Duck its the Duckman

Duck on Duck Dynasty:  So now we have even more "ammunition" for a conservative rant.  Comments are piling up.  Fox News troops out even more young women with short skirts to blather about freedom of speech.  Millions "like" facebook rants that attack A&E for suspending a poor Christian man who simply spoke his moral mind.

First of all, even conservatives I think recognize that if any person embarrasses his place of employment with controversial comments, there can be consequences.  Many contracts include such language.  A company that deals in appeallng to a diverse population can ill afford one of  its employees making statements that alienate its base of customers (or viewers as this case demonstrates).

But, according to Sarah Palin and other conservative "lions" this is a case of free speech.  Nonsense, it is nothing of the sort.  The Duck Dynasty "star" gave an interview in a magazine, that he no doubt was compensated for, and made controversial remarks.  That is right, he no doubt was PAID for his interview.  That's the way it works for the famous, they get paid.  And, he no doubt violated his contract with A&E by making controversial comments that reflected negatively on the company.

But, oh, we all scream, his freedom of speech has been violated.  No it hasn't.

Look, we all have freedom of speech.  The ACLU defends KKK members, Nazis and little old ladies from Pasadina.  The idea is in a public forum, without constraints due to obligations to employers, schools, etc., people can say what they want, as long as it doesn't slander or threaten the public safety.   And  the Duck man did just that, predictably forgetting that he was breaking the rules of his employer.

And the predictable happened, he was reprimanded.

There is no loss of Civil Rights here.  Palin and Fox as usual are USING you, stirring up your anger, for political effect.

And of course, they attack the progressives for this whole thing.  Liberals are accused of tolerating things except for things they don't agree with.

Huh, isn't that what conservative pundits like Palin are doing right now?  They are tolerating the Duck Man, but blasting liberals, who had nothing to do with reprimanding the Duck spokesman.  How do conservatives know that liberals with A&E punished the Duck Man.  A&E has not said it, but it is a sure bet, since the Duck Man is losing income if he is suspended, because his  contract was abrogated by his interview to the magazine.

So, he has the right to stand on a street corner, and say all he wants. He also is responsible for his comments if those comments damage his employer.  His employer is punishing him not the government.  I want to punish him because his comments were whoop ass stupid.  And I can, as long as I stay within the law.

For years, during the Civil Rights struggle, we heard segregationists speak about how separate but equal was fair, how people of color were unequal, and laws were passed to buttress these racist positions.  And that is what got them, because when racism became institutional racism, it ran eventually into the Bill of Rights, and was declared unconstitutional.

Read up on Civil Rights, and the First Amendment.  Visit your local ACLU Chapter, and get materials on the legal constrants on freedom of speech (they do exist).

And, please take a few deep breaths, stop your anger, you are getting worked!!!!!!

Panic and Play into their Hands

The American people can are amazing sometimes.  They are so prone to panic.  They also are fickle.

The Affordable Care Act, is violently opposed by Republicans.  The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the Act, including provisions that are already saving lives (coverage of children until 26 and eliminating pre-existing conditions from coverage).

I wonder if they ultimately are successful and repeal the act, what they will do about the millions who will lose insurance and health care?  

The GOP has made it their "wedge issue" that succeeded in the 2010 rise of the Tea Party that won them the House.  Now, they are using the same method to try to win the Senate and stave off Democrats attempts to win control of the House in 2014.  

It is all political and has little to do with the ACA.

Americans are fickle.  A recent poll showed distrust of the ACA, and a tendency to blame the Act on risies in premiums (which is not proven by the way).

Now, we are coming out of a recession.  Wall Street is setting records.  Housing starts are booming.  And unemployment is dropping.  In short, we are in a full fledged economic recovery.  

Insurance rates for everything, not just health insurance, and going up like they always do when people buy more.   

And who does the GOP blame, the ACA.  The facts are this is nonsense, the ACA has little to do with it.  

The ACA does regulate health insurance for the first time in our history.  For decades, health insurance companies ran like a banana republic, anything goes.  Policies had exclusions in small print, there were millions of junk policies, that charged low premiums, with no hospitalization, or huge co-pays and deductables (basically a person was duped by low cost and no value).

