March 9, 2010

Suddenly, this society which humans have all pretty much had a hand in shaping, for as long as they’ve been part of it, is all shaken up over the sorry state of its ethics. This is especially apparent in their mindless responses to the actions of political and governmental leaders, that they have chosen. This commentator still wants to know what kind of lotus leaves they’ve been sucking on, for the past several decades? To begin with, it’s important to acknowledge Herbert Spencer’s argument, that no one can be perfectly free until everyone is free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral and no one can be perfectly happy, until everybody’s happy. Since such things are virtually impossible, one must settle for the nearest possibility. Those who organized our government understood the inevitability of human frailty and did their best to counter it. That’s precisely why they constructed ethics laws as they now appear. They not only stress the avoidance of wrongdoing by public officials but insist that they shun even a perception of it and that’s become the crux of the problems we now face. It’s that old devil, perception, maneuvering to befuddle us and for the most part, succeeding.

Pundits are quick to remind us, we live in different times, and things now have changed. If so, there’s not much proof, it’s for the better. At just about the time, that Britain’s American colonies opted for independence, the German scientist/philosopher, Georg Lichtenberg noted that nothing contributes more to peace of the soul, than having no opinion at all. Today’s Americans have gone Georg one better. They’ve let corporate captors not only control the informational sources they’ve relied on for opinions, they’ve ceded the right to form and act on them, to a corporate-congressional cabal.

Today’s typical Americans apparently not only expect but accept some form of dishonesty to be the norm, not only for those they deal with or purchase from but those invested with the responsibility to represent and protect them from such behavior. So how is it so many of them are paid-up members of the AARP, which also sells healthcare insurance and pharmaceuticals, while protecting them from others who also do?

Why is a New York Governor guilty of an ethics violation, for accepting free tickets to Yankee Stadium, where former Presidents, Governors and Mayors have presided from seats of honor? And how is it that fans are taxed for the wherewithal to build newer, more opulent stadiums, yet charged more to watch the games in them and do so?

Is anyone now able to give a valid opinion, about anything? On subjecting opinion to coercion, Thomas Jefferson once asked: “Whom will you make your inquisitors? And then answered: “Fallible men… men governed by bad passions… by private as well as public reasons.” Now, someone will remind me, that these are different times, thus we perceive things differently. Once, in another different time, James Reston of a different New York Times wrote: “All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.”

So, do you still think times… or people have changed? Not sure? Just ask Pogo.

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March 2, 2010

The month just past is best known to most Americans for the several of their most noted Presidents, born in it. It’s to our shame (or should be) that we’ve allowed a fault in our national character: the love of money over all other incentives, to disparage and degrade the way we now celebrate their birthdates: lumped into a weekend, favorably positioned for the greatest promotional and recreational sales hype. That noted, this commentator still finds a reason to lament yet another sad example of disrespect, the lack of attention given to Ben Franklin, perhaps the wisest of our founders who, despite his merit was never honored, with an elective position of leadership. Or perhaps, it was his ultimate wisdom, not to seek or accept one.

Looking back over the spate of prejudice, deliberate viciousness and perverse hypocrisy, with which a body of our elected officials and some mindless adherents have bombarded our newest President and his purported legislative supporters, one is impelled to recall a long-forgotten comment, once published by Ben Franklin, in “Poor Richard’s Almanac: “Blame all and praise all…” he noted, “ are two blockheads!”

Despite the self-serving and utter misrepresentation-by-design, with which political and religious demagogues have been cannonading the rest of us, via their paid-for radio and TV puppet ventriloquists, honest pollsters have discovered and reported, that a majority of American citizens want their President and a conscientious, bi-partisan Congress, to produce the least politicized, most practical and prudent solutions to the onerous problems, now bedeviling this nation, as quickly as it’s possible to do so. And to achieve this, with the least personal or corporate gain, for any functionary, lobbyist or commercial enterprise. That’s an explicit and provable fact. A failure by any of them, to attempt an honest response, ought to be reason enough, as Yogi Berra might have put it, to “Throw the bums out.”

Given this observer’s poetic predilection, he’s impelled to cite yet another, more metaphoric source, the honored American bard: Robert Frost, from his poem – “Take Something Like A Star,” composed in 1949.

“……It asks a little of us here,
It asks a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may take something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.”

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February 23, 2010

Sensing a profound change, weighing on the world’s once-widely-perceived ‘last best hope for democracy,’ this commentator has suddenly realized, a critical element, gone from the clamorous chorus of voices echoing across our nation. What’s missing is ‘conscience’. In 1949, the great journalist/ curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken, wrote: “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us, somebody may be looking.” A national conscience is what we now lack. This critical ‘inner voice’ has been silenced by a massive dose of disregard. The truth is, too few Americans seem to care, that someone may be looking… or not.

Many examples can prove this but the one that finally convinced this observer is the abject, waver of responsibility, a craven United States Attorney General and his cowardly corps of milksop underlings handed, to Gestapo-cloned mimics, in the Bush/Cheney administration’s Department of ‘Nazi-ite Injustice.’ For more than half a century, this commentator was proud to be counted among what countless fellow citizens identified, as America’s “greatest generation.” That pride came at a horrendous cost. For many, their very lives but for all of us, years of suspension, hardship and both physical and emotional pain. What helped us endure was the knowledge, our sacrifice was not only necessary but carried out under the weight of the most arduous strictures conscience could apply. Our mission was not only fitting but our humanity and self-restraint, against the most grievous inhumanity, gave the world proof of the difference. A panel of the most respected judiciary levied extreme penalties against the perpetrators of a genocide, that no legal explanation could mitigate. The present U.S. Attorney General and his lieutenants degraded this mass infliction of conscience, on the souls of an entire generation, with a single, mindless ameliorating phrase: that Bush/Cheney’s Nazi-like legal clones simply showed “poor judgement.”

How does our system of justice now answer similar perpetrators of the most bestial acts: like kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of innocent adults and children? Will it now be possible to mitigate such crimes down to examples of poor judgment? After all, isn’t ours a system of legal precedent? What next? Does our new President, like a once oblivious Reagan, lay a mitigating wreath on graves of Nazi heroes? Perhaps this time, Goering or Heidrich?

This awful miscarriage raises other questions, too, of the lost voice of conscience in our midst. Where are the heart-tugging sounds of those who once cried “NEVER AGAIN!” The nettlers of memory who yearly dispense thousands of candles for windows, on Yom Hashoa (The Day of Remembrance)? What of the criers of conscience, like The Anti-defamation League, who somehow let this horrendous pronouncement go by, without a single shout of condemnation? What prompted their memory slip? Is anyone listening? Does anyone still care? What’s become of our nation’s once insistent, still, small voice?

This caring commentator can still hear the echo of Pastor Niemoller’s grim reminder.

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February 16, 2010

Politically speaking, much grievance has been aired, of late, about the misstatement, overstatement and pure falsification by media, that Americans have long held to unimpeachable standards of reliability. It’s not possible for most of us to pin-point exactly when this bent for fallibility-by-design became a norm but for certain, there’s little doubt among a majority of us, that it now exists. What makes it all the more hurtful and well-nigh impossible to reverse, is the realization that it’s actually much more pervasive, throughout our societal fabric than just in the political arena.

For this observer, the scourge of fictionalizing truth, by most news media outlets, has become standard operating procedure, ever since corporate owners decided, not only to marry operating policy to investor profit but to ensure eternal success with an ongoing campaign of anti-intellectual erosion. Its symptoms are easy to spot. They include shrinking the space and time allotted for any information focused on improving reader, viewer or listener intelligence and replacing it with appeals to thoughtless appetites for food, drink, gadget-faddery, fast vehicles and faster-acting informational apparatus. Except, that all of the latter by-pass process, to provide ultimate answers ASAP. How they’re come-by is too time consuming, thus decidedly unnecessary. Note,

also, the blatant change in advertising content, which features adults who appear to have lost all virtues of judgment or resistance and most, exhibit demeanors that project them as moronically agreeable, to whatever’s being pitched. In the course of this process, media moguls have emasculated language and made the airing of intelligence a thing of shame.

Upbraided with the charge that their pages, screens and speakers are more-than-ever devoid of serious examples of rhetoric, drama, music, literature or art, the media’s corporate overlords bemoan the erosion of these and the exorbitant cost of imposing them, on a miniscule and unappreciative audience; overlooking the truth of their own manipulative roles, to create this outcome. The sorry truth is that many foreign nations we consider inferior, boast better educated populations, not only in technologies and the various art-forms we’ve proclaimed as dead or dying but also, in our language.

If intellectualism and the arts are dying in America, it’s because those who persist in vociferously telling us so, are doing their utmost to kill them. They’re also the ones who most persistently and loudly urge us to trust them, while at the same time, doing their utmost to breach and despoil our trust. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare, as usual, was right-on… dooming a character to prance through most of the play, portraying an ass. Trouble is, in this winter of our discontent, there aren’t nearly enough appropriate costumes to go around.

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February 9, 2010

Toward the conclusion of his great treatise, “Walden,” Thoreau remarked on the shortsightedness of human self-indulgence, that led his neighbors to act: “…as if there were safety in stupidity alone.” For himself, Thoreau said, he treasured truth more than love, money or fame. To this commentator, it seems that the stupidity of today’s Americans gives greater credence to Thoreau’s words, more than ever before. Then, again, it just may be that as a people, we’ve always exhibited this level of mass stupidity. De Toqueville recognized it, barely fifty years after we’d achieved independence. “I know of no country,” he wrote, “where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men and where a more profound contempt is expressed for the permanent equality of property.”

Why, except for mass stupidity, would so many Americans literally turn their backs on a truth that brought them to the current state of a chaotic economy, unemployment totals and bank failures verging on those of the great depression of the nineteen thirties, plus an explosive ‘anti-American’ hostility among Islamic nations, that number more than half of the world’s population? Intensifying all this is a myopic propensity for disunity at a typical moment, when solidarity has been a critical element of our deliverance in the past.

Ignoring the fact of their own subservience to the facilitators of this national calamity, it’s as though Republicans are now determined to make its worst consequence a disastrous fact, via deliberate and persistent resistance to any and all corrective efforts. Even more astonishing are the antics of Democrats, many of whom seem bent on being accessories to the swift return of oppressive G.O.P. chicanery. The proof is in their dogged disposition to counter every curative attempt by their newly installed President, with a welter of splintering disaffections. Not to mention a spate of political disparities.

The once proud and purposeful alliance that championed the rights of millions of America’s common-folk, has now morphed into spin-off hybrids; like the scared rabbit Blue-Dogs, who pose as Democrats but literally retreat from being classified as such. Stirring the political stew-pot are the flakes, who rebel just for the hell-of-it, even abetting their own adversity, like kids who threaten to eat worms. Other political provocateurs plot mayhem from inside the party, ensuring the awful upshot of debacle.

From colonial times onward, more than one discerning observer has called our nation a melting pot, meaning it in the best sense of the word. Now, rushing hell-bent away from the kind of unity that won us this appellation is certain to earn us a ‘melt-down’ none of us wants or needs.

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February 2, 2010

Josiah Stanford and Aldo Leopold never knew each other. Josiah worked the land on the family farm he established around 1816, in Niskayuna, New York. Aldo became the so-called father of American land conservation, about a century later. If there were such beings as ghosts, the shades of these two would be writhing in agony, today, at the wanton waste of a once-proud mansion and its verdent, surrounding wooded grounds, now reduced to a crumbling hulk and rubbled acreage, just to feed the greed of a few bankers and voracious developers, who should be exposed as public enemies of any effort, to reverse the almost certain ruin of upstate New York’s once robust environment.

If one were seeking to support the thesis that the malling of America would be more aptly spelled ‘mauling,’ no better example could be found than in the general vicinity of the once lushly green, rolling countryside of Niskayuna, now rapidly becoming the newest graveyard of speculative failures, in the history of commercial development, north and west of New York’s capital.

Politicians, from our nation’s President on down, have found a rallying cry, for opening a new route to prosperity, in the twenty-first century. They call it the greening of America, with talk about the wonders our genius can produce, to clean up the mess of our progress, to date and turn its trash into assets. It may sound great but it’ll never happen. Not until someone asserts the honest courage, to tell those behind the big-box and strip-mall carnage, that the days of greening their wallets at the expense of hard-working American taxpayers and their children are over.

Aldo Leopold wrote that we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity, that belongs to us. When we truly see land as part of the community to which we belong, he noted, then we may begin to use it with love and respect. Trouble is, love and respect are words, long erased from the vocabulary of commercial development. Like the verdant woods that once surrounded Josiah Stanford’s farm, they’re neglected remnants of another time. It’s not likely, we or our children will see much of them, here, ever again.

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January 26, 2010

In a 1942 essay, on the contribution of an independent judiciary to civilization, the great Federal Appeals Court jurist, Learned Hand, wrote: “no court can save a society so riven, that the spirit of moderation is gone.” Sixty eight years later, in a rash and callous show of activist intemperance, the now openly politicized majority of this nation’s highest court has proved the falsity of its own stated opposition to judicial activism. In giving corporations and unions a no-limit sanction for political spending, the court’s reactionary paladins have made the constitutional right of public self-expression a virtual impossibility for millions of ordinary citizens. To accomplish this, it has used the artificial mechanisms of distortion and technicality. First and most blatant is the court’s irrational rationale, that there’s no difference between a corporation and an individual; a reversal that annuls the basis for many previous strictures applied to corporations.

But beyond this is the technicality, that not only now exempts purchased speech from limitation but its intensity. By defining money as equivalent to expression, the court has also erased all limits to the volume of human expression, in effect, erasing any ordinance that controls the magnitude of mechanically generated sound. If corporations can now air all manner of electronically reproduced opinion, what then becomes of laws that communities have established against offensive sonic disturbance, like various forms of too-loud music or other amplifications that some owners of boom boxes and outdoor sound systems have seen defined as public nuisances?

Then, there’s the simple question of equal justice. If those with the monetary capability to control all available transmission outlets are able to out-shout opinions of all others, what lawful mechanisms are left to ordinary citizens, to make public officials and fellow citizens aware of their feelings and impressions, on issues that affect them?

