Category Archives: Letters to the Editor

Double Think

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To the Editor:
    Considering the ease and frequency with which the Romney/Ryan ticket is able to tell bald-faced lies, one has to wonder at their level of self-awareness that they are openly lying.  With Paul Ryan, there is a sense that he tends to be a compulsive liar and that his level of Double-Think, his ability to hold equally in mind totally opposing ideas, is fairly impenetrable.  On the other hand, Mitt Romney seems fully aware of his lies and that he is committed to say whatever he has to in order to achieve his aims, essentially that his ends justify his means, not a bad way to become a multi-millionaire.  I suppose one could puzzle a bit over which form of lying is worse.  Double-Think runs strong through today’s American psyche, but, in Romney’s case, it should be pointed out that one’s means generally become one’s ends.
RP

Dirty Harry

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To the Editor:
    The story has it that Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer and everyone’s favorite Tarzan portrayer, would frequently rock the halls of the nursing home he spent his last years in with his signature Tarzan yell (well echoed for another generation by comedienne Carol Burnett).  Clint Eastwood’s later years, likewise, should equally be a real hoot, although he definitely should not be allowed to have firearms.
RP

Confusion Rules

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To the Editor:
    How can it be that every deficit-complaining, Romney/Ryan, Tea Party supporter fails to see that every unpaid-for, deficit-creating policy, be it Medicare Part B, the Bush tax cuts, the “off-budget” wars, and banking deregulation and bailouts, were Republican initiatives?  And how can they, after the still rumbling international bank debacle, want more deregulation and less government without seeing that it is corporations and the financial industries that are writing federal legislation and the tax codes, that these are the forces behind “the government” they so dislike and distrust?  Do they not see that all the millions pouring into Conservative candidates are there in the hope of preserving the favorable status of the tax structure for the very wealthy and for a Supreme Court that consistently rules in the favor of wealth and corporate power over the rights and well-being of the public and the common man?
 – RP

Interconnectability

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To the Editor:
    As if there weren’t enough growing anxiety over the prospect of a Romney presidency and Conservative economics on steroids, the “Arm the People” crowd wants our public (and private) places filled with loaded guns “to prevent gun violence”.  So much for finding escape and sanctuary in bars and darkened theaters.  Best to stay home and watch retro, campy, BAM!  POW!  SOCK EM IN THE JAW! Adam West as Batman reruns.
    Sorry for the sarcasm in response to tragedy but it drives me crazy that, in the same way that some continue to deny our role in global warming, as a society we continue to ignore the desensitization implicit in a consumer economy that regards human lives as but another commodity to be used and exploited.  How much difference is there in the celebration of those cheering the bomb blasts of “Shock and Awe” at the beginning of the Iraq war and the elation a deranged mind feels in opening fire in a crowded theater?  Is there more tragedy in Aurora than in the “collateral damage” of a wedding party being mistaken for a terrorist meeting in Afghanistan?  Who among us has a psyche not in some way damaged and scarred?
    A hard truth is that we have lost sense of the fragility and interconnectedness and responsibility of being alive and part of a world that is in itself a living organism.  The hard question is:  will we recover these in time to save us from ourselves?
RP

Original Intent

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To the Editor:
         Reduced to their basic elements, politics is concerned with the creation and distribution of power within a society, while economics delineates the creation and distribution of its wealth.  Democracy and capitalism are not automatically, or even necessarily, synonymous.  Socialist democracies exist, as do capitalist autocracies.  At the time of the writing of the U.S. Constitution, the idea of a democracy, of a government by the people of a nation rather than by an aristocratic elite, was an untried and unproven proposal.  If there was genius in the creation of this ground-breaking document, it was that, through argument and discussion and compromise, the Founding Fathers came upon an extensive system of checks and balances designed to prevent the abuse of power by any one sector of the many voices that make up the wide spectrum of interests that is “We the People”.  This balancing of powers is crucial to the survival of democracy.  No form of government will always be correct in its actions and America’s democracy is no exception, but it has had the capability and flexibility to correct  its mistakes along the way.
           Of equal importance to the maintenance of a democracy is a balance of wealth. This does not mean an equality of wealth, but rather a balanced distribution.  In human nature there will always be some who pursue wealth relentlessly while others may care little about its accumulation.  However, since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, wealth has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands to the point that today we have 400 billionaires with more wealth than that held by nearly the entire rest of the population.  While some may wish to say this outcome is simply a result of “Social Darwinism”, that this is a natural process in capitalism, it has actually come to fruition through the halls of government, through a legislated tax structure that favors disproportionately the interests of the wealthy over those of the common citizen.  The influence of money in politics acts as both the carrot and the stick in driving the legislative process.
           Further, the five conservative Justices on the Supreme Court have consistently ruled that the interests of corporations supercede those of the individual and, in the Citizens United decision, have legitimatized money as integral to the right of free speech first granted in the Magna Carta in 1215.  In today’s world of commercial advertising on radio and television, a world the Founders, even in their wildest dreams, could never have imagined, money in political campaigning has immense power.  In these rulings, five men have radically tipped the scales of government in favor of the influence of wealth in the political system.  In the coming presidential election it is projected that the combined campaigns alone may spend nearly a billion dollars and unprecedented amounts are pouring into Congressional races as well.  To what end are the super rich funneling millions into Republican campaigns if not for the continuation of a favorable tax code and a lasting bias in the Supreme Court.
           How the Conservative Justices find “original intent” in any of this requires a leap of logic that is hard enough to fathom without recalling that this was the same group that decided that an accurate accounting of the votes in Florida was inconvenient and unnecessary and installed George Bush as President over Al Gore in 2000 and realizing just how much power the Court  has assumed for itself over the years.  It is impossible to imagine the writers of the Constitution not being shocked at the shambles their checks and balances are in today and that their dream of democracy is being supplanted by a wealthy ruling class.
RP

