What Sort of Response?

Robert Reich posted:

"Cliff notes on a potentially disastrous decision. (1) Were Syrian civilians killed by chemical weapons? Yes. (2) How many? Estimates vary. (3) Was Assad responsible? Probably but not definitely. (4) Should the world respond? Yes. (5) What’s the best response? Economic sanctions and a freeze on Syrian assets. (6) What are the advantages of bombing Syria with missiles? (a) Highly visible response, (b) no American troops on the ground. (7) What are the disadvantages? (a) Syrian civilians will inevitably be killed, (b) it will fuel more anti-American, anti-Western sentiment, thereby increasing the ranks of terrorists in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, (c) our involvement will escalate if Assad or others use additional chemical weapons or engage in retribution against the us or Israel, (d) we have no exit strategy, (e) most of our allies aren’t with us, and we can’t be the world’s policeman everywhere, (f) it will distract us from critical problems at home, (g) the Syrian rebels are not our friends. (8) So why is Obama pursuing this so vigorously? (Your theory?)"

And that is what drives me a little crazy right now.  I agree with him.  "War weary" does not begin to describe where I am on this Syrian intervention.  We would likely be much better off finding other ways to corner the Syrian government without creating more terrorists in the process.  The current drum beat seems to stem mostly from those seeking even more military action.  We absolutely need the the international community with us... we cannot continue to be the sole player in dramas like this.  The Europeans could probably get behind asset seizure and it the Russians would find the price for that much higher than our bombing hte Syrians.  

There are just too many unknowns to figure out if bombs are going to get the world community where we want to be on this outlawed attack with sarin gas.

Who ARE the Bad Guys Today?

So, let me get this straight. We are going to bomb some targets in Syria that will not specifically aid the rebels, will take out the Syrian government capability to pursue further use of chemical weapons while not killing any Syrian civilians? Does that about cover it? We are the friends of the Syrian people (where have I heard that before) but not of the government. We can't support the rebels because they are our sworn enemy (Al Qaeda) and the whole conflict takes place right next door to our ally (Israel). Could this get any stranger?? There seems to be no move to attempt to try anyone in Syria for war crimes in any jurisdiction. While it is a wonderful thing to see that the President is moving away from the Imperial Presidency so favored by the Teapublican bunch the debate seems to be focused on the wrong questions.

Um, what consequence did we experience when we Napalmed whole villages during the Viet Nam conflict?  Did anyone come and bomb us for the serious misuse of one of the nastiest types of weapons?

Food v. Protest

A recent article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times hit the nail on the head.  Here is the piece that says what so few have seen so clearly:

Hypocrisy of Sound Bites.

Since the start of the Bush Recession conservatives have yammered away at "those" poor people taking up space without paying more into the system.  With what, one might ask?  Wages have been suppressed for the last 30 years.  When you cannot find work there is only the safety net (public and private) to keep you above water until things turn around.

While the economy is getting better the Teapublicans have voted consistently to eviscerate the safety net.  This will cost us all for years to come... even if we fix it soon.

Is it time to protest the acts of these haters, these short sighted ignoramuses?  Yes, I think it is time to push back on the streets and the ballot box.  Without that these takers, the 1%, will continue to load their wagons with our goods and then horde as much as they can in off shore accounts.

Darrell Issa is an Idiot

Representative Darrell Issa has been leaking selected partial quotes from his oversight committee's testimony regarding the so-called IRS scandal.  Other members of the committee have gotten tired of the misdirection and have put the testimony in its entirety on-line.

So, here it is:

Part I

Part II

Okay, now your job is to decide how messed up Mr. Issa is.  Ah, he is a gasbag_blowviator_teabagger you say??  Yes, he is.

Wait, Which Scandal??

"How them Mets??", as a friend says when things just too weird to be believed.  That's bit of where I find myself these days.

I mean, everywhere I look the Teapublicans are trying desperately to gin up some sort of scandal to hit Democrats (and particularly the President) over the head with.  For the most part we are left with Representative Issa pounding the table and foaming at the mouth without any substance to his rants.  He won't release testimony because it does not support his position that the President or Democrats have done something wrong.  For the most his oversight committee is a sham at this point.

But, all this nonsense is really a distraction from the real problems that need fixing.  The list is very long at this point.  High on the issues is the need to unwind thirty years of bad economic theory.  "Trickle down" is a mythological bit of nonsense that is destroying the underpinnings of the country.  We need taxes and we need government.  What has made government problematic is the mega trend to privatize every possible aspect of the job it should be doing.  For this we pay enormous sums more than if government hired people to do the actual jobs that corporations are now contracted to do.  Trickle down has created this connection to the oligarchy and continues to take us down a road of worse and worse government capability.  Even privatizing education will have very long lasting effects.  Charter schools and the additional cost such a for profit system creates is ruining education.  It is not the teacher's being unionized that is the problem.  The unions are actually one of the best things about the public education system.  Voucherizing education leads to fewer controls of what education should be about.  It takes away local control for our systems to work well.  No-child-left-behind has meant the dumbing down of the educational system.  This is by no means the worst of what has happened to us.