In the same Learned Hand essay, cited to begin this commentary, the great jurist made a final and eminently wise observation: a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of the spirit of moderation, he wrote, in the end will perish. There’s one sound even this bought-and-paid-for High-Court may have overlooked and this commentator prays they’ll yet hear it: the sound of aroused voters, flexing their electoral muscles in millions of voting booths, throughout this country. Now, if Americans will just wise up and sound off, they can still save this democracy.

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January 19, 2010

Back when we were just becoming a nation, in a direct reference to theocratic despotism, like medieval Who, among our nation’s many political pundits and prognosticators would have guessed, in the month after Barach Obama’s inauguration, that he and his party would now face not one but a series of critical tests, any of which might jeopardize the tenure of this administration and its Democratic congressional majority, beyond the present term? Foreseen or not, that’s exactly what they’re facing. A persistently tenacious economic plunge, that resists attempts to upgrade its label to a recession and goads many victims into venting their rage, not at Republican instigators but Democrat successors, struggling to reverse it. The new President’s key campaign issue, of enacting healthcare reform to serve Americans, in every economic stratum, teeters on the brink of dissolution, in a welter of political disagreements and inexplicably negative reactions, from those who seemed to need and desire it most. Added to these is the ultimately unnerving straw of blunders and defections, by some of the Democrat Party’s longest serving and most strategically placed stalwarts, fuelling the opposition’s electoral hopes and possibilities which ‘til now, appeared illusory, at best.

Self-styled experts and veteran analysts float various reasons for these reversals, some of which even sound relevant. There’s one, though, that all interested Democratic participants and observers need to consider and address, to garner even a slight hope of change for the better. It has to do with self-image, courage and confidence. All bear on a fate that seems to counter Democrats’ reasons for being Democrats. So, now, they have to ask themselves, why they decided to be Democrats? If those who formed this party, did so around a set of principles to reflect their belief in a government of, for and by the people, then the inclusive nature of democracy should negate any other belief, that asserts special privilege to any group, for whatever reason but proved and dire necessity.

Somehow, those who believe in the power of material wealth, to determine national policy and practice, have been able to redefine the term ‘principle’, from an ethical to a pecuniary standard. They’ve repeated the ‘big lies’ about Democrats, as tax and spenders, soft on crime and national defense for so long, their targets are themselves now unsure about them. At the same time, the purveyors of Nixon/Reagan/Bush perversion have used this distraction to push their own mastery of evils, for which they’ve blamed others. In the process, ethical principle has become an endangered species, all but replaced by a term spelled the same but of a hugely different meaning.

As he campaigned for our votes, Barach Obama promised change we could believe in and a sizeable majority of us responded. If that change hasn’t happened, perhaps it’s because we didn’t strive for it strongly enough. The time is late but courage and confidence can still prevail. As Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson noted, courage isn’t the absence of fear but a mastery of it, and long, long before that, in 19 B.C., Virgil revealed this unshakable truth. They can do all, he wrote, because they think they can. So, how about it, Democrats? Your President, party and country await the answer.

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January 12, 2010

Back when we were just becoming a nation, in a direct reference to theocratic despotism, like medieval Spain’s dreaded ‘Inquisition,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we’ve not advanced one inch toward uniformity.”

In that perceptive and courageous statement, Jefferson took the first of a continuing series of resolute stands, with others, for the outright separation of church and state, in the policies and actions of the United States Government. With the overwhelming concurrence of the founders, this separation became one of the first stipulations of the U.S. Constitution, still unchanged. At the same time, the founders wisely included inviolate protection of religious beliefs and practices by individuals, as long as they didn’t infringe on the rights of other believers or non-believers. Despite these assurances, tyranny and suffering inflicted by the Holy Roman Church, imposed vestiges of anti-Catholic prejudice, long after our Constitution was adopted. It was only the intelligent and courageous examples of leaders like Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Joeseph Biden, and upstate New York’s own Bishop Howard Hubbard, that enabled us to overcome this extreme residual intolerance.

Now, one blindly barbarous diehard congressman, who views himself, more important and powerful than all the wise and courageous American leaders who preceded him, seeks to re-impose the dreaded inquisition modus on our entire nation, “as an assertion of my Roman Catholic faith,” as he puts it.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the frighteningly savage and depraved effect of such a purely evil construct, as the bill proposed by Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, to prevent women who receive federal healthcare insurance subsidies, from obtaining abortion coverage is the almost certain probability, that it is unconstitutional. Not just because of the lawful protection now afforded a woman’s right to choose, but of Stupak’s own stupidly pointed justification of this bill, as an assertion of his Roman Catholic faith. A pronouncement that literally negates the language of the First Amendment, which prevents Congress from creating any law, based on a religious ideological purpose.

Even more disturbing, is the now common knowledge of the Congressman’s own personal history, whose admitted attitudes and actions stamp him, a former state trooper who more-or-less saw himself, not just as a policeman but an avenging judge and jury. Added to this, his horrific, pro-NRA pronouncements and actions, after his own son’s gun-shot suicide, paint a frightening picture of a berserk zealot, bent on dispensing self-determined discipline, judgment and punishment, to those he regards as offenders.

There’s another illegal act that Congressman Stupak’s assertion reveals. It makes him an unregistered and unlawful representative of a foreign power: The Vatican.

Bart Stupak’s perverted zeal has obviously blinded him to the long established and accepted fact of religious freedom, in these United States where everyone, including Catholics, has the right to believe and practice or not… as they wish and choose. What they do not and hopefully never will have is the right to tell or force any other person what to believe in or practice. For all our sakes and our country’s, the United States Congress must regain the courage and will to remind him of this.

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January 5, 2010

A top priority for all Americans to address, in this new year of two thousand and ten, is a tenet of our identity as a democratic republic, that’s almost become a cliché, as a result of our abuse of it. The phrase …”freedom of speech, and of the press,” is contained in the very first Amendment to our Constitution’s all-important Bill of Rights. In assuring this right, the framers took pains to separate freedom of speech from freedom of the press. It’s an important detachment to bear in mind, because those who would control and subvert the latter have made it synonymous with rampant unrestraint of the former.

In 1960, Albert Camus wrote, that freedom of the press is the freedom that has probably suffered most, from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty. No less a power than our nation’s Supreme Court has granted both prevaricators and corrupt nonprofessionals a license to run amuck, with deception and distortion of the truth, under the false identification of printed or broadcast news, as speech. The result; marauders armed with overpowering wealth have bombarded millions of otherwise optionless readers, listeners and viewers, with every form of verbal perversion, from insinuation to deliberately manufactured falsehood. All under the guise of protected speech, powered by the Court’s spurious description of money, as a form of human expression.

The key, here, is the Constitutional separation of speech and press, as separate entities and it seems, not even those most affected by this obvious split have emphasized it enough. Clearly, the framers saw the people’s right to unvarnished information, provided by professionally ethical and documented sources, as clearly different from the personal expression of opinion, by individuals or groups. This also asserts, that providers of such information be held to a measurable standard of professionalism, and adherence to factual reporting of statements and events, that can be documented or corroborated. There was a time, not that long ago, when print and electronic reporters of the news were held to such standards by regulations, under which their professions were practiced. It was also a time when deaths, births and marriages were reported as events of the day, by publishers who now label them commercial announcements, charged for at so-much a line. Electronic newscasts, too, were allowed sponsor promotion but never at the expense of news delivery, which wasn’t shredded with commercials. Editorial comment, too, was aired and labeled apart from news.

Now, fast and loose perversion of news, by government, corporate and money-vested manipulators, deprives vast numbers of citizens of their constitutionally promised and vital right to know. It’s time both government regulators and the courts, returned that prerogative to its rightful inheritors.

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December 29, 2009

It seems, the more vexing and challenging a time, the more inclined we are to look ahead and hope for something better. Increasingly, for this commentator, wisdom born of experience is still a persuasive teacher. As we near the onset of a new year and a new decade, the words of the ancient Roman truth-sayer, Seneca, still offer us hope’s most essential elements: our own ideas and involvement. For this observer, the great lack that defies our technology and defiles its promise is ‘quality.’ Our achievements promise much. Their peddlers tout more-than-enough of everything, for prices and terms, always scripted to appear within reach. What we get in return makes a mockery of truth.

Old Seneca had it exactly right. It’s quality rather than quantity that matters, he wrote. The one element we’ve not only lost but continue to ignore is quality. Ours has become a culture steeped in schlock. Our media not only glorify it but our populace seems to revel in it. The cheap and tawdry, wrapped in a valueless veneer, appear to have the strongest attraction for us and those who vend them for profit, promote them, ad infinitum.

Why does the lesser, yet louder, attract more of our populace? What is it that draws them to sounds certain to destroy their hearing, yet shun intelligent sweetness, that stimulates the brain and inspires the heart? Why do thousands crowd eateries, ignoring those they sit with but talk nonsense to others, somewhere else on tiny, hand-held devices, while the eateries compete, to offer more obesity per serving, at an attractive price, than any intelligent diner should ever ingest?

Why have we allowed those who’ve leased the people’s communicative resources, to abuse them, offering moronic parodies of prejudice as news, increasingly laced with promotional clap-trap, to the point where the promotion outweighs programs, in the time and space allotted both, while TV and computer screens are cluttered with debris of persuasions to buy, that literally overlay subject matter we’ve a right to peruse, in peace?

In “King Lear,” Shakespeare added this observation to Seneca’s: To the vile, wisdom and goodness seem vile; he wrote, filths savor but themselves. In the days and months of the coming year, this commentator wishes a rebirth in the pursuit of quality, by and for us all. The only certain way to make our future a truly profitable and happy one.

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December 22, 2009

Throughout the current ongoing Armageddon, on national healthcare reform, ‘change’ has become the byword, for those on every side of the issue. Liberal Democrats incessantly remind the President and their more conservative partisans of the impassioned promise, that carried the Obama campaign to victory. Old-line ‘moderate’ Democrats remind their more impatient members that incremental change, in close proximity to middle-of-the-road consistency, mirrors what the majority most often favors. Loyal and disciplined Republicans warn of an unending chain of catastrophe, that radical change will let loose, ignoring the reality of suffering and chaos already created, by the previous President and his henchmen, whom they supported, in virtual lockstep commitment. Meanwhile, a ‘hard-right’ alliance of radical religious zealots and cement-minded conservatives forms anti-change battle lines, behind a barrage of used tea-bags.

At this point, we should all focus on one unchangeable reality. As the insightful sociologist-educator, Helen Merrell Lynd so aptly noted, it’s characteristic of humans to change accustomed ways, as little as possible. For proof, she recalled that the very first Packard automobile, came equipped with a whipstock, attached to the dashboard. But despite our stubborn penchant for immovability, change is inevitable. The great French physiologist and founder of experimental medicine, Claude Bernard, who also served in the French Senate, observed that ideas are only instruments we use to break into phenomena. When no longer useful we must change them, he said, just as we would a blunt lancet, that no longer serves its purpose.

For this commentator, an unforgettable lesson was delivered by Archibald Cox, the brilliant Boston lawyer, whose honesty and courage launched the downfall of Richard Nixon and created the great people’s advocacy alliance, Common Cause. When liberal hot-heads lost patience with the pace of progressive change and threatened to desert, unless the response was just as they originally viewed and immediate, Archie would counsel tolerance and tenacity. The key to Democracy, he reminded, is tolerance. If all we can get is a piece of what we’re after, he’d urge, it’s better to take it and come back another time, for the rest. Far better than having to start over, from an iffy beginning.

Through many lean years, this observer has seen Archie’s approach work, time and again. For all those who see the present healthcare reform bill as far less than a full measure of success, this is the time for tenacity. That means hanging in there, together and gearing up for the next go ‘round, so we can then win the rest of what we set out to achieve. Walking away only increases the distance from success. Sure, we were promised change but the politics of democracy has never been nor will it ever be an exact science. It’s the art of the possible. That often takes more time and effort than we’re willing to give but that’s where one’s mettle is really tested. The question we need to answer now is: How strong is ours?

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December 15, 2009

In his “Reflections,” the French philosopher, La Rochefoucauld, wrote, that quarrels would never last long, if the fault were only on one side. It’s amazing to this observer, how the most evil deed and serious malfeasance can be clouded and often overshadowed, in the process of finger-pointing and fixing blame. Somehow, that process seems to have become a hallmark of our time and particularly so, if we can transfer even greater guilt, than the malfeasance itself. Turn an apparent social misdeed into a resultant injury, that visits personal pain, on all who hear of it.

The great change this commentator notes, in the time we’re living through, from times before, is a common failure to recognize the offense to principles, that were once universal guideposts for a whole society. Personal injury is now the dimension of right and wrong, most often measured by monetary loss or annoyance at the limiting of comfort or pleasure.

We’ve made it almost a habit, to place our trust in politicians who promise what we ourselves should recognize as impossible, if we’d just take the time and trouble to think their impracticality through. Like willful children, we wish for what – by now – we ought to know is undeliverable, except at exorbitant or unaffordable cost. In fact, we’ve become so habituated to hyperbolized statements as facts, we bridle at truth and seek to punish those who speak it to us. Former New York State Senate Majority Leader, Joe Bruno, sluffs off his clearly defined ethical misconduct with the lame alibi, that he’s “a businessman,” ignoring a law that prohibits using his public office, to enhance personal and/or especially business gain.

New York’s Governor David Paterson, who in good faith, took on a job he didn’t seek, finds himself disliked and the object of childish, selfish disfavor, for behaving like a responsible public official (something unheard of, in today’s politics), while those who deserve punishment are the instigators and expediters of the many difficulties he and we face. Meanwhile, the public temper ignores piggish bankers and insurance finaglers, to insist that Government keep its hands off programs, designed to make our lives easier and more manageable. Government, of course, being us, an onus we should have assumed in the first place but traded away, for fast cars that foul our air and media that glorify ignorance. Shakespeare had it right but his wisdom’s lost, in the I-pod mish-mash of ughs and grunts that we now use to communicate our self-centered search, for ambiguous answers. “The trouble, dear Brutus (and that includes most of us), lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”

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December 1, 2009

In the first century B.C., the learned Publius Syrus wrote: “It’s a bad plan that admits of no modification.” Since then, humanity’s greatest sages have hailed planning, as a requisite preamble to any meaningful action. We’re told (ad infinitum) it’s even an essential element for any effective capitalist endeavor. So, it’s with good reason one wonders, why do arch capitalists seem to abhor any social mechanism, that’s based on or employs a plan or worse luck, displays the term in its title?

