. Simple fairness is not a fit topic for political discussion and no one dares even mention the poor."
"The public seems fearful and cowed. People unworthy of high office are arrogantly on the march."
"You can say whatever you’d like about the Kennedy era and the ’60s in general, but there was great energy in the population then, and a willingness to reach beyond one’s self."
"Kennedy spoke in his acceptance speech of a choice “between national greatness and national decline.” That choice was never so stark as right now. There is still time to listen to a voice from half a century ago."

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Republican Party

That’s Where the Money Is

by BOB HERBERT

It’s beyond astonishing to me that John Boehner has a real chance to be speaker of the House of Representatives.


I’ve always thought of Mr. Boehner as one of the especially sleazy figures in a capital seething with sleaze. I remember writing about that day back in the mid-’90s when this slick, chain-smoking, quintessential influence-peddler decided to play Santa Claus by handing out checks from tobacco lobbyists to fellow Congressional sleazes right on the floor of the House.


It was incredible, even to some Republicans. The House was in session, and here was a congressman actually distributing money on the floor. Other, more serious, representatives were engaged in debates that day on such matters as financing for foreign operations and a proposed amendment to the Constitution to outlaw desecration of the flag. Mr. Boehner was busy desecrating the House itself by doing the bidding of big tobacco.

Embarrassed members of the G.O.P. tried to hush up the matter, but I got a tip and called Mr. Boehner’s office. His chief of staff, Barry Jackson, was hardly contrite. “They were contributions from tobacco P.A.C.’s,” he said.
When I asked why the congressman would hand the money out on the floor of the House, Mr. Jackson’s answer seemed an echo of Willie Sutton’s observation about banks. “The floor,” he said, “is where the members meet with each other.”

For the love of all that is good, if you can't or wont' vote Democratic, vote Libertarian.  Vote Independent.  Vote the Green Party if there is one you can vote for.  But don't, by any means, vote Republican.  They're for themselves.  They're for Big Business.  They're for the corporations.  They're decidedly not for you and me.  They're not for the "little guy".  They're not for the middle or lower classes.
 
Link to original post:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/opinion/05herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

Quote of the day--on voting against your own best interests

...in light of what Bob Herbert calls "the most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans," the Tea Party movement wants to abolish government and expand even more the deregulated capitalism that has unsettled the lives of so many of its members. Ignorance prevails around both the movement's policy recommendations and its often racist protest against "the election of a "foreign born' - African-American to the presidency." Link to original post: http://www.truth-out.org/the-disappearing-intellectual-age-economic-darwinism61287

Is there anyone for whom this doesn't seem true?

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It’s not just that we can’t plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we’ve become. We can’t seem to do much of anything. --Bob Herbert, columnist, The New York Times Link to original quote here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22herbert.html?src=me&ref=general

Four insanities, to me, anyway

The reason I started this blog was because, during the George W. Bush administration, there were such crazy, insane things being proposed and even, too frequently, passed into law that I couldn't take it. This blog was a catharsis for me, to state what was wrong.

So today, in that vein, I'd like to point out four more things, going on now, that I believe strongly have no basis in logic or intelligence.

1) There is a woman in the Bush administration--Nancy de Parle--who heads up President Obama's health care inititative to change our system who made $2.3 million in the last year or so, from those same health care corporations.

This is insane.

That woman--any person--who is from the health care industry should not be in charge of changing the system.

She will not, in fact, change it. Not enough, anyway. Not the way we need. Not to benefit us, the users of health care in the United States. She's too invested in its maintenance.

2) Quote from The New York Times today: "The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Clean Water Act does not prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from allowing mining waste to be dumped into rivers, streams and other waters."

Insanity.

This is so insane it makes me angry. I have to not think about this, it makes me so angry.

People will regret that corporations were allowed to do this--to dump mining waste into rivers, streams and other waters. It will be regretted and sooner, not later.

3) The Obama Administration is continuing to imprison people at Guantanamo Bay without charging them with any crimes, with no evidence of any wrong-doing and, on top of both those things, indefinitely.

As The Times says today--Bob Herbert, to be specific--this is not who we ever were. It's not who we should be.

