He wants you

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate… Leads to suffering.”

Yoda – Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace

I was born on December Tenth Nineteen Seventy Three. Much of my young life was shaped by two very important things. The Soviet Union, and Nuclear Armageddon. The truth is, that those two things, were really just one thing. My life, was shaped by fear. READ FULL POST

Hidden victims

Sexual violence. It’s not usually the sort of thing that makes the lead of the nightly network news shows. But for those of us who cast our news gathering nets just a bit wider it’s been on the radar quite a bit lately. There’s been talk of the culture of sexual violence in the military against female soldiers, and of increasing incidents of rape on college campuses to name just two of the most recent.

Such news, is to any compassionate person, always disturbing. And the natural and understandable impulse when faced with such news is to place most, if not all of our focus on the very obvious and visible victims of sexual violence. To find ways to keep them “safe”. But all too often we do not take the time to step back and consider the larger systemic problems that need addressed if we are ever to have any real hope of creating a meaningful and lasting diminishment in the incidents of sexual violence.

While there are a great many factors that go into creating a person who engages in sexual violence against another, I believe there is one factor that is primary, and in fact facilitates any others.

Extreme objectification. READ FULL POST

Reagan Chicken

There has recently been a tidal wave of Air Traffic Controllers falling asleep on the job, during late night shifts, when often staying awake presents the single most daunting challenge they’ll face all shift.

This has happened in places as diverse as Seattle, Washington; Reno, Nevada; Lubbock, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Washington, D.C. and Miami, Florida.

Needless to say every one is VERY CONCERNED. They are busily harumphing, talking about responsibility, and accountability, and their “watch”, and all the usual things that they talk about whenever something big enough, and bad enough happens long enough to enter into the little bit of the American people’s brainspace not taken over by obsession with what celebrity has a sex tape “leaked” this week, or who is going to win on American Idol.

Some are even actually talking about the underlying cause. Namely that the over night shifts are understaffed (all too often by only one person), and that there are not nearly enough air traffic controllers to go around.

But it seems that almost no one, (and certainly not the main stream media) has the guts to stand up and speak the truth about where the real root of many of these problems lay.

To put it simply, it’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. READ FULL POST

Regulation is the American Way

Let me ask you a question. What are you an expert on? Seriously what is it that you know forwards and backwards? Personal finance? Personal computing? Picking out the right wine to go with a meal? Fixing a car, rewiring a house, training a dog? Almost everyone is at least good, often very very good, at something. Some are even good, sometimes very very good, at many somethings. But if you are like most people, I’d be willing to bet that you aren’t good at everything.

The simple fact is that no one is. Every day, most of us make decisions about things that we know very little about. Many of us try to research these things as best we are able, but even with the internet to help, some of the topics with which we may have to deal are so complex that only someone with years of training and experience can really steer us in the right direction. Sadly all too often such a person is not available to us, for reasons ranging from said person simply not existing near us, to said person existing but charging fees that, while not unreasonable, are still far higher than what we can afford to pay.

This is just one of the many reasons why we need strong government regulations.

There is another reason, one that is perhaps even more important than the first. American business, as it has been framed for at least the last hundred plus years is designed to be completely amoral. There is quite literally, all things being equal, no incentive for businesses to care about doing the right thing, any more than they feel they absolutely have to. All too often their default position is to do what they like, and on the far too few occasions that a person or group of people manage to sue them, they then will often tie things up in litigation hoping that the ability of the aggrieved party will falter before the cost of defending themselves outstrips what it would have taken to simply have made things right, or even better yet to have prevented the problem in the first place.

Once again the redress for this is regulation.

Regulation has been demonized, by the Right, and by Big Business, for as long as the idea has been around. Sadly, it has become all too common today, for average people to have bought into the web of bullshit that those two spin, about how onerous even the lightest and most reasonable of regulation is. Even sadder still is the fact that Democrats who are supposed to be the voice for regulation have either jumped on the “Deregulation” band wagon as Clinton did, or failed to fight effectively against it as was the case with Carter.

But regulation is good, and decent, and noble and right.

When you buy milk at the grocery, stamped with its use by date, you can trust that the milk in that container will not be spoiled, and if it is, then you can trust that you can return it and get your money back thanks to regulation.

When you go to buy a house, or a used car, the reason why the seller must state up front anything they know of that is wrong with either, in some cases having to put it in writing is because of regulation.

When a business is kept from making claims that they either, do not know for certain to be true, or even worse know for certain to be untrue, the reason for that is regulation.

When you have to deal with the final disposition of the remains of a loved one, a time when people are often at their most vulnerable and least clear-headed, the funeral home MUST list everything they are charging you for before you sign anything, because of regulation.

It is regulation that assures that people get fair treatment, and quality products and services.

There are always those who want to whine and cry about how awful it is that “No one trusts anyone any more!” insinuating that we should just go on faith unless someone does something bad. These are usually the same people who interestingly enough want to limit a persons right to sue if they are defrauded in a business transaction. Personally they’ve nothing to say that I’ve any interest in hearing since I’d be willing to lay good money down on the table to bet that they are all hypocrites. Unless they don’t own or use locks on their doors, then I’d say their “trust” is pretty much a one way street.

Then there are the ones (usually the same ones as mentioned above) who complain about how Regulation only increases the cost of doing business. Sometimes this is true. Often the increase is, over the long-term, fairly miniscule. Sometimes admittedly the cost is fairly high, but this is most often in those businesses that have managed to go unregulated for far too long. The irony that many businesses do not wish to acknowledge is that sometimes regulation will SAVE them money, because in forbidding them from engaging in one type of potentially risky behavior or another, they are saved from taking a chance, having it go badly, and being successfully sued for far more than the cost of following the regulations.