The question has bedeviled this commentator, throughout a maddening series of machinations pursued by stalwart champions of “the Capitalist system,” who are now thwarting every plan advanced to reverse an eight-year repudiation of planning, practiced by a Bush administration that made a farce of the process. Bush boosters removed every sensible rule or regulation, installed to limit reckless squandering of the nation’s natural or developed wealth or any mechanism that signalled such intent had become a reality. The Bush/Cheney wrecking crew accomplished this decimation with thuggish impunity and the cooperation of the same Republican congressional wheeler-dealers, who’ve now donned the phony tin-foil armor of self-righteous negativism. Alas, their shameful shenanigans were aided by Democrats, who lacked the courage to defend canons they once proudly embraced.

Now, we’ve literally reached a point of no return, in not one but several crises that could spell the end of life on this planet, as a place of orderly, convivial and continuing productivity to sustain survival. And the same, stupid, stubborn, self-serving and sanctimonious saboteurs who encouraged and escalated this havoc, are now finagling with half-measures, all aimed at delaying the inevitable, imposing on ourselves the liabilities and limits, necessity demands. Spendthrifts, who squandered fortunes they were sworn to safeguard, now have the gall to complain about the cost, for unborn generations. Ignoring the ultimate truth, that no place may be fit for anyone to inhabit.

As world leaders prepare to meet and agree on limits that all know are key to human survival, piratical profiteers still press for deals that allow them ‘green stamps’ for environmental short-shrifting. Credits they can trade for bad behavior passes. But why stop there? Why not use this system to promote bogus adherence to all socially-necessary behavior? We could short-change banks on debt payments, settle grudges with beatings that stop just short of homicide, a whole new order that allows us to be sort-of but not quite in sync with what’s required. And think of the trading possibilities; the swap of lesser infractions, to cover huge and harmful crimes. Welcome to the corporate/capitalist cosmos of free trade, without hindrance or regulation; just profit to encourage good behavior… and hope it occurs, in a world, unfettered from plan or limit.

In 700BC, Hesiod added this post script to Syrus’s wisdom: …”Evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.”

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November 24, 2009

For many embroiled (by choice or circumstance) in the American Revolution of 1776, the words of the Greek philosopher Democritus were starkly true. Theirs’ had become a “world turned upside down.” All the traditional guideposts and norms that ordered their lives were overturned and disordered. What most failed to grasp were the character distortions of fellow humans, drunk on power, that triggered the ensuing cataclysm. Nearly two and a half centuries later, the truth in these words has never been clearer.

For Americans, ours is truly a world turned upside down. Especially noticeable is our total lack of sense, spurred by a twisted ignorance of our own history. A horde of citizens who demanded change and achieved its means, now not only turn their backs on it but vehemently oppose it – in the streets and outside offices of government bodies. Their demand? An end to government interference in their lives. A moment of honest thought should remind them, they’ve already accomplished this, when they deserted interest in their own affairs, turned them over to self-serving surrogates and became obsessed with the acquisition of gas-guzzlers and gadgets.

Now, they’ve traded bales of a tyrant’s selfishly overtaxed tea, for tiny sodden discards of what they’ve already consumed, as symbols of discontent, which only advertise their ignorance. A current world we’ve largely created is truly upside down. A majority of those we’ve elected to lead and represent us have done and continue to do nothing but line their own pockets and abet those whose lucre lines them. From when they first created it, our founders saw government, of, for and by the people as the most efficient means of achieving the most necessary ends for most of us. That doesn’t mean dictatorship, it means self-imposition and constant supervision of mechanisms, that best serve our needs and interests, in other words: public options honestly and efficiently run.

A despicable attitude of “me and mine, only,” has spawned an entrenched national system, that winks at official impropriety and has transformed the vital art and science of healing into a means of profit for corporate connivers, who’ve not only made a crap game out of human survival but want to fix the odds, to ensure that they can always win.

When he coined the phrase: “the world turned upside down,” Democritus also added some critical advice: He warned against following bad examples: “Like Aesop’s fox, who when he lost his tail, would have all his fellow foxes cut off theirs.”

Wake up Americans. It’s time we all took a hand in turning our world right side up.

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November 17, 2009

Slogans are not new to the manipulation of mass mindset, in the stratagems of American political history. One need just think of the early depiction of George Washington, as: “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen;” or “The Iron Armed Soldier of Tippecanuoe,” used in William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign. The repetitive slogan has played an intimate role in our historic political development. But when slogans are replaced with the insidious innuendo of pure hyperbole or political libel, to establish rigidly negative public beliefs, some means is needed to expose the danger of their infecting the entire body of our national thought.

The most current pernicious ploy is the unfounded and totally distorted use of “Socialist,” as a derogatory description of any effort or program that embodies the involvement of government or any of its agencies. The whole idea of a federal union of states, to establish and oversee activities which literally required public involvement was elemental to the origin of these United States. So was the establishment of the labor union, as a necessary instrument of collective bargaining, for workers at the mercy of callous company owners, who forced employees to endure sweatshop enslavement. The unified strength of many is a logical antidote, to any singular enveloping despotism. .

There’s also a malicious add-on, that invariably accompanies the use of insidious accusations, based not on facts but labels. All too often the practice is meant to deflect attention from an even more injurious threat, that the accusers themselves may represent. The “Socialist” pejorative is most often applied by corporate and pro-business agents, with agendas that feature much more regimentation and abuse of the civil and economic rights of those they seek to control, than any current Socialist system.

The rampant, rapacious retailer, Walmart, is a glaring and overtly ominous example. While the most crippling decline in economic circumstance, since the ‘Great Depression’ of the nineteen-thirties, threatens to erase an entire class of independent small-businesses, while adding hundreds of thousands to the ranks of the homeless and unemployed, Walmart, now the world’s largest retailer, boasts record profits, while denying those it employs even a semblance of fair labor practices: like stipulated work-hour shifts, paid holidays and overtime, plus decent, humane health-care. Meanwhile, using syncro-slashed price reductions, it dooms smaller competitors to oblivion. Believe it. The tyranny of the all-powerful, all-encompassing corporate collective is about to replace any remaining semblance of citizen-participation in our government, with corporate sector control; a tyranny that makes simple Socialism resemble a nostalgic option of the past.

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November 3, 2009

The news media’s political pundits, even those leaning leftward, have become so engrossed in analyzing what’s happened and will or may occur, to the disparate remnants of the Republican Party, that Democrats have virtually become an endangered species, short shrifted of the valuable time and space, so vital to political viability, in today’s struggle to seduce the fickle electorate. Sad to say, the Democratic leadership has done little to reverse this sorry trend. Apparently, they’re fixated on money to rebuild the muscle, lent by historical perspective and the productive pride it once imbued. But no amount of money can purchase courage or unity of purpose and both are what the Democrats lack, in amounts needed to inspire and attract emulators and followers.

Financial support is always a necessity for any organized political effort but when complicity to providers turns ordinary dollars into ‘filthy-lucre,’ credibility accrues the greatest loss and right now, it’s a loss Democrats can ill afford.

Realizing the incredible confederation that created his miraculous election victory, President Obama is walking a thin line among elements tenuously allied, under a barely visible Democratic banner. But he and they have a treasure trove of historic precedents, from whom to borrow corroboration and courage. Long before the astounding likes of Martin Luther King, then-President Franklin Roosevelt was goaded to political deeds, even he hadn’t envisioned, by the courageous leadership of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who waged a courageous battle for workers to have decent conditions and a fair wage for honest labor, whatever their careers or color.

FDR chose creative people of principle, to craft programs that reclaimed the nation’s forests and farms. He challenged the Congress to pass legislation that forced financial finaglers and money lenders to play by rules that not only kept them from conspiring in secret but held them to public account… and the Congress responded, in clear and no-nonsense language. Power for factories, farms and homes became a publicly regulated commodity, available to all. Yes, and a little known Senator, named Harry Truman, chaired a committee, that investigated corporate connivers and price-gougers and brought them to justice.

Then, as now, those with selfish axes to grind called it “Socialism” and warned we were on the road to wrack and ruin. We all know, now – or should – it made us a prosperous giant, known to the world as “The arsenal of democracy.” Sure, there were some wealthy visionaries who also led, along with some very brainy folks who understood that United States, always needs both words, together, to succeed. The Democratic Party needs to reconnect with those whose honest efforts helped them create such history: the ordinary thousands known as “The People.” But they’d better do it soon, before misery makes The People seek other company to love.

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October 27, 2009

The linchpin slogan of Barak Obama’s Presidential campaign promised: “Change we can believe in!” Now, nine months into his presidency, we can believe, without a hint of contradiction, the promise has become a prophetic fact. Alas, its embodiment is neither one of Obama’s intent nor of his accomplishment. Actually, it began a number of years before he decided to seek any office and his decision had little to do with its evolution.

The essence of this change was best described by Jessie Unruh, the once legendary Speaker of the California Assembly and later powerful State Treasurer, better known as ‘Big Daddy,’ who ran that state’s affairs throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies.

Jessie Unruh, who said:”money is the mother’s-milk of politics,” putting into words what the U.S. Supreme Court, some twenty years later certified, when it redefined money as speech. Given this final sanction, money has become the measure and the muscle for every political action that defines and determines the conduct of our government, its leaders, functionaries and ultimately, its citizens.

Under the most objective and non-political definition, we’re told that in the ideal sense, a democratic system of government is supposed to do for people, what they’re unable to do for themselves. It’s from this belief that such activities as national defense, policing, legislation, energy, natural resource conservation, mass transit, and yes, hospitalization and public health were – from the first – considered responsibilities of government; either for oversight or outright management. No more. The latest to consider privatizing all its prisons is the State of Arizona. It’s also an accepted fact that many of the nation’s largest and most prestigious hospitals are now owned and operated by for-profit corporations. It’s plain fact, that areas of social necessity, once considered the province and responsibility of government, are now answerable to the profit-making requirements of corporations and their investors. Activities of government once ascribed to the ‘good and welfare’ of the populace are now secondary to the monetary return their operations provide to owners and investors. Their dollars having now become the same means of persuasion as words, providers of healthcare and medicines can literally pay legislators to enshrine their dictates as policy and write them into law, as receivers of legalized payoffs, once correctly branded as bribes. So much for the possibility of ‘a public option.’

But the grossest and cruelest cut of all is the sanction which allows those with the most monetary resources, to literally purchase elective office. The once holier-than-thou New York Times recently trumpeted, in passing it along with other news of daily interest, that Mayor Bloomberg’s quest for reelection is the costliest ever in U.S. history, putting the amount at 250 million dollars of Mr. Bloomberg’s own money.

With no decisive word of criticism or opposition, why not just do away with elections and put national, state and local offices up for public auction, each post going to the highest bidder? Yes, fellow citizens believe it. Change is here and ours has become the first wholly monetary democracy, in which anything’s for sale, to those who’ll pay the price. Here’s a hint for the Supreme Court to further reduce the prison population. Having already sanctioned the carrying of firearms in public, they could now declare the phrase “Hand it over,” as simple speech and voila! Armed robbery’s no longer a crime.

Welcome, fellow Americans, to Washington Irving’s land of “the almighty dollar.”

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October 20, 2009

If citizens from every segment of this imperfect union seem confused by a serious disconnect, between their own situations and the economic eruption that has split us into a disparate splatter of geo-social atoms, a corrupt combine of corporate profiteers has succeeded in their design. This spirited and sanguine amalgam, that once seemed capable of just about any achievement, has not only lost its momentum but the decisive ‘mass-attitude’ that impelled it. The obvious proof of this is the almost primitive patois that our language has shrunk to and a universal fixation on gadgets, designed to discourage intellectual initiative and keep the greatest number of us focused on tripe and trivia.

Even more discouraging is the evidence, that we are being intellectually outstripped by the populace of nations we’ve long considered unfit, either as trading partners or geo-political allies. We demeaned and denigrated Venezuela’s Chavez, whose oil was offered along with criticism of our arrogant pressure on smaller countries, to emulate our policies and posture. One wonders, how can Venezuela, with such an apparently crude and unintelligent leader, produce over one hundred student symphonic ensembles, all at incredible levels of score reading and instrumental performance? Their awesome accomplishment is attributed to a learning program entitled ‘El Systema,’ now being copied world-wide. The newly appointed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel is a notable alumnus, said to have memorized all nine scores of the Mahler Symphonies by the age of eighteen. While such mind-boggling accomplishment is now being emulated in countries, much poorer than ours, the mavens of American TV, who’ve made millions from glorifying trash as talent, continue to air their assessment, that classical music and other such art forms are either extinct or near-death. Instead, they urge hordes of ash-heap audio/video addicts to think less and patronize more of Face-book effluent and fast cars. Meanwhile, their hireling gutter-level grunge grinders fill the spaces between TV commercials with deceptions that redefine liberty as license.

Why is it, that at the height of the worst recession in more than half a century, an aroused electorate decries expenditures to combat it as wasteful but utters not a disapproving word at billions spent on sports taj mahals and still more millions, for a handful of players who use them? Meanwhile theaters and halls for drama, music and art go dark, and programs in arts curricula are cut, for lack of funds. The list of such failures, in the northeast, grows with each passing day, as patrons groan on, at the cost of tickets to rank routines, that are passed off as extravaganzas but line up to pay for them, nevertheless.

Far-right Republicans and worry-wart Democrats can denigrate FDR’s New Deal as socialist demagoguery (which truly it wasn’t) but it produced a cultural renaissance and ultimate prosperity, that still elicits foreign respect and honest national pride. The real problem we face, now, is the lack of leaders with the guts and brains to enlist our best talents and rekindle our highest aspirations, and an enlightened populace to support both.