One of the large things gone wrong has been the privatizing of our National Security.  We now don't have a government entity actually doing hte work of intelligence gathering... we have a variety of contractors, private corporations, collecting and digging around in our data.  The NSA is just front for a scads of companies sucking our internet, phone and other data dry to suss out the bad guys.  Then we get this idiot, Edward Snowden, acting as if we do not have a representative form of government and saying he released information to help let the people decide what was right or wrong about the information being gathered.  He will likely go to jail for a very long time but the real story is that the company he worked for, Booz, Allen, Hamilton (BAH for an appropriate short handle) should be fired along with all the other contractors doing the job that government should be doing inside.

The press has been snowed by the focus on Snowden but has yet to dig into the real problem.

Working for a Living

When I was an employer and not really having time to think about such things I offered a package of work for pay that seemed reasonable at the time.  There were not positions that paid minimum wage because it was not that sort of business.  We consistently gave raises yearly even in the years we were not doing as well as other years.  No, I was not probably as good an employer as I could have been given my much broader understanding of that now, but we held our own at the time.

Now that I do have time to ponder the situation I read with interest any article that broadens my understanding.  My spouse worked for the welfare department in her state and has explained to me that many she interviewed over the years were told when they went to work for WalMart that they should apply immediately for food stamps, medical assistance and any other help available at the time.  I was flummoxed by this bit of information... but the continued reading has proven this to be true.  What sort of business model preys on its customers in this way?  With the owners of WalMart very firmly part of the 1% I got a clear view of what greed really looks like.

Walmart-Taxpayers-House-Report

The economic theory at work here is not, "we're in this together..." but, rather, "Give me all you got, I got mine...".  It is the bully's way of walking the path.  It is corporate irresponsibility at its greatest.  Years ago I hired a painter to spruce up the house.  He was struggling a bit at the time and decided to take a job outside his field to tide him over in a down economy.  He ended up at WalMart for a time and told me the stories of their employee abuse.  I was stunned then by the system in place to suppress the workers who made the company run.

So, here come the questions.  What is a fair wage for the worker bees?  Why are unions so vilified and suppressed today?  What is a reasonable minimum wage and why?  Who is writing the laws that favor the abusive practices?  What is to be done to correct the abusive power of corporations AND can it be relatively painless? 

I have read several opinions about what the minimum wage should be.  The easiest of these puts the minimum at around $14.75 and hour on the logic that with steady but small steps would have put it there since its last adjustments.  I have noted that Congress rarely takes up this question and generally acts long after the need has become extremely dire.  That is, or seems to be, the model for this rate.  I have also read that if the MW had been upped all along the way since the 1960's (even though it dates from 1938) the current value would be in the neighborhood of $21 and change.  What does that mean?

The minimum wage as a percentage of the poverty level.

(From study by Oregon State University)

I have to ask why is the minimum wage for a full time worker LESS THAN THE POVERTY LEVEL?

If one is working full time to get to somewhere in the area of 60% of the poverty level there would seem to be something seriously broken in the equation.  This means there is no healthcare in the formula and that we have reached a level of indentured servitude not seen for centuries.  This is not freedom.  This is not acceptable either.  The politicians have failed us in providing for the general welfare.  They have crimped economic expansion and eventually it will lead to a deep collapse of the economy.

As an aside here is the history of the Federal Minimum Wage:

Minimum Wage Chart

If you are in the situation of providing for your family at these levels you are incapable of making a meaningful stand against a specific employer.  The threat of job loss is too great.  Even if you are not truly making a living you are fearful of losing what little you do have.  Given that the employee handbook for so many organizations admonishes against talking about your wages with other employees there is every reason to suppose that you are powerless as an employee.  Given too that appointments to the Labor Relations Board have been stalled in Congress for some time the mechanism for dealing fairly with employee complaints has been hamstrung.  There are so many reasons the scales have been more than just tipped against the worker at this point that general unrest and frustration is begin to form the early cracks in the system.

Which means for me... more on this later.

To Ponder the Second Amendment

While the news has shifted, yet again, to other things for the moment I have revisited the Second Amendment and gun violence thought.  Understand that one of my past times is to comment on articles on various news sources but particularly on Huffington Post.  See earlier posts as to why I like that format but here is the point... I enjoy hunting the Trolls and commenting to correct the misinformation they put out there.

A lot of that stuff is juvenile and thereby easily dealt with but others are more thoughtful and it takes deep pondering to chat with them on a realistic basis.  That's why it's such a fun endeavor.  Some of the time it sinks to name calling after one exchange but often enough you have to look further to see what the real question is.  That's the set up for this entry.

Since long before the Sandy Hook tragedy my inclination has been to find a way to understand the path to controlling gun violence in incremental steps.  That means that I get a lot of criticisms saying something like,"...but that would not have prevented Sandy Hook."  Well, that is true enough but irrelevant.

It took a long time to SEE the Second Amendment in a different way simply because the arguments are old... very old at this point.  Some of the misdirection is aimed at obscuring real issues.  So here is the direction I have gone.