Now, as the ACA stops these practices, what do you think insurance companies will do, cooperate?  

Of course not, they scream, they contribute to the GOP lie machine, and they conspire to raise rates, cancel policies for sometimes no reason, in an attempt to overturn the regulations they hate.

America do you believe that fair  insurance competition existed prior to the ACA?  Do you remember the 30% raises in rates, yearly, BEFORE the ACA?  Have any of you been screwed by an insurance company, buying a policy and getting nailed by the small print?  

Do not be fooled.  Give the ACA five years at least to work, it took seven for a very similar law in Massachusetts to take effect.

You are getting worked by masters of deception.  Quit playing into their greedy hands.

Finally remember this fact:  the ACA mandates that 80% of your premium dollar has to go to care, not to greedy insurance profits.  That is way more than before, but allows a reasonable profit, because insurance companies will gain millions more customers under the ACA.  But that is not enough for these guys, they want it all.  

Do not trust them.   

Mythmaking Danger

There is great danger in governing from mythology.  One of the major tenants of fascism is mythology used by the fascist party, through propaganda, to affect political systems.

Nazi Germany is the most obvious example, but others are relevant..  Mussolini's Italy is a perfect example.

Post WWI Italy was in ruins.  Italy had been on the Allies side in WWI, and suffered huge losses. Mussolini emerged as a savior, of what was a new Republic.  Italy had just attained nationhood before WWI.
Mussolini used mythology of a return to Rome, some anti-smites, his Catholic upbringing, and outright lies to take over the Italian government.  He did make the trains run on time, and was able to mitigate some of the effects of the depression that began for Europe in the 1920s.

The mythology of a return to Roman glory was his strongest motivator.  He used the roads leading to the Coliseum as his common parade route, dressing his followers as Roman Legionaries; etc.  A return to Roman Glory was the myth.  Dictatorship was the goal.  And it worked.  Hitler copied the fascist strategy.
We see this same strategy  in America unfortunately today.  The radical right, who now own the Republican Party, use the Tea Party as a mythology to motivate fascist organization.

A cursory read of history, invalidates the Tea Party myth.  The fact are that a group of colonists, upset in what they perceived was an unfair tax on tea, dressed up as Indians, boarded a couple tea carrying ships, and threw a few barrels into the ocean.  The were not backed by the local population, who mostly did not support the protests against tea prices.  The Boston Tea party was a small event.

The Boston Massacre was different.  British regulars opened fire on civilians, and sparked the revolution.  The Tea Party did not spark the revolution.  Taxes were not the major cause of the American Revolution; it was the drive for colonial independence, the left-overs of the French/Indian War and the unbelievable incompetence of King George.

But the Tea Parties, have adopted the myth of the Boston Tea Demonstration, since it dovetails with their small government, cut taxes (especially when those taxes help poor people of color).  The poor are the scapegoats, especially African American poor, of a mythology that calls for a roll back of Civil Rights of both women and minorities.
And empirical evidence is the first victim in this myth making.   For example, conservatives in California claim that the democratic majority has caused a flight of people from California to Texas (a low tax, conservative stronghold).  Empirical evidence does not support this view.  In fact, immigration only went significantly down during the governorship of Pete Wilson, a tax cutting Republican,  who helped pass an anti-immigration bill that the Republicans are still trying to live down.

High taxes have nothing to do with immigration or emigration; climate (the Dust Bowl, famines and drought) is the true stimulus of large scale movement of people.

But the myth continues unabated.

Charles K in his latest diatribe against the President claims that the current administration has spent the most in history,a lie, that the President has expanded government, another lie.

All of these lies, buttress what is a fascist myth machine.  And our very freedom is its victim.

Can't They Grow Up?

Ok, who out there believes in the filibuster?  Really, doesn't anyone remember Jimmie Stewart, courageously filibustering against the evil special interests, to the point where the enemy finally broke and tried to kill himself?

But that was a "good filibuster", the minority stalling the majority interest for good.

Most of the filibuster history has not been so placid.  For decades, literally decades, the south blocked any desegregation law in the United States Senate.

