February 2010

Recent Articles

• Lightening the load

  February 16, 2010 in General

  I’m in the process of getting my house ready for sale. The transition from my last house to this one was smaller to larger so I didn’t have any motivation to glean through 12 years of accumulated “stuff”. I just packed most of it into boxes and let the movers have at it. It’s now 8 years later and we expect to move into a smaller living space. Thus my goal is to de-clutter and dispose of all the crap, either unusable or otherwise, and lighten the load in my life. So far I’ve been pretty successful.

  Part of the reason I just kept throwing all my old tech into a box was that most of it still worked. I just upgraded and didn’t want to fill up the landfill with more hazardous waste. Now that my county has a tech recycling process, that excuse just won’t fly. So out it goes. What I can’t sell will be donated. What can’t be donated will be recycled and what can’t be recycled will just be dumped.

  And as I look around at the now (mostly) empty rooms I feel like a tremendous load has been lifted from my life. Ahhhhhh!

• Open Highways: Why Net Neutrality is important

  December 8, 2009 in Featured

  Imagine they take the interstate highway system and sell it off to private corporations because “it will bring the efficiencies of the free market system” to keep them repaired and functioning. All such roads would become toll roads and the corporations would not only maximize the revenues extracted but might eventually control what kind of vehicles would be allowed to traverse them. Not only that, they could restrict, say, truck traffic to their own fleets and start to control commerce. Sounds like crazy talk, but that’s what “privatizing” the Internet is all about and that is the threat to our open and free democracy. Today these corporations have their hooks in the “people’s representatives” through their massive political contributions and for the last 40 years or so we’ve seen the erosion of oversight and passage of “reform” legislation that does the opposite and benefits, not the American people, but the private interests of their political donors.

  If the media corporations shut down an open internet they will want to control what your can say and will start to exclude people who are a political liability to them. Historically, the people who own the printing presses got to control the content printed from them. The Internet needs to be free and open so our “printing press”, that of a free people is filtered by no one. An open Internet allows free expression, association and commerce. When it becomes the domain of private interests you can be assured that all that will disappear.

• Opposition to current HCR bill largely from the left

  December 8, 2009 in Featured

  FiveThirtyEight

  I’ll just quote at length, but go read the whole thing.

  

  Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn’t go far enough?

  It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan — or about 12 of the overall sample — did so from the left; they thought the plan didn’t go far enough

  Here’s the ugly part…

  With that said, I also think the White House’s positioning on this the public option has been questionable. There’s a middle ground between a world in which the White House would have insisted that the inclusion of a public option was a non-negotiable part of health care reform, and their actual positioning, which has been transparently indifferent toward it. In other words, run the bluff — and make the left happy — and then if you have to give up on the bluff at some point to get a bill passed, do some play-acting and look really unhappy about it. Give a big speech, say your hand was forced by the necessity to get such an important bill passed and your desire to reach common ground, blah, blah, blah. Some on the left, certainly, would look upon you cynically if you did this — but probably fewer than if you hadn’t seemed to care about the public option in the first place (i.e. what has happened in the the status quo). Meanwhile, you might have picked up a few points with independents for your apparent willingness to compromise.

  So there you…(more)

• “Unrestrained Consumption” is destructive to a democratic society.

  December 6, 2009 in Featured

  The problem is not that spending on consumer goods is in itself destructive but that unrestrained consumption that puts people into a position of a excessive debt without an adequate income that is to us as individuals and as a democratic society. “Spend, spend, spend” has replaced “Jobs, jobs, jobs” in the political construction and the corollary to the “Go out and buy” side is “Debt, debt, debt”. A good job provides a positive income and stability. Putting people into excessive debt does the opposite. Of course, the corporations who make vast amounts of money from Borrow Money and Consume don’t want to change this. They don’t want checks and balances on their ability to operate freely, and they have used their wealth to protect the system even while in the long term it will fail and wreck the economy, the society and the people therein.

  This is not a new concept and many very smart observers have made this point time and time again since the Depression of the 1930′s. The regulatory controls on our financial system, put in place under the New Deal, have been systematically eroded, until today, the party of FDR has become fully capable of grasping that “third rail of politics”, the Social Security System, begin to implement reforms. The kind of reforms that a political Establishment, under the thrall of big money interests use to destroy the objects of such reform.

  Unfortunately, for us all, this is going to have to play itself out. The evidence of the upcoming tragedy was there in the 20′s with the recession in the farm community in late 1924 and early 1925. The new technology of the internal combustion engine brought efficiencies to crop production that increased yields without increasing adequate consumption. Many family farms failed and the…(more)