Almost every Troll sticks to the idea the 2nd Amendment says that their right to own guns is based on, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."  This is the version that was actually ratified by the states at the time.  There are a few that post differing versions of that but they can be ignored.  What these folks focus on is that the right may not be infringed.  Generally they gloss over the, "...well regulated militia..." part of this so they shout that the right cannot be infringed and it is the right that they have.  The part that says you can KEEP weapons is pretty clear as well, but you need to know what the essential right is before you can begin to bring that into focus.

It took many exchanges to bring this into focus but here it is.  According to this amendment you have the right to bear arms.  Put yourself in the place of the founding fathers and look closely.  It does not even give you the right to OWN a gun (just to keep them).  Okay, back up the bus a bit and look again.  At the time the words were written the concern was that a standing army was a danger to the Republic.  We have all seen in some part of the world the so-called Banana Republics facing their military taking over the government.  We did not want a standing military.  Got that.

Part of an armory at the time of the Revolutionary war.

 

The right to bear arms means that, when called upon, you have the Right to fight against foreign powers.  To maintain that right the amendment further implies that you must be part of that militia!  That you will be part of drills on a regular basis.  That you will be keeping the arms provided for that defense in the armory of the State or the Municipality or some such.  I do not even want to attempt the strange twist in logic that some have made that they have the right to bear arms against their government... in other ways that is called treason.

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Here are some exchanges that have brought this change in view into focus.  More on this later.

 You wrote:
Look, I don't think anyone... repeat, ANYONE... is trying to TAKE AWAY your guns. There is not an infinite right to bear arms at the expense of all other rights, however. Additionally, there ARE already limits on military style weapons. And, no, every citizen is only potentially a member of a WELL REGULATED militia. The 2nd amendment does imply that your right to bear arms is strong but not infinite. It does not even imply that you have a right to OWN a gun; only to have them available in the event there is a military NEED. Other than that you are not actually reading the amendment.

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  You wrote:
The gun folks are not thinking in terms of what is best for the country (once again). Okay, so be it. Waste your time and money on stupid. The restrictions on guns seems a correct one given the off the chain level of gun violence
in the country. I feel safer in some places because there is not some imagined infinite right to carry military weapons around.

But if you really want to exercise your first amendment right to petition the government (first amendment) to attempt to restrict the freedoms of the rest of us to be free from the worry the unrestricted guns create please waste as much money as possible. The lawyers will love you and the rest of us will feel better that you are off the streets and occupied. You cannot hide stupid.

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You wrote:
Look, I don't think anyone... repeat, ANYONE... is trying to TAKE AWAY your guns. There is not an infinite right to bear arms at the expense of all other rights, however. Additionally, there ARE already limits on military style weapons. And, no, every citizen is only potentially a member of a WELL REGULATED militia. The 2nd amendment does simply that your right to bear arms is strong but not infinite. It does not even imply that you have a right to OWN a gun only to have them available in the event there is a military NEED. Other than that you are not actually reading the amendment.

 joeThibo:
Well let's clarify. There is an unconstitutional limit on military weapons, but as you can see if you actually read the second amendment there is no limit applied to military weapons supplied in the amendment. So where does the government get the right to limit the type of arms the people can bear. That's where you have a problem like a lot of other people, they think they can just legislate the rights of the people in the second amendment. That also is not in the second amendment if the founders wanted the government to legislate to regulate the right to bear arms they would have provided that provision.
Since they didn't nobody can infer that their intention was to have the government any government regulate the rights in the second amendment. Since when has the government well regulated anything. They can't regulate a balance budget they can't regulate Banks they can't regulate the mortgage industry. Heck this administration can't even regulate the State
department without getting people murdered. So please the public is better at self regulating than the government. 

The constitution doesn't state the government is the regulator and since they can't regulate anything well the founders had it right to not supply the government should be the regulator of the second amendment.

 You wrote:
Given your failure to connect the dots, this will likely fall on deaf ears.  You cannot own a tank, rocket launcher or machine gun.  It is not a question of Constitutionality that you are prohibited from owning certain weapons at present.  Again, the 2nd amendment SAYS, literally, that you have the right to bear arms... it gives you no particular right (read it again) to OWN any gun.  It is more efficient that you are allowed to own a gun but you have misled yourself in the understanding that leaps from a "right to bear" somehow  means you have a right own.  It does not say that.  Get over it. 

Again, no one is looking to take your gun away but you need to understand that, technically, it is just a privilege not a right.

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 You wrote:
These days the militia IS the National Guard. Pretty straightforward, really.

 agenda21 wrote:
No it not it is called the National Guard, they purposely did not name it the United States Militia. Go look up the debate when the Nation Guard was started.
The Framers and Founder were very adamant about having any standing army in times of peace. The plan was to disband the Army during times of peace. An Army sitting around inside your country during times of peace is a very bad risk to have around.

 You wrote:
It appears you did not understand what you may have read.  The founders did not want a standing army, that part is true.  AND, the NG is not a standing army.  It is the present day version of the militia... organized by state.  Their weapons are kept in armories just as they were at the time of the founding of the country.  A gun, a musket, at that time was a years worth of earnings.  The state bought the weapon and stored it in the armory.  You might actually do a bit more reading before giving out misinformation.

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