View From The Left Coast

It’s about time somebody made some positive suggestions about how to clean up the mess we have with our government and electoral system. Since the problem is systemic, we’ll need some serious changes.

First, since the root of the endemic corruption is the overwhelming power of corporations and their control of elected officials, and since the courts have interpreted the constitution as seeing corporations as “persons� with the same rights as humans, we need a constitutional amendment to clarify, once and for all, that corporations are artificial constructs designed to make money for their owners. As collective entities they are not covered by the Bill of Rights.

Second, since our electoral system is broken, we need to rewrite the rules for elections: limit the time span to 3 months, as they do in Britain, eliminate ALL campaign spending, and limit campaigns to a series of debates, sponsored and formatted by the League of Women Voters in each jurisdiction. The current campaign system features nothing but lies and disinformation, and has become so efficient at fooling all the people most of the time that honest, intelligent candidates are frightened away. Public campaign financing? No way! Why would we tax ourselves to be lied to? We need to ensure we have verifiable voting, with printouts for each voter.

At the beginning of each campaign, each candidate will be expected to sign a code of ethics, which requires him or her to:

1. pledge to take no money from anyone for travel, goodies, or promises of future employment for themselves or their friends or family;

2. agree to held civilly liable to their constituents for their actions;

3. agree to forfeit any retirement benefits and the right to run for ANY office if they are convicted of a felony committed while in office;

4. Agree to index their total salaries and benefits to the average of those of their constituents, to be recalculated each year;

5. Limit the size of their staffs to a prearranged formula;

6. Agree to make themselves available to ALL their constituents at free meetings at regular intervals;

7. Agree to take NO fees for speaking engagements;

8. Agree to be present AT LEAST 90 percent of the time their elected body is in session;

9. Agree to run for and serve no more than three terms in any single office, and no more than four terms total in elected office;

It’s time we admit that our system of government is out of our control, and we need to get it back again. How many more Abramoffs do we need to get the picture?

Posted by Walt Frazer at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Among the many things I don’t understand is the issue of the “sanctity of life.� People who oppose abortion say that life is sacred, even potential life, and that man has no right to interfere with it. But most of these people also support the death penalty, often citing the line in Exodus “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall surely be put to death.� None would have any problem with having Osama Bin Laden killed.

Then there are those who oppose the death penalty, who say society has no right to kill people, regardless of the heinousness of the crimes they commit. They cite the earlier Exodus passage “Thou shalt not kill.� It makes it easier for them when a convicted killer shows remorse and seemingly mends his ways. Yet these same people say a woman has the right to abort her fetus, which is not a person until birth. And what of the woman who takes drugs during pregnancy so the child is damaged or born addicted?

Life is either sacred or it’s not: I would think those who oppose abortion should also oppose the death penalty (and there are a few who do). And it would make sense that someone who supported the right to abortion should also support the death penalty.

And then there is the question of which life forms deserve protection: Vegans oppose the taking of milk from cows or eating them, but have no problem with yanking a carrot from the ground and eating it. Are cows better than carrots? Both are living creatures.

And what of the issue of assisted suicide? The Bush administration has tried to stop the people of Oregon from allowing it, citing religious concerns. But if a person is facing death, pain and suffering, do they not have the right to end their lives? Or are they obligated to make the health care providers still richer?

And then there’s the big question: What IS life? If they can keep parts of somebody like Terri Schiavo “alive� for years, with only the barest hint of central nervous system activity, is she alive? Is that something the President or Congress should decide? Or maybe not THIS president and THIS congress.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The announcement recently that the internet search engine Google has decided to censor searches for its Chinese viewers wasn't so surprising or frightening: Despite their "Don't be evil" motto, they ARE a corporation, after all, and whatever it takes, lying, torture, mass layoffs, downsizing, profiting on their emplyees' deaths, etc, is all part of the game. When a reporter for the London Times pointed out to the head of Google's European branch that search engines like Wikipedia have refused to go into China because they refuse to kowtow to Beijing, he replied "Well, how much do THEY make?".

What is unsettling about the announcement is that they CAN do it. Google has set up their search engine not only to exclude sites the Chinese government doesn't approve of, but will instead aim the user to an official site, one that says how awful Falun Gong is, and that nothing happened at Tiananmen Square. Yahoo helped the Chinese government track down a dissident blogger, and Microsoft is making nice with the Chinese, too. . .all for profit.