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October 13, 2009

One wonders whatever became of the noble experiment that Abraham Lincoln called: “the last, best hope of earth?” Have we truly and finally traded this incredible heritage for a misspent and mundane payoff of paltry dollars and cents? Amid the myriad calls for change, from the political left, right and a scatter of fringe groups on the outer- edges of this restive society, what kind and how much change can we really afford?

So much that shaped this incredible social experiment has changed already, that its identifiable outlines have grown dim and difficult to recognize. Take, for example, the bedeviling question of healthcare reform, that currently divides us into a myriad of disaffected fragments. What we’re really talking about, here… or should be, is the well-being and survival of a populace, without which this nation, as a cohesive entity, literally ceases to exist. Since its inauguration, in 400 B.C. the healing art of medicine’s ethic has been “to help or at least to do no harm.” How many of those, who literally now lead the legislative endeavor to reconstitute our national healing effort, can honestly say they believe in and subscribe to this principle? Do actions truly speak louder than words? The most vociferous members of the United States Senate and a healthy number of imitators, in the House of Representatives are out to prove just the opposite. Most are craven hirelings of insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical providers, for whom the irresistible goal is corporate and investor earnings. For these ringmasters of the human circus, the hours and minutes in which we breathe are the essence of dollars and cents. Life, to them, is but a time-frame allotted for profit.

Now here’s a hypocritical irony to fracture all logic: The so-called public options and government sponsored plans, that recalcitrant members of Congress are dead-set against are modeled after the exact health-plan options already provided to every one of them and paid for, with money collected from taxpayers, for whom their ‘NO’ votes ensure the denial of equal treatment. And the reason, they say, is that they’re worried about passing the cost of all this on to our children and grandchildren. Not the cost of their own healthcare, mind you, that’s a given… but ours. What doesn’t bother them one wit, is the blood money they’ll pocket for their dirty work, from corporate sponsors who can now smugly boast of how they saved us from socialist degradation. If all this makes you more than a little upset, next time you pass a mirror take a good look at yourself and think of the adage you should have remembered: “Sheepish voters beget wolfish politicians.”

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September 29, 2009

It’s tragic, that religions are exempt from the compulsory accountings imposed on other organized American endeavors. What sins would have been by now acknowledged? In the wake of Ramadan and Yom Kipur, holiest days observed by two of civilization’s three great faiths, we find little abatement in animus, despite much breast beating and professions of peace, justice and forbearance, they all claim to represent. What’s perhaps most disturbing to one who still retains great faith in the constitutional document, that’s said to set this democracy apart from all others, is the extent to which the separation of church and state activity, a primary aim and proscription of our founders, has been subverted and literally contorted to abet what it was meant to prevent.

President Obama campaigned on the premise that while faith-based organizations retain religious freedom to practice, they have no basis for participation in programs organized and funded by local, state or federal governments. Now, as President, he seems to falter in actions to reverse involvements initiated by the previous Bush administration. Such hesitance only emboldens movers of faith-based initiatives, already supported by government, to seek new venues of public insinuation, cultivating acceptance they didn’t rate in the first place. One recalls such unsavory examples of religious pandering, by politicians, as the insidious use of public funds, to provide school busses for the restricted orthodox Jewish School District of Kyrias Joel, in New York, which then refused to hire female bus drivers, because of a theocratic gender prejudice.

The callous disregard of humanity by fundamentalist religious leaders of all faiths, in their efforts to impose theocratic tyranny, is far reaching and unapologetic. Typical of those abroad is the Taliban’s indiscriminate use of explosives which more-often kill and maim innocent bystanders, while pursuiing intended political targets, in Afghanistan. Here in America, a leading Orthodox Jewish Rabbi recently told a Jerusalem Post interviewer, he looked forward to saying Kaddish (the memorial prayer for the dead) for Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism. In Israel, followers of these sects are still denied equal rights, though Israel calls itself a democracy, much like ours. By what connotation is hard to understand, since religious parties and leaders hold positions, there, that strongly influence the policies and actions of the government.

Interfaith animus has been a fact, since before burnt offerings. Church-state shenanigans were a catalyst for American democracy. The efforts of hard-line Christian fundamentalist leaders and groups, to influence and participate in our nation’s political decisions and programs, were once loudly and energetically opposed by such groups as the national Interfaith Alliance and Interfaith Impact, in New York State. Of late, though, while these groups have taken positions antithetical to those of the religious right, on issues of choice and gender, they’ve become silent on issues directly related to church/state separation.

Like our founders, this commentator respects the right and belief of every deist. But when those who claim the right to speak for God decide to claim and levy God-like power, it’s the duty of every caring citizen to oppose them.

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September 22, 2009

It’s not clever or commendable to carp at critical statements by highly regarded persons, at pivotal moments in history. But despite my respect for Jimmy Carter, this commentator must take issue with a remark the former President made, in a recent, widely aired TV interview. Referring to a rude slur shouted at President Barak OBama, by a South Carolina Congressman, during a formal Presidential address to both houses of Congress, Mr. Carter was asked if he thought the discourtesy was spurred by race prejudice. His answer expressed the belief, that much of this country, North and South, still showed distinct symptoms of racism, against African-Americans and this is the point at issue. Given his comprehensive experience, gained over years of on-sight observation, why would he stop there? Why not complete the prejudicial thesis to its undeniable conclusion, that the malevolence goes far beyond a single racial group? It’s not just “racism” that plagues Americans, it’s “-ism,” per se and its fanatical extent is far more injurious than the mere shouting of insults.

The literal definition of “ism” is an extreme ideal, doctrine, system or practice that disparages. In today’s mean and abusive atmosphere, we needn’t look far, to find one.

If George W. Bush and his so-called advisors had just glanced beyond their noses, they might have discerned the implacable hatred of Sunni for Shiah, and vice versa, in Iraq. That insight could have averted thousands of needless deaths and endless carnage. Our own founders saw and understood the evil theocratic alliances of Catholic and Protestant dictators with monarchs whose installations they facilitated. The founders were so affronted, they pointedly barred such practices in our constitution. The Jihads, not just of power hungry caliphates but of warring intra-familial sects have embroiled the Muslim world in turmoil and terror for centuries. Even the Biblical Israelite ‘People of the Book,’ have engaged in internal intrigues and blood feuds, the results of which still impede their modern attempts to salvage residual peace for their followers. In present-day Iran, either a totally villainous or totally deranged leader screams hysterical denials of History’s most depraved “ism:” Nazism, while adherents of related sects unsettle the social fabric of nearly half-a-world.

Then, there’s the worst kind of “ism,” contrived Conservatism, organized and goaded by dispassionate but greedy instigators whose only aim is profit. Embedded in the fabric of this democracy are the boll weevil cabals of corporate skulduggers, whose hirelings inspire fellowships of zealot Fundamentalist faithful with hard-core Conservatives, their only goal, to confuse and confute the orderly achievement of governance that places public need ahead of personal gain. Jimmy Carter wasn’t wrong. He just stopped too far short of where he should have gone, to make a point that needs to be hammered into the consciousness of every thoughtful and concerned American, still capable of speaking up and pulling a voting machine lever down. Until their enlightened voices are raised beyond denial, there will always be a lurking danger of our hearing an equivalent of “Zieg Heil!” and seeing a frightful Nazi-like salute, on some American street.

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September 15, 2009

Okay… the mishchief makers have had their play and the tantrum throwers have had their way. Now it’s time for reasonable Americans to get on with what they know has to be done, if their nation is to survive as the world’s only still-working democracy. It’s time for the fundamentalist hypocrites and their political panderers – all of whom seem bent on committing sacrilege – to stop using The Lord’s name, in the vain pursuit of power and profit. The message to them from every concerned citizen, from the President-on-down, should be: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t preach false warnings against government-imposed ‘death panels’ in one breath and urge us to keep healthcare, a ‘good old competitive American, profit-making business, in the next. Saving lives, anyone’s, is a serious and necessary endeavor and no one should rate it on the same level as banking, investment and insurance sales; none of which is extolled in any of the Bibles being thumped!”

We’ve now sadly learned the horrendous cost of farming out our nation’s defense efforts, on-contract, to mercenaries. The health of our people is of equal value and should be a national requisite, not just another means for market forces to ‘make-a-buck.’

The upshot of all this should be clear enough for any normally intelligent and truly concerned citizen to understand. Prodded by devilish brats, the thoughtless, pampered- darling, usually normal American offspring has gone off-the-wall and lost all self-control; numbing embarrassed parents and shocking onlookers into stunned silence. After a thoughtful pause, a wise parental President will be calm but firm--- and a prudent Congressional family will support him, using reasonable yet necessary words and actions, to do it. When all’s said and done, it’s the only sensible way out of a situation for which there’s but one and no other logical resolution.

If we’re insightfully lucky enough for this crisis to end this way, a reasonably healthy and intelligent future generation of Americans, in a still functioning democracy, will someday read about this in their history books and may even find it, somewhat surprising.

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September 8, 2009

Where have all the Americans gone? Gone to Cell-Phones, every one….or I-Pods…or Black-berries…or text-messaging, whatever. The real point of this parody is that profiteers, control freaks and fear mongers have sold us on the disastrous division of ‘To-each-his-own.’ The one-time, world’s most “We-can-do-anything, together!” nation, that proudly stamped “E Pluribus Unum,” on its coinage, has chucked this winning belief for the mass myopathy of “All-for-one” and “Me for myself.”

The mini-minded ideologues who seek to impose a lock-step life style on all of us, fly false banners, like Fundamentalist Freedom and Family Values. They indict every cooperative effort to achieve a common goal as a subversive plot for a Socialist takeover. In their zeal to impose a real theocratic or governmental dictatorship, they deliberately ignore other socially significant signposts, like “popular,” “public;” “civic,” “community” and the all-important: “humane.”

One of the growing legion of media pundits, now trying to make sense of the destructive and misnomered debate on “Healthcare Reform,” has urged an effort to turn a Republican charge that OBama will “ration Health-Care,” into an argument for “rational Health-Care,” not realizing that the mere similarity in sound can fuel a false and baseless fear.

What a short sense of history we have. Are there none left, who can recall the stirring sound of choruses singing the New Deal’s “Marching Along Together,” in FDR’s national effort to end the depression? Or how he mobilized the nation to become “The Arsenal of Democracy,” against an Axis threat? The key to our eventual defeat of those enemies was a simple pronoun, repeated in slogan and song: “We’ve done it before and We can do it again!” Moving on, Ronald Reagan may have ordered the Berlin Wall to be taken down but it was the Marshall Plan, “We” Americans unanimously backed, that made it happen. So now, why not launch a Healthcare campaign with a unifying motto, like “FOR A FAIR SHARE IN HEALTH CARE! EVERYONE INTO THE POOL!”

The secret of any national success we’ve ever achieved has come with the remembrance that U.S. also spells “US,” which is just another way of saying “WE.” To reform any problem we now face – and there are many – our only effective approach will be in making the effort as “one nation indivisible.” We’ve done it before and we can do it again. But this time, as always, it will take all of us… together, to do it.

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September 1, 2009

The welter of falsehood and fabricated noise, generated around what was meant to have been a debate about healthcare in America, has obliterated a fact that has helped saboteurs of reform shunt the controversy even further from the goal of reformers who, though unwittingly, are also guilty of having misidentified it. President OBama and those he invested with the responsibility of waging this corrective campaign, have erred in calling it: “Healthcare Reform.” Merely applying such an identity impugns not only one of the nation’s most humane and scientifically effective callings, but those who’ve dedicated their lives and intellects, to the well-being of all the rest of us: the doctors, nurses, technicians and aides who devote endless time and expertise to preserving the lives and health of our populace. Many of them, it should be added, are still not compensated as fairly as their efforts and capabilities merit.

The correct title of this campaign and its ensuing discussion should, in fact, be “HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM,” because the extent, variety and amount of coverage; plus the settings, cost, means of providing and accounting for such coverage is actually what’s in need of reform. Once correctly identified, the subject and its details are much easier to more closely examine. But even more important, is the elimination of misunderstanding and demystifying the pernicious myths, that selfish miscreants have deliberately implanted in the public’s perception, to defeat it.

It’s also, now, time for this reform’s sponsors to face down their own qualms and quell their faint hearted appeals for fairness, from opponents who’re obviously determined to use any ruse to ensure their defeat. It’s time to expose the dishonest subversives, who roil the public temperament with false fears of government takeovers and dire predictions of death-knell dictatorship, to deprive sufferers of the very care they need, just to enlarge the ill-gotten profit of venders. Every one of these Health-Care Quislings holds an IOU chit, from some corporate component of the for-profit Health-Care related confederacy.

The worst of these are the holier-than-thou high-priests of fundamentalist religious orders and ultra-right conservative ideologies, who’ve sold their very souls to devils, who’d actually engineer human deprivation, to protect their unGodly profit margins. Finaglers like Dick Armey: disgraced and ousted former G.O.P. House Minority Leader, who’s slithered from ultra-right political panderer to pharmaceutical and corporate health-care spin-doctor-in chief, of the DLA Piper lobbying group and now, liar-in-chief of the so-called “national grass roots” movement: “FreedomWorks,” whose cabal of hypocrites riles right wingers into rebellious rages, to derail traditional Town Hall discussions; trashing truth with shout-downs in the old strike-breaker ‘scare-em-into-silence’ style. The tried and true anti-American practice of intimidation.

There’s a stark parallel one might draw between those who’d deliberately deny fellow Americans the chance to obtain affordable and necessary health-care, that might actually improve and prolong their lives, and the Taliban’s theocratic despotism, which would sooner set fire to and destroy fifteen truckloads of desperately needed food and medicine, for starving sufferers, than see infidel U.N. providers succeed with its delivery.

In this last bastion of human rights and reasonable freedom for all, are there still enough true believers, with the intelligence to know the difference and the courage to prove it? A world of wavering watchers awaits an answer that only we can give.