In those days, the Dixiecrats were part of the Democratic Party, and hamstrung the liberal wing from doing anything, I mean anything, to lessen what was essential apartheid in the United States.

It took the assassination of a President to finally get the Democratic Party to push through a Civil Rights Bill. 

The direct effect of this, was that the Dixiecrats in mass, moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

This was a seismic shift.  Lyndon Johnson, as he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, said famously, "We will not win another Presidential election in a generation". 

He was almost right.  When he essentially resigned the Presidency, Richard Nixon, who used the "southern strategy" won in 1968 and would have been a two term President, ushering in years of Republican Presidents, if it hadn't been for Watergate.

Now, we see a solid south, blocking President Obama's nominees.  It got so bad, and so racist, that finally Harry Reid called a halt to it, and changed the filibuster rules for appointees only.

Now the Senate is witnessing another slowdown, as southerners basically throw a fit, and are holding up everything with childish tantrums.

It is time to kick these fools out.  It is the same racist crap that held this nation hostage for years in the mid twentieth century.

And it is wrong.  And I hope it kills the Republican Party, which is more divided everyday.

And the real culprits are the same racist segregationists, who now hide behind small government and cut deficits language, but are really the same old apartheid coven....

The Pope is Right...the Right is Wrong

What bothers me in this endless debate is if you criticize capitalism you are automatically branded as anti-free market, socialist or worse.  And the branders are usually those on the right who deal in he 'dog eat dog', 'just win baby' world of a capitalist myth.

Marx, Lenin and the boys criticized capitalism at its core.  But their communist manifesto failed hugely for two reasons:  the dictatorship of the proletariat never evolved into democracy; and stifling government overreach killed innovation and motivation to succeed.

The Pope who is most certainly not a socialist, in his recent statement, points to the excesses of capitalism.   He rightly criticizes the insanity of 'trickle down' economics.  He points to one of capitalism's weaknesses, allocation of wealth.

I always use the  Hollywood metaphor.  First, as we watch say the Academy Awards, we note the winners, the few actors who succeed and are the absolute rich winners.  Meanwhile there are thousands in Hollywood who are either support players, or starving artists.  The winners make huge salaries, and accumulate great wealth.

And who provides this wealth?  We do.  Every time we buy a ticket, motivated by endless advertising of the movies, we add to the few actor's wealth and yes support the rest of the industry.  But, the wealth we trade basically for entertainment is not distributed evenly or close to fairly.  It flows to a few at the top.

Ronald Reagan was an actor, and a product of this phenomenon.  He originally was a Democrat, but as his career matured and he got  richer, the marginal tax rates, taxing levels of high income at high percentages, drove him nuts.  Reagan never explained, nor considered I would guess, that these high tax rates were mostly used to pay off WWII, the most expensive war  in human history, and then sustain the Cold War.

Along the way his heart hardened, to those in the United States, who in the midst of the most dynamic economic growth in our history, stayed behind in poverty.

To the conservative mind set, that could not happen in a system that was producing unheard of wealth, and therefore it must be "their faults".  It was the welfare queens, the slackers, those lulled in laziness by give away government programs.

Meanwhile, the facts were that Popes were even then,  writing the same kinds of criticism of world and United States capitalism that  Pope Francis just did.

Look, there are losers who chose their lot.  But the vast majority of the poor in the United States for all our history are hard working poor.   My father, who is 90, just yesterday for the thousandth time, told me my grandfather who worked for the railroad, always looked forward to Christmas, because he moved up the 'extra board' and got work, because those who higher in seniority took the holidays off.  My dad told me he had a Christmas because of the extra board.  My grandfather was a hard working man, who was victimized by the depression, but never gave up, stayed with Southern Pacific, and fought his way through the Great Depression.  He was no slacker, he was just poor.  He also was 1/4 Cherokee.

 For a variety of reason, mostly race before 1964, whole segments of our society have been mired in irreversible poverty.  The United States had a system of segregation, Apartheid, that was not ended until 1964.  It created a huge caste system, that forced my grandfather to never admit he was Cherokee (he would have been fired).  It produced chronic unequal opportunity in the United States for over a hundred years.  And that poverty still drags us all down, as we endlessly debate and maybe even fight over the Affordable Care Act for example.