4) Finally, Citigroup, which has done so horribly, business-wise, in the last year to two years (so much so that comic, satirist Bill Maher calls it "ShittyGroup") that it had to accept billions of dollars in tax money from you and me through the Federal Government is now planning to increase its pay to its employees--some by as much as 50%--because it can't hand out juicy bonuses (in your and my tax moneys) to those same employees.

So Citigroup has been a horribly-run business, it wanted to hand out bonuses, it can't so it's going to do an end-around and just hand out pay raises instead.


I would like less insanity in the world. All our worlds.

Links to related stories:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-us-health-czar-boards,1,5907802.story
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23alaska.html?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=&st=nyt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/24citigroup.html?scp=1&sq=Citigroup%20has%20a%20plan%20to%20fatten%20salaries&st=cse

I'll write a few things this weekend. This was too good, true and important not to put up

The New York Times
April 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist

A Culture Soaked in Blood
By BOB HERBERT

Guns.

Philip Markoff, a medical student, supposedly carried his semiautomatic in a hollowed-out volume of “Gray’s Anatomy.” Police believe he used it in a hotel room in Boston last week to murder Julissa Brisman, a 26-year-old woman who had advertised her services as a masseuse on Craigslist.

In Palm Harbor, Fla., a 12-year-old boy named Jacob Larson came across a gun in the family home that, according to police, his parents had forgotten they had. Jacob shot himself in the head and is in a coma, police said. Authorities believe the shooting was accidental.

There is no way to overstate the horror of gun violence in America. Roughly 16,000 to 17,000 Americans are murdered every year, and more than 12,000 of them, on average, are shot to death. This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.

When the music producer Phil Spector decided, for whatever reason, to kill the actress, Lana Clarkson, all he had to do was reach for his gun — one of the 283 million privately owned firearms that are out there. When John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Malvo, went on a killing spree that took 10 lives in the Washington area, the absolute least of their worries was how to get a semiautomatic rifle that fit their deadly mission.

We’re confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows.

There were ceremonies marking the recent 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School, but very few people remember a mass murder just five months after Columbine, when a man with a semiautomatic handgun opened fire on congregants praying in a Baptist church in Fort Worth. Eight people died, including the gunman, who shot himself.

A little more than a year before the Columbine killings, two boys with high-powered rifles killed a teacher and four little girls at a school in Jonesboro, Ark. That’s not widely remembered either. When something is as pervasive as gun violence in the U.S., which is as common as baseball in the summertime, it’s very hard for individual cases to remain in the public mind.

Homicides are only a part of the story.

While more than 12,000 people are murdered with guns annually, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (using the latest available data) tells us that more than 30,000 people are killed over the course of one typical year by guns. That includes 17,000 who commit suicide, nearly 800 who are killed in accidental shootings and more than 300 killed by the police. (In many of the law enforcement shootings, the police officers are reacting to people armed with guns).

And then there are the people who are shot but don’t die. Nearly 70,000 fall into that category in a typical year, including 48,000 who are criminally attacked, 4,200 who survive a suicide attempt, more than 15,000 who are shot accidentally, and more than 1,000 — many with a gun in possession — who are shot by the police.

The medical cost of treating gunshot wounds in the U.S. is estimated to be well more than $2 billion annually. And the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, has noted that nonfatal gunshot wounds are the leading cause of uninsured hospital stays.

The toll on children and teenagers is particularly heartbreaking. According to the Brady Campaign, more than 3,000 kids are shot to death in a typical year. More than 1,900 are murdered, more than 800 commit suicide, about 170 are killed accidentally and 20 or so are killed by the police.

Another 17,000 are shot but survive.

I remember writing from Chicago two years ago about the nearly three dozen public school youngsters who were shot to death in a variety of circumstances around the city over the course of just one school year. Arne Duncan, who was then the chief of the Chicago schools and is now the U.S. secretary of education, said to me at the time: “That’s more than a kid every two weeks. Think about that.”

Actually, that’s our problem. We don’t really think about it. If the crime is horrible enough, we’ll go through the motions of public anguish but we never really do anything about it. Americans are as blasé as can be about this relentless slaughter that keeps the culture soaked in blood.

This blasé attitude, this willful refusal to acknowledge the scope of the horror, leaves the gun nuts free to press their crazy case for more and more guns in ever more hands. They’re committed to keeping the killing easy, and we should be committed for not stopping them.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company