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August 25, 2009 EMOTIONAL RESILIENCY TRAINING…AN IDEA WHOSE TIME CAN NEVER COME

It’s been written that nothing is more dangerous than an idea, that’s the only one available. This obviously is the case for the plan hit upon by U.S. Army commanders, to train more than a million soldiers slated for exposure to combat, in emotional resiliency to head off mental health problems. The lack, not just of understanding but basic knowledge about the dilemma they’ve so summarily dealt with, once again proves the correctness of former French Premier, George Clemenceau’s observation, that decisions about war are too important, to be left to the generals. The extent of U.S. Army commanders’ ignorance about mental health matters is only emphasized by the way in which they’ve lumped problems like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide together, into a one-approach-fits-all preventive regimen. One wonders why the Brass-Hat committee (and it must have been a committee) that thought up this patent panacea, didn’t just put a contract for a three-in-one preventive inoculation out for bids, from among some of the country’s top pharmaceutical companies.

One could spend more than a little time, checking the backgrounds of those who contributed their creative energies to the final form of this 117 million-dollar program but it would shed no constructive light or change the absolute adherence to military-mode thinking, that produced this latest expensive and inoperative response, to a costly and tragic national necessity, boondoggled by the Military-Industrial complex. The answer to this continuing conundrum was pointed out by Ernest Hemingway, more than five wars ago, in his forward to “Men At War,” a collection of the greatest war stories of all time. “War is that thing,” he wrote, “which no one knows about who has not done it.” This is the inevitable clue that defeats any effort to immunize potential combatants against the ravages of soul and psyche, that participants become heirs to. There is no preventive serum or silver bullet that can endow such immunity. And handing such a hopeless chore to sergeants, already engaged in preparing soldiers for the rigors and deadly onus of combat, is not only an insult to their intelligence but a fatal and two-faced travesty.

Pure and simple, war is about pre-designed death and destruction, dealt to ultimate intractability. It’s a genie that once out of the bottle, becomes an uncontrollable force. Those who send others to participate in such horrors, not only need to know this beforehand but have an inescapable duty to inform those they expose to it, of every possible result.

As one who’s met the genie face-to-face, this commentator has learned, the only truly effective antidote is an unopened bottle.

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August 18, 2009

At a crucial point in this nation’s past political history, Susan B. Anthony spoke unerring words of wisdom. “Cautious, careful people,” she said, “out to preserve their reputations and social standing, can never bring about reform.” This country has never faced a more critical need for unqualified political reform, than now, when those who exert political influence, from the national government to the most elemental local officials, plus their patrons, struggle to maintain a status quo, geared to nothing but the retention of power. Meanwhile, the needs of people, starved for the slightest hint of attention, go unheard and ignored. The erosion of public confidence in those selected by the people, to create policies that best answer their needs and to oversee and manage necessary government activity, is graphically shown by the steady erosion of voter enrollment, in both major political parties. This is further confirmed by the growing number of voters now enrolled as independents. Even more pointed and discouraging is the dramatic increase in those who choose not to engage in any form of the electoral process.

In the face of such telling evidence, there’s a dangerous disconnect in the reactions of elected officials, to the mistrust of their obvious lack of credibility. It’s as though politicians have read this as a “we-don’t-give-a-hang” allowance, to continue their general practice of self-serving delinquency and the pursuit and holding of public office. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the public mood is one of stunned disbelief. When in our history was there ever such a protracted period of grasping greed and the-devil with regard for ethical consideration or plain-spoken truth?

Natural and inevitable questions arise: “What can we do?” “How do we do it?” and “Who will lead us? ”The great British political leader, William Gladstone, expressed his belief this way: “I will always back the masses against the classes!” Almost a century before, our own Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Alexander Hamilton, wrote: “The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” So now, as always, if sorely needed political reform is to occur, it must come from the people themselves. And who or what is to say it can’t. Sometimes, the most elusive answers are the closest to us. In the past week alone, there’ve been reports of efforts to organize independent campaigns, to challenge party-backed incumbents, in the next New York State elections.

In New York’s Capital District, a gutsy seventy-year-old independent, with the impossible-to- pronounce-or-remember name of Di Giandomenico ran and was elected to the Glenville town board. Pressured both by Democrat and Republican party leaders to choose sides, she refused. Elected with the largest plurality, she’s now been denied re-nomination and is forced to run for re-election as a write-in candidate. Undeterred, she’s doing just that. Asked to justify her courage against such impossible odds, she answers: “My only aim to run in the first place, was to speak for the people. I have faith, that now, they’ll speak up for me.”

It’s been written that charisma knows only inner determination. If ever there was a time for this democracy’s ordinary citizens to show charisma. That time is now.

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August 11, 2009

News that a former CIA Director, for George W. Bush, has publicly discredited the former President’s devoutly announced ‘world-wide anti-terror crusade,’ reminds this commentator of an earlier career in music, before politics deflected my focus. As a violist with the New York City Ballet, I was mesmerized and enlightened by the Fokine-Stravinsky opus: “Petrroushka.” It’s based on an old folk-tale, also known as ‘Punch and Judy,’ a puppet show in which a timid little hero is killed, trying to save his secret love from a villainous captor. The real villain, of course, is the puppeteer, who always sees to it, that the hero loses. The Bush ‘anti-terror’ sham is a grim reminder of how villainous puppeteers pull strings, that decide a travesty’s ultimate outcome, to make them the real winners. The CIA director’s confessional rightly exposed the “world-wide terrorism campaign,” as a deceptive ploy; to cover a multitude of sins; which is just how Bush spin-agents, with the help of the Hard-Right media, used it.

Unlike Petroushka, true terror is far from a simple folk-tale. It’s a vicious, many-headed monster, adaptable for use by villainous puppeteers, to enthrall and propel public interest to their shady ends. In the heat of the French Revolution, an ardent colleague chided Robespierre for using a distortion to arouse the people. His answer? “The people is a dumb and ugly beast!” Not much different from today’s sinful schemers who force-feed public fury, to spin the healthcare reform effort out of control. Like the microphonic loud-mouth, Rush Limbaugh, who overlays a White-House logo with his own crude ‘SWASTIKA’ drawing, to identify it as a Nazi lookalike. Obvious fakery for his ilk but others are more adept, like corporate healthcare connivers. Bent on protecting outsized profits and facilitating the acquisition of more, they’ve added a new twist, teaming up with Republican Right-Wing rejects, to subvert common courtesy and constitutional rights, inciting mass attacks on our oldest and most respected tradition: the town meeting.

Careerists who peddle political influence, have settled on a strategy of Hooliganism, to defeat the healthcare reform, that Americans were demanding just months ago. The storm troops for these un-American goon squads are Heaven-sent minions, fresh from the faith-based front, with newly minted scripts in the ‘bullying’ mode. Gone is their “Golden Rule.” The new modus is drown-out! Crash other peoples’ gatherings! Bury the right to speak under a blitz of barbarous bellows. The watchword? “Intimidate!” Give no-one a chance to speak. A great family value, for fundamentalist Christian kids to copy. In the process, they’ve profaned the selfless sacrifice of every man and woman who gave their lives, so that other Americans might enjoy our singular system, with its revered town meeting tradition, that they’ve heartlessly trashed. A crime, by-the-way, the severity of which ranges from disorderly conduct, to menacing and threatened bodily harm; all subject to fines/or imprisonment. Veterans, especially, should condemn this and demand that violators receive a full measure of punishment, especially those who travel to other states, specifically to inhibit the lawful rights of local residents.

Adolf Hitler boasted that ‘terror’ was the one means of his easiest victory over reason. Those who truly love this democracy must never allow such a victory to occur here.

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August 4, 2009

Imagination is as old as humanity itself but the most dangerous kinds of imaginings are what Joseph Campbell described as: “…those that blister sleep, boil up from the basic magic ring of myth.” There’s a political myth that for too long has roiled the ability of Americans, to think through adversity and bring logic to bear on practical yet necessary solutions. The same manipulative miscreants who created the myth that sent Americans to war and unnecessary death in the wrong country and squandered, not just precious lives but valuable resources, in the trillions, right now are spending millions of under-the-table dollars, to sell a myth, that any program or undertaking with a government stamp on it is not only incapable of efficiency but a dictatorial step in the direction of organized despotism. These are the hot-shot pitch men, mind-you, who hyped the brand of “Free-Market Capitalism” that put us in the financial melt-down and economic quagmire that threatens our entire nation now, with an endless era of wrack and ruin. The sorry truth is that the lack of a single logical plan, obviously required regulation and constant, unpoliticized supervision is the only means we have of ensuring that such chaos and economic degradation won’t happen again.

Those who spawned this mess are selling the myth, that a government run program of health-care is a sure-fire bet to the imposition of second-rate care for all, whether they want it or not and even an imposed lottery, that decides who dies and when. They’ve cooked up a piece of pure fiction, in the hope that John and Jane American will be spooked enough, to let the same villains who’ve already hooked them on over-valued investments, unpayable mortgages and over-priced pharmaceuticals, to also hook them on expensive, unworkable healthcare plans, that profit from the suffering of millions and bleed them in the name of free-choice.

What’s mind blowing about all this is the plain fact, that senior citizens, veterans and the political agents who’re selling this unsavory fictional claptrap against government-run programs are now, themselves satisfied beneficiaries of the very plans they rail against. Try to change these and see how loudly they’d squawk. The solution to this ‘witches’ brew’ is really very simple. Americans, right now, should be bombarding their congressional reps and senators, demanding the same health-care programs their tax dollars are paying for, with the further demand that any elected official voting against such a solution should immediately relinquish their own or give up their elected status.

American voters and tax-payers who accept the hyped hogwash, now being peddled by the “Free market’s” rampant renegade raiders, without screaming bloody murder about it, will have no one to blame but themselves when this battle to enact a national healthcare plan is over and the Free Market’s free loaders chalk up another big win, for the ‘deep pocket’ brigade, over America’s own, the suck-it-up-and-suffer patriots who can always be counted on to flinch, in the name of freedom, when Big Money’s chips are down.

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July 28, 2009

If nothing else, the recent flap over the mistaken identity of Harvard Professor, Henry Louis Gates, his subsequent arrest and the ensuing explosion of these events into an uproar that literally provoked Presidential intervention, is powerful proof of the prevalence and depth of race prejudice in these misomered “United” States. Ours is truly a nation afflicted with a virulent and destructive social sickness. Call it what you will, White Supremacy, racial intolerance or plain old Xenophobia, it seeps from every geographic pore and social stratum of this self-advertised ‘democratic’ (small-d) republic. While there is some evidence of a possible willingness to eliminate this affliction from our culture, efforts are too fleeting and far between to make an effective and enduring difference. One of the most significant reasons for this is the widespread existence of a patina of national denial.

Intolerance of the so-called ‘other’ has been bred in the human race, almost from its beginnings. We’ve also nourished and strengthened this through its use as a vehicle to organize and inspire continuing efforts at survival and conquest. Nothing impels humans to cohere for a common purpose more effectively than fear and hatred. Nothing also seems to equal the appeal of these, to connivers, in constant search of the means to advance their own self-serving ends. What makes such social ills even more formidable to treat is the difficulty in persuading those who’re infected to accept a diagnosis.

Former New York Knicks basketball star, Bill Bradley, who then became a United States Senator from New Jersey, made the problem of solving race relations a key issue of his campaign for the United States Presidency, only to have his contention rebuffed, that allowing the problem to fester, unresolved, would precipitate an eventual disaster of insurmountable proportions for the nation. His argument earned him the disaster of a primary defeat. Combustible innuendo and fabrication also fuel additional animosity, especially in the hands of paladins, whose only aim is to goad hostility to boiling points.

It’s neither this commentator’s contention nor his intent, to drape our entire national community in an all-inclusive net of guilt, on the charge of race prejudice. But the sadly inescapable truth is that it exists in various actions, degrees, geographic locations and in some injurious form, everywhere. Professionals with the most experience and successful records of combating addiction tell us, the first and most important step is acceptance and admission, that one is addicted to a harmful and habitual condition. If each of us were to search his or her conscience and agree to such a single honest admission, we just might make a successful and encouraging beginning, in the absolutely critical and necessary effort, to get this virulent monkey off America’s back.

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July 21, 2009

In 1945 the great anthropologist, Franz Boas, stated a view he’d spent a lifetime propounding, that the behavior of an individual is determined not by his or her racial affiliation but by the character of their ancestry and cultural environment. Sixty-four years later, a few bigoted, dim-witted, dyed-in-the-wool, white-supremicist ignoramuses are still blindly, not only taking issue with his premise but using privileged political positions, to try and make an entire nation accept their invalid prejudice as gospel. At least, that’s the way a handful of biased senators made it seem, as they hammered away at Judge Sonya Sotomyor; not about her judicial record throughout years of experience in jurisprudence, from prosecutor to Federal Appeals Court Justice, but in attempts to make her eat words in a single phrase she uttered, during a speech to young college students aspiring to enter the legal field. The sentence for which they attacked her was a fairly accurate paraphrase of the great anthropologist’s assertion. Proof of its accuracy, by the way, was produced by her attackers, themselves, who – when the chips were down – reverted to their own, despicably narrow and self-serving partisan natures.

Make no mistake, this wasn’t merely some face-saving oratory, to divert an attentive public from an impressive record of accomplishment, by a determined child of immigrant, under-class parents. It was a calculated ploy to reassert a false premise, that self-serving Caucasian hucksters have used, since their forerunners imposed a bogus myth of master-race supremacy on hapless captives, they first condemned to sub-human status, with word and whip. Prejudice has been an odious blot on America’s otherwise worthy effort to create a truly democratic republic, since its inception. It’s been imposed by selfish and falsely arrogant White males on Amerinds, Blacks, Asians, Irish, Jews, Latinos and women of all ethnicities, since the first settlers realized, there was more to be gained here, than freedom.

These self-styled defenders of the so-called American heritage cloak their duplicity in the linguistic legacy of a sacrosanct (their word) constitution. But even its authors understood this wasn’t entirely possible, given the additional impact of time and experience. That’s precisely why our Constitution contains the means for review and expansion. If it didn’t, persons of color would still have the inhuman status of being mere property and women would not only lack the right to vote but the right to own anything.