So what's to stop them from doing it HERE? Yes, the New York Times sat on the NSA spying story for a year, and yes, the Cheney Administration has "bought" news stories, here and elsewhere, and yes, Fox News is the official organ of the administration (just as the Eureka Reporter will be once it has eliminated the pinko competition), but many of us had presumed the internet would be the last bastion of free speech. Think again.

My suggestion is that, when information like this leaks out, we learn who we can trust, and who we can't. Clearly the answer is for us to avoid dealing with snakes like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sony and the like. We can also, as consumers, put pressure on folks like Coop's board of directors to rethink their flipping off the membership by continuing to sell Coke products despite the clear statement the members wanted the boycott. They, like the Pennsylvania school board that mandated "intelligent design" for the biology classoom, can and should be replaced.

If they aren't using Diebold voting machines.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 01:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s money that matters
Now you know that it’s true
It’s money that matters
Whatever you do.
-Randy Newman

The recent revelations about Jack Abramoff and his friends "relations" with half of
America’s elected officials (including an unrepentant Hillary Clinton),
underscore a well-established fact of American life: money is the
mother’s milk of politics. ""Big Daddy" Jesse Unruh said it decades ago, but it got truer.

Whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, more and more political
figures are being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, like that
classic Abscam figure in the 70’s immortalized on video taking a bribe
and laughingly stuffing his pockets with cash. But when even the most
legal and “mainstream� methods of influence peddling, like Halliburton’s
hiring Dick Cheney to be its CEO with absolutely no experience working
for, much less running, a large corporation, are looked at carefully,
one begins to see that every $25,000 given to guys like Abramoff
for “face time� with the President is laid out for a reason: it gets
results. Cheney was the best investment Halliburton ever made.

Yes, Clinton did it too: $300,000 donated to Hillary's run for the Senate bought
an "indulgence": a twilight pardon for a convicted mafioso.

Some years ago, when I was a reporter covering a race for county
supervisor, donations to a local candidate started coming in from other
states. Someone called an Iowa donor and asked why she had contributed
to a man for whom she couldn’t even vote. She’d never heard of him, but
her son, an attorney for a developer looking to build a 1500 home
subdivision in the supervisor’s area, definitely had. Every secretary
and paralegal in that law office (in another county) also contributed
the maximum the law allowed, and that supervisor worked very hard to
make sure the project got special treatment.

Most people would like to think “persons� like Enron, Maxxam and
Halliburton give money to politicians because they believe in the
candidates’ philosophy, or buy TV ads to amuse the viewers. Americans
freely expressing their beliefs.

Uh-uh.

Every time these folks put out the money, they get what they pay for.
People like Ken Lay and Charles Hurwitz aren’t stupid: they invest again
and again because for every quid, there’s a quo. Lay commits the
grandest fraud in US history, everybody knows it, but four years later
is he in prison? Has he even been tried? No. And No. And who did he
spend millions getting “elected�? As Deep Throat said, follow the money.

There IS another way to do this. If we really wanted to, we could outlaw
“lobbyists� and “gifts� to elected officials, or, if we were thinking of
getting radical, limit campaigns, as they do in England. Hell, why not limit
campaigns to a series of debates, sponsored by the League of Women
Voters. No ads at all!

I think that's more what Madison and Hamilton had in mind.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 01:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recent stories about Ford and others laying off tens of thousands of American workers to try and save companies circling the drain are disturbing. A story in the paper last week said Kraft Foods, “the nation’s largest food manufacturer�, plans to lay off 8,000 workers and close as many as 20 plants, this on top of earlier cuts. At the same time, Kraft reported it’s fourth quarter earnings rose 23 percent, beating even Wall Street estimates.

This would appear to be yet another case of American jobs disappearing into the far east, where they can manufacture food for a fraction of what it costs to do it here. In the case of Kraft, they do it to make MORE money. It reminds me of the time I and a couple dozen others were NAFTAed out of a job here in Humboldt County (thank you, Bill Clinton) not long after 1,200 Pacific Lumber employees were Hurwitzed out of their jobs. In both cases, the companies putting people out of work were making plenty of money: they just wanted more.

The question is, how long can this go on?

An adjacent story in the paper said the savings rate among Americans is the lowest now since the great depression. “That means that people not only spent all of their after-tax income last year, but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing,� the story said.

The answer is: not much longer.

Regardless of your political beliefs, you can’t help but wonder what happens when we hit the wall that is coming closer and closer. When you look at what savings accounts pay in interest, it’s no wonder people are putting their money into real estate, or stocks. . .or even Hummers, big screen TV’s and lotto tickets. Even at 4%, you’re not keeping up with inflation in the real world. But this is obviously not something we can keep doing, especially with gas, energy and health care costs going up many times faster.