However there is a problem abroad in the land.

During the 80’s Ronald Reagan brought the spirit of deregulation with him and passed that spirit on to Bill Clinton. Over time though the support for massive deregulation seemed to start to wane. And so a program, active to this day of back door deregulation was stepped up. The best example of this can be seen with regards to the Food and Drug Administration. It is just one of many government agencies that is so horribly underfunded on top of laws being passed that all but strip it of the power to take action that it cannot effectively enforce the regulations that do exist. It is thanks to situations like this, that the salmonella tainted peanut epidemic of a couple of years ago was allowed to happen.

Back door deregulation is what allowed the horrible disaster caused by BP last year to happen.

But writing regulation, and funding its enforcement is not by themselves enough. There is an important third component, that even the most strident Progressives all too often fail to acknowledge, let alone articulate. For regulation to be effective much of it Must be at the Federal not the state level.

Once upon a time when it was possible for a person to be born, live and die without leaving their home town, never mind their home state, nor really have their lives directly impacted by what happened in other areas, it made a certain amount of sense to have Federal regulations be fairly minimal, almost like an outline and let the states have more control. That time is passed. If you need a clear proof of what a disaster weak Federal regulation and deference to the will of the states is I have just three words for you… Credit Card Companies.

Despite doing business all over the country these companies set up their “official” headquarters in states that have little to no regulation of their practices, meaning that unless a card holder is lucky enough to live in a state with laws that have been written in such a way as to regulate the transaction at the cardholders end, regardless of the laws where the card provider is based they have little to no protection.

Recently there has been some attempts to change some of this as regards credit cards thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of Elizabeth Warren. But like almost all regulation of any kind it has been fought tooth and nail by the Right and Big Business. A huge shock I know.

The bottom line is that no matter what free market fantasies the Right might spin, businesses are loath to put what is right above what is profitable. And in this day and age thanks to the Interstate and the Internet, we are no longer a loosely affiliated collection of somewhat united states. We are one country and it’s high time that our regulation and enforcement of that regulation accepted and reflected these facts.

Keep The Faith My Brothers And Sisters!

The following resources were consulted in the creation of this article:

From AlcatrazHistory.com: Al Capone At Alcatraz

From ConsumerAffairs.com: Life Alert Emergency Response

Special thanks to @Shoq

Related articles

• Robert Reich: Why the Republican Attack on “Job-Killing Regulations” Is Dumb (huffingtonpost.com)

The other day I offered my thoughts on France’s recently implemented law making certain kinds of facial covering garments including those commonly associated with some of the more extreme practitioners of the Muslim religion.

There were a great many comments, but the most cogent came to me from a person named Casey.

I asked and received their permission to repost their remarks. Following that I’ll offer up a few thoughts on what they had to say.

So without further mildew, I’ll turn the floor over to Casey… READ FULL POST

“Forty-five percent of people who go to college, four-year colleges, don’t get a bachelor’s degree within six years. Those people often have met with disappointment and their investment isn’t particularly good, necessarily. Another group of people graduate from college and then have trouble getting jobs and end up taking jobs for which a college education is not really a prerequisite. Twelve percent of the mail carriers in the United States today have college degrees. And I have nothing against mail carriers with college degrees, but I don’t think it’s an absolute necessity to have a college degree to deliver the mail. ”

Professor RICHARD VEDDER (Ohio University)

Once upon a time there was a much clearer divide between “Education” and “Training”.

The former was about gaining a set of skills to help one gather information about the world in which one lived and then filter, understand, and act upon that information. The latter about gaining very specific skills necessary to do a particular task or set of tasks.

While the two were considered in many ways equally important, they were not confused for each other. READ FULL POST

Bad Idea

There are a lot of people who are sorely disappointed in Barack Obama. I’m one of them.

The person who seemed like the second coming of FDR has turned out to be more like the second coming of Clinton instead. Excelling at talking a good game, but far to eager to appease the corporations and the Republican extremists who have taken control of the GOP.

Obama is constantly seeking the “Center” from the beginning of any political action, which pretty much guarantees that he’ll end up on the “Right” every time.

On issues ranging from financial reform, to healthcare for all, he has time and time again let the Progressive Left down.

As a result, there are a lot of people calling for Obama to face a Primary Challenge. I am Not one of them. READ FULL POST

The broken man

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

There was a time in this country when the dream of America was so strongly felt, so powerfully dreamt, and so completely believed that there were many who could not even begin to imagine that it might be a false dream. It was the dream that anyone could be a material success if only they worked hard enough. The dream that, that same material success indicated spiritual success. It was the dream that nothing separated the common man from the Rockefellers except a little luck to go with the aforementioned hard work. That at any moment one might rise above even the humblest of circumstances and “make something of oneself”.

But then came the horrible awakening known as The Great Depression. A time that saw unbelievable numbers of people go from prosperity, to poverty, in one fell swoop. READ FULL POST

Doubly imprisoned

Say, did you hear the one about France caring so much about the freedom of women that they passed a law that is almost certain to result in some of them not being able to leave their homes?

If you say that the joke isn’t very funny you’re right. But sadly with the recently enacted law against women wearing the traditional head and face covering garments associated with members of the Muslim religion it is likely to have exactly that effect. READ FULL POST

There are times when I wonder if political orientation isn’t, for some of us at least, like race or sexual orientation. Some may choose, to be Republican, or Democrat, Conservative, or Liberal. But I am beginning to suspect that for others we are quite literally born a certain way and are not likely to change. READ FULL POST