As for immigrants, our plainest spoken and perhaps most incisive philosopher, Will Rogers, observed that Americans are like bus riders, who can’t understand why all the standees in the aisle grumble, when they’re asked to make room for new passengers who squeeze in. Yet, at the very next stop, when someone else enters, the last entries are the first and loudest complainers. Neither color nor origin guarantees special privilege in this democracy, nor should they. But intent and character deserve respect.

The carping contingent of White-dominant Senate die-hards is the same clique of nay-sayers, who also oppose the public-option part of President OBama’s’s Healthcare Reform plan for the populace but see nothing wrong in accepting a similar benefit for themselves. Now, this vanishing breed of superior White masculine pre-eminence and privilege has good reason to be distressed. On their own turf, they’ve been duly tried by a Latina lady jurist… and found wanting, on all counts.

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July 14, 2009

The great liberal author and social critic, Charles Eliot Norton wrote, that when clamor by the press and pulpit bids everyone to fall in and obey the word of command, then, more than ever, it’s the duty of the good citizen not to be silent. This commentator was recently roundly criticized, by some media and political pundits, when he took issue with a call by certain public figures, for a constitutional convention, to force procedural reforms on legislative leaders of both political parties, whose gridlocked efforts to outmaneuver each other for control of the state’s legislative apparatus is creating havoc for institutional budgets and the livelihoods of thousands of New York State citizens. The big surprise, here, more than this dissenting voice, is the proof of how little is understood by so many, about the workings of the political process, in New York State. Also, the fleeting political memory of the electorate.

Was it just less than a year ago, that millions of aroused voters were shouting “YES WE CAN!” at OBama campaign rallies and sporting buttons and bumper stickers that demanded: “CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!”? Well, slogans and public demands are provocative but as Tom Paine once reminded us, there are times when talking the talk’s not enough and only walking the walk will do. Change rarely happens of itself and almost never, in politics. In politics, change is the product of an aroused electorate.

The straight truth is, that too many of the movers and shakers who created the current problems now bedeviling us are still either calling the shots or influencing them. Whatever the governing game, it really won’t change unless there are new teams of players, willing to consider fresh ideas and new approaches and above all, players untainted by persistent pay-offs, that place their own personal careers ahead of the public good. Change is the direct political effect of voter involvement.

A constitutional convention that ensures faster and better responses to New Yorkers’ needs can only succeed, if it’s crafted and driven by public citizens with no personal axes to grind. A document produced by the same political crowd will only extend the tenure of those who got us into the muck we’re mired in. The onus is now on each of us, not only to speak up but to listen, question, discuss and above all, get involved; find a viable path and pursue it. If you’re among those listening, this means you.

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July 7, 2009

It’s time more Americans learned the hard truth, about how our unique but complex form of government really works, before what they don’t know can rudely deprive them of it. The current corruption and chaos, at both national and state government levels, is stark proof of how little the average person comprehends and many even care. With this in mind, one is impelled at least to try and bring citizens to their senses, about this rare mechanism, with its often cited three equal branches of government which, at present, seem not only dangerously unequal but precariously poised on the edge of catastrophe.

The keystone of our democracy was set by founders, strongly against placing utmost power in the hands of a single sovereign. Their solution was a federally elected executive, with a bi-cameral legislature, its lower house, from local districts across each state and an upper one, with two senators from every state. All are guided and constrained by a set of rules, called a Constitution, with a special panel of judges to interpret them. But no matter how or by whom they’re read, one fact is clear: The Congress holds the power of the purse and much permission, as to what the President can or can’t do or decide. That’s where most of our problems have begun and continue.

A case in point: Several times in our history, banks have become reckless in pursuit of profit, at the expense of depositors and investors and when unchecked greed has led to inevitable failure, it’s fallen to taxpayers to bail the banks out. Twice before, Presidents have promised ironclad oversight and regulation, to prevent recurrences. The problem was that Presidents can only propose solutions. Putting them in place is a legislative job and key senators (especially good senatorial friends of bankers) have made sure that rules were favorably bank slanted. These shenanigans have begotten us what anyone with an ounce of common sense could plainly predict: more of the same bind and burden.

Now it’s happened again, on a scale close to the Nineteen-Thirties crash, that triggered our greatest ‘Depression’. President, OBama, has grasped the near-disastrous scope of this calamity, born of pure greed and the reckless unrestraint of financial custodians, who knew better but cared less. Once again, it’s the onerous fate of innocent taxpayers to cover the cost of the financial community’s irresponsibility. A sense of history and his own honest intent have led this President to propose tough rules, to regulate and oversee the rebuilding of a national bank structure, based on sound practice and openness. The banking clique has answered with millions (of the bucks we lent them), for congressional lobbyists to parcel out. Veteran Congress-watchers have already gleaned hints of watered-down double-talk in legislative language, to weaken the OBama proposal. Legislators are banking on a bewildered public, to buy another fiduciary flim-flam, they can always blame on a hapless President. This swindle can be stopped at its start, with a promised pay-back, in the next congressional election, for every pol who helped to scuttle it. Savvy voters should take a crucial moment or two, to warn their congressional rep and senator. Generations of Americans yet unborn will thank them for it.

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June 30, 2009

Believe it or not, there was a time in this democracy when even business activity had some basic principles that meant more than the mere words that expressed them. One of the most potent was conveyed by the capital letters “C.O.D.” For those engaged in obtaining the requisites of life, in this promising but provocative land, they sent a clear message, that payment – whether monetary, muscular or moral – was expected in immediate exchange for goods or services delivered. Despite its ominous intent, though, the rule did have a measure of elasticity, born of benevolence that characterized most of its adherents. But here, too, charity was inspired by intent, that honest example verified.

For most, an I.O.U was an ironclad promise to pay, to which a debtor was morally bound.

Somewhere along the way, in the rush to exploit wealth that some saw as quick and easy pickings, exploiters and their willing political patsies have devised the nefarious scheme of “purchase now, pay later;” redefining C.O.D. to mean: “CONSEQUENCE OBLIQUELY DEFERRED” and it’s become a tragic national calculus. For politicians it represents a formula, applied not only to legislative laissez faire but to ethical inertia. In the American political lexicon, it means: “Promise anything; deliver with approximate exactness and only when all other evasive maneuvers fail.”

For American entrepreneurs, credit has become the means of subjugating an entire population. Our people’s insatiable appetite for things, materials and devices to lessen the expenditure of energy and sap independent thought and action, has enticed them to trade away the very essence of what their founders sacrificed their fortunes for and risked their very lives to obtain: freedom of thought, expression and most of all the exercise of free will. The most exorbitant cost of this has been the loss of responsibility for independent and decisive action .in our own behalf.

The addictive modus of purchase now, pay later is a mindset for our certain demise, as a coalition of individuals, capable of obtaining mutual prosperity and well-being, despite a myriad of differing viewpoints and motivations. The key to this amalgam is an honest effort at fairness, born of comprehension. But alas, all this has been drowned out by the incessant noise of our own voices, prattling nonsense to each other on thousands of devices, for which final payment never comes. Let’s face it, we’re a society, indentured to our own enslavement. Meanwhile, those who helped engineer this madness collect and live on what we pay them, for the despicable privilege, promising to earn it at some vague future date, that never comes. The saddest sum of this nonsense is contained in the locked box of our social security, from which our own agents have been stealing, for years, with impunity and the snarled disorder of a government, devised to do our bidding but too impeded by battles for the selfish aims of contenders, that we ourselves installed.

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June 23, 2009

One has to be amazed at the extent to which laws have suddenly become a most emphasized subject, in our own country and others. We call ourselves a nation of laws, ignoring that laws are crafted and applied by humans, the same humans who, since their own beginnings, have been susceptible, both to error and evil. These failings have allowed some of our most venerated institutions to become laws unto themselves. Add to this the hypnotic equation of time plus unquestioned repetition and you have a perfect formula for the destruction of democracy.

Perhaps the most noticeable example of this is the subversion and virtual monopoly of speech. The oxymoronic principle of ‘free speech,’ became an accepted norm at a time when street corners and public meeting halls were recognized places for the free expression and exchange of opinions and ideas. But time, technology and greed have turned the ordinary practice of speaking out into an outmoded relic. In this entrepreneurial society, speech and its public projection has become not a right but a commodity. The sad truth is that the means of speaking out, money, is both a product and a symbol of callous inequity.

As a result, a single despotic individual, with sufficient wherewithal, can easily re-invent himself as an ideological confederation. The magic of money can multiply an autocratic ego into a faceless, pretentious assemblage, like the one called “Responsible New York.” An unconscionable contradiction bought with cold cash. On an even more audacious and dangerous level, a single autocrat like Rupert Murdock, with limitless cash, can corral a media monopoly and virtually dampen public expression into silence.

The most tragic consequence of the ménage-a-trois made by talk, technology and transgression is its institutionalized autocracy; a status that has intimidated and silenced the very means of its deterrence. Our courts have given it constitutional Carte-Blanche.

The Congress and even state legislatures have seized on the concept, to recast their institutional structures as ‘laws unto themselves.’ But there may yet be a solution to this devastating dilemma. Tradition has fixated us on the concept of institutional democracy as a three-legged stool, each leg of equal proportion. Those who propounded this view may have overlooked an obvious remedy, a fourth leg: the people, supported – as Lincoln observed – by their revolutionary right to effect necessary change and in this case, technology, itself, may have provided an answer. Call it what you will, when what started as a twitter becomes a thunderous shout, Vox Populi may once again become democracy’s dominant, determinant and most welcome sound.

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June 16, 2009

Flecked with flaws though they may have been, our founders owned wisdom that more than any other, still provides our most reliable guideposts. One maxim inherited from Demosthenes and valued by Madison, Franklin and Jefferson would now seem more priceless than ever. “In a democracy, the best safeguard against despots is distrust.”

If there’s one word to define the political mess in which New York State government has now become embroiled, it‘s ‘despotism.’ Approached from any viewpoint, it still comes down to this. A self-impelled and self-aggrandized collusion of, at most, four individuals has conspired to impose their lust for power and a sinister agenda for achieving it, on the population of an entire state.

Here are some questions, one would hope, that any Judge ruling on the outcome of this imbroglio and New York State’s Attorney General would have considered germane:

Since when, does a single individual (with no appointed or elected standing, whatsoever) have the right to approach an office-holder or group of them, with a promise of money, in exchange for their adherence to his political or ideological dictates? This is exactly what Thomas Golisano publicly boasted he did, a boast captured by TV and news media and witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers. Whatever happened to the statutes on bribery, involving elected or appointed officials?

When does the gripe of a legislator, over the amount of funds allocated for his personal distribution and his threat to retaliate, if they’re not increased, become blackmail? This is exactly what two Democrat State Senate members allegedly did – before witnesses – and then proceeded to act upon. If their actions add up to participation in a coup, to reorganize an entire house of the New York State Legislature (in this case, the Senate), is the opposing party’s leader of the secretly planned coup guilty of conspiracy?

Almost twenty-five years ago, this commentator (as then Executive Director of New York State Common Cause) proposed to leaders of both State Legislative houses, the abolition of non-budgeted awards to members for personally decided-on uses, in their districts. The awards were widely viewed as “re”-wards, doled out to members, on the basis of loyalty to leaders and party. When members protested, that these were really in response to critical needs within their districts, this commentator then proposed public hearings, with agreed upon criteria of need, where projects and levels of necessity could be aired and decided upon. This proposal was unanimously ignored.

In recent statements, legislative leaders of both parties have used the word “reform” to describe their actions. It’s a word also used by some of history’s most notorious despots, as they imposed dictatorial regimes on thousands, without public discussion or acceptance. There’s another word one might paraphrase here, it’s “shame.” As W.H. Auden used it in The Sheld of Achilles: “Their shame is all the worst could wish.”

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June 9, 2009

Two prized trophies grace the wall above this commentator’s desk. They’re copies of bills signed into law by then Governor Mario Cuomo, in 1987. Both deal with State Government Ethics, one reordering the process of awarding contracts to companies and individuals, who provide goods and services to New York State. The other spells out standards of ethical conduct for State officials and those who lobby and seek to influence their actions. As then Executive Director of New York State Common Cause, this commentator worked with the Governor’s counsel, helping to draft and achieve their passage. At the time of their enactment they were cited as the first evidence of ethics reform in New York State, in more than twenty years. Another advancement came on the heels of these successes: the creation of a so-called State Ethics Commission.

So how much reform did these significant changes really produce? A quick scan of the stories that have dominated news of New York State Government’s meanderings, in the wilderness of political non-accomplishment, over the past twenty-two years, etches a stark, sad answer: none. What New York’s political movers and shakers have accomplished, though, is to implant a deep and abiding belief, that whatever the need or circumstance, regardless of whatever party or person holds a leadership position, the only outcome of which New York’s voters and taxpayers can be certain, is one that benefits those responsible for our governance and the management of our resources.

The time is long past, for us to realize, that with few exceptions, those we invested with the duty to maintain the good and welfare of New York State’s population and its assets are interested in only one good and welfare: their own. There’s a logical reason for this. Ours has long ago ceased to be a government of, for and by the people. It’s become a mechanism for the political advancement of opportunists, in search of ladders to increasingly higher levels of wealth and power, where the only requisites for success are paying lip service to a behavioral code considered passe’ and obedience to the self-serving code that’s superseded it. Those who’re veterans at this game daily prove, that they are deaf to all public pleas for open, honest and responsible governmental action, to solve the problems that affect the lives of their constituents and enhance opportunities for improving them. Instead, they bend every effort and use every stratagem, to ensure their own dominance and tenure. And they do this without embarrassment or apology. They do it, because they know they can get away with it and that’s because we’ve assured them, they can. They’ll continue to do it, until we absolutely prove to them, they can’t.

The poet Tennyson spoke of a still, small voice that said: “Thou art so full of misery. Were it not better, not to be?” It’s time all New Yorkers, regardless of their party or position, heard that still small voice and responded with the only acceptable answer.