So, assuming somebody reads this, and can reply, what do YOU think? Should we sell everything and buy gold? Should we install huge gasoline tanks and invest big time now, and wait for the price to triple (until supplies dry up).

Or should we just bet the farm that Exxon, Kraft and Halliburton stock will rise indefinitely, with strictly Mexican, Chinese or Indian employees? So far, this appears to be the elephant in the living room everyone pretends isn’t there.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 01:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Have some Madeira, m’dear,
It’s really much nicer than beer.
I don’t care for sherry, one cannot drink stout,
And port is a wine I can well do without.
It’s simply a case of “chacun a son gout�…

--Michael Flanders

We all know Snow White, but now I’d like to introduce the Seven Dopes. No, not Stumpy, Lumpy, Frumpy and the rest, but real dopes, the ones that define our culture, all or some of whom all or some of us are addicted to. They are, in descending order of ubiquitousness:

Television
Movies (and Hollywood generally)
Sports (watched, not played)
Tobacco
Alcohol
Drugs, naughty and legal
All the other stuff.

Regarding the first, if I only had a nickel for every study that has shown TV more useful than trepanning for emptying the brain case, I’d have almost enough to buy a 40 foot wide screen HDTV with surround sound. One has only to consider the millions of dollars advertisers pay for one minute of Super Bowl time to realize how effective they KNOW it is for making people pay more than they can afford for something they don’t need. TV is the most powerful dope ever, Marx notwithstanding.

A close second is the wonderful world of Hollywood. The distance between, say, Archibald Leach and Cary Grant or Marion Michael Morrison and John Wayne is approximately the same distance between reality and Reality TV. But they named the airport after John Wayne. And people pay big bucks to be flown over Jennifer Lopez’s swimming pool, and cigarette companies still pay for “placement� in movies because the connection between fantasy and reality, between us and our dreams, are the products our idols consume.

What is called “sports� has nothing to do with exercise, and more to do with feeding Christians to the lions in days of old. How many calories does a fan burn watching a Super Bowl game? I lost interest in football when it became plain there was no connection between the team (in my case the Raiders) and the city (Oakland) where they played. Team owners like Charlie Finley and Al Davis didn’t inspire loyalty, and too much of my money was going to them. Several cents. The players, with their studied illiteracy and massive amounts of legal and illegal drug ingesting, don’t seem like idols to me.

With what has come out in the past decades about what smoking does to people, it amazes me that anyone with a shred of conscience can sell the things. If you have to take care of somebody who is dying of lung cancer, like I did my mother in 2002, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The people who produce them knew and know very well what they’re doing, condemning millions to a slow, ugly death, but they do it anyway. And they, and I as a former smoker for 27 years, know how addictive this dope is. Smug? Not hardly. I’d love a smoke right now.

An alcoholic friend of mine used to say, “Why be little and weak when with just one drink you can be big and strong?� A number of the brightest people I’ve known have become alcoholics to allow them to cope with a brain that has not enough to do and lots of time to do it in. Their excuses are bogus, though human. Once when I was a journalist interviewing a family whose star daughter was killed by a repeat offense drunk driver, I found it hard to take notes through my tears at their loss. Interviewing mothers of drunk driving victims, whose lives are blasted forever, I find it hard to sympathize with drunks who kill, and who are still alive and drinking. But it’s legal.

The illegal ones are illegal for a reason: they’re more profitable that way. While Humboldt’s cash crop may have “medicinal� value for a few, the real impetus for its legalization has nothing to do with healing (they could take it in pill form), and everything to do with the fact that marijuana makes you stupid and pliable. What better way to control a population? So much better than alcohol, which makes the user stupid and aggressive. The thing for a government to do is make it LOOK like you’re trying to irradicate drug use, while at the same time profiting from the sale. Just make sure the “War on Drugs� is never WON.

Finally, there’s all the Other Stuff: computers, cookies, coffee, newspapers, gardening, cooking, model trains. My brother, one of the smartest people I knew, was addicted to information. Whether it was technical journals, the news on TV, radio and newpapers, non-fiction books, whatever: every receptor had to be receiving data during every waking hour, or he would crash and burn. My drug of choice is books. I have a lot of them, some might even say more than is good for me. I wallow in them, they cost pennies an hour, they don’t give me hangovers or make me oblivious to injustice and crimes against humanity. And I can quit reading, or writing, any time I want. Really. I just don’t want to.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)