I got my hair cut yesterday.  The lady cutting my hair was new.  I asked if she was new, and she said not really, she had worked for the shop over a year ago.  Because of her age, a young mother I guessed, I asked if she had a child.  She slowly said not, she had a ulcerated colon, that had to be removed, and nearly lost her life.  She said she had three operations, and was in the hospital for weeks.

I asked if she had insurance, knowing that the shop probably could not provide it.  She said she did not, BUT BECAUSE SHE WAS UNDER 26 SHE WAS COVERED UNDER HE PARENT'S POLICY!

Right there, right there, it sits.  The unequal distribution  of income, of health insurance coverage, that the Pope warns about, was at least buffered for the 24 something who was cutting my hair.  Right there she was saved from a life of poverty, and her parents from bankruptcy, by the ACA.  It works!  Government intervention in the free market works to protect the major damage that capitalism will cause if not regulated.

But we endlessly debate the ACA.  We endlessly debate the obvious inequities that have produced a huge class of have- nots in this county, and throughout the world, that ultimately will deeply threaten peaceful societies everywhere. Conservatives, who cling to harmful and hateful assumptions of human behavior that are flat wrong, cause endless damage and drive us toward war.

We need to listen to the Pope, and the radical right needs to just shut up!

The Tough Get Going

This is a response to an editorial in the Record Searchlight of Redding:   

A word of congratulations about your recent article.  

I graduated from Shasta High in 1965, a product of Redding's public schools.  I also was, and am, a 1/16th Cherokee, that I didn't know when I was fortunate to be admitted to Stanford University on a football scholarship.  The next four years I toiled as a Stanford Indian.  And, yes, I agree that the mascot had to be changed.  Racial stereotypes, even heroic ones, have no place as a sports mascot....none.

But that is not my point.  After a 35 year long career in education, over half in administration, I look back fondly on my experience at Pine Street, Sequoia and Shasta High.  

There is a caveat to the self praise for Redding schools, when I was a freshman at Stanford there was a glaring gap in my educational background.  I was competing against the best in the country understand, both on the field and in the classroom, but there were gaps.  

But, there was something non-academic that carried me through.  That was the toughness of Redding, the working man ethic, the plain be tough or lose attitude that carried me through.  "When the going gets tough", had been hammered into us, and Blankenship was my classmate.  He had come from even more humble of a background than I.  

This sometimes manifested itself in Friday night fights, and not the T.V. kind, but people in Redding worked hard, played hard, fought hard and expected that everyone else would do the same.

And, this is political, there was a progressivism, a patriotism here, that was symbolized by the huge concrete wonder, Shasta Dam.  There was a hope for the future, a belief that education was the key for advancement.

And finally, there were roads to success all over the place.  I am afraid that today, these opportunities have declined for our youth due to the negativity of conservatism and the plain facts that the global economy has changed the game.

But I digress.  The list of my favorite teachers are the same, and Paul Hughes and his wife are personal friends.  Pam worked with me, not for me, when I was Principal at Pioneer and at Central Valley High School.

All of us who were educators, kept trying to measure up to  Richard Riis, Gordon Compton, Carl Brown, C.K. Stevens, George Economou, I could go on and on.

It wasn't so much the academic excellence that they bestowed, quite frankly I found at Stanford that other privileged students had more background than I.  It was in the toughness, the fact that almost all of them were veterans and many had seen combat; and you just made no excuses.  And it was my father and mother, who didn't have to say it, but you just never quit.   Quit was not in our vocabulary back then.

That is the academic high expectation that often is left out of eulogies and such.  We dwell on the academic and not the affect.

When Gordon Compton was dying in the hospital, I visited him.  He was barely conscious.  I went up to his bedside and whispered, "When I was most down at Stanford, barely hanging in, overwhelmed by the students who all were smarter than me, and by the football players who were all bigger and stronger, I was kept going by what you taught me; never quit, never give up, always keep working, and you may not win the game, but you will win in the end".

He got a funny look on his face, and said, "I didn't do that, you did it"  

And that says it all.  

Sent from my iPad