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June 2, 2009

Thanks to the honest enterprise of a few committed documentarians and the courageous perseverance of journalists, like Bill Moyers, who still consider the public’s right to know a sacred trust, many Americans now have seen pictorial proof of the lengths to which the callous cabal of the so-called Bush-Cheney Presidency was willing to go, to achieve politically motivated but still, unconstitutionally illicit ends. As a result, despite the disguised diversions of ‘hard-right’ conservatives, shamming concern over President OBama’s appointment of a bullying, activist, Hispanic, female jurist (their words) to the nation’s highest court, something rotten in the Bush-Cheney legacy reeks to high heaven.

Rush Limbaugh, a caricature of chauvinism-run-amok is suddenly distressed, no-end, by an offhand and vague analogy, used in conversational context by the now Appeals Court Judge. Former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, himself fined and unseated for ethics violations, questions whether Sotomayor would be capable of applying equanimity to questions that come before the High Court. And lastly, former Vice-President Cheney, who’s praised the use of unmitigated torture on unproved but accused suspects of anti-American intrigue, defends placing an American President above and outside any proscribed restrictions that current law imposes. And this observer repeatedly raises the question: why should any of this matter to Americans who, without an eye-blink of hesitancy, have nullified American justice of the highest order, like that of the Nuremburgh Tribunal, after World War II, that brought former Nazi-German leaders to trial, to answer for their heinous injustices and patent inhumanities?

To his credit, current President, OBama is making a good-faith effort to move us back toward a reasonable and honorable juristic process, as envisioned by our founders and spelled out in our Constitution. He’s also, alas, expressed an unwillingness to deter progress with charges of debilitating recrimination. But the trial we face is now deeper and more crucial than this. We must answer the honestly asked question, whether or not ours is truly a nation in which all citizens respect its professed laws, regardless of their positions or prosperity. It’s a doubt previous leaders’ questionable actions have raised.

Condemning Nazi offenders at the Nuremberg Trials, after World War II, then Prosecutor and later Supreme Court Justice, Robert H. Jackson noted: that while the law was being applied against German aggressors, to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any nation, including those who sat in judgment, at the time. Not only the vile and inhumane acts ordered by the Bush-Cheney command and committed by its underlings and agents but the deliberate perversion of constitutional restraints, by its legal staff must be adjudicated by an authorized body and those proved guilty, must be judged and penalized. Not to do so would certify that the deaths of every Allied military service person, plus all the innocent victims of World War II were just vain, hypocritical and meaningless gestures. More important, it would ensure the exposure, from then on, of every captured American, to equally inhumane treatment or worse.

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May 26, 2009

It’s encouraging to note, the growing number of media reporters and commentators who were moved to criticize the selfishness and rank materialism, both of entrepreneurs and American consumers, immersed in the pursuit of profit and pure pleasure, over the just-past holiday weekend of Memorial Day. It’s high time, someone reminded the great mass of ‘me-first’ materialists in this country, that the thousands of dead we honor ostensibly gave their lives, so that millions of their fellow-citizens – whose names they never even knew – would be able to pursue their dreams and hearts’ desire, in peace and freedom. One or two days of serious contemplation, a year, shouldn’t be too much to ask, in return. That so many apparently believe it is, ought to be a matter of shame and great embarrassment for the nation, as a whole. But alas, some of the very creators of our mass advertising messages are the same loud-mouth patriotic publicists, who promote all-those “GOD BLESS AMERICA” AND “WE’RE NUMBER ONE!”slogans, that Americans love to affix to their gas-guzzling vehicles.

We hope our thought was wrong, that a less than appreciable number of self-stroking American egos were convinced, at least for a few moments, to dwell on that great sacrifice but we doubt it. Meanwhile, examples by which Americans convince both foreign friends and foes of our smug insincerity, have grown hugely over the past several days, impelled by the penchant of an overwhelming number of members, in the U.S. Congress, who personify the 21st Century equivalent of “The Ugly American.” The ‘NIMBY’s’ and ‘AMERICA FIRST’ Quislings, who – like some before ‘Pearl Harbor,’ – believed we should do business with Adolf Hitler and sell-out the defenders of democracy. Some may think this too harsh a censure but there’s more than enough reason for it.

How else could one describe the gutless cowardice of craven Congressionals who denied support to an outstanding and courageous leader, for his promised effort to shut-down a lingering symbol of brutal and illegal tyranny – at Guantanamo. Instead, like scared rabbits, they turned tail and ran, at the first hint of danger, concocted by some unprincipled Republicans. Almost the entire Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate, went scurrying to hide in a caucus closet, under the guise of protecting their constituents. In the process, they insulted the professionalism and dedication of American military and police forces, who’ve time-and-again proved capable custodians of prisoners incarcerated in the United States. Remember that tired bromide: “SUPPORT THE TROOPS!” ? What it really meant was: “We support sending our young people anywhere else, to fight and die for our benefit… except in our own backyards.”

Unlike recent leaders, who approved torture to reveal predicted dangers; most of which were products of their own concoction, this President is asking the nation to support the lawful and dedicated defense efforts of its most capable military and police professionals. That members of the U.S. Congress would withhold such help, is tragic and treasonous.

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May 19, 2009

Throughout this commentator’s childhood, his mother’s favorite admonition was delivered after any exchange with an antagonistic schoolmate, who launched uncomplimentary critiques about his ethnicity, or having to wear glasses and / or the inescapable burden of the violin case he daily carried to and from school; an instrument that (in some eyes) unalterably branded one a sissy, a classification all-too-often resisted with fisticuffs. As she applied a wet cloth to bruises or occasional mercurochrome to a scrape, my mother would intone this counsel: “Just remember, sticks and stones can break your bones but names will never hurt you.”

It was useless advice for one so young who, more than anything else, wanted the respect of peers. The phrase now returns to memory, as one watches the spiteful political disparagement play back-and-forth, between antagonists who should know better and many, who do but are too engrossed in the one-upmanship game, to admit it or desist.

Long before Madison avenue became the New York City home, for hucksters who made disparagement a lucrative business, political pundits made negative labeling a popular American sport, especially at campaign times. And the advent of high-tech devices, for speedier and wider dissemination, has only egged the technique to more expansive and inveterate use. What’s of most interest, now, is the way in which the same insults can be fitted, to buttress arguments on opposite sides of almost any political argument.

This observer wonders at the ease with which Congressional propagandists, against single-payer health-care plans, pin ‘socialist’ or even worse labels, on anything that remotely resembles one but blithely ignore the fact, that ‘single-payer’ is exactly the kind of health-care program, in which they, themselves are enrolled… and at our expense.

One is also amazed at the disparagement that banker-money lenders and insurance investors have heaped on government attempts to regulate or even aerate their dealings, equating this with dictatorship. They’re perfectly willing to accept financial hand-outs with no strings attached but they label any aid for working class people, another sure step in the direction of a communist welfare-state..

Progressives and super-patriot conservatives can argue ad infinitum, about mottos like “one nation under God.” And “E Pluribus Unum.” The plain truth is, any wording’s a lie, as long as there are two Americas and from where this observer sits, there won’t be just one, until all Americans have an equal shot at the good life, that that other America has been offering too much of, to a few of its citizens and not enough of, to too many.

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May 12, 2009

As the OBama administration leaves the shelter of a one-hundred-day honeymoon, that provided little of the hoped-for tranquility and accord, expected in such periods, the President and his people now face a storm-tossed sea of Republican rip-tides and worrisome cross-currents, created by dogmatic differences within his own party’s far-from-solid ranks. It’s only natural there’s a growing wave, both of self-serving and serviceable ideas, pitched at the President and his paladins, by every proponent of national or vested interest. This commentator, too, offers one for serious consideration.

Every important idea for recessional recovery seems to be preceded by an appropriate acronym, as is this one. Its initiator has chosen to label it “NANPRAT”: The ‘National Newspaper Revitalization And Training’ Project. Now, before you respond with a hail of hilarious hoots and demeaning derision, think about this, for a minute. It’s been seventy years, since a thoughtlessly generous U.S. Congress handed the nation’s publicly owned airway rights to a conglomerate of commercial venture capitalists, who’ve – ever since – pursued ways to make the original owners pay, just to retrieve entertainment they were told they’d get for free. The Congress – to give them their due – wasn’t entirely conscienceless. They did officially require the profiteers to allocate specific time and effort, to provide not only non-controlled or politically neutral news and information but also a modicum of cultural applications and art-forms. These, from the outset, received minimal attention, which now seems to have been further reduced to the merest fraction.

More dangerously, though, profit pursuers have now manipulated practically all requisite news-reporting into profit-generated program features. Combine these with computer linked involvement; multiply that by countless cable outlets, also expedited by the Congress, and you have the makings of an almost insuperable formula for pure profit, plus control of news dissemination. In launching his national effort to salvage the nation’s banks, President OBama noted, they’re essential to the national economy. With respect to the country’s newspapers, they’re actually essential to the continued existence of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson put it even more strongly. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he wrote, I shouldn’t hesitate to prefer the latter.” A concurring opinion of the United States Supreme Court, in the Pentagon Papers case, stated: “In revealing the workings of government, that led to the Viet Nam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely what the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.”

Shills for the corporate conglomerate tell us, if the nation’s newspapers disappear, they’ll just be replaced by something better. Thus far, their proof says little about knowledge or understanding. As for TV news, it’s now just an ad-scattered interruption, in hours of boring blather, aimed at the national intellect’s lowest common denominator. A plan to keep newspapers reporting real news, while helping to train others who’ll keep real Journalism alive and kicking, would be worth every taxpayer dollar we can spare.

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May 5, 2009

If ever proof was needed, of the disastrous consequence of combining the financial ventures of government with Wall Street or using the investment community as a basis for Social Security or any other government-run system, the near-calamitous outcome of the Obama administration’s most recent effort, to save the foundering Chrysler automotive conglomerate from disintegration, should provide that proof in spades.

Dyed-in-the-wool disciples of the dogma, that wearers of the corporate community’s old- school-tie are still the best navigators for our Ship-of-State, need to wake up to the devastating reality, that times and this place have changed. The once standard presumption, that stock value reflects a company’s stability and the prognosis of its continuing pursuit of profit is now an impossible dream. That’s because fast-buck chasers and con-artist connivers have turned America’s time-honored avenue of investment institutions into a back-alley haunt for cut-throat crap games. These are games driven by side-bettors, who care nothing about a company but the up or down movement of its stock. They look to make money from failures they can either predict or facilitate. The hedge-fund hawks who put the kibosh on the good-faith effort of President OBama and those trying to help him save Chrysler, its thousands of workers and related small business providers and their employees, could care less about this country’s economy, the well-being of its citizens or the fate of their progeny. This is the ilk to whom the Bush-Cheney cabal were going to outsource our national retirement system.

Now, self-made prognosticators and media shills for the out-of-power party use thirty-second sound bytes, to tell us how badly our new President missed the mark, in his first one hundred days of trying to undo an eight-year mess, calamitously concocted by others. One good sign of our new Commander-in Chief’s candor, is the lack of illusion in his rhetoric. He’s told us in advance about the hard road ahead, with no guarantees of quick or easy fixes.

There’s a way all of us can help to keep the national recovery effort on track and moving ahead. We can choose not to buy into the Doomsday prognoses and “Won’t Work!” prophesies of the Far-Right’s sour grapes groupies. Like the hedge-fund finaglers, they also seek to profit, from someone else’s good-faith failure. For unyielding nay-sayers of this ilk, the best answer is: “Put up or shut up!” Meanwhile, we should all try, in whatever ways we can, to lend the nation’s recovery a willing hand. President OBama has harked back to our proud past, urging us, in the words of a Depression-era pop tune, to “Pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.” This Depression-era and World War II survivor remembers another pop tune lyric. It, too, lifted the spirits of Americans in dark times. “We’ve done it before and we can do it again!” the song promised. There’s no doubt we can do it, this time, too. But only our President and (alas) a capricious Congress can assure us, that this time will be the last.

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April 28, 2009

There’s an eerie and disturbing disconnect, between statements and status reports on this country’s continuing economic crisis and responses to it, by government officials and the public, in general. It’s as though everyone’s fixated on the worsening succession of financial debacles and the seeming inability of conventional agents and agencies to arrest or reverse them. What’s noticeably missing from this scenario is any display of public angst or anger, at the seeming inability or unwillingness of all concerned to take obvious steps required, to prevent such calamities from being repeated. The most evident of these is the failure to repeal the often referred to, Glass-Spiegel Act. It’s the vaunted firewall that for so long, kept collusive manipulators of fiscal mischief from roaming, at will, into areas where their collective sleight-of-hand could commit multiple fiscal damage, without immediate detection or restraint. Even our new President, despite the laudable actions he’s launched and successfully sold the Congress on enacting, has somehow seemed reluctant to push them toward such an explicit deterrent.

Here are some interesting and contradictory pieces to this puzzle. Those making the loudest objections, now, to government obtrusion into the dispensing of funds to alleviate the current fiscal mess are members of the political party that, for most of the last decade, worked the hardest to remove all government restraint and oversight from the marketing actions of banks, insurers and investment firms. This, though, still leaves unanswered, the riddle of why Democrats (now in the majority) still seem reluctant to take implicit action, that would not only reveal wrongdoing but mete out specific punishment to those involved in it. Could it be some of them are worried about public knowledge of their own prior involvements? A nagging question that still awaits an answer.

But what about the rest of us, the millions of ordinary folks struggling to meet payments of mortgage and medical bills, plus the levies of local, state and federal taxes that keep our duly elected representatives (at all levels) doing what they claim to be doing in our behalf? Why aren’t we more adamantly demanding to know, all there is to know about who’s getting what we provide and under what circumstances/ Why aren’t we demanding explicit penalties for those who play fast and loose with funds extracted from us? This is one struggling taxpayer who’d like to know more. If there are others who feel the same, why aren’t you saying so to those with the power to do something about it?

There’s never been a time in our history, when knowing less could hurt us more.