Kill Your TV

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To the Editor:
   As much as the Republican Party likes to be in control of government, it can’t be said that  they ever govern well.  The Bush Administration will be noted in history as having been massively incompetent.  Its eight years of dismal governmental diligence resulted in 911, the Enron fiasco, two long and expensive wars, the financial collapse of 2007, and a massive federal deficit
    Ronald Reagan came across as everyone’s, feel-good-about-America uncle, but his eight years were marked by indictments of Cabinet officials, the Silverado Savings and Loan scandal, defense budget boondoggles, and an unprecedented, non-wartime, federal deficit.  His military forays were invasions of Grenada and Panama, but when the going got rough in Beirut, he immediately bailed out.
    And before Bush and Reagan, there was Richard NIxon.  Enough said about Republican governance.
    What the Republican Party does do extremely well, probably from its long association with business, is market itself.  And advertising does work on the American public.  Companies spend millions on market research, focus groups, and carefully crafted ads to keep their products on constant display in people’s minds.  With the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision promoting unlimited campaign spending, we can be certain that in the next five months we will be inundated with a virtual monsoon of political advertising, most of which will be either inflammatory, misleading, or downright prevarication. The best political decision Americans can make right now is to simply unplug the television, find a good book or two, read up on media consolidation (that’s where the money is going), and talk to friends and neighbors.  It’s time to return to reality.
RP

The Dust Bins of History

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To the Editor:
    For those fortunate enough to have grown up in the Golden Age of Education when “camping out” for several years at a university was economically viable and a person could enjoy a long access to its portals of thought and learning while delaying one’s entry into “the real world”, the economics of today’s higher education is frankly mind-boggling.  And the societal changes are enormous.
    While a college degree is still regarded as being socially preferable, public monetary support for education has fallen precipitously and the subsequent personal debt incurred in acquiring that sheepskin has, along with the rise of a ravenous service economy and the death of the Middle Class, has greatly reduced both its accessibility and its cost/benefit ratio.  If one is not pursuing a specialized (and generally narrow) degree with the prospects of a high income, the overall monetary value of higher education is clearly on the decline.
    Further, with the ubiquitous distractions of pop culture and the commercial idiocy that dominates television and the instantaneous access to “information” offered by the Internet and so-called “Smart” Phones, it seems possible that the pursuit of knowledge, reasoning, and a well-rounded education (and their proponents) all seem headed to the dust bins of history.
RP

Capitalism Is Not A System of Government

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To the Editor:
    Given the nature of human nature, history shows that the so-called “freedom” of unregulated, free-market capitalism simply does not work.  Further, “capitalism” is merely an economic system that allows wealth to be made from wealth.  It is not a system of government and is not, by its nature, automatically conducive to democracy and, in fact, seems increasingly a corrupting influence on our representative democracy. The joke about the Golden Rule, that those with the gold make the rules, demonstrates just how far from being democratically governed we are today in America.
    Important also to note here is that we are not dealing with absolutes.  Neither capitalism nor democracy is, of its own, intrinsically good or bad.  What seems lacking is a morality of discipline and self-government with a watchful eye toward a common good.  Edith Hamilton’s claim that Athenian Greece invented the freedom of self-government, rose to glory, then fell by succumbing to the lure of unlimited freedom and power should stand as a warning to all Americans that conscience is still an integral part of any social contract.
RP

Media Should Hold Government Accountable

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To the Editor:
    The devil is in the details.  Insider trading for elected officials and their staffs, legislation written by lobbyists, campaign funding offered and solicited, kickbacks, perks, travel junkets, and who knows what other  shenanigans, all being conducted behind the scenes, accepted as normal behavior, and overlooked by mainstream media outlets; and yet it is precisely the details that are important and the devils in them need to be brought into the light.  Government can be seen as the problem, but it needs to be made clear the players and impetus for the legislative actions that helped precipitate the financial collapse,  Clearly Congress cannot be trusted to police itself.  It is up to the media, that fourth estate of government, to do the deed.
RP

Church and State

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To the Editor:
    The current pressure on the Catholic Church to comply with federal law is not unprecedented.  In 1895, in order to attain statehood, the Territory of Utah abandoned the Mormon Church’s sanction of polygamy, although it is still practiced by break-away sects.  If  the Catholic ban on insurance coverage for contraception falls under the umbrella of religious freedom, shouldn’t also Mormon polygamy, Evangelical refusal of inoculation against communicable diseases or medical care for sick children, or, for that matter, Islamic Sharia Law?  This is not an intrusion into religious belief.  Catholic women may act as they see fit, but insurance policy must meet federal standards.
RP