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April 21, 2009

If nothing else, the motley mélange of well-meaning and misled Tea-bag remonstrators, who were moved to punish our new and earnestly engaged President for his predecessor’s eight-year stint of sins, with an embarrassing re-play of the original revolt against British tyranny, proved old P.T. Barnum’s take, on suckers, was bulls-eye sharp. But in allowing the same split-tongued truth twisters, who sold us the Bush-Cheney plan for pseudo-patriotic profit mongering, to deflect national anger from its rational recipients, the enraged electorate overlooked an even more significant truth. Any plan, whether well-meant or fault-riddled, remains just that, until a sufficient number of congressional conceders decide to act on it. Even now, as they simulate a body bent on buttressing President O’Bama’s pledge, to reform Washington’s pay-to-play shenanigans, our national legislature consistently proves, it’s really a toothless tiger, strong on rhetoric but always a bit short on the votes needed, to take determined steps toward corrective action.

This lag lives on, even in the face of mushrooming threats, like mass murder. There’s telling evidence of it in the area of gun control. The most recent reports of every agency with a vested interest in reducing violence in the United States show dramatic increases in the type and number of weapons, that flow through this country, to neighboring ones. There’s also an alarming rise in the number and intensity of violent acts, that account for the wounding and deaths of growing numbers of citizens in North, Central and South America, by criminal elements using guns that shouldn’t be available to them but are. In Mexico, police and military forces find themselves outgunned by hirelings of narcotics bosses, who compete for marketing dominance, using deadly force with impunity.

This is no longer a knotty question of whether the private ownership of firearms should be banned but an uncomplicated and critical one: to ban the sale of armaments like the deadly a k 47 to dealers and owners whose only reason to sell or purchase them is clearly for their use against others, in illegal and violent attacks. Here, the plain truth is, that the United States Congress can’t muster the necessary votes to keep such deadly weapons from killing and maiming innocent victims in ever increasing numbers. Our elected representatives in both houses can speechify ad infinitum, for and against stem cell research, abortion, child abuse, drugs, famine and a myriad of perceived evils, that threaten the lives and well-being of children and others but they lack the courage and will, to take a firm and unified stand against the deadliest deliverers of violence, to our communities and those of our international trading partners.

The windiest congressional orators love to use the metaphor against gaining political advantage on the backs of those, who lack the means to defend themselves. Notwithstanding, until sufficient members of Congress are willing to enact a ban on the sale and transport of deadly weapons, clearly designed for use against other humans, they’re as guilty of assaults that kill innocent victims, as those who carry them out.

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April 14, 2009

A recent Poll Question on the WAMC Roundtable program asked for listener responses to the query: “Is classical music dead, in America? It’s not the first time this question’s been asked or that the premise has been raised by skeptics, who’re mostly motivated by the more blatant sounds that crass commercialism uses, to muffle and degrade the public’s power to discriminate between what’s more beneficial and desirable for them, than for those who profit from the sale of the second-rate and sub-standard. Just as Americans have had to decide that a government for the people is more desirable than a self-serving one, it’s now also time for them to decide, that a citizenry inspired to make the most of their capabilities and intellects is far better for everyone, than a populace willing to settle for mediocrity at best and dumb-dereliction as an average.

A quick reassurance, here, for conclusion jumpers who may see this as an attack on any form or style identified as music, outside the strictly classical mode. The late, great Jazz icon and rare humanitarian, Louie Armstrong, put all such narrow nonsense to rest, with a simple truth: “There are only two kinds of music,” he said, “good and bad.” This commentator’s criticism is not so much about a kind of music, as it is about excellence and the passion to achieve it. What we’ve discarded, in our haste to acquire the aura and accoutrements of self-importance, is the sweet sound of self-expression, in any form.

We’ve traded away our unique propensity for superior achievement, for the trappings and unreal appearance of superiority. What advertises our artificial importance, now, are the sounds of the many things we’ve acquired, all lacking in any esthetic quality. Even more revealing is the lack of taste or intellect in their selection.

One needs only to read the ratings of viewers, audience attendance, dvd and cd sales, to realize that noise-level and “American Idol” outlandishness outsell talent and virtuosity, hands-down, in every venue. In the annually televised and highly advertised “Grammy” Awards, ostensibly given for recorded excellence, citations for real virtuosity are announced and handed out off-screen, so as not to bore the audience. If there’s now a truly American sound, it’s the irrelevant babble of cell-phone talk and the continuous monotone, correctly labeled ‘Rap’ and its humdrum variants, that fills our streets.

When Walt Whitman penned the phrase: “I hear America singing…” he was moved by soul stirring sounds, that lifted the national spirit and impelled Americans toward higher standards of achievement. Today’s Americans surf channels and internets for quick fixes and ready answers, many of which are only revealed to soul search and unhurried reflection. Still missing, over-all, are soaring sounds that lift the heart and let one feel at one with the world. Sounds we need today, more than ever.

Long ago, Shakespeare wrote that one without music in himself, who’s not moved with the concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. Classical music will surely survive. It’s what will become of this society, we still have to worry about.

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April 7, 2009

In Homer’s ”Odyssey,” the poet, blamed wine for compelling words, “that were better left unspoken.” His indictment was accurate but far too narrow. To paraphrase George Santayana: From whatever motivation, words can be the deadliest weapons. Residents, and officials of Binghamton, New York; at least those still alive are, one way or another, witnesses to this fact. Nearly two dozen hapless humans, guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are now dead and their families, friends and neighbors, indeed most of the city’s people, have had the prospect of leading average, peaceful lives shattered, by the utterance of lethal language.

Police and other officials, plus all the electronic and print media agents who covered their involvement, have dutifully charted the source and sequence of events that created this tragedy. They’ve profiled the armed assailant who carried out the heinous acts of indiscriminate homicide. They’ve buttressed their descriptions with his pre-meditated plan of attack and methodically followed steps, to the event’s grizzly end. They’ve even briefly revealed, that the attacker was infuriated by fellow workers, who teased him over a difficulty with the daunting language of his newly adopted country, noting that he formerly attended the very facility that helped immigrants, where his violent attack was carried out and identified him by name and photo, as a recent émigré` from Viet Nam.

In the coming days, officials may note that even if he hadn’t killed himself, they probably might not have been able to charge the attacker with a crime, because of possible mental impairment, undetected before the time or instilled and aggravated by a pattern of careless teasing and verbal abuse. Thus, the real culprits will pass under the radar of concerned societal scrutiny. The momentary lull of having elected an African-American as our President, notwithstanding, this nation is still pervasively infected with the vitriolic viruses of racial and ethnic prejudice. Embedded in our national psyche for generations they’re still too flimsily restrained, not to be an unconscious and persistent part of the speech and attitude of large numbers of our populace; ready to release a hurtful barrage, at the slightest provocation. Sure, fellow workers were only teasing. They meant no real harm. The same kinds of slurs, voiced by those who oppose many immigrants, now coming to pursue the better lives we brag about , here in this “greatest nation on earth.”

Xenophobia’s deeply rooted in our society and until it’s erased, it will continue to spawn its deadly poison among us. “Hate Crime” is now prosecuted in many states but speech that incites it, isn’t always. So, despite a city’s grief and shock, some, in Binghamton, who pushed someone to pull a trigger, are still free to practice prejudice.

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March 31, 2009

In a speech in 1898, Samuel Gompers, the virtual father of the American labor movement, spelled out what it was that impelled his life-long effort. It was, he said, “to protect workers in their inalienable rights to a higher and better life; to protect them, not only as equals before the law, but also in their health, their homes, their liberties as workers and as citizens; to overcome and conquer prejudices and antagonism; to secure to them the right to life; and the opportunity to maintain that life; the right to be full sharers in the abundance which results from their brain and brawn.” Take note, not a single reference to any political ideology or party, nor a claim to greater human significance than anyone else. The underlying point of what Gompers uttered was the assertion of just and fair treatment; a decent recompense for a contribution of measurable work, under humane conditions; work from which others profited.

Much history has evolved, since Samuel Gompers spoke those words. Too much of it, a shameful negation of his intent. Most tragic is the fact, that fair play and the triumph of principle over prejudice and greed have regressed to an astonishing degree in this unique nation, that once was the envy and a model for the world. It’s odious enough, that a small but ever-present corps of personal profiteers has used times and trials of great national need to advance their own power and wealth, at the expense of millions of hard-pressed fellow citizens. But it’s a national tragedy, that craven and corrupt politicians have allowed themselves to become the hirelings of such unscrupulous schemers, for whom gambling with the economic well-being of their country and its people is simply an acquired habit.

It’s hard to believe, yet a shocking truth, that in a nation where finagling with the privacy of casting one’s vote in an election is a criminal offense, there are still major elements of the working class, denied this privilege and legislators still debating the passage of a guarantee, an omission they wouldn’t countenance, in their own electoral process. It’s also appalling, if not so surprising, that the imposition of non-union membership, as a condition of employment is now rampant, in states where white supremacy and oppressive anti-black laws and practices were most prevalent.

Legislation, to ensure every worker the right to vote for or against union representation, by secret ballot, is now before Congress, in an Employee Free Choice bill. Those who’ve always opposed the right to collective bargaining and other fair employment practices for labor are bringing every argument and pressure to bear, to defeat this enactment. Some have even publicly offered bribes – of promised campaign support – to incumbents who agree to oppose it; as well as threats to support opponents of those who vote in favor of the bill. In the ensuing debate, we’re sure to hear ringing phrases about ‘freedom’ and the great ‘American tradition.’ Cover words for ‘Free Market’ democracy, in the 21st century mode. In this observer’s view, what America really needs is a hyper injection of principle, to re-float our sinking Ship Of State.

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March 24, 2009

When President and former General, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address to the nation, on radio and TV, in 1961, something more than his use of the two media made the event historic. It was the alarm he sounded. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,” he warned, “whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” How dire did he consider this threat? Eisenhower then added an ominous prediction: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” What the outspoken commander couldn’t begin to divine, was the calamitous effect of a virulent contagion, on the entire body of our miraculous yet fragile form of government. Ike’s perception was right-on. He just didn’t have the political experience to connect a shady string of dots, to its most evil conclusion.

It’s a pity Eisenhower wasn’t better acquainted with U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Butler, who could have given him some revealing clues. In a speech he made after leaving the service, in 1933, the two-time Congressional Medal of Honor awardee said this of his thirty-three-years in the military: ”I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Cuba a decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped rape half-a-dozen Central American republics for Wall Street’s benefit. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers… brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests… in China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way, unmolested.”

To crimp his credibility, the Hearst empire’s paid parrots branded Butler a raving renegade but he continued to speak, calling those then in command of the U.S. Military, “high class musclemen for Big Business, Wall Street and the Bankers.”

The dangers that Butler and Eisenhower warned us about are now more brazen and sinister, and the climate in which they flourished has also become more poisoned, with even more insidious toxins. A new peril’s been added to the original menace of the ‘military-industrial complex’. It’s the contemptible “Congressional-corporate-coalition,” created in the same insidious way, that drug dealers tempt and trap prospects and turn them into servile addicts. The dismal catch, here, is that any attempt to rid our republic of this pervasive evil requires a prevalent number and tenure addicts in key positions can subvert every effort. Such is the obvious case with Connecticut Senator Dodd, who slavishly struck a measure to rein in the ravaging financial giant, AIG, from a bill he helped craft. The poisonous addiction of federal and state legislators to obscene corporate subsidy will only stop, when we who bear the heaviest cost, repudiate every recipient, despite his or her position, party or plea. Our President says he honestly wants to change Washington’s pervasive climate of cozy connivance with corporate corruption. It’s also plain, that any help he gets from Congress will be less-than-needed. It’s time for the People to weigh in and speak out. If we really want to make “Yes we can!” an honest response to the nagging question OBama answered and we echoed, now is the time.

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March 17, 2009

Just consider how much we’re indebted to the propensity of American entrepreneurs, who simultaneously venerate, popularize, trivialize and capitalize on every patriotic, ethnic, sacred and sentimental holiday, related to any group that’s identified by a hyphenated distinction. This observer is always amazed at how a vast majority of Americans can, on an instant, not only empathically identify with but virtually adopt an ethnic or religious identity for the duration of one annual devotional event, display all the recognizable trappings that validate it and within days, afterward, all but ignore the occurrence and its significance.

Take, for instance, the present one, of St. Patrick’s day. The business establishment and the media that help trumpet this holiday’s advent, weeks in advance, have bent every effort to convince potential patrons, that money spent on the purchase of related costumery, food and drink, ensures a one-way ticket to everlasting tolerance and good-will. Inscrutably, no one’s yet been able to explain, why promoters invariably end up dispensing the most unworthy aspects of the holiday, while those responsible for maintaining public order and civil courtesy are invariably pressed to the limit of restraint,

One is moved to wonder, what logic imbues a tradition to honor one of Celtic history’s most saintly personages, by ingesting enough alcohol to create loss of good judgment and manners, not to mention the incitement of physical mayhem and the annual increase in vehicular accidents, highway deaths and injuries, plus who knows how large a rise in the number of those suffering liver damage.

Still to come, in the weeks and months ahead are other holidays that are supposed to focus our attention on religious tolerance, love of country, respect for its precepts and honor for those who’ve literally offered their lives in the defense of all of these. A few nights ago, on his TV Journal, Bill Moyers interviewed the Biblical historian, Karen Armstrong, on the seemingly impossible goal of achieving universal tolerance among leaders of fundamentalist religions and nationalist sects. Armstrong cited the great First Century Talmudic scholar, Hillel, who taught that the sense of the entire Old Testament is contained in a single phrase: “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That.” he wrote, “is the whole Torah. The rest is but commentary.”

My wife, Jeanne, who’s devoted most of her adult life to the wellness of others, then volunteered this view. “Wouldn’t it be great,” she said, “for the ‘powers that be’ to designate every day, that’s not already an official holiday, as a Hillel Day?” She has a great idea, there, but the business community would never buy it. Because the ‘Golden Rule’ is antithetical to the Gold Standard. It goes against every method ever used, to generate maximum monetary profit, from sales, for the few in control. That kind of thinking might spread the riches around, to those who really need them most. So happy holidays and remember: to make yours truly memorable, just go and